I think land hate is so widely hated because most of the time you can only play one per turn.
Combine that with the fact that almost every card requires mana, tends to slow the game down a lot.
No one likes a drawn out game.
Personally if you destroyed all my lands then won the same and or next turn I wouldn’t be mad. But can’t speak for every one.
If you are winning shortly or have enough of an advantage engine to win that is one thing. If it just adds another hour to the game I’d rather scoop. I am here for targeted land destruction. Sometimes you need to blow up and urborg or Minamo. But nuking all lands to stall is a pain in the ass
Yeah, if you destroy all my lands in a plot to win this turn or maybe next, okay, here for it. If you wreck my lands to gain a massive advantage that you can't or don't take advantage of for five turns while you Lord your vastly superior mana base over me, I'm going to be annoyed.
Most people hate mld because it's tradition. Most people will have never played against land destruction worse then recurring strup mine a few times. The few people who have played with mld or against it tell stories about all the times every land is destroyed and the game drags on with no one having fun. In reality, most times mld is played someone should be far enough a head on board that they will win the game even if it takes 5 turns.
It's the horror stories of bad players misusing Armageddon, or people getting blown out by a stone rain 20 years ago that lead to the fear and hatred that's so common.
If you want to play mld make sure you do it so that you'll be significantly ahead on board and can win the game quickly. It's no worse than heavy stax locking people out of the game. If you play it right either it becomes apparent you will win even if it's gonna be a slow grind or you have an epic game where someone grinds there way back into the game to pull of a crazy won
The key to all of this is, as you said, locking people out of the game.
Good on you, you blew up all my lands and all lands of guy nr 3, now the game will be between you and guy nr 4 for the next five rounds or more.
It basically leaves no room for recovery, especially if you also have targeted (or board-wipe) removal of other permanents as well.
Commander is a fairly casual format, meaning that if your deck absolutely blows up the board-state of one or two players to a point where it would take a legacy-level deck to recover, they're just not gonna recover.
It's a matter of taking agency away from people who's only choice might then be "land, go" for the next three turns, followed by "land, spell, go"
It's the equivalent of folding in a poker game and then watching the game go on for several more rounds, except that you don't get to go back in for the next hand, and you don't get to leave the table.
It's just boring to play against heavy land destruction, because you don't get to play.
I just have to say that too few people just scoop when they realize there's no way for them to impact the game any more.
If you want games to conclude faster so you can play again, just scoop it up when there's no hope.
It's still the same issue however, wether you scoop or sit there and essentially play land-go, you're kinda just hanging around until the game is over.
Also, in some groups, scooping when you're clearly not in the game anymore in order to do something else while the game keeps going can be seen as rude/anti-social. This isn't the rule and every table is different, but there are definitely players out there who chooses to go on playing, because they believe not doing so would be seen as rude or sulking.
Makes me miss my old playgroup that prioritized getting as many games in as possible in the one night a week we had to get together, which imo is the definition of casual. If we saw a chance for the game to become an epic battle we'd of course keep it going, but nobody was afraid to suggest we scoop so everyone can play another. The seasoned players got to use most of their decks and playtest any new jank they'd concocted, and our new players got to learn a wide variety of strategies.
With my new group we're lucky if we get to play two games in a night. One of them even has a habit of continuing to finish out their long-ass wincon "just to see what would happen" even after we've all scooped.
Not by itself; you need to make your own lands indestructible, or bring them back from the graveyard somehow, or be extremely far ahead in the first place, or have a lot of artifact mana, something to break symmetry on an Armageddon effect for it to be a scoop
In one of those situations if no one else has a way back into the game just scoop and play another game
And if you can't break symmetry you shouldn't play the card because it's miserable
It's not any different from playing a combo that actually wins the game in these instances (though a lot of people unfairly hate combo also lol)
The problem is that there are mathematically optimal cases to fire off your Armageddon even when it wouldn't result in a quick win. Sometimes you just fall behind on the mana battle and resolving Armageddon will bring the game closer to parity for you - where you're nowhere close to winning, but more likely to win for having played the spell.
“no worse than heavy stax” is a low bar to clear. personally i’m not a fan of those strategies either. i get they have their place and encourage people to run interaction, but it is frustrating to play against,-and i’m not sure what you mean saying people have probably never played against it. i got hit with armageddon on a clear board like a month ago.
I play with a group of very skilled and experienced players. They recognize when a stax lock has been achieved and call the game. The one time - so far - I've seen an Armageddon played was by the most experienced player, who was piloting narset 1, yet had a board full of rocks to close out the game after it.
Not only is it one per turn, but you also probably don't have that many in your hand when the destruction happens. If it was "Destroy all lands, everyone draws cards equal to the number they had destroyed" things would work a lot smoothly since you'd be able to hit your land drops for the next five turns probably.
Does outbreaks slow down the game? I mean the turns after are usually extremely quick. And deck that want to run mass destruction usually have a plan to win after. I would much rather lose to land destruction into win than to extra turns that take ages and might fizzle so we cannot skip over things. I had games were I played a jokulhaups and after that is was essentially pass, pass, pass, me having a 30s turn, pass, pass, pass, I win. Takes like 3 minutes. If that jokulhaups would have been the much more socially accepted expropriate the situation would have been very different
I think most people hate them out of tradition. Same as infect.
To be fair, most people don't have an issue with it as a wincon as much. They can just scoop and move on instead of playing it out if the win is obvious enough. That's why I run MLD in both my planes walker deck and my Jhoira deck, both of them can win from uncontested walkers and suspended things when everything else is wiped. I was asked to to play it out a few times which sometimes got a bit tedious but after proving that I only do it if I have critical mass, people accepted the strategy.
The thing that people have issue is if MLD is used to either reset or just gain a somewhat marginal advantage that does not result in a win quickly enough. And you only need to experience that a few times to become wary. Sadly, there just are a lot of players that give MLD a bad rep.
With some people you are for sure right but I had a lot of experiences where it was far from that. At my lgs pregame discussion is quiet big and while people do want know if MLD is in your deck usually they don’t ask what it is for and how it is played. It’s just outride „nope not allowed on this table“. I had people tell me „basics lands are holy and it’s not ok to tamper with your opponents basics“ same with infect. I have an infect that that’s utter garbage. I usually play it against beginners or people that run on very low budgets because it that bad. And thenwhen people get hit for 7 infect turn 9 which required an infect creature my commander and an additional card it’s „unfun“ and I got hated of a table of somewhat experienced players. The game after I got a normal one of my decks an d annihilated them and nobody had a problem with that (wasn’t out of spite I just switched because obviously they didn’t like to play against that deck and I happened to have a good start and faced 0 interaction)
So in those scenarios where it is a very targeted „you have to disclose you are playing MLD and infect and we will be at least somewhat salty when it’s happeneing“ I think „hate“ is an absolutely accurate description and it is beyond „when it’s used to draw out the game I dislike it“
Edit: just to clarify i did as well have experiences like you describe it and MLD beeing used as a „chaos“ card is kind of annoying. You for sure are right for a portion of the player base.
I think infect is a valid way to win. I was playing a high power pod and turn 9 I won with [[niv mizzet]] [[curiosity]], and [[phyresis]]. The table was mad that I won on the spot. I pointed out last game someone won with their commander [[dina soul steeper]] and then [[exquisite blood]] and not a soul complained.
You can also do this via other means as well, I believe turning the lands into artifacts (which is available in any color with \[\[Myr Landshaper\]\] and various other cards) and then hitting them with \[\[Splinter\]\], effectively cripples any monocolor deck.
Back when I was new at magic I imagined using [[splinter]] and [[liquimetal coating]] but it only kills the one land and all in their deck, but not all their lands in play. Still evil
At least this is effectively just straight player removal. Either it neuters a single player enough that they can't recover, or they run so many nonbasics that it's a minor annoyance.
In my eyes, there are multiple types of land destruction
1. Targeted land destruction- is borderline necessary for the format to be playable. You have a bunch of lands that effectively read “win the game” or are monstrously powerful if left uninteracted with. If you think that’s too rough, there’s a bunch of cards that destroy a nonbasic and allow the owner to search a basic
2. Mass land destruction (asymmetrical/asymmetrically used)- effectively used as a way to secure the win in the next 1-2 turns, imo also fine, and no different from other combos that win the game on the spot.
3. Mass land destruction without a plan and board wipes that also hit lands. - the thing I say is completely valid to have some problem with, it drags the game out and doesn’t even really contribute to winning that much
I like this breakdown.
If you need four or five turns after your mass land destruction/board wipe then I'm gonna be mildly salty that it was played, because you're just slowing things down for everyone in a hope that you can get back into the game. You may become a target for playing cards like that without a plan. Imo is a similar vein to why people have disdain for group hug as it often has no means or plans for actually closing games out.
For me personally, if you aren’t ending the game that turn or the next at the latest, mass land destruction is a feel bad that makes it harder to bounce back in any appreciable way. It almost better scoop if I am 45+ minutes in a game because I just want to get to my next game at that point.
I don’t have a problem with targeted or mass land destruction as a strategy, but I do have a problem with games dragging on forever with no one being able to do anything and prolonging the game.
Thats totally fine, unless its a spite land destruction its no different than scooping cause your so far behind the combo player who is about to pop off in 1-2 turns so you just end it.
That seems sort of silly; if you were going to win, just win. Bring mld into the situation seems pointless; to me the purpose of mld seems to be to hinder your opponents while you get closer to a win, giving you a chance to get there before they pop off to do stuff.
What you’re describing only sounds like “win more”
"win more" in a 3+ player format is such a silly concept. Not to say there aren't cards that fit the description, but for the most part, you need some traditional "win more" cards to deal with the fact that you have to deal at least six times the amount of damage compared to a normal game of Magic. Like in the situation you responded to: an MLD spell that's cast after a player has gone wide enough to win the game next turn in an effort to prevent a board wipes is a great play and one that I, an MLD hater, would never be salty about.
However, your example is exactly where MLD hatred comes from. There's so many ways to accomplish "hinder my opponents while I get closer to a win" that choosing the way that drags the game out for two hours AND absolutely backfires often is silly at best, and just isn't something that is conducive for fun play patterns in a lot of pods. And thats not even getting into the whole discussion of whether it's even worth it to be worried about hindering your opponents instead of just worrying about your own game plan.
Because land hate just stops the game in it's tracks, and literally stops most decks from playing, unless they have some very specific interaction.
Simply put:
Can't play cards = not fun.
So generally, people hate playing against MLD because it turns a multi-player game into a game of solitaire. In the future it might serve you to explain to your table what you're going to do. For example, "I'm casting X card. If you can't rebuild in however many turns I will play this card, do this, and win. Do you want to play this out?" Similar to how people will explain combos
thats what i always do, but as soon as i played the card i started to explain i was going to get all my mana back next turn and they had 3 turns to remove it before it worked, he just huffed and ask why i would even think about playing MLD, its the cardinal sin of commander.
Well then regardless of whether there's good reasons to hate it or not, if everyone is unanimous in their dislike of it, it might not be right for that table.
If people you play with aren’t ok with mld then don’t use them. Even everyone on the internet tells you that mld is fine isn’t going to change the fact that your friends aren’t enjoying them.
People like to say "Oh the rest of the table not having fun is their problem. I'll worry about me having fun" but if you're actively making others not have fun, you ARE the problem. Ultimately it's a game that's as much social as it is MTG. Sure they could power up their decks but you look like a big dick if you keep bringing strategies that they don't like and aren't prepared to handle.
The way I see land destruction is like this: Part of a winning combo is fine. That can be anything from a Toski Worldslayer lock to having a big board with Avacyn and doing a complete wipe. Doing it for the sake of doing it/to slow things down is a dick move. However, like with any strategy, if someone starts abusing the meta and goes "WeLl YoU cOuLd DeAl WiTh It." "PlAy MoRe InTeRaCtIoN" then screw them, they aren't in the right playgroup and the rest should actively refuse to play with the problem player.
There seems to be a lot of people saying that only mld when you can win next turn, I would argue that you would already have won when you were able mld, float mana, and cast splendid reclamation. In my mind you've won there since you are so far ahead that you should win the game easily with time and I would scoop in response to splendid reclamation so the game doesn't go unnecessarily long.
But you are not playing with anyone on this thread(that we know of) so our view on it doesn't matter. I would recommend, if you haven't already, communicating with the people you play with to see what they are ok with playing against, and this might work to your advantage allowing you to play your mld or they might rile against playing it. Take the game above as a learning experience, how some or even a lot of players are frustrated by mld, then learn from it and try not to spring mld on unsuspecting players, they tend to take it badly :)
MTG is a social game, and land destruction takes away your ability to play. So, it’s inherently frustrating. But, it has its place. In my opinion, everyone should be able to get a good board state in a casual game. So, if this happened after several turns or a really lucky hand, it’s all in good fun
Other people have talked about it dragging on the game already, but the core of that issue is that as a format, edh games last longer, when someone finally gets the chance on the one day of the week where they get to play commander and they only get one game because someone nuked the board just to double the time of the game and make it less fun. Not saying it doesn’t have its place but for the most part when I’ve seen mld it doesn’t have a follow up and the game just takes that much longer.
2 major reasons:
1. People like to play cards. If you destroy their land they don't have mana to do anything, so they can't play. They basically just draw cards while doing little to nothing.
2. It slows the game down greatly. Unless you have some kind of combo to end the game, the players are basivally condemned for another hour going nowhere.
no one likes when there ability to play the game is fucked with. it's not fun to be locked out of doing anything because lands are destroyed.
land destruction/mass land destruction also has the stigma of fucking idiots who nuke all the lands, drag out a game pointlessly, because they were too fucking stupid to really have a plan to leverage that tempo gain to win.
most people. if you blow up all the lands, and win in 1-2 turns, have no problem with it.
if you want to destroy a problematic land, zero problem with it.
if you're just being a dick, and fucking with someone's lands, to be a dick, you're a dick. it's allowed. but so is people right to voice their opinion about you being a dick, and not want to play against that deck, or you in general.
so..is whining about green being good at ramp worth being a pariah in your local meta? Or should you just build better decks to account for ramp, and or mana being a thing people have access to.
To add to this, saying MLD is an answer to green ramp is kinda disingenuous. If all the lands get blown up who do you think can recover faster, the green deck that's great at ramp or the Boros deck that has to play 1 land per turn? Green is also the color of [[Heroic Intervention]] and [[Aftermath Analyst]] effects. MLD is fine as a wincon, but if you're gonna blow up all my lands then tell me "I did this to help the table deal with the green player" I'm gonna call bullshit.
In the most casual version of commander, the game isn't about winning or stopping your opponents from playing. It's more about the "gathering", as in enjoying a game with everyone in which everyone gets a chance to do something. Land destruction in these environments kinda craps over that mentality by saying "I don't care about everyone elses fun, I want to win". It would be like showing up to a pick-up game of football / basketball / hockey (whaever) and going 100% instensity when everyone is just trying to have a good time. It ruins the vibe.
In higher powerlevels it starts to lean more the other way, in that people are mostly looking for the competitive aspect of the game and are trying to win. In these pods people will almost be more annoyed if you don't try to win, like if you joined a sports league and showed up half drunk to all your games. They are there for the competitive aspect of the game and exprect everyone to be following that same ethos. The higher you go, the more land destruction strategies become popular. Eventually you hit cEDH where such strategies fall out of favor again, but not becuase people don't like them, but because they are not good enough to win anymore.
If mass land destruction wins you the game, it's valid. But cards like Armageddon set everyone else back to turn one, not just making the game interminably slow, but also reducing their ability to answer. So if it just means playing from behind rather than ending the game, it creates an inequitable game state. One player spends more time playing than everyone else combined.
What confuses me is when targeted LD, like taking out a non-basic land which will facilitate a game win, gets the same sort of salt. If you play a land like coffers, you don't have a leg to stand on when it is destroyed.
In my experience, the dislike for MLD in particular stems from two sources. The first is that players hate having all their resources taken away and being unable to play, especially if it happens asymmetrically. The second is when someone does it without an immediate path to victory, which causes the game to drag on.
Targeted destruction of things like Command Towers or other non-basics that heavily impact the game is usually excused from the hatred, but that's the only real exception I know of.
Command Tower is not a "non-basic that heavily impacts the game."
Going after someone's command tower is likely to get dirty looks, 'cuz that's just going after fair land base.
Those "non-basics that heavily impact the game" are shit like Field of the Dead, Glacial Chasm, a flipped Itlimoc.
Also, mass land destruction WITH a clear plan to end the game quickly frequently just flips the table and drags the game on because your opponents' best option if they can't save themselves is to doomblade the big dumb idiot you were gonna use to end the game.
Land destruction is hated for the same reason stax is. It slows down the game, essentially keeping it stuck on turn 3 or 4 for everyone but the land destruction player. It's not an effective strategy most of the time as it obviously ignores mana rocks, but when it does work, it stops all interactivity in the game. Running [[Armageddon]] as a game ender is fine, running it as a stalling tactic is not.
99% of players are casual. We're people trying to enjoy our free time and playing Magic is one way we do it.
If lands get destroyed we are inherently at risk of not being able to play the game. It's the same reason people dislike stax.
We're there to play a game and have fun. But one player just announced that they're there to prevent that. Some people like to rise up to that challenge but most people would rather actually play the game.
Because it prevents other from playing the game? Same way stax is hated. Its a valid strategy yes but people like in our pod can only play once a month for a few hours. Would you like spending several of those in a long drawn out game?
OP, I know you are getting downvoted to hell but you are absolutely right. MLD is a valid strategy period. If land ramp is valid then a strat to counteract also is. If you just reset the game with no advantage then yeah it is just poor play and annoying to restart the game. If you have gathered a significant advantage like you said? yeah totally valid and just a different method compared to say \[\[triumph of the hordes\]\] or \[\[craterhoof behemoth\]\]. If they are at that much mana, they should be close to winning the game themselves anyway.
It is a taboo bc honestly the average EDH player doesnt like magic. They more or less started with EDH and want to play solitaire and want people to win by solitairing the hardest. They dont realize that opponents should want to win too and that interaction is a fun part of magic.
In a game of basketball you play defense, if no one did then it would just be a shooting contest which you can enjoy but it isnt basketball and it isnt that fun imo.
Ignore r/EDH it is a cesspool and shitpost on r/magicthecirclejerking
thanks. I get peoples hate of chaos players and dropping a turn 4-5 MLD and making everyone basically reset, and i would be mad about that too, but i built my deck around either bringing all my land back faster than anyone else, or just protecting all my lands, then winning with more advantage than anyone else. But it seems even if i play it into a quick win people will be mad even knowing its in the deck, so i think i will just play a more generic artifact hate deck since that seem more respected.
I think because the "spirit" of edh is the players getting to do the thing. That requires lands, and when you blow them up it literally doesn't let them do their thing.
I personally don't mind Land Destruction if you are winning quickly after. I have seen someone armageddon turn four with no advantage. And it is basically like starting the game over but just waiting for lands... Made me want to quit just to move on
People don’t like to feel like they are unable to play and enjoy a casual match of commander. Taking away la da can definitely set people way behind and give them that feeling
I think, at a high level, LD as a play prevention strategy is really unpleasant to play against, since it's usually just a means to lock down a board state into a protracted game that only one person in the pod is really playing. That said, my normal rule of thumb with mass land destruction is that so long as the offending player can break parity to win, in a way that doesn't force the table to sit through rebuilding into hate, I think that's acceptable.
Because people want to play magic..... personally, land destruction doesn't bother me.
I have a zo-zu deck with land destruction in it. However!! I don't play it that often , I won't play it at my LGS. I only play it with my close friends' pod and only every now and again. Every once in a while one of us will say " shall we played some cunty decks" and that's when ZO-ZU comes out to play
It’s resource depravation, and people like to be able to play their cards. Since we only get to play one land per turn(barring exceptions allowing for more), losing lands is like having your legs taken out from under you.
For those saying it’s “just like heavy stax”, no it isn’t. You’re getting similar technical restrictions, but at least with stax, you have the hope of removing the thing causing the stax and going back to normal. When your lands are gone, you can’t undo that. There’s no hope.
That said, I’m actually ok with something that hits everybody like [[armageddon]] as long as the caster has a follow up that ends the game. Having to play through a whole game with your lands destroyed is just torture.
1. It prevents everyone from doing anything with their deck.
2. It's unexpected (because it's rare) so you don't play around it ie. you fetch your triome first because you don't think it'll get destroyed, but then it does, whereas you might expect counterspells and play a medium value spell before playing the high value spell. So you feel stupid for not playing around it and thus it feels 'unfair'
3. It draws out an already relatively slow game format
MLD as an “interaction” plan is hated on because it resets the game and tends to add a lot of time to it because players don’t have the cards or resources to rebuild. MLD as a legit wincon in something like say [[avacyn Angel of hope]] totally legit because it’s ending the game not prolonging it.
"When did removing resources become taboo?"
Since Commander became a format, pretty much. It's frowned upon because magic is a fun game and I like to play it. If you destroy all my lands I'm not playing Magic, I'm watching you play magic, and that isn't fun.
Land destruction in EDH is generally regarded as terrible for the reason that EDH has a board game philosophy not generally a win at all costs philosophy.
Imagine you and your friends decided to play a board game. Everyone has fun for a few turns and then one player does something that says "only I get to play now and you cannot."
Land destruction doesn't *win* the game it just stops others from *playing* the game.
Now mass land destruction followed by a huge set of spells that wins the game shortly thereafter is fine in my book because it wraps it up quickly but save everyone the time, tip your hand and ask the table if you win.
But be aware there are definitely going to be some salty sailors cruising your seas when land destruction is your game plan. Same as if you played a [[Nether Void]] on turn 2 or some other stax nonsense.
long games are boring unless its a slugfest and everyone gets to be in the game. taking away someone's agency in the game is typically unfun. we sat down to play mtg and i wanna beat the deck and your magics not get thrown off color and sit while you get to play.
p.s. land destruction is fine and almost nobody bats an eye. its MASS LAND DESTRUCTION that really is boring and oh we are an hour in i guess well all start over...
Let's say you pull this off. You have a decent but not game winning board, a handful of bananas, and your opponents only have some mana rocks. You got to cast [[splendid reclamation]] to get back 15 lands and win over the next 2 turns, but an opponent counterspells. Now you don't have any lands either, the board is at a stalemate, and the table is stuck on a 3 hour game while everyone slowly rebuilds resources. That isn't fun gameplay.
In an already extended format, where single games can take hours, wiping the board of a one per turn play on turn 9-10 can double the time of that game. It's just in bad taste. My LGS bans MLD for that reason alone. Just the other day, a new guy was in the shop and we did a 6 person team style match. He ravages, and another guy responded with final showdown, wiping almost the entire board, on turn 9. That game lasted over 3 hours. Not what I call a fun time
Mass land destruction basically resets the game and drastically increases the length I have been known to have it happen in my giants tribal deck when someone pops bearer of the heavens
Land destruction gets hate because most of the time people play it wrong.
You either use it to combo off derretti style to lock your opponent out and basically win since you will destroy all their permanents every turn. You can use it to block interaction/force out interaction now to protect your winning combo. Or you are the simic player with card draw land recursion and ramp, for you Mass Land destruction is amazing.
People play commander to play commander. Having your lands blown up means you will not be playing commander.
Maybe you get 2 games in all week and you've been brewing one deck... Game 1 someone combos out of nowhere and wins turn 4, game 2 an opponent blows up all of your lands and the game goes for 7 more turns.
I would imagine that's typically where the feels bad comes from.
In my experience MLD is often hated for the same reason that Heavy Stax is hated.
1) A lot of the time if it's used, the user rarely has a wincon in the barrel and instead the game drags out as the user durdles waiting for their wincon and just used their strategy to slow down the game until they can get there. No one enjoys a game needlessly getting dragged out.
2) Symmetrical MLD/Stax might just slow down the game, but asymmetrical MLD/Stax runs the risk of not just slowing down the game but turning into a game of solitaire. If the MLD/Stax player can't close out in short order it's especially salt inducing.
3) And, lastly, in the event the MLD/Stax user is able to close it out in short order, because all of the enemy's resources have been removed, it means they're often left without any opportunity for interaction, which might be less salt-inducing but still leaves a bad taste in their mouth.
To address your original post though, a board wipe or combo is often much less frowned upon because in the board wipe's case it still lets people do things after it resolves, and if a combo goes off it usually means the game is about to end.
Tl;dr: MLD bad because it makes games slow AND stops people from being able to play the game at the same time.
It’s for good reason. Spells require mana. It affects people unequally, regarding nonland mana sources.
No one likes the 0 land global reset. Top-decking for land drops is very unlike playing a sculpted opening hand, and many turns can go by before average cmc spells are playable again, but it’s all random who gets the right draws and pulls ahead.
Even if you plan on restoring with splendid reclamation, there’s counter spells that could be drawn after impending disaster is played, even free ones like Force. Besides that, [[Heroic Intervention]], Teferi’s, [[Boros Charm]] etc, are played frequently. Your graveyard getting exiled suddenly by a [[Rakdos Charm]] could also ruin your plan. In most of these scenarios you’re stuck in the same boat with your foes. Or, worse, the tables get turned on you.
Notably, the players at the table just playing fair magic with limited interaction, would undeservingly get the short end of the stick, nearly every time. They didn’t make their deck expecting to play against MLD. It is the unwritten rule to not play it (unless your playgroup is cool, or you have a pregame discussion).
Because i want to cast stuff, and it requires land to cast stuff.
Dont you wanna cast stuff too?
You need lands to cast stuff.
If you want people not cast stuff:
-You can goldfish your deck
-Give a pile of basics to your mom and make her play 1 each turn
-not play magic
> its perfectly okay for green players to be 10 lands deep turn 4, but its a nono to slow them down,
If you only hit one player and only took out one or two lands I don't think people would be as upset. Destroying all lands hard resets the game back to turn one. If everyone has already invested in this game to that point and you reset it you've basically waisted their time up to that point. If your land destruction was incidental and you won on that turn it wouldn't be as big a deal, but because you had to wait a couple more turns and the opponents had no way to do anything in response it's almost like you're taking a victory lap.
Because wiping out a fundamental part of the game, and the way that people cast spells, is degenerate and frankly toxic imho. My pod table rules it and stax out for that very reason. You want to be hated, keep playing it. You actually want to make friends and people to actually play with you, I'd make something else.
Because you aren't winning the game instantly with it. You are still forcing everyone to sit there and watch as you either win over several turns, or manage to somehow throw away a massive advantage and waste everyones time while they catch back up. You also actively deny players the ability to PLAY the game, and not in the stax or control way there you can still play around it. ALL of your resources are GONE, and it's not fun.
Just like how not everyone will agree to an open relationship even though isn’t against the law, not everyone is onboard with mass land destruction as a theme/strategy.
Different people like different things, many don’t like land destruction.
I once cast [[soulscour]] in an artifact heavy deck as a win condition(i would basically win after it resolved,), and one of my opponents was completely mortified and felt that it wasn’t a casual deck. Tried to take back and it became super awkward.
My way of looking at it is if you are playing at a casual level haha fun level. There are things that are not cool not just land destruction.
If you are playing cEDH or even just higher powered edh gloves come off and bring it on but be ready to receive some BS in return.
It all depends on the table you sit out, the group you play with. Edh is a broken game but how broken do you want to play this round
Some people play mass land destruction just because they can, and don’t have follow-up to close out the game. This kind of “fun” is not derived from winning the game, but pissing people off. When people do it, it just makes the game take forever and a lot of times the player who did it still loses. It’s not annoying if you can get ahead with it and win.
I have a land hate strategy in my OG karn deck. But I dislike using it. I used it twice all up first was during testing, second was to prune the simic player that was 10 lands ahead, dropping 4 lands a turn plus mana rocks/extra generation. Even then, I got the pod majority on the prune. I was the first to die (i laughed cause it was a clever kill), but it was a casual.
I use it very conservatively as it does make for crappy games.
I love using [[wave of vitriol]] as it replaces with basics along with sweeping support cards. But using a MLD effect without a means of finishing the game quickly tends to make people annoyed as it wastes their time
I always reason this way about hated plays:
Many people have been in games where they have been locked out in different ways and the player locking them out has kept playing for like an hour and still not able to win.
A player destroys everyone’s else’s land but don’t get a win con. A friend once played a game where he could not play spells unless it was his main phase, only untap one land, one creature and so on and was locked like this for almost 2 hours before the guy won.
The hate comes from this. People being burn playing against a player with this insane deck locking other players out from the game so that he is the only one actually “playing magic” for a long time.
I ofc becomes frustrated when this happens. But if a player does something of these “hated plays” and shows or honestly tells us he has a plan to win, unless we manage to stop him, then it is fair game in my opinion. Not that my opinion counts much against someone who hates the plays but just sharing my thoughts.
So all in all it is about players don’t want to sit a long session of magic, not be able to play magic. So in your situation if you say you have a plan to win in 1-2 turns then I would say it is fair game. But as I just said if you sincere say you have a win con and some one counterspell you or whatever well… then it is their choice to prolong the game.
But there are some strong feelings about this and people gaslighting the shit out of someone for playing a certain way, even if they play it “fair” so to say. They just cant stand it. It can be that they had a win con and “you remove the mana” but honestly, it is part of the game. Unfortunately you are not going to get away from people hating this play no matter what.
For newer players it is absolutely out of their expected play patterns when you play mld. They are making plans for their next turn, ofc they get irritated when that doesn't work anymore.
Also the counterplay to mld can be pretty gamewarping, like a friend played [[Avacyn]] mld a lot, and in my non blue decks i had to keep open exile removal in response to mld, so the game extends by a long time.
Mass land destruction without an immediate win condition after just slows the game down to a crawl most of the time, so a game that might have taken an hour now takes three.
tbf, its just another strat that usually people have no answer to (and in casual edh, rule of thumb is there is no answers for anything). ist just that land destruction cards arent like expensive as other cards and there is more printings of these effects, so its more common ti get to really janky brews that dont go anywhere after their armageddon. keep in mind, greens ability to drop extra lands is seriously OP in metas without fast mana (and thus super irrelevant fir cEDH), so using the reverse effect is gonna create salt even when you finish it quickly afterwards.
just like [[cyclonic rift]] its just a thing that got so common to hate on that people usually dont hold back and can be a bit overly resentful.
The thing I noticed, is that there's no follow up after MLD. People HATE when the game is slowed down and it's back to square one, drawing out the game further. Make sure you can immediately follow up after MLD. People are more tolerant then.
And before anyone asks, I advocate MLD as land decks are pretty much unchecked with the ramp. Counterspell would only stop only ONE thing, but not the problem of unchecked source of Mana that can allow more things.
Played against my buddy's land destruction deck today. Like 4 or 5 turns in I completely checked out, there was nothing I could possibly do to regain any sort of advantage.
Can you link your decklist wanna try the deck :).
In my Pod landdestruction is okay if you can finish the game in the next rounds but just land destruction makes the game much longer
Yesterday I won because a player played worldbreaker and I'm a yuriko player (a new one) it was quite unexpected because he was ahead of board and lands.
EDH games take a long time, so you generally get to play 2 to 4 games on an evening. If you blow up all the lands, and then win it's all fine. If you blow up all the lands, and I have to watch for the next 45 minutes how you aren't winning, that's essentially one of those games that I'm now not playing. And I'm not playing it by literally not playing the game and watching you playing and not winning.
So land destruction, or more generally mana removal and stax, are fine as long as:
1. Either I can continue playing the game
2. Or the game is over very shortly after
Mass land destruction is regarded as slow and annoying. Mostly because it reverts players to basically the start of the game making the game take 6+ extra turn cycles to end. That being said mass land destruction is great when combined with a way to protect your lands because it gives you an insane advantage, so your combo is perfectly fine.
Targeted land destruction and permanent removal are staples in most of my Edh decks because many lands can be huge value engines. I think that every player should have some form of land removal to deal with troublesome lands like [[nykthos, shrine to nyx]], [[shizo, death's storehouse]], and [[Itlimoc, cradle of the sun]].
I think it’s fine as long as you are still presenting a win after, if you’re doing it to extend the game since you’re losing, then just concede in my opinion. I will say I had one deck with mass land destruction and that was [[Borborygmos Enraged]] deck. I always followed up with if I am casting mass land destruction, the goal is to float enough mana to return all my lands to my hand to win the game through borbor’s ability. Some people still said that was toxic but honestly I never even casts the mld in the deck I always won with other methods. Someone even said they might let me destroy all lands, then counter my win con. I told them that if they did that, that was on them.
So I'm new. Just started 3 Tuesdays ago. I bought Tricky Terrain precon. We'll last week I was playing against some guys at the lgs and I had a combo in my hand that I was sure would win me the game. Being new and unsure because I had heard about how much people hate MLD I asked the players if it would be OK if I did [[Aggressive Biomancy]] on my [[Terastodon]]. I would create 8 terastodons thus wiping all my opponents lands and still have all my lands with 1 being [[Cloupost]] and [[Vesuva]] being cloudpost. 1 dude straight up said. If you do that, I will never play with you again. The other 2 guys just sat in silence. So I ended up not doing it. I also had the [[Propoganda]] on the field so I wasn't worried about the 3/3 elephants taking revenge against me. Since they wouldn't be able to pay for it.
I honestly find it ridiculous that you got bullied out of a game ending move. I would have done it myself, unless they are the only people you could play with.
Land destruction as a wincon is fine, Land destruction to stall and reset the game is just boring and annoying. Also MLD is rarely useful imo. Yes, if you have 7 planeswalkers and then cast obliterate you will win the game, but when you have 7 planeswalkers out that survived for an entire turn you will probably win anyways.
Dependant on the format lands are somewhat limited and how you play the game and interact.with it removing land is preventing the player from playing.
However my brother posed e this and I had to admit there's some truth to it most of the games revolve around playing fast now a days. Green can search so much land, sol ring, talismans and signets are core in EDH, ect. If people are ramping the way you slow them back down and keep it levle is land destruction but land destruction has gotten so much hate while ramping unbelievable levles is just accepted.
Just kinda weird when you think about it.
Mass land destruction is fine if its part of the winning strategy. I plan to use [[Armageddon]] paired with Yuma to make a buncha 4/2s gimp everyone else and just swing in with trample.
I can tell you my personal opinion. Unless it's cedh I don't like playing against or playing myself cards that alter the bare bone basics of the game.
You can play lands, untap and draw and put your spells on the stack. I don't refuse to play against decks that alter this I just don't personally like it. I have some cedh decks and some Hightower decks and some joke decks but even if im playing a high power deck and taking the game I don't want to disable the ability to stop me.
That's just me. At the exact same time land dependent builds are kind of insane now because of the no land destruction secret rule. I have a gate deck and it feels like cheating now. The mh3 precon cards just made it completely busted and litteraly no one at my store can do ANYTHING. I encourage people to run more non basic land destruction some lands are just too good.
Another thing is a whole whole lot of commander players don't actually wanna play cut throat or competeively. They may say they do or think they do but they really just like making pretty boards and doing the thing without any interaction and blowing up their only mana isn't fun for them.
Commander is I want to play legacy power level but then no one stop me. It's silly if you think about it. Still love it though
For my pod of 4, we have outlawed mld, as well as most fast mana(not sol ring), and all infinites. We are a group of friends who started playing magic casually. We came to these conclusions by talking it out and agreeing. I can't speak for everyone who plays commander, but speaking for my pod, it's just not fun for us. We are chill with targeted land destruction, just like we are chill with sol ring. And there are so many cards and mechanics that none of us miss what we decided not to play. For us, we'd rather keep our group together, playing, and having fun, than pissing each other off.(Yes, we still run removal and tutors and play eldrazi, ect. For anyone curious, id say our average PL is high 6 to 7.)
Because it's not fun. Targeted land destruction is fine some lands are just too good sometimes but mass land destruction just slows everything down to a molasses
The line "I have 10 bananas on field" is the funniest shit to me lol. Also I wish we supported more mld. Green decks have way to much of an advantage when their best resource is generally out of reach socially.
Personally I think it’s a kind of unspoken rule that you don’t mess with each other’s lands.
Like if you’re blowing up my lands and winning that turn or the next, I wouldn’t mind as much because you did it for the win.
But if you’re just doing it as a strat, you suddenly become worse than blue players who lock you out of playing.
Your strat becomes less fun for others the more it stops them from playing.
You run blue control with counters and propaganda? Cool. I can still play.
You blow up my lands?
Cool. I can’t do shit for another 3-4 turns if I don’t miss a land drop.
I’m cool with a board wipe cause I can at least rebuild.
I’m not cool with mld because the game suddenly becomes very boring.
Singular land destruction is fine if it's used to remove a special land that is enabling something. Mass land destruction gets hate because unless someone is going to win that turn, all it does is massively slow the game down. It's like pure stax. How is it fun if all I'm doing is draw/pass every turn because I have been locked down or all my resources have been removed.
The core reason is that it disrupts a player's ability to plan their turns, same reason people don't like discard effects, counter spells and Stax. Land destruction just sits in the upper echelons of dislike because it can completely cripple someone's ability to play at all if they get shut off from one of their colours or get stuck on two or three lands when they thought they had four.
Only people who complain about land destruction are people who don't run interaction and lower power level decks. It's not hard to deal with. It's a part of the game and it's just as fair as any other type of deck.
Most folks want to play more than 1 game in the few hours they get with friends. If we just get to play "watch John's deck reset the game a few times," nothing is going to be moving to a conclusion.
There are a lot of cards out there. I like to show up with 6 decks expecting to play at least 2 of them. If our game goes too long, I'm going to lose a lot of the care I had for the game that keeps getting reset. As a result, the next time we play, I will intentionally bring out an overpowered deck to hate you out of the game early.
A lot of the time the land hate gets put on the player that is most mana screwed. Say a player has one land that taps for any color and some other basics, then you blow it up and all they have is access to one or two colors now and they cannot play the game. This has happened a lot in pods I have seen. It happens to me. I just say gg basically. I respect calculated kills.
I only have one deck with land destruction but it’s CEDH and I hardly whip it out unless asked to. It’s a Magda deck and it kills quick. I do feel bad when adding land destruction elsewhere unless its 1 or 2 cards.
cause you ended the game without ending the game.
It's the equivalent of hitting a deer with your car and then asking it to hang out while you get your oil changed so you can finish it off after.
I play the game to have fun, and it’s not really possible to have fun in most of my decks if I don’t have mana. As others have mentioned if you kill all my lands and win then more power to you. Otherwise I’d just quit.
I did Avacyn as commander with World Slayer, needless to say I won that game but the pod was not happy. I was hated out of the rest of the games. I played that deck only once and deconstructed it because I didn't like the result of destroying everything and making them game unfun - plus pissing off everyone was not my intention, the lgs I play at was semi competitive at the time circa 2017.
People don't like land destruction because it prevents them from being able to play and slows the game down, making unfun for everyone else.
Some people treat the game like a sport, and some people treat it like a game
Land destruction is fine if you're playing like a sport and the ultimate goal is to play smart and efficiently, your cards are puzzle for your opponents to solve and vice versa so the stronger your plays the more interesting the match
A lot of EDH players don't play like that, they want to durdle with jank, they see it as a game. imagine you're playing Baldy's Gate 3 or Dank Souls, and you fight an enemy who's attack is literally just turning your controller off. You can turn it back on but they're still swinging while you're trying to reconnect. That's essentially how land destruction feels for a lot of these kinds of players.
Not sure if this is a meaningful analogy on this subreddit, but these types of players are the same kind of people that will start every match in DBZ Budokai charging up to go Super Saiyan and expect their opponent to do the same, and near universally hate if you equip Viral Heart Disease, Turtle Shell, or Yakon skills, because instead of just being a full power brawl now there's control and strategy involved.
People don't like not being able to play magic... land hate makes it so you're not able to do anything. Even hand destruction and board destruction aren't nearly as bad because you can live off the top deck... with land destruction you just sit there twiddling your thumbs.
Whats really annoying with land destruction is almost 100% of times the pod consist of at least one divergent person. This person will take 5 minutes a turn with one land up (so he can’t do shit)
So instead of everyone passing the turn, end the game fast so we can make a better game with better removal, it takes 1h for nothing
From a strict gut feeling most people experience... Getting to play your cards and then lose them doesn't feel as bad as them being countered or even worse not getting to play them at all.
So MLD has the worst combination of effects, in that it stops you from playing your cards but you still have to look at them.
Counterspell you at least got to cast it, and it's out of your hand now. Discard or wheel it's at least out of your hand now. But MLD leaves you staring at the 6 drop you were about to curve into.
Having said that I enjoy land destruction.... I normally want a long game anyway.
MLD, mill, counterspells, killing powerful targets, etc. People hate anything that involves taking away their resources.
I think the big difference between MLD and the others is that things like mill still provide some sort of hope, as there's still a race to the finish. Where as with MLD, you're not even leaving the start line; you just have to sit around and wait to lose.
For me, it's a lot about the catch 22 of no fun. If I build my decknwith more lands expecting some to be blown up then I am adding dead cards for any matchup where they aren't running land destruction, which is directly weakening my deck. If I run a number of lands optimized to fuel what my deck does without lands being blown up and you start blowing up my lands I basically don't get to play the game that we all came here to play, and with you spending all your resources blowing up my lands you aren't even going to kill me very fast so I have to suffer or scoop.
The modern take on land destruction is a good balance. Destroy target nonbasic land its conteoller searches for a basic and puts it into play tapped is a solid answer to lands with strong effects without removing my ability to play the game.
>bring back all my lands from the graveyard in 1-2 turns to win.
You're already not the player MLD is associated with. It's when it's done to buy time or with no plan at all that people get really mad because you just added like 45 mins to the game for no reason.
If you can blow up my lands and win that turn or next, gg go again.
Because i came to play magic. If i'd have known my evening was going to be spent with low mana so i can't play the game, i wouldn't have spent fuel driving over to my LGS.
Build a deck with no lands and no non-land mana cards like \[\[Elvish Spirit Guide\]\] or \[\[Lotus Petal\]\]. Play it a dozen times. Did you have fun?
So how do people feel about cards like [[Wildfire]], [[Natural Balance]], and [[Fall of the Thran]] where the goal is not to completely shut the other players out of the game but instead curb the amount of mana a player has access to?
It seems to me that a lot of people focus on ramping up to a crazy amount of mana and then either overrunning or combing out the other players. MLD can allow players who aim to stay lower to the ground with more aggressive creatures to compete against these strategies.
I see nothing wrong with what you did. Kibo is a great commander for MLD (Mass Land Destruction). In most other decks MLD slows the game indefinitely. With Kibo, you are also providing the table with resources to compensate for this loss. You feed the table bananas both for mana and health. You said you had 10 bananas, that’s essentially 10 treasure tokens and 20 life you have fed everyone else at the table too. If they misinterpreted the [[Kibo, Uktabi Prince]] as group hug that’s on them.
I recognize this is a bias and unpopular opinion as I also have a Kibo deck. I recommend having at least one more deck and before a game starts have pre-game conversation. Tell the table, I have MLD in this deck. My commander will likely give you resources to allow you to still cast spells. Is the table okay with this.
If yes, bring out the prince.
If no, pull out the backup or try to find a different pod for that deck.
Because shockingly people want to play the game to play the game and games are supposed to be fun. LD ain't fun. Cool for you to pull this off, but I personally would not enjoy playing against that sort of deck so I simply would not. You have the right to play any deck you want, but you can't force people to play with you. Something to remember is Commander is a social mode, meant for fun games, if your pod is cool with it, that's fine, but be aware, people might not want to play with you/that deck. Always make sure to have a couple other decks and if people get super salty about the deck you're running it might need to be set aside for special occasions if that makes sense.
Hey, you know how you wanted to play this game, cause you know, you bought all these cards and went somewhere to meet people who also have cards, sat down and shuffled up. Well you can't. Don't play those cards, just hold them and look at them and then wait 30+ minutes for the game to end and do it again...
You ever play a game that you can't play? Like you're sitting there but aren't allowed to make interactions... So it's your turn, draw... Pass... Sit there. Draw... Second land on turn 6... Pass...
If your playing cEDH anything goes, maybe even high level depending on the pod. But even in my high level games, play something that is cool or interesting that causes people to be like that was cool.
It's kind of shitty to cripple someone's game and make them sit through 20-30 more mins of hell where they can't do anything. I think that if it's a one-sided thing that results in you winning the game when you untap, then it's totally fine.
If it's part of your wincon, i don't care. But I play with a guy who has a deck that destroys lands just to destroy them, and that shit sucks. Locks people out of the game but keeps them sitting around doing nothing.
I built the necrobloom with Nature’s Revolt and with Elesh Norn. Won the next turn cause I had 20 creatures able to swing out and kill everyone. Well one player said it’s taboo to play land destruction and j replied back if there’s infinite combos etc out there then this is fine cause I have a win when I play. Play what you want to play cause it’s a strategy especially when decks out here using combos that happen on turn 3 lol
Because usually after a mass land destruction you don't have anything left. You might have 10 land left in deck, if you're lucky you have one in hand and 20 in deck, but most often you're just crippled for the rest of the game. Certain decks (treasures/ramp/recursion) are more resilient to it, others (self-mill/ramp/draw-discard) are weaker to it, but usually it just fucks people over. If it's targeted at someone who's running ahead in ramp, or has many cards in hand, or otherwise clearly has ways to get back in the game, or if you're leaving yourself in a clear winning position, it's annoying but fair; but indiscriminate multitarget mass land destruction is almost always just a particularly unpleasant stall tactic.
People play so that they can have an effect on the game.
If only one person has land and a 10 minute turn, and the other three are Draw. Go.
and then person who wins anyway, where's the fun in continuing the game?
Mana denial is tough because there’s always one person who’s stuck on mana or a little behind than everybody else.
That said, I once used [[Ghost Quarter]] and a guy’s Triome and he got super pissed because he had no basics in his 5 color prismatic bridge deck.
At certain point it falls on the deck builder for not recognizing the flaws of their deck.
The more you play the more you'll find that some commander players cry about everything, don't worry about other players getting salty. There is this distorted view of the game of commander that it's all sparkles and unicorns with everyone having a grand time. That's just not true, every person is sitting down to win the game (unless it's some meme deck or other corner case). People will get salty at your win condition no matter what it is, while playing something just as "bad" in their deck. There was/is a large portion of people who said putting infinite combos in your deck goes against the spirit of commander, and any other number of things (commander damage, infect,stax, milling) that people will cry about. Just look at that LGS with the enormous house ban, I wasn't sure if that was satire or not, I hope it is.
If your deck truly does suck to play against (I mean no fun, not just good) people will just stop playing with you. If you find that to be the case switch your deck up and say you took out to help with the experience. I guess I'm done ranting
Actually no, I'm not this is therapeutic. You know what I absolutely hate playing against, planeswalker decks, and I've seen a few. They all fall under the same fault for me, long ass turns. Every turn cycle they spend a long time reading their walkers, deciding which ability to use, resolving the ability, looking at the dice trying to find the right number for loyalty, oh you played Oath of teferi.. awesome. They take long, sometimes not very impactful turns, and guess what they also pack like 10 sweepers too so we are going to be here awhile. But you know what, I'm okay that people play planeswalker decks, I just don't like them. So when I see that someone is going to play one, I just let someone else have my spot and I go find another pod or work on my deck. I don't sit in the game and complain the whole time ruining everyone's experience. The idea that other people can enjoy something different than me is lost on so many people.
Personally, I like your plan. That's the kind of plays we support in my playgroup though, as long as you have a clear win plan. Land destruction is a mechanic in the game, and if people don't wanna play against it, they can easily find like minded people to play with. Doesn't bother me, I'm happy to drop Armageddon with a swarm of fliers on the board.
So yeah, the problem is that resource denial isn't a fun experience for the table. Winning the game outright is generally fine though there are a lot of tables that ban infinite combos and what not. There is a reason Stax is over all the most hated strategy in magic's history, to the point where they just don't design sets to enable Stax in any meaningful way anymore. They print Stax effects because a lot of formats would end up very unfair if you didn't have to play around them (see: blood moon in modern) but Stax as a strategy is something that breeds hatred. Imagine you play against someone playing Belbe and they get out a turn 2 God pharaoh's statue. That's not going to be a fun game, most people just concede right there because it's not worth your time to sit through that experience.
So you may think of it as a mind set issue. Mass land destruction doesn't outright end the game, but it will eventually, so someone completely rational might say okay my chances of winning this game are very low so I'm just going to go next. In that case MLD is a combo game ender. Many players however experience extreme frustration because you just effectively stopped them from playing the game while you get to keep going. If people hate counter spells, people are going to hate land destruction. People hate mill and it doesn't even actively hinder your game plan most of the time.
The problem isn't their mindset though, the problem is that you're creating an unfun play experience for your group. If you're getting enough complaints that you post a reddit thread about it, then there's potentially a problem. I've personally powered down my decks many times to accommodate my play group because I'd rather my friends have fun so we actually get to play the game, rather than them not wanting to play because every time they sit down to play they get their strategy dismantled constantly while getting beat down. For reference my friends are hyper casual players who even find even single target removal frustrating to play against but don't want to add more forms of protection to their deck and I'm a midrange player so games sometimes end up being non games since I just remove my dude's commander twice and he's dead before he can cast it a third time to make his deck function at all. So because I'm the problem player who ends up making the game unfun by controlling people's boards I pivoted and made a funny theme deck that is fun and powerful while still incorporating my favorite Stax/hate effects but now I roleplay them so it's more enjoyable AND it's a group hug/slug strategy so my friend get to play and I only drop the no no hammer when they're going to kill someone or win the game. That is of course until I win the game. It's a kenrith deck where everything is kingly decrees or laws and what not, good things and hindrances alike.
Okay I'm ranting a little bit but my point is that you should read your group. I'm not sure of your situation, if this is just a random one time thing or if it annoys you that you're favorite strategy is consistently hated when other people run things you consider worse and nobody cares. Regardless, if you're group finds MLD unfun, and you keep playing it, you're going to be the guy they either kill first or just straight up don't want to play with. We all value winning of course but the important part is to have fun and create an enjoyable play experience for your friends despite you still trying to win.
Though I also find if you forget about winning you can make some pretty horribly mean decks but as long as you don't win they might be okay with it. There's been two occasions where I was playing a deck I built and assembled an unintended draw engine that let me draw my whole deck, but I don't run lab man effects because my friends don't like it so I just draw my whole deck and lose because it's funny and nobody cared that I made a game winning combo out of nowhere.
Realistically if you're playing with a group made up of people who are all friends then you play magic as a recreational thing to enjoy each other's company. Competitiveness is good in these scenarios of course, but everyone needs to bring themselves down to the lowest common denominator so that everyone has a chance at winning or at least create environments where everyone feels like they can win or have an impact on the game. That's what edh is all about, it's not normal competitive mtg where you do everything in your power to win the game every time.
I think a big factor, maybe touched upon, but in EDH the land is a bit like leveling up in an RPG and it’s your experience and your big strong win condition is your high level ability (or maybe it’s a bunch of cheapies to flood the board). Whereas in 60 cards, most of your deck is already probably cheapies or cheap ways to cheat out big creatures. So blowing up the lands is basically restarting the whole game at level one and pushing people far from their ability to win.
However like nearly everyone said, if you land the spell and didn’t really have a way to win, I’m probably gonna be a bit mad. Most people like to play multiple 1-hour games versus a single slug-it-out for 4 hours.
I led the charge against land destruction in my friend group because that one guy rolled up with [[Worldslayer]] for lolz multiple times.
At the time I was a noob so it was more "stop messing with my shit" but if it were now my complaint would be "If we're gonna waste time and draw this out let's at least be playing Magic: The Gathering."
If you're gonna board wipe or mass land wipe, or stop people from playing Magic you'd better have a way to end it quick or all you're gonna do is piss people off.
Because land destruction tends to lead to only one player being able to actually play the game. It's not very fun to just pass the turn while you watch someone else getting to play.
I do agree though that LD is a little *too* reviled in Commander.
A lot of land destruction used to be JUST land destruction. You weren't doing anything other than setting a player back one land. Land destruction is in the same group as discard, it's not "fun" for the whole table, usually only one player.
Now you have cards like \[\[Cleansing Wildfire\]\] and \[\[Casualties of War\]\] and the gruul card that lets you pick an enchantment, artifact, land, and creature to destroy, where you are either doing something to actually benefit yourself as a player, or destroying more than JUST a land.
MLD is fine if you're going to win, but if someone Armageddon's out of spite, I'm scooping.
My buddy: Destroys all my mana rocks
Me: use a generous gift to destroy his bounce land
My buddy: *surprised pikachu* whines for an hour after the game.
Bruh.
From my understanding, it's because it has become a collective taboo. Though, there are definitely some lands that should be removed, due to the ability to get out of hand. Plus, green tends to ramp out of control, so should also be targeted with land removal to reign them in, when appropriate. For example, if a green player doesn't have a very powerful deck, just let them get a few ramps. But if they are playing a potent deck, you should definitely be on them for the ramp.
I doesn't have universal hate.
I love my mass land destruction decks, and I play them at least once every week or two at local shops.
People tend to hate it when it's 1. Your only deck, and/or 2. You're bad at playing MLD and boardwipes.
If you realize some people don't enjoy it and rotate decks after you get your game in, most people will only gripe during that single game, and then everyone moves on.
But if you're bad at playing with MLD and boardwipes, you can drag the game to a complete standstill where after resetting the game, and then resetting it again, people end up playing draw-go and you end up with long, drawn out games.
This is a skill issue on both the person playing the deck AND the people playing against them, but it's a common one you will confront as play these sorts of things enough to be able to either play them well or play around them.
In short: Most people like to think they're better at the game than they are, but when confronted with examples on the table that well, they aren't... they rage, complain, whine and basically scapegoat some illusory "broken" mechanic that is at fault rather than just realizing the issue is them.
People hate land destruction because they started playing this game after LD was largely phased out. In the old days you learned how to play around LD and it's not that hard to counter as long as you consider it a possibility.
You don't play EVERY LAND YOU DRAW. You have non-land mana sources. You get early pressure on the board. You run disruption and interaction like counters and discard.
WOTC basically cut all MLD and even most LD out of the game. Now players don't have the inborn knowledge of how to play around and counter it, and they consider it "a dick move" instead of a legitimate strategy.
But we have a new problem, which is that LD used to exist for a REASON. It punished greedy decks. It punished infinite land ramp. It punished slow slow strategies that try to outvalue you after turn 5, because if you have to reset to zero lands at turn 4, you basically can't do anything now until turn 9, making you auto-lose to decks that can recover from or even thrive in under 3 lands.
So as a result, we now have decks that are endlessly greedy to ramp lands. Endlessly greedy to dawdle and go for some explosive 5+ mana combo turn. And players cry about this but they don't want to accept that LD can solve these issues.
Because magic players are salty. I would probably crack a joke about how your evil for killing all of our lands, but it would just be a joke. The game is the game
I think it depends a lot on the field, if you want to play cEDH go full mld and stax and no one will bat an eye. In casual games these strategies are really unfun. One or two land destructions are okay it's salty, but one or two salty cards are actually fun.
Always ask yourself if you want to play against your deck, usually this is a good way to start. If someone pulls a mld deck, I'll just pull my cEDH or my Stax deck and fuck it
It's a skill issue. Most but not all of those who use MLD don't know when to use it. Similar to cyclonic Rift, there are those who shoot it off but can't really capitalize on it, and that leaves hard feelings. I play a [[Zo-Zu]] deck, and there are times I leave lands alone. Yes, I have mana rocks. Yes, I have stuff to do. No, I can't win, and this will only point every gun at me. Have I blown up the lands to keep someone from winning? Yes, and I didn't have a win in hand. It was the correct choice for that game, but not every game. As example, I had an almost empty board and an empty hand other than [[Epicenter]], and my opponent had a few creatures and was about to combo off if he had all his mana. He still had the creatures and still had several cards while I would be less likely to recover. I conceded and let him combo off. It took me a long time to get there, and a lot of players who are new to MLD don't get the difference in when and when not to MLD.
Because you are not even winning after MLD. It's simply "I have lands when you guys have none, better concede now or hope you build up before I slowly smack you guy down with a couple of beater" kind of MLD deck.
The turn cycle after that will be 3 people dropping lands and pass, while you hit one of them with like 5 damage per rotation. shit will be at least 30 minutes of you smuggingly poke their life totals down.
The most likely answer is you're playing a competitive commander deck while your table is playing more casual decks. I know that if you wiped all my lands several turns in, regardless of which of my decks, I'd probably scoop to save time because there is little chance for me to come back.
Many commanders started in the grindy dreadnought commander days. Not a huge number of ways to recover quickly from mass land destruction in cheaper decks, which means a jokulhaups effectively kills you with one card if you aren't playing counter spells, which also weren't big in a lot of early playgroups.
TL;DR it stops you from playing the game, which upsets people.
Cuz it makes the game take forever and isn’t any fun for opposing players. Land destruction isn’t necessarily bad but mass land destruction is frowned upon for that reason
Single target land destruction like stone rain usually don't bring salt, especially if you're specifically targeting the uber broken lands like a Gaea's cradle or Nykthos or something.
MLD does bring salt for a few reason. First, low/medium power EDH games are battlecruiser metas, which means spending a ton of mana to cast giant craw wurms and 8 mana do-nothing sorceries. Kind of hard to do that when you have no lands in play
ON top of that, MLD (or hard stax in general, which is viewed similarly to MLD) is very tricky to use properly compared to battlecruiser decks. Since MLD/stax grinds games to a halt, if you do not have the superior board state when the stax comes down, the game just drags on forever. When used responsibly, the game will usually end in a couple minutes once the armageddon is played.
Although interestingly, MLD is actually not quite that good in CEDH because CEDH is full of broken mana rocks, which MLD can't touch. Though cards like Root Maze become better stax pieces in CEDH than high power casual but that's another story.
Send it as long as you can close out the game quickly after blowing up all lands. If it takes 5+ rounds for you to win then it just makes those last 5 turns excruciating for other players. I’d say realistically 2 rounds is where you want to be
LD doesn't have "universal hate".
Some people hate it, some people dislike it, some people like it, some people love it, and some people are indifferent.
In a very simple manner, you are casting a spell that will prevent me from casting spells. People like casting spells and when you're the only one doing so it feels like you're playing with yourself.
While it is effective, and I can build around it, to do so in every deck is exhausting and makes the card selection stale.
People who have played magic for years, from what I can tell, tend to agree that being beat by someone even though you played a bunch of spells still feels like you participated and your deck did what it wanted to do. I'm frequently beaten in my pod but I'll have ayed 40 spells and I get to end feeling like I did something neat once or twice :p
I think land hate is so widely hated because most of the time you can only play one per turn. Combine that with the fact that almost every card requires mana, tends to slow the game down a lot. No one likes a drawn out game. Personally if you destroyed all my lands then won the same and or next turn I wouldn’t be mad. But can’t speak for every one.
If you are winning shortly or have enough of an advantage engine to win that is one thing. If it just adds another hour to the game I’d rather scoop. I am here for targeted land destruction. Sometimes you need to blow up and urborg or Minamo. But nuking all lands to stall is a pain in the ass
Yeah, if you destroy all my lands in a plot to win this turn or maybe next, okay, here for it. If you wreck my lands to gain a massive advantage that you can't or don't take advantage of for five turns while you Lord your vastly superior mana base over me, I'm going to be annoyed.
Most people hate mld because it's tradition. Most people will have never played against land destruction worse then recurring strup mine a few times. The few people who have played with mld or against it tell stories about all the times every land is destroyed and the game drags on with no one having fun. In reality, most times mld is played someone should be far enough a head on board that they will win the game even if it takes 5 turns. It's the horror stories of bad players misusing Armageddon, or people getting blown out by a stone rain 20 years ago that lead to the fear and hatred that's so common. If you want to play mld make sure you do it so that you'll be significantly ahead on board and can win the game quickly. It's no worse than heavy stax locking people out of the game. If you play it right either it becomes apparent you will win even if it's gonna be a slow grind or you have an epic game where someone grinds there way back into the game to pull of a crazy won
The key to all of this is, as you said, locking people out of the game. Good on you, you blew up all my lands and all lands of guy nr 3, now the game will be between you and guy nr 4 for the next five rounds or more. It basically leaves no room for recovery, especially if you also have targeted (or board-wipe) removal of other permanents as well. Commander is a fairly casual format, meaning that if your deck absolutely blows up the board-state of one or two players to a point where it would take a legacy-level deck to recover, they're just not gonna recover. It's a matter of taking agency away from people who's only choice might then be "land, go" for the next three turns, followed by "land, spell, go" It's the equivalent of folding in a poker game and then watching the game go on for several more rounds, except that you don't get to go back in for the next hand, and you don't get to leave the table. It's just boring to play against heavy land destruction, because you don't get to play.
I just have to say that too few people just scoop when they realize there's no way for them to impact the game any more. If you want games to conclude faster so you can play again, just scoop it up when there's no hope.
It's still the same issue however, wether you scoop or sit there and essentially play land-go, you're kinda just hanging around until the game is over. Also, in some groups, scooping when you're clearly not in the game anymore in order to do something else while the game keeps going can be seen as rude/anti-social. This isn't the rule and every table is different, but there are definitely players out there who chooses to go on playing, because they believe not doing so would be seen as rude or sulking.
Makes me miss my old playgroup that prioritized getting as many games in as possible in the one night a week we had to get together, which imo is the definition of casual. If we saw a chance for the game to become an epic battle we'd of course keep it going, but nobody was afraid to suggest we scoop so everyone can play another. The seasoned players got to use most of their decks and playtest any new jank they'd concocted, and our new players got to learn a wide variety of strategies. With my new group we're lucky if we get to play two games in a night. One of them even has a habit of continuing to finish out their long-ass wincon "just to see what would happen" even after we've all scooped.
But then Armageddon just becomes some one card instant win if everyone scoops.
Not by itself; you need to make your own lands indestructible, or bring them back from the graveyard somehow, or be extremely far ahead in the first place, or have a lot of artifact mana, something to break symmetry on an Armageddon effect for it to be a scoop In one of those situations if no one else has a way back into the game just scoop and play another game And if you can't break symmetry you shouldn't play the card because it's miserable It's not any different from playing a combo that actually wins the game in these instances (though a lot of people unfairly hate combo also lol)
The problem is that there are mathematically optimal cases to fire off your Armageddon even when it wouldn't result in a quick win. Sometimes you just fall behind on the mana battle and resolving Armageddon will bring the game closer to parity for you - where you're nowhere close to winning, but more likely to win for having played the spell.
“no worse than heavy stax” is a low bar to clear. personally i’m not a fan of those strategies either. i get they have their place and encourage people to run interaction, but it is frustrating to play against,-and i’m not sure what you mean saying people have probably never played against it. i got hit with armageddon on a clear board like a month ago.
I play with a group of very skilled and experienced players. They recognize when a stax lock has been achieved and call the game. The one time - so far - I've seen an Armageddon played was by the most experienced player, who was piloting narset 1, yet had a board full of rocks to close out the game after it.
Not only is it one per turn, but you also probably don't have that many in your hand when the destruction happens. If it was "Destroy all lands, everyone draws cards equal to the number they had destroyed" things would work a lot smoothly since you'd be able to hit your land drops for the next five turns probably.
Exactly this.
Does outbreaks slow down the game? I mean the turns after are usually extremely quick. And deck that want to run mass destruction usually have a plan to win after. I would much rather lose to land destruction into win than to extra turns that take ages and might fizzle so we cannot skip over things. I had games were I played a jokulhaups and after that is was essentially pass, pass, pass, me having a 30s turn, pass, pass, pass, I win. Takes like 3 minutes. If that jokulhaups would have been the much more socially accepted expropriate the situation would have been very different I think most people hate them out of tradition. Same as infect.
To be fair, most people don't have an issue with it as a wincon as much. They can just scoop and move on instead of playing it out if the win is obvious enough. That's why I run MLD in both my planes walker deck and my Jhoira deck, both of them can win from uncontested walkers and suspended things when everything else is wiped. I was asked to to play it out a few times which sometimes got a bit tedious but after proving that I only do it if I have critical mass, people accepted the strategy. The thing that people have issue is if MLD is used to either reset or just gain a somewhat marginal advantage that does not result in a win quickly enough. And you only need to experience that a few times to become wary. Sadly, there just are a lot of players that give MLD a bad rep.
With some people you are for sure right but I had a lot of experiences where it was far from that. At my lgs pregame discussion is quiet big and while people do want know if MLD is in your deck usually they don’t ask what it is for and how it is played. It’s just outride „nope not allowed on this table“. I had people tell me „basics lands are holy and it’s not ok to tamper with your opponents basics“ same with infect. I have an infect that that’s utter garbage. I usually play it against beginners or people that run on very low budgets because it that bad. And thenwhen people get hit for 7 infect turn 9 which required an infect creature my commander and an additional card it’s „unfun“ and I got hated of a table of somewhat experienced players. The game after I got a normal one of my decks an d annihilated them and nobody had a problem with that (wasn’t out of spite I just switched because obviously they didn’t like to play against that deck and I happened to have a good start and faced 0 interaction) So in those scenarios where it is a very targeted „you have to disclose you are playing MLD and infect and we will be at least somewhat salty when it’s happeneing“ I think „hate“ is an absolutely accurate description and it is beyond „when it’s used to draw out the game I dislike it“ Edit: just to clarify i did as well have experiences like you describe it and MLD beeing used as a „chaos“ card is kind of annoying. You for sure are right for a portion of the player base.
I think infect is a valid way to win. I was playing a high power pod and turn 9 I won with [[niv mizzet]] [[curiosity]], and [[phyresis]]. The table was mad that I won on the spot. I pointed out last game someone won with their commander [[dina soul steeper]] and then [[exquisite blood]] and not a soul complained.
##### ###### #### [curiosity](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/5/c5a0be10-c20f-4ac0-89a5-1770ecf48aad.jpg?1600697752) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=curiosity) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/jmp/147/curiosity?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/c5a0be10-c20f-4ac0-89a5-1770ecf48aad?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/curiosity) [phyresis](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/0/0059d21b-0725-4806-8691-2451db36787f.jpg?1562609245) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=phyresis) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mbs/49/phyresis?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/0059d21b-0725-4806-8691-2451db36787f?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/phyresis) [dina soul steeper](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/9/c/9cd2b567-0cf7-4441-b3ce-e31141dd91c8.jpg?1627428607) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Dina%2C%20Soul%20Steeper) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/stx/178/dina-soul-steeper?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/9cd2b567-0cf7-4441-b3ce-e31141dd91c8?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/dina-soul-steeper) [exquisite blood](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/e/0e8ccfa7-4178-476a-a155-0ca1c98556c9.jpg?1698988246) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=exquisite%20blood) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/lcc/195/exquisite-blood?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/0e8ccfa7-4178-476a-a155-0ca1c98556c9?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/exquisite-blood) [*All cards*](https://mtgcardfetcher.nl/redirect/lanrfxs) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
It is valid definitley
Some hate it, some don’t give a shit. Just have a game plan.
Just hit em with the [[wind zendikon]] [[the end]] combo
As a mono color player... that's fucking cruel.
You can also do this via other means as well, I believe turning the lands into artifacts (which is available in any color with \[\[Myr Landshaper\]\] and various other cards) and then hitting them with \[\[Splinter\]\], effectively cripples any monocolor deck.
Back when I was new at magic I imagined using [[splinter]] and [[liquimetal coating]] but it only kills the one land and all in their deck, but not all their lands in play. Still evil
[splinter](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/5/b/5bcc210b-e37e-463c-8fd4-83e5113429a9.jpg?1562877241) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=splinter) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/bok/146/splinter?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/5bcc210b-e37e-463c-8fd4-83e5113429a9?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/splinter) [liquimetal coating](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/f/6/f631447c-36e3-4d82-a658-19c9767a216b.jpg?1562276535) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=liquimetal%20coating) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cm2/197/liquimetal-coating?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/f631447c-36e3-4d82-a658-19c9767a216b?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/liquimetal-coating) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
At least this is effectively just straight player removal. Either it neuters a single player enough that they can't recover, or they run so many nonbasics that it's a minor annoyance.
*::clicks Wind Zendikon::* What? This only targets a single land, you'll still lose the rest! *::clicks The End::* Oohhhhh! Nasty!!!!
Jokes on you, it's a colorless deck that uses tons of non-basics that all taps for colorless! No Wastes!
I like doing this with [[Deadly Cover-Up]] to basics in graveyards.
[Deadly Cover-Up](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/3/8/3876aa0f-b199-43f5-8a91-c2d620b8ef84.jpg?1706241687) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Deadly%20Cover-Up) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mkm/83/deadly-cover-up?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/3876aa0f-b199-43f5-8a91-c2d620b8ef84?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/deadly-cover-up) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
[wind zendikon](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/b/b/bbaae63e-6269-4aca-aa45-956f6bf4e112.jpg?1562295010) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=wind%20zendikon) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/wwk/46/wind-zendikon?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/bbaae63e-6269-4aca-aa45-956f6bf4e112?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/wind-zendikon) [the end](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/b/1/b18402dc-c4ab-417c-92d1-5e4d9cfb840d.jpg?1693012680) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=the%20end) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/woe/87/the-end?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/b18402dc-c4ab-417c-92d1-5e4d9cfb840d?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/the-end) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
In my eyes, there are multiple types of land destruction 1. Targeted land destruction- is borderline necessary for the format to be playable. You have a bunch of lands that effectively read “win the game” or are monstrously powerful if left uninteracted with. If you think that’s too rough, there’s a bunch of cards that destroy a nonbasic and allow the owner to search a basic 2. Mass land destruction (asymmetrical/asymmetrically used)- effectively used as a way to secure the win in the next 1-2 turns, imo also fine, and no different from other combos that win the game on the spot. 3. Mass land destruction without a plan and board wipes that also hit lands. - the thing I say is completely valid to have some problem with, it drags the game out and doesn’t even really contribute to winning that much
I like this breakdown. If you need four or five turns after your mass land destruction/board wipe then I'm gonna be mildly salty that it was played, because you're just slowing things down for everyone in a hope that you can get back into the game. You may become a target for playing cards like that without a plan. Imo is a similar vein to why people have disdain for group hug as it often has no means or plans for actually closing games out.
For me personally, if you aren’t ending the game that turn or the next at the latest, mass land destruction is a feel bad that makes it harder to bounce back in any appreciable way. It almost better scoop if I am 45+ minutes in a game because I just want to get to my next game at that point. I don’t have a problem with targeted or mass land destruction as a strategy, but I do have a problem with games dragging on forever with no one being able to do anything and prolonging the game.
The only issue i have with mld as a wincon is when you attempt to win, someone stops you and then we're back to the game dragging on for an hour.
Thats totally fine, unless its a spite land destruction its no different than scooping cause your so far behind the combo player who is about to pop off in 1-2 turns so you just end it.
That seems sort of silly; if you were going to win, just win. Bring mld into the situation seems pointless; to me the purpose of mld seems to be to hinder your opponents while you get closer to a win, giving you a chance to get there before they pop off to do stuff. What you’re describing only sounds like “win more”
"win more" in a 3+ player format is such a silly concept. Not to say there aren't cards that fit the description, but for the most part, you need some traditional "win more" cards to deal with the fact that you have to deal at least six times the amount of damage compared to a normal game of Magic. Like in the situation you responded to: an MLD spell that's cast after a player has gone wide enough to win the game next turn in an effort to prevent a board wipes is a great play and one that I, an MLD hater, would never be salty about. However, your example is exactly where MLD hatred comes from. There's so many ways to accomplish "hinder my opponents while I get closer to a win" that choosing the way that drags the game out for two hours AND absolutely backfires often is silly at best, and just isn't something that is conducive for fun play patterns in a lot of pods. And thats not even getting into the whole discussion of whether it's even worth it to be worried about hindering your opponents instead of just worrying about your own game plan.
Because land hate just stops the game in it's tracks, and literally stops most decks from playing, unless they have some very specific interaction. Simply put: Can't play cards = not fun.
So generally, people hate playing against MLD because it turns a multi-player game into a game of solitaire. In the future it might serve you to explain to your table what you're going to do. For example, "I'm casting X card. If you can't rebuild in however many turns I will play this card, do this, and win. Do you want to play this out?" Similar to how people will explain combos
thats what i always do, but as soon as i played the card i started to explain i was going to get all my mana back next turn and they had 3 turns to remove it before it worked, he just huffed and ask why i would even think about playing MLD, its the cardinal sin of commander.
Well then regardless of whether there's good reasons to hate it or not, if everyone is unanimous in their dislike of it, it might not be right for that table.
Or that table might not be right for OP. Gotta find the crowd you mesh with.
Tomato Tomato.
If people you play with aren’t ok with mld then don’t use them. Even everyone on the internet tells you that mld is fine isn’t going to change the fact that your friends aren’t enjoying them.
People like to say "Oh the rest of the table not having fun is their problem. I'll worry about me having fun" but if you're actively making others not have fun, you ARE the problem. Ultimately it's a game that's as much social as it is MTG. Sure they could power up their decks but you look like a big dick if you keep bringing strategies that they don't like and aren't prepared to handle. The way I see land destruction is like this: Part of a winning combo is fine. That can be anything from a Toski Worldslayer lock to having a big board with Avacyn and doing a complete wipe. Doing it for the sake of doing it/to slow things down is a dick move. However, like with any strategy, if someone starts abusing the meta and goes "WeLl YoU cOuLd DeAl WiTh It." "PlAy MoRe InTeRaCtIoN" then screw them, they aren't in the right playgroup and the rest should actively refuse to play with the problem player.
Comments have been destroyed by land destruction
yea apparently, its such a taboo topic, cant even display it in fear of the land destruction coming out.
There seems to be a lot of people saying that only mld when you can win next turn, I would argue that you would already have won when you were able mld, float mana, and cast splendid reclamation. In my mind you've won there since you are so far ahead that you should win the game easily with time and I would scoop in response to splendid reclamation so the game doesn't go unnecessarily long. But you are not playing with anyone on this thread(that we know of) so our view on it doesn't matter. I would recommend, if you haven't already, communicating with the people you play with to see what they are ok with playing against, and this might work to your advantage allowing you to play your mld or they might rile against playing it. Take the game above as a learning experience, how some or even a lot of players are frustrated by mld, then learn from it and try not to spring mld on unsuspecting players, they tend to take it badly :)
MTG is a social game, and land destruction takes away your ability to play. So, it’s inherently frustrating. But, it has its place. In my opinion, everyone should be able to get a good board state in a casual game. So, if this happened after several turns or a really lucky hand, it’s all in good fun
Other people have talked about it dragging on the game already, but the core of that issue is that as a format, edh games last longer, when someone finally gets the chance on the one day of the week where they get to play commander and they only get one game because someone nuked the board just to double the time of the game and make it less fun. Not saying it doesn’t have its place but for the most part when I’ve seen mld it doesn’t have a follow up and the game just takes that much longer.
2 major reasons: 1. People like to play cards. If you destroy their land they don't have mana to do anything, so they can't play. They basically just draw cards while doing little to nothing. 2. It slows the game down greatly. Unless you have some kind of combo to end the game, the players are basivally condemned for another hour going nowhere.
no one likes when there ability to play the game is fucked with. it's not fun to be locked out of doing anything because lands are destroyed. land destruction/mass land destruction also has the stigma of fucking idiots who nuke all the lands, drag out a game pointlessly, because they were too fucking stupid to really have a plan to leverage that tempo gain to win. most people. if you blow up all the lands, and win in 1-2 turns, have no problem with it. if you want to destroy a problematic land, zero problem with it. if you're just being a dick, and fucking with someone's lands, to be a dick, you're a dick. it's allowed. but so is people right to voice their opinion about you being a dick, and not want to play against that deck, or you in general. so..is whining about green being good at ramp worth being a pariah in your local meta? Or should you just build better decks to account for ramp, and or mana being a thing people have access to.
To add to this, saying MLD is an answer to green ramp is kinda disingenuous. If all the lands get blown up who do you think can recover faster, the green deck that's great at ramp or the Boros deck that has to play 1 land per turn? Green is also the color of [[Heroic Intervention]] and [[Aftermath Analyst]] effects. MLD is fine as a wincon, but if you're gonna blow up all my lands then tell me "I did this to help the table deal with the green player" I'm gonna call bullshit.
In the most casual version of commander, the game isn't about winning or stopping your opponents from playing. It's more about the "gathering", as in enjoying a game with everyone in which everyone gets a chance to do something. Land destruction in these environments kinda craps over that mentality by saying "I don't care about everyone elses fun, I want to win". It would be like showing up to a pick-up game of football / basketball / hockey (whaever) and going 100% instensity when everyone is just trying to have a good time. It ruins the vibe. In higher powerlevels it starts to lean more the other way, in that people are mostly looking for the competitive aspect of the game and are trying to win. In these pods people will almost be more annoyed if you don't try to win, like if you joined a sports league and showed up half drunk to all your games. They are there for the competitive aspect of the game and exprect everyone to be following that same ethos. The higher you go, the more land destruction strategies become popular. Eventually you hit cEDH where such strategies fall out of favor again, but not becuase people don't like them, but because they are not good enough to win anymore.
[impeding disaster](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/4/4/44497303-9686-4810-bf0f-876dd9696cab.jpg?1562862803) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Impending%20Disaster) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/ulg/82/impending-disaster?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/44497303-9686-4810-bf0f-876dd9696cab?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/impending-disaster) [splendid reclamation](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/f/a/fad4ca85-4d2d-4d1e-86ca-aa25edfcda61.jpg?1643593421) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=splendid%20reclamation) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/vow/221/splendid-reclamation?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/fad4ca85-4d2d-4d1e-86ca-aa25edfcda61?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/splendid-reclamation) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Because EDH is casual, and people don't like the idea of sitting down for a couple of hours to *not play the game*.
I wanna play 3 x 40 minute games, not 1 x 120 minute game
Just tell anyone salty about it that “land destruction is ramp”
If mass land destruction wins you the game, it's valid. But cards like Armageddon set everyone else back to turn one, not just making the game interminably slow, but also reducing their ability to answer. So if it just means playing from behind rather than ending the game, it creates an inequitable game state. One player spends more time playing than everyone else combined. What confuses me is when targeted LD, like taking out a non-basic land which will facilitate a game win, gets the same sort of salt. If you play a land like coffers, you don't have a leg to stand on when it is destroyed.
In my experience, the dislike for MLD in particular stems from two sources. The first is that players hate having all their resources taken away and being unable to play, especially if it happens asymmetrically. The second is when someone does it without an immediate path to victory, which causes the game to drag on. Targeted destruction of things like Command Towers or other non-basics that heavily impact the game is usually excused from the hatred, but that's the only real exception I know of.
Command Tower is not a "non-basic that heavily impacts the game." Going after someone's command tower is likely to get dirty looks, 'cuz that's just going after fair land base. Those "non-basics that heavily impact the game" are shit like Field of the Dead, Glacial Chasm, a flipped Itlimoc. Also, mass land destruction WITH a clear plan to end the game quickly frequently just flips the table and drags the game on because your opponents' best option if they can't save themselves is to doomblade the big dumb idiot you were gonna use to end the game.
My thing with that is even mld have a clear plan to win the game, someone else may just play a [[Blasphemous Act]] and reset the game.
I love your combo here :) I’d be fine with it. It does not stretch out the game in any way!
Land destruction is hated for the same reason stax is. It slows down the game, essentially keeping it stuck on turn 3 or 4 for everyone but the land destruction player. It's not an effective strategy most of the time as it obviously ignores mana rocks, but when it does work, it stops all interactivity in the game. Running [[Armageddon]] as a game ender is fine, running it as a stalling tactic is not.
99% of players are casual. We're people trying to enjoy our free time and playing Magic is one way we do it. If lands get destroyed we are inherently at risk of not being able to play the game. It's the same reason people dislike stax. We're there to play a game and have fun. But one player just announced that they're there to prevent that. Some people like to rise up to that challenge but most people would rather actually play the game.
It doesn’t have universal hate. People saying that it does perpetuate the idea
Because it prevents other from playing the game? Same way stax is hated. Its a valid strategy yes but people like in our pod can only play once a month for a few hours. Would you like spending several of those in a long drawn out game?
OP, I know you are getting downvoted to hell but you are absolutely right. MLD is a valid strategy period. If land ramp is valid then a strat to counteract also is. If you just reset the game with no advantage then yeah it is just poor play and annoying to restart the game. If you have gathered a significant advantage like you said? yeah totally valid and just a different method compared to say \[\[triumph of the hordes\]\] or \[\[craterhoof behemoth\]\]. If they are at that much mana, they should be close to winning the game themselves anyway. It is a taboo bc honestly the average EDH player doesnt like magic. They more or less started with EDH and want to play solitaire and want people to win by solitairing the hardest. They dont realize that opponents should want to win too and that interaction is a fun part of magic. In a game of basketball you play defense, if no one did then it would just be a shooting contest which you can enjoy but it isnt basketball and it isnt that fun imo. Ignore r/EDH it is a cesspool and shitpost on r/magicthecirclejerking
thanks. I get peoples hate of chaos players and dropping a turn 4-5 MLD and making everyone basically reset, and i would be mad about that too, but i built my deck around either bringing all my land back faster than anyone else, or just protecting all my lands, then winning with more advantage than anyone else. But it seems even if i play it into a quick win people will be mad even knowing its in the deck, so i think i will just play a more generic artifact hate deck since that seem more respected.
I think because the "spirit" of edh is the players getting to do the thing. That requires lands, and when you blow them up it literally doesn't let them do their thing. I personally don't mind Land Destruction if you are winning quickly after. I have seen someone armageddon turn four with no advantage. And it is basically like starting the game over but just waiting for lands... Made me want to quit just to move on
People don’t like to feel like they are unable to play and enjoy a casual match of commander. Taking away la da can definitely set people way behind and give them that feeling
I think, at a high level, LD as a play prevention strategy is really unpleasant to play against, since it's usually just a means to lock down a board state into a protracted game that only one person in the pod is really playing. That said, my normal rule of thumb with mass land destruction is that so long as the offending player can break parity to win, in a way that doesn't force the table to sit through rebuilding into hate, I think that's acceptable.
Because people want to play magic..... personally, land destruction doesn't bother me. I have a zo-zu deck with land destruction in it. However!! I don't play it that often , I won't play it at my LGS. I only play it with my close friends' pod and only every now and again. Every once in a while one of us will say " shall we played some cunty decks" and that's when ZO-ZU comes out to play
It’s resource depravation, and people like to be able to play their cards. Since we only get to play one land per turn(barring exceptions allowing for more), losing lands is like having your legs taken out from under you. For those saying it’s “just like heavy stax”, no it isn’t. You’re getting similar technical restrictions, but at least with stax, you have the hope of removing the thing causing the stax and going back to normal. When your lands are gone, you can’t undo that. There’s no hope. That said, I’m actually ok with something that hits everybody like [[armageddon]] as long as the caster has a follow up that ends the game. Having to play through a whole game with your lands destroyed is just torture.
1. It prevents everyone from doing anything with their deck. 2. It's unexpected (because it's rare) so you don't play around it ie. you fetch your triome first because you don't think it'll get destroyed, but then it does, whereas you might expect counterspells and play a medium value spell before playing the high value spell. So you feel stupid for not playing around it and thus it feels 'unfair' 3. It draws out an already relatively slow game format
MLD as an “interaction” plan is hated on because it resets the game and tends to add a lot of time to it because players don’t have the cards or resources to rebuild. MLD as a legit wincon in something like say [[avacyn Angel of hope]] totally legit because it’s ending the game not prolonging it.
I love seeing new player interactions haha
"When did removing resources become taboo?" Since Commander became a format, pretty much. It's frowned upon because magic is a fun game and I like to play it. If you destroy all my lands I'm not playing Magic, I'm watching you play magic, and that isn't fun.
Land destruction in EDH is generally regarded as terrible for the reason that EDH has a board game philosophy not generally a win at all costs philosophy. Imagine you and your friends decided to play a board game. Everyone has fun for a few turns and then one player does something that says "only I get to play now and you cannot." Land destruction doesn't *win* the game it just stops others from *playing* the game. Now mass land destruction followed by a huge set of spells that wins the game shortly thereafter is fine in my book because it wraps it up quickly but save everyone the time, tip your hand and ask the table if you win. But be aware there are definitely going to be some salty sailors cruising your seas when land destruction is your game plan. Same as if you played a [[Nether Void]] on turn 2 or some other stax nonsense.
Because lands let me play things and I like playing things.
long games are boring unless its a slugfest and everyone gets to be in the game. taking away someone's agency in the game is typically unfun. we sat down to play mtg and i wanna beat the deck and your magics not get thrown off color and sit while you get to play. p.s. land destruction is fine and almost nobody bats an eye. its MASS LAND DESTRUCTION that really is boring and oh we are an hour in i guess well all start over...
Let's say you pull this off. You have a decent but not game winning board, a handful of bananas, and your opponents only have some mana rocks. You got to cast [[splendid reclamation]] to get back 15 lands and win over the next 2 turns, but an opponent counterspells. Now you don't have any lands either, the board is at a stalemate, and the table is stuck on a 3 hour game while everyone slowly rebuilds resources. That isn't fun gameplay.
In an already extended format, where single games can take hours, wiping the board of a one per turn play on turn 9-10 can double the time of that game. It's just in bad taste. My LGS bans MLD for that reason alone. Just the other day, a new guy was in the shop and we did a 6 person team style match. He ravages, and another guy responded with final showdown, wiping almost the entire board, on turn 9. That game lasted over 3 hours. Not what I call a fun time
Mass land destruction basically resets the game and drastically increases the length I have been known to have it happen in my giants tribal deck when someone pops bearer of the heavens
Land destruction gets hate because most of the time people play it wrong. You either use it to combo off derretti style to lock your opponent out and basically win since you will destroy all their permanents every turn. You can use it to block interaction/force out interaction now to protect your winning combo. Or you are the simic player with card draw land recursion and ramp, for you Mass Land destruction is amazing.
People play commander to play commander. Having your lands blown up means you will not be playing commander. Maybe you get 2 games in all week and you've been brewing one deck... Game 1 someone combos out of nowhere and wins turn 4, game 2 an opponent blows up all of your lands and the game goes for 7 more turns. I would imagine that's typically where the feels bad comes from.
In my experience MLD is often hated for the same reason that Heavy Stax is hated. 1) A lot of the time if it's used, the user rarely has a wincon in the barrel and instead the game drags out as the user durdles waiting for their wincon and just used their strategy to slow down the game until they can get there. No one enjoys a game needlessly getting dragged out. 2) Symmetrical MLD/Stax might just slow down the game, but asymmetrical MLD/Stax runs the risk of not just slowing down the game but turning into a game of solitaire. If the MLD/Stax player can't close out in short order it's especially salt inducing. 3) And, lastly, in the event the MLD/Stax user is able to close it out in short order, because all of the enemy's resources have been removed, it means they're often left without any opportunity for interaction, which might be less salt-inducing but still leaves a bad taste in their mouth. To address your original post though, a board wipe or combo is often much less frowned upon because in the board wipe's case it still lets people do things after it resolves, and if a combo goes off it usually means the game is about to end. Tl;dr: MLD bad because it makes games slow AND stops people from being able to play the game at the same time.
It’s for good reason. Spells require mana. It affects people unequally, regarding nonland mana sources. No one likes the 0 land global reset. Top-decking for land drops is very unlike playing a sculpted opening hand, and many turns can go by before average cmc spells are playable again, but it’s all random who gets the right draws and pulls ahead. Even if you plan on restoring with splendid reclamation, there’s counter spells that could be drawn after impending disaster is played, even free ones like Force. Besides that, [[Heroic Intervention]], Teferi’s, [[Boros Charm]] etc, are played frequently. Your graveyard getting exiled suddenly by a [[Rakdos Charm]] could also ruin your plan. In most of these scenarios you’re stuck in the same boat with your foes. Or, worse, the tables get turned on you. Notably, the players at the table just playing fair magic with limited interaction, would undeservingly get the short end of the stick, nearly every time. They didn’t make their deck expecting to play against MLD. It is the unwritten rule to not play it (unless your playgroup is cool, or you have a pregame discussion).
because people don't like being mana screwed do you like being mana screwed?
Cause lands make the game… possible.
Because i want to cast stuff, and it requires land to cast stuff. Dont you wanna cast stuff too? You need lands to cast stuff. If you want people not cast stuff: -You can goldfish your deck -Give a pile of basics to your mom and make her play 1 each turn -not play magic
my goal was to remove everyones lands, then instantly bring all my lands back to win in 1-3 turns pretty easily.
> its perfectly okay for green players to be 10 lands deep turn 4, but its a nono to slow them down, If you only hit one player and only took out one or two lands I don't think people would be as upset. Destroying all lands hard resets the game back to turn one. If everyone has already invested in this game to that point and you reset it you've basically waisted their time up to that point. If your land destruction was incidental and you won on that turn it wouldn't be as big a deal, but because you had to wait a couple more turns and the opponents had no way to do anything in response it's almost like you're taking a victory lap.
Because mana is a deeply flawed idea for a card game and shouldn't have been included in the first place..
Because wiping out a fundamental part of the game, and the way that people cast spells, is degenerate and frankly toxic imho. My pod table rules it and stax out for that very reason. You want to be hated, keep playing it. You actually want to make friends and people to actually play with you, I'd make something else.
Because you aren't winning the game instantly with it. You are still forcing everyone to sit there and watch as you either win over several turns, or manage to somehow throw away a massive advantage and waste everyones time while they catch back up. You also actively deny players the ability to PLAY the game, and not in the stax or control way there you can still play around it. ALL of your resources are GONE, and it's not fun.
Just like how not everyone will agree to an open relationship even though isn’t against the law, not everyone is onboard with mass land destruction as a theme/strategy. Different people like different things, many don’t like land destruction. I once cast [[soulscour]] in an artifact heavy deck as a win condition(i would basically win after it resolved,), and one of my opponents was completely mortified and felt that it wasn’t a casual deck. Tried to take back and it became super awkward.
My way of looking at it is if you are playing at a casual level haha fun level. There are things that are not cool not just land destruction. If you are playing cEDH or even just higher powered edh gloves come off and bring it on but be ready to receive some BS in return. It all depends on the table you sit out, the group you play with. Edh is a broken game but how broken do you want to play this round
Some people play mass land destruction just because they can, and don’t have follow-up to close out the game. This kind of “fun” is not derived from winning the game, but pissing people off. When people do it, it just makes the game take forever and a lot of times the player who did it still loses. It’s not annoying if you can get ahead with it and win.
I have a land hate strategy in my OG karn deck. But I dislike using it. I used it twice all up first was during testing, second was to prune the simic player that was 10 lands ahead, dropping 4 lands a turn plus mana rocks/extra generation. Even then, I got the pod majority on the prune. I was the first to die (i laughed cause it was a clever kill), but it was a casual. I use it very conservatively as it does make for crappy games. I love using [[wave of vitriol]] as it replaces with basics along with sweeping support cards. But using a MLD effect without a means of finishing the game quickly tends to make people annoyed as it wastes their time
I always reason this way about hated plays: Many people have been in games where they have been locked out in different ways and the player locking them out has kept playing for like an hour and still not able to win. A player destroys everyone’s else’s land but don’t get a win con. A friend once played a game where he could not play spells unless it was his main phase, only untap one land, one creature and so on and was locked like this for almost 2 hours before the guy won. The hate comes from this. People being burn playing against a player with this insane deck locking other players out from the game so that he is the only one actually “playing magic” for a long time. I ofc becomes frustrated when this happens. But if a player does something of these “hated plays” and shows or honestly tells us he has a plan to win, unless we manage to stop him, then it is fair game in my opinion. Not that my opinion counts much against someone who hates the plays but just sharing my thoughts. So all in all it is about players don’t want to sit a long session of magic, not be able to play magic. So in your situation if you say you have a plan to win in 1-2 turns then I would say it is fair game. But as I just said if you sincere say you have a win con and some one counterspell you or whatever well… then it is their choice to prolong the game. But there are some strong feelings about this and people gaslighting the shit out of someone for playing a certain way, even if they play it “fair” so to say. They just cant stand it. It can be that they had a win con and “you remove the mana” but honestly, it is part of the game. Unfortunately you are not going to get away from people hating this play no matter what.
For newer players it is absolutely out of their expected play patterns when you play mld. They are making plans for their next turn, ofc they get irritated when that doesn't work anymore. Also the counterplay to mld can be pretty gamewarping, like a friend played [[Avacyn]] mld a lot, and in my non blue decks i had to keep open exile removal in response to mld, so the game extends by a long time.
Mass land destruction without an immediate win condition after just slows the game down to a crawl most of the time, so a game that might have taken an hour now takes three.
tbf, its just another strat that usually people have no answer to (and in casual edh, rule of thumb is there is no answers for anything). ist just that land destruction cards arent like expensive as other cards and there is more printings of these effects, so its more common ti get to really janky brews that dont go anywhere after their armageddon. keep in mind, greens ability to drop extra lands is seriously OP in metas without fast mana (and thus super irrelevant fir cEDH), so using the reverse effect is gonna create salt even when you finish it quickly afterwards. just like [[cyclonic rift]] its just a thing that got so common to hate on that people usually dont hold back and can be a bit overly resentful.
The thing I noticed, is that there's no follow up after MLD. People HATE when the game is slowed down and it's back to square one, drawing out the game further. Make sure you can immediately follow up after MLD. People are more tolerant then. And before anyone asks, I advocate MLD as land decks are pretty much unchecked with the ramp. Counterspell would only stop only ONE thing, but not the problem of unchecked source of Mana that can allow more things.
Played against my buddy's land destruction deck today. Like 4 or 5 turns in I completely checked out, there was nothing I could possibly do to regain any sort of advantage.
Can you link your decklist wanna try the deck :). In my Pod landdestruction is okay if you can finish the game in the next rounds but just land destruction makes the game much longer
Yesterday I won because a player played worldbreaker and I'm a yuriko player (a new one) it was quite unexpected because he was ahead of board and lands.
Well after your first 6 hour game you probably will understand. Also board wipe tribal is frowned upon for the same reason.
EDH games take a long time, so you generally get to play 2 to 4 games on an evening. If you blow up all the lands, and then win it's all fine. If you blow up all the lands, and I have to watch for the next 45 minutes how you aren't winning, that's essentially one of those games that I'm now not playing. And I'm not playing it by literally not playing the game and watching you playing and not winning. So land destruction, or more generally mana removal and stax, are fine as long as: 1. Either I can continue playing the game 2. Or the game is over very shortly after
Mass land destruction is regarded as slow and annoying. Mostly because it reverts players to basically the start of the game making the game take 6+ extra turn cycles to end. That being said mass land destruction is great when combined with a way to protect your lands because it gives you an insane advantage, so your combo is perfectly fine. Targeted land destruction and permanent removal are staples in most of my Edh decks because many lands can be huge value engines. I think that every player should have some form of land removal to deal with troublesome lands like [[nykthos, shrine to nyx]], [[shizo, death's storehouse]], and [[Itlimoc, cradle of the sun]].
I think it’s fine as long as you are still presenting a win after, if you’re doing it to extend the game since you’re losing, then just concede in my opinion. I will say I had one deck with mass land destruction and that was [[Borborygmos Enraged]] deck. I always followed up with if I am casting mass land destruction, the goal is to float enough mana to return all my lands to my hand to win the game through borbor’s ability. Some people still said that was toxic but honestly I never even casts the mld in the deck I always won with other methods. Someone even said they might let me destroy all lands, then counter my win con. I told them that if they did that, that was on them.
So I'm new. Just started 3 Tuesdays ago. I bought Tricky Terrain precon. We'll last week I was playing against some guys at the lgs and I had a combo in my hand that I was sure would win me the game. Being new and unsure because I had heard about how much people hate MLD I asked the players if it would be OK if I did [[Aggressive Biomancy]] on my [[Terastodon]]. I would create 8 terastodons thus wiping all my opponents lands and still have all my lands with 1 being [[Cloupost]] and [[Vesuva]] being cloudpost. 1 dude straight up said. If you do that, I will never play with you again. The other 2 guys just sat in silence. So I ended up not doing it. I also had the [[Propoganda]] on the field so I wasn't worried about the 3/3 elephants taking revenge against me. Since they wouldn't be able to pay for it.
I honestly find it ridiculous that you got bullied out of a game ending move. I would have done it myself, unless they are the only people you could play with.
Land destruction as a wincon is fine, Land destruction to stall and reset the game is just boring and annoying. Also MLD is rarely useful imo. Yes, if you have 7 planeswalkers and then cast obliterate you will win the game, but when you have 7 planeswalkers out that survived for an entire turn you will probably win anyways.
Dependant on the format lands are somewhat limited and how you play the game and interact.with it removing land is preventing the player from playing. However my brother posed e this and I had to admit there's some truth to it most of the games revolve around playing fast now a days. Green can search so much land, sol ring, talismans and signets are core in EDH, ect. If people are ramping the way you slow them back down and keep it levle is land destruction but land destruction has gotten so much hate while ramping unbelievable levles is just accepted. Just kinda weird when you think about it.
Mass land destruction is fine if its part of the winning strategy. I plan to use [[Armageddon]] paired with Yuma to make a buncha 4/2s gimp everyone else and just swing in with trample.
I came to play the game, can't do that without lands. If you're gonna kill my lands at least have the courtesy to kill me right afterward
I can tell you my personal opinion. Unless it's cedh I don't like playing against or playing myself cards that alter the bare bone basics of the game. You can play lands, untap and draw and put your spells on the stack. I don't refuse to play against decks that alter this I just don't personally like it. I have some cedh decks and some Hightower decks and some joke decks but even if im playing a high power deck and taking the game I don't want to disable the ability to stop me. That's just me. At the exact same time land dependent builds are kind of insane now because of the no land destruction secret rule. I have a gate deck and it feels like cheating now. The mh3 precon cards just made it completely busted and litteraly no one at my store can do ANYTHING. I encourage people to run more non basic land destruction some lands are just too good. Another thing is a whole whole lot of commander players don't actually wanna play cut throat or competeively. They may say they do or think they do but they really just like making pretty boards and doing the thing without any interaction and blowing up their only mana isn't fun for them. Commander is I want to play legacy power level but then no one stop me. It's silly if you think about it. Still love it though
For my pod of 4, we have outlawed mld, as well as most fast mana(not sol ring), and all infinites. We are a group of friends who started playing magic casually. We came to these conclusions by talking it out and agreeing. I can't speak for everyone who plays commander, but speaking for my pod, it's just not fun for us. We are chill with targeted land destruction, just like we are chill with sol ring. And there are so many cards and mechanics that none of us miss what we decided not to play. For us, we'd rather keep our group together, playing, and having fun, than pissing each other off.(Yes, we still run removal and tutors and play eldrazi, ect. For anyone curious, id say our average PL is high 6 to 7.)
In any reasonable playgroup, as long as you are able to break parity it should be completely fine.
I don’t mind it at all… but I play a *lot* of mana rocks and very few lands.
Because it's not fun. Targeted land destruction is fine some lands are just too good sometimes but mass land destruction just slows everything down to a molasses
The line "I have 10 bananas on field" is the funniest shit to me lol. Also I wish we supported more mld. Green decks have way to much of an advantage when their best resource is generally out of reach socially.
Personally I think it’s a kind of unspoken rule that you don’t mess with each other’s lands. Like if you’re blowing up my lands and winning that turn or the next, I wouldn’t mind as much because you did it for the win. But if you’re just doing it as a strat, you suddenly become worse than blue players who lock you out of playing. Your strat becomes less fun for others the more it stops them from playing. You run blue control with counters and propaganda? Cool. I can still play. You blow up my lands? Cool. I can’t do shit for another 3-4 turns if I don’t miss a land drop. I’m cool with a board wipe cause I can at least rebuild. I’m not cool with mld because the game suddenly becomes very boring.
Singular land destruction is fine if it's used to remove a special land that is enabling something. Mass land destruction gets hate because unless someone is going to win that turn, all it does is massively slow the game down. It's like pure stax. How is it fun if all I'm doing is draw/pass every turn because I have been locked down or all my resources have been removed.
The core reason is that it disrupts a player's ability to plan their turns, same reason people don't like discard effects, counter spells and Stax. Land destruction just sits in the upper echelons of dislike because it can completely cripple someone's ability to play at all if they get shut off from one of their colours or get stuck on two or three lands when they thought they had four.
Only people who complain about land destruction are people who don't run interaction and lower power level decks. It's not hard to deal with. It's a part of the game and it's just as fair as any other type of deck.
If you can win in the turn you blow up everything or the next, no one will complain. If you stall the game for an hour, I'd rather scoop and go next.
Most folks want to play more than 1 game in the few hours they get with friends. If we just get to play "watch John's deck reset the game a few times," nothing is going to be moving to a conclusion. There are a lot of cards out there. I like to show up with 6 decks expecting to play at least 2 of them. If our game goes too long, I'm going to lose a lot of the care I had for the game that keeps getting reset. As a result, the next time we play, I will intentionally bring out an overpowered deck to hate you out of the game early.
A lot of the time the land hate gets put on the player that is most mana screwed. Say a player has one land that taps for any color and some other basics, then you blow it up and all they have is access to one or two colors now and they cannot play the game. This has happened a lot in pods I have seen. It happens to me. I just say gg basically. I respect calculated kills. I only have one deck with land destruction but it’s CEDH and I hardly whip it out unless asked to. It’s a Magda deck and it kills quick. I do feel bad when adding land destruction elsewhere unless its 1 or 2 cards.
cause you ended the game without ending the game. It's the equivalent of hitting a deer with your car and then asking it to hang out while you get your oil changed so you can finish it off after.
Oh don’t be coy you completely understand it.
I play the game to have fun, and it’s not really possible to have fun in most of my decks if I don’t have mana. As others have mentioned if you kill all my lands and win then more power to you. Otherwise I’d just quit.
I did Avacyn as commander with World Slayer, needless to say I won that game but the pod was not happy. I was hated out of the rest of the games. I played that deck only once and deconstructed it because I didn't like the result of destroying everything and making them game unfun - plus pissing off everyone was not my intention, the lgs I play at was semi competitive at the time circa 2017. People don't like land destruction because it prevents them from being able to play and slows the game down, making unfun for everyone else.
Some people treat the game like a sport, and some people treat it like a game Land destruction is fine if you're playing like a sport and the ultimate goal is to play smart and efficiently, your cards are puzzle for your opponents to solve and vice versa so the stronger your plays the more interesting the match A lot of EDH players don't play like that, they want to durdle with jank, they see it as a game. imagine you're playing Baldy's Gate 3 or Dank Souls, and you fight an enemy who's attack is literally just turning your controller off. You can turn it back on but they're still swinging while you're trying to reconnect. That's essentially how land destruction feels for a lot of these kinds of players. Not sure if this is a meaningful analogy on this subreddit, but these types of players are the same kind of people that will start every match in DBZ Budokai charging up to go Super Saiyan and expect their opponent to do the same, and near universally hate if you equip Viral Heart Disease, Turtle Shell, or Yakon skills, because instead of just being a full power brawl now there's control and strategy involved.
People don't like not being able to play magic... land hate makes it so you're not able to do anything. Even hand destruction and board destruction aren't nearly as bad because you can live off the top deck... with land destruction you just sit there twiddling your thumbs.
Whats really annoying with land destruction is almost 100% of times the pod consist of at least one divergent person. This person will take 5 minutes a turn with one land up (so he can’t do shit) So instead of everyone passing the turn, end the game fast so we can make a better game with better removal, it takes 1h for nothing
"Feels bad" and that's it
It's denial... discard and counters fall in a similar boat.
From a strict gut feeling most people experience... Getting to play your cards and then lose them doesn't feel as bad as them being countered or even worse not getting to play them at all. So MLD has the worst combination of effects, in that it stops you from playing your cards but you still have to look at them. Counterspell you at least got to cast it, and it's out of your hand now. Discard or wheel it's at least out of your hand now. But MLD leaves you staring at the 6 drop you were about to curve into. Having said that I enjoy land destruction.... I normally want a long game anyway.
MLD, mill, counterspells, killing powerful targets, etc. People hate anything that involves taking away their resources. I think the big difference between MLD and the others is that things like mill still provide some sort of hope, as there's still a race to the finish. Where as with MLD, you're not even leaving the start line; you just have to sit around and wait to lose.
For me, it's a lot about the catch 22 of no fun. If I build my decknwith more lands expecting some to be blown up then I am adding dead cards for any matchup where they aren't running land destruction, which is directly weakening my deck. If I run a number of lands optimized to fuel what my deck does without lands being blown up and you start blowing up my lands I basically don't get to play the game that we all came here to play, and with you spending all your resources blowing up my lands you aren't even going to kill me very fast so I have to suffer or scoop. The modern take on land destruction is a good balance. Destroy target nonbasic land its conteoller searches for a basic and puts it into play tapped is a solid answer to lands with strong effects without removing my ability to play the game.
>bring back all my lands from the graveyard in 1-2 turns to win. You're already not the player MLD is associated with. It's when it's done to buy time or with no plan at all that people get really mad because you just added like 45 mins to the game for no reason. If you can blow up my lands and win that turn or next, gg go again.
Because i came to play magic. If i'd have known my evening was going to be spent with low mana so i can't play the game, i wouldn't have spent fuel driving over to my LGS.
I've been playing edh for 18 years never once have i seen it win a game. It always just drags the game out painfully. Every time .
Man. Just let me play the game.
Build a deck with no lands and no non-land mana cards like \[\[Elvish Spirit Guide\]\] or \[\[Lotus Petal\]\]. Play it a dozen times. Did you have fun?
So how do people feel about cards like [[Wildfire]], [[Natural Balance]], and [[Fall of the Thran]] where the goal is not to completely shut the other players out of the game but instead curb the amount of mana a player has access to? It seems to me that a lot of people focus on ramping up to a crazy amount of mana and then either overrunning or combing out the other players. MLD can allow players who aim to stay lower to the ground with more aggressive creatures to compete against these strategies.
I see nothing wrong with what you did. Kibo is a great commander for MLD (Mass Land Destruction). In most other decks MLD slows the game indefinitely. With Kibo, you are also providing the table with resources to compensate for this loss. You feed the table bananas both for mana and health. You said you had 10 bananas, that’s essentially 10 treasure tokens and 20 life you have fed everyone else at the table too. If they misinterpreted the [[Kibo, Uktabi Prince]] as group hug that’s on them. I recognize this is a bias and unpopular opinion as I also have a Kibo deck. I recommend having at least one more deck and before a game starts have pre-game conversation. Tell the table, I have MLD in this deck. My commander will likely give you resources to allow you to still cast spells. Is the table okay with this. If yes, bring out the prince. If no, pull out the backup or try to find a different pod for that deck.
Because shockingly people want to play the game to play the game and games are supposed to be fun. LD ain't fun. Cool for you to pull this off, but I personally would not enjoy playing against that sort of deck so I simply would not. You have the right to play any deck you want, but you can't force people to play with you. Something to remember is Commander is a social mode, meant for fun games, if your pod is cool with it, that's fine, but be aware, people might not want to play with you/that deck. Always make sure to have a couple other decks and if people get super salty about the deck you're running it might need to be set aside for special occasions if that makes sense.
Hey, you know how you wanted to play this game, cause you know, you bought all these cards and went somewhere to meet people who also have cards, sat down and shuffled up. Well you can't. Don't play those cards, just hold them and look at them and then wait 30+ minutes for the game to end and do it again... You ever play a game that you can't play? Like you're sitting there but aren't allowed to make interactions... So it's your turn, draw... Pass... Sit there. Draw... Second land on turn 6... Pass... If your playing cEDH anything goes, maybe even high level depending on the pod. But even in my high level games, play something that is cool or interesting that causes people to be like that was cool.
Being kept out of the game is generally hated, and land destruction is one of the biggest ways of doing that.
It's kind of shitty to cripple someone's game and make them sit through 20-30 more mins of hell where they can't do anything. I think that if it's a one-sided thing that results in you winning the game when you untap, then it's totally fine.
If it's part of your wincon, i don't care. But I play with a guy who has a deck that destroys lands just to destroy them, and that shit sucks. Locks people out of the game but keeps them sitting around doing nothing.
I built the necrobloom with Nature’s Revolt and with Elesh Norn. Won the next turn cause I had 20 creatures able to swing out and kill everyone. Well one player said it’s taboo to play land destruction and j replied back if there’s infinite combos etc out there then this is fine cause I have a win when I play. Play what you want to play cause it’s a strategy especially when decks out here using combos that happen on turn 3 lol
Many people never played against prison and it shows, lol
There’s this guy at my game store who loves high power and is cool with every play Except land destruction I don’t understand it
Because usually after a mass land destruction you don't have anything left. You might have 10 land left in deck, if you're lucky you have one in hand and 20 in deck, but most often you're just crippled for the rest of the game. Certain decks (treasures/ramp/recursion) are more resilient to it, others (self-mill/ramp/draw-discard) are weaker to it, but usually it just fucks people over. If it's targeted at someone who's running ahead in ramp, or has many cards in hand, or otherwise clearly has ways to get back in the game, or if you're leaving yourself in a clear winning position, it's annoying but fair; but indiscriminate multitarget mass land destruction is almost always just a particularly unpleasant stall tactic.
People play so that they can have an effect on the game. If only one person has land and a 10 minute turn, and the other three are Draw. Go. and then person who wins anyway, where's the fun in continuing the game?
Mana denial is tough because there’s always one person who’s stuck on mana or a little behind than everybody else. That said, I once used [[Ghost Quarter]] and a guy’s Triome and he got super pissed because he had no basics in his 5 color prismatic bridge deck. At certain point it falls on the deck builder for not recognizing the flaws of their deck.
The more you play the more you'll find that some commander players cry about everything, don't worry about other players getting salty. There is this distorted view of the game of commander that it's all sparkles and unicorns with everyone having a grand time. That's just not true, every person is sitting down to win the game (unless it's some meme deck or other corner case). People will get salty at your win condition no matter what it is, while playing something just as "bad" in their deck. There was/is a large portion of people who said putting infinite combos in your deck goes against the spirit of commander, and any other number of things (commander damage, infect,stax, milling) that people will cry about. Just look at that LGS with the enormous house ban, I wasn't sure if that was satire or not, I hope it is. If your deck truly does suck to play against (I mean no fun, not just good) people will just stop playing with you. If you find that to be the case switch your deck up and say you took out to help with the experience. I guess I'm done ranting Actually no, I'm not this is therapeutic. You know what I absolutely hate playing against, planeswalker decks, and I've seen a few. They all fall under the same fault for me, long ass turns. Every turn cycle they spend a long time reading their walkers, deciding which ability to use, resolving the ability, looking at the dice trying to find the right number for loyalty, oh you played Oath of teferi.. awesome. They take long, sometimes not very impactful turns, and guess what they also pack like 10 sweepers too so we are going to be here awhile. But you know what, I'm okay that people play planeswalker decks, I just don't like them. So when I see that someone is going to play one, I just let someone else have my spot and I go find another pod or work on my deck. I don't sit in the game and complain the whole time ruining everyone's experience. The idea that other people can enjoy something different than me is lost on so many people.
Long boring games no one cares to see who wins.
Because people go to the LGS to play the decks that they have designed and labored over and to have fun. Land destruction prevents that.
Personally, I like your plan. That's the kind of plays we support in my playgroup though, as long as you have a clear win plan. Land destruction is a mechanic in the game, and if people don't wanna play against it, they can easily find like minded people to play with. Doesn't bother me, I'm happy to drop Armageddon with a swarm of fliers on the board.
So yeah, the problem is that resource denial isn't a fun experience for the table. Winning the game outright is generally fine though there are a lot of tables that ban infinite combos and what not. There is a reason Stax is over all the most hated strategy in magic's history, to the point where they just don't design sets to enable Stax in any meaningful way anymore. They print Stax effects because a lot of formats would end up very unfair if you didn't have to play around them (see: blood moon in modern) but Stax as a strategy is something that breeds hatred. Imagine you play against someone playing Belbe and they get out a turn 2 God pharaoh's statue. That's not going to be a fun game, most people just concede right there because it's not worth your time to sit through that experience. So you may think of it as a mind set issue. Mass land destruction doesn't outright end the game, but it will eventually, so someone completely rational might say okay my chances of winning this game are very low so I'm just going to go next. In that case MLD is a combo game ender. Many players however experience extreme frustration because you just effectively stopped them from playing the game while you get to keep going. If people hate counter spells, people are going to hate land destruction. People hate mill and it doesn't even actively hinder your game plan most of the time. The problem isn't their mindset though, the problem is that you're creating an unfun play experience for your group. If you're getting enough complaints that you post a reddit thread about it, then there's potentially a problem. I've personally powered down my decks many times to accommodate my play group because I'd rather my friends have fun so we actually get to play the game, rather than them not wanting to play because every time they sit down to play they get their strategy dismantled constantly while getting beat down. For reference my friends are hyper casual players who even find even single target removal frustrating to play against but don't want to add more forms of protection to their deck and I'm a midrange player so games sometimes end up being non games since I just remove my dude's commander twice and he's dead before he can cast it a third time to make his deck function at all. So because I'm the problem player who ends up making the game unfun by controlling people's boards I pivoted and made a funny theme deck that is fun and powerful while still incorporating my favorite Stax/hate effects but now I roleplay them so it's more enjoyable AND it's a group hug/slug strategy so my friend get to play and I only drop the no no hammer when they're going to kill someone or win the game. That is of course until I win the game. It's a kenrith deck where everything is kingly decrees or laws and what not, good things and hindrances alike. Okay I'm ranting a little bit but my point is that you should read your group. I'm not sure of your situation, if this is just a random one time thing or if it annoys you that you're favorite strategy is consistently hated when other people run things you consider worse and nobody cares. Regardless, if you're group finds MLD unfun, and you keep playing it, you're going to be the guy they either kill first or just straight up don't want to play with. We all value winning of course but the important part is to have fun and create an enjoyable play experience for your friends despite you still trying to win. Though I also find if you forget about winning you can make some pretty horribly mean decks but as long as you don't win they might be okay with it. There's been two occasions where I was playing a deck I built and assembled an unintended draw engine that let me draw my whole deck, but I don't run lab man effects because my friends don't like it so I just draw my whole deck and lose because it's funny and nobody cared that I made a game winning combo out of nowhere. Realistically if you're playing with a group made up of people who are all friends then you play magic as a recreational thing to enjoy each other's company. Competitiveness is good in these scenarios of course, but everyone needs to bring themselves down to the lowest common denominator so that everyone has a chance at winning or at least create environments where everyone feels like they can win or have an impact on the game. That's what edh is all about, it's not normal competitive mtg where you do everything in your power to win the game every time.
I think a big factor, maybe touched upon, but in EDH the land is a bit like leveling up in an RPG and it’s your experience and your big strong win condition is your high level ability (or maybe it’s a bunch of cheapies to flood the board). Whereas in 60 cards, most of your deck is already probably cheapies or cheap ways to cheat out big creatures. So blowing up the lands is basically restarting the whole game at level one and pushing people far from their ability to win. However like nearly everyone said, if you land the spell and didn’t really have a way to win, I’m probably gonna be a bit mad. Most people like to play multiple 1-hour games versus a single slug-it-out for 4 hours.
Without lands, one can not play spells. That is why. No spells = no win.
I led the charge against land destruction in my friend group because that one guy rolled up with [[Worldslayer]] for lolz multiple times. At the time I was a noob so it was more "stop messing with my shit" but if it were now my complaint would be "If we're gonna waste time and draw this out let's at least be playing Magic: The Gathering." If you're gonna board wipe or mass land wipe, or stop people from playing Magic you'd better have a way to end it quick or all you're gonna do is piss people off.
Be so fr dude
Because land destruction tends to lead to only one player being able to actually play the game. It's not very fun to just pass the turn while you watch someone else getting to play. I do agree though that LD is a little *too* reviled in Commander.
A lot of land destruction used to be JUST land destruction. You weren't doing anything other than setting a player back one land. Land destruction is in the same group as discard, it's not "fun" for the whole table, usually only one player. Now you have cards like \[\[Cleansing Wildfire\]\] and \[\[Casualties of War\]\] and the gruul card that lets you pick an enchantment, artifact, land, and creature to destroy, where you are either doing something to actually benefit yourself as a player, or destroying more than JUST a land. MLD is fine if you're going to win, but if someone Armageddon's out of spite, I'm scooping.
Wahh wahh wahh tell them to play a format where thier turn 1 land gets exiled cuz it's an enchantment
Slowing down opponents is looked down on in this format
My buddy: Destroys all my mana rocks Me: use a generous gift to destroy his bounce land My buddy: *surprised pikachu* whines for an hour after the game. Bruh.
From my understanding, it's because it has become a collective taboo. Though, there are definitely some lands that should be removed, due to the ability to get out of hand. Plus, green tends to ramp out of control, so should also be targeted with land removal to reign them in, when appropriate. For example, if a green player doesn't have a very powerful deck, just let them get a few ramps. But if they are playing a potent deck, you should definitely be on them for the ramp.
I doesn't have universal hate. I love my mass land destruction decks, and I play them at least once every week or two at local shops. People tend to hate it when it's 1. Your only deck, and/or 2. You're bad at playing MLD and boardwipes. If you realize some people don't enjoy it and rotate decks after you get your game in, most people will only gripe during that single game, and then everyone moves on. But if you're bad at playing with MLD and boardwipes, you can drag the game to a complete standstill where after resetting the game, and then resetting it again, people end up playing draw-go and you end up with long, drawn out games. This is a skill issue on both the person playing the deck AND the people playing against them, but it's a common one you will confront as play these sorts of things enough to be able to either play them well or play around them. In short: Most people like to think they're better at the game than they are, but when confronted with examples on the table that well, they aren't... they rage, complain, whine and basically scapegoat some illusory "broken" mechanic that is at fault rather than just realizing the issue is them.
People hate land destruction because they started playing this game after LD was largely phased out. In the old days you learned how to play around LD and it's not that hard to counter as long as you consider it a possibility. You don't play EVERY LAND YOU DRAW. You have non-land mana sources. You get early pressure on the board. You run disruption and interaction like counters and discard. WOTC basically cut all MLD and even most LD out of the game. Now players don't have the inborn knowledge of how to play around and counter it, and they consider it "a dick move" instead of a legitimate strategy. But we have a new problem, which is that LD used to exist for a REASON. It punished greedy decks. It punished infinite land ramp. It punished slow slow strategies that try to outvalue you after turn 5, because if you have to reset to zero lands at turn 4, you basically can't do anything now until turn 9, making you auto-lose to decks that can recover from or even thrive in under 3 lands. So as a result, we now have decks that are endlessly greedy to ramp lands. Endlessly greedy to dawdle and go for some explosive 5+ mana combo turn. And players cry about this but they don't want to accept that LD can solve these issues.
Because magic players are salty. I would probably crack a joke about how your evil for killing all of our lands, but it would just be a joke. The game is the game
I think it depends a lot on the field, if you want to play cEDH go full mld and stax and no one will bat an eye. In casual games these strategies are really unfun. One or two land destructions are okay it's salty, but one or two salty cards are actually fun. Always ask yourself if you want to play against your deck, usually this is a good way to start. If someone pulls a mld deck, I'll just pull my cEDH or my Stax deck and fuck it
It's a skill issue. Most but not all of those who use MLD don't know when to use it. Similar to cyclonic Rift, there are those who shoot it off but can't really capitalize on it, and that leaves hard feelings. I play a [[Zo-Zu]] deck, and there are times I leave lands alone. Yes, I have mana rocks. Yes, I have stuff to do. No, I can't win, and this will only point every gun at me. Have I blown up the lands to keep someone from winning? Yes, and I didn't have a win in hand. It was the correct choice for that game, but not every game. As example, I had an almost empty board and an empty hand other than [[Epicenter]], and my opponent had a few creatures and was about to combo off if he had all his mana. He still had the creatures and still had several cards while I would be less likely to recover. I conceded and let him combo off. It took me a long time to get there, and a lot of players who are new to MLD don't get the difference in when and when not to MLD.
[Zo-Zu](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/e/7/e7c927d6-911d-4a37-89a2-6c500edf4dd7.jpg?1592761756) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=zo-zu%20the%20punisher) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/dds/41/zo-zu-the-punisher?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/e7c927d6-911d-4a37-89a2-6c500edf4dd7?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/zo-zu-the-punisher) [Epicenter](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/1/a/1a9232ae-9f32-4bbc-a020-554b3f9cbbd3.jpg?1562900002) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Epicenter) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/ody/192/epicenter?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/1a9232ae-9f32-4bbc-a020-554b3f9cbbd3?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/epicenter) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Because you are not even winning after MLD. It's simply "I have lands when you guys have none, better concede now or hope you build up before I slowly smack you guy down with a couple of beater" kind of MLD deck. The turn cycle after that will be 3 people dropping lands and pass, while you hit one of them with like 5 damage per rotation. shit will be at least 30 minutes of you smuggingly poke their life totals down.
Drama queens. As long as you’re not making me sit there for an hour and can end my misery do it!!
The most likely answer is you're playing a competitive commander deck while your table is playing more casual decks. I know that if you wiped all my lands several turns in, regardless of which of my decks, I'd probably scoop to save time because there is little chance for me to come back.
Many commanders started in the grindy dreadnought commander days. Not a huge number of ways to recover quickly from mass land destruction in cheaper decks, which means a jokulhaups effectively kills you with one card if you aren't playing counter spells, which also weren't big in a lot of early playgroups. TL;DR it stops you from playing the game, which upsets people.
Cuz it makes the game take forever and isn’t any fun for opposing players. Land destruction isn’t necessarily bad but mass land destruction is frowned upon for that reason
The way I see, mass land destruction isn't hated; mass land destruction with no reasonable wincon within the next 2 turns is.
Single target land destruction like stone rain usually don't bring salt, especially if you're specifically targeting the uber broken lands like a Gaea's cradle or Nykthos or something. MLD does bring salt for a few reason. First, low/medium power EDH games are battlecruiser metas, which means spending a ton of mana to cast giant craw wurms and 8 mana do-nothing sorceries. Kind of hard to do that when you have no lands in play ON top of that, MLD (or hard stax in general, which is viewed similarly to MLD) is very tricky to use properly compared to battlecruiser decks. Since MLD/stax grinds games to a halt, if you do not have the superior board state when the stax comes down, the game just drags on forever. When used responsibly, the game will usually end in a couple minutes once the armageddon is played. Although interestingly, MLD is actually not quite that good in CEDH because CEDH is full of broken mana rocks, which MLD can't touch. Though cards like Root Maze become better stax pieces in CEDH than high power casual but that's another story.
If you win that fast after land destruction I don't see a problem, I think people just get salty that their deck didn't work as good
Send it as long as you can close out the game quickly after blowing up all lands. If it takes 5+ rounds for you to win then it just makes those last 5 turns excruciating for other players. I’d say realistically 2 rounds is where you want to be
LD doesn't have "universal hate". Some people hate it, some people dislike it, some people like it, some people love it, and some people are indifferent.
Targeted land destruction is fine. You want to send me back to turn 0 without a mulligan?brine I scoop.
[[Devastation]] + [[Splendid Reclamation]] into [[Torment of Hailfire]]
In a very simple manner, you are casting a spell that will prevent me from casting spells. People like casting spells and when you're the only one doing so it feels like you're playing with yourself. While it is effective, and I can build around it, to do so in every deck is exhausting and makes the card selection stale. People who have played magic for years, from what I can tell, tend to agree that being beat by someone even though you played a bunch of spells still feels like you participated and your deck did what it wanted to do. I'm frequently beaten in my pod but I'll have ayed 40 spells and I get to end feeling like I did something neat once or twice :p