Landscape with a cemetery and a church by Karl Friedrich Lessing (1837). Karmic Guide by Heather Hudson.
This week I'm going to tackle the problem of poison. Recently Mark Rosewater in his popular "Drive to Work" audio podcast, devoted episode #468 to the history of poison counters in Magic the Gathering.
Poison is an alternate win condition. If a player gets 10 poison counters they lose the game. Mark's exact quote was as follows.
"I think Commander should change its poison total. It changed its life total. I don’t know why its poison total doesn’t change. If your life total doubles I don’t know why your poison total doesn’t double or... whatever it needs to do to be at the appropriate level. I guess Commander is at 30 life now? I don’t play a lot of Commander. It should be corresponding. I’m not sure why it’s not."
- Mark Rosewater
In his podcast "MaRo" went further, encouraging Commander players to contact the EDH rules committee to ask that it be increased to 20 poison counters.
Today's article will look at the issue of poison counters in EDH. I've overseen hundreds of EDH league games, played in hundreds of EDH games myself, and have run infect in a variety of decks. I'm even aware that Multiplayer EDH uses a 40 life total, not 30. That does not mean I know everything about the format, but I do have some familiarity with it. I'll do my best to go over what I've learned and I'll try to explain where I think the EDH poison count should be and why.
It should be noted that I'm writing about EDH, not about "Competitive EDH", and my own infect decks have never been more than "casual" builds. I've got a few good cards in some of them but they're FAR from expensive or "tuned". Not playing or playing against "tuned" cEDH infect decks may mean that my own understanding of infect is somewhat lacking but I'll do the best I can to explain my own thought process throughout today's post.
Skittles Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon is the poster child for scary infect commanders. "Skittles" can hit the table with haste and any number of pump spells and enchantments can be added in so that you can kill an opponent pretty much out of nowhere. This means that as long as you have no flying blockers, the Skithiryx player has enough mana and a card in hand, you absolutely have to be ready with a counterspell or removal. Otherwise you could be dead on their next turn even if they don't have a single creature currently on the field.
As you can see, if you can make the mana, there are lots of ways to get to 10 damage. The examples above don't even include all the equipment you normally throw into a Skithiryx deck. Killing one foe with the Blight Dragon is easy.
I've had a Skithiryx deck for the past few years. It is my go-to deck for one-on-one games and is extremely effective in those situations. In general, the deck can almost always kill one player at a table. The problem in multiplayer that once you've knocked someone out, everyone else hates you off the table. They all gang up on you because nobody wants to be the next one eliminated.
The first build of the deck was loaded up with as much ramp, pump and infect dudes as I could find in black. I've killed lots of opponents with Skithiryx but I have NEVER won a table with it. I have way too many decks, so this is admittedly not from a huge sampling of games. It's enough games for me to be able to conclude that as an experienced EDH player, if I've never won a table using the best infect commander in the format, maybe there's no real need to raise the infect count to 20.
My Skittles deck on TappedOut.net
My takeaway: Politics is an incredibly effective factor in keeping infect from dominating play in Commander.
Sidar & Ravos Infect
If you want to build an infect deck, Skithiryx isn't the only option available to you. There are lots of infect creatures in Magic, though most of them tend to be very small compared to your average "viable" creature in EDH. Viability is a key concept here. The average creature in EDH is much bigger and scarier in EDH. It simply has to be. We have more mana, a higher life total, and access to all the cards ever printed. We can pick from a wide variety of creatures when building our decks but that same variety simply isn't available when you're looking at creatures with the infect keyword. They're generally quite small.
The challenge of how to build an effective deck with small infect creatures was something I tackled in my first Skittles build, and eventually found that the little guys just didn't have enough of an impact at a multiplayer table. Many of them don't have evasion, so I built a deck to see if I could win by making an army of little infect dudes really hard to block.
You can find infect creatures in pretty much every color. Black and green are the best colors, white only has four choices and red and blue both only have three creatures for you to choose from. In EDH the creatures you put in your decks often scale up with the higher life total, but when you're trying to run infect threats there simply aren't many with a power level higher than 3.
When the partners commanders came out in 2016 I fell in love with Sidar Kondo of Jamuraa. He allows your power 1 and 2 creatures to be unblockable except by creatures with reach or flying. Being able to easily get attackers through worked like a charm for Sidar & Tana so I paired Sidar up with Ravos, who gives me access to black and lets me return one of my fragile little infect guys back from the graveyard to my hand on my upkeep. I built it around using power 1 & 2 infect creatures to try to kill my opponents. Given that most infect creatures are little anyways, it seemed like it was worth a try. I added instant speed pump to use after blockers are declared, as that's what worked so well with Sidar & Tana.
In principle I think the idea was sound, but the problem was a familiar one. If it's a challenge to kill a player with a single dragon, it's more difficult to kill a player with lots of little dudes. You may be able to get a bunch of poison counters on one opponent but what I gained with more infect creatures, I lost with them being weaker and more susceptible to removal and sweepers.
The deck kinda worked but in a bunch of games I was only able to get one opponent close to death - not actually dead. The only game my Sidar-Ravos infect deck ever won was by using Vraska to create 1/1 assassins that would kill someone if they did combat damage to them. While it was a win - the strategy of having lots of little infect dudes always felt weaker than just running a bigger, evasive commander with infect.
My experience with Skithyrix taught me that an infect commander has real challenges in Multiplayer EDH.
My experience with Sidar & Ravos taught me that going wide with unblockable infect dudes is really scary to some players but isn't a serious threat to run away with any multiplayer games.
These things are always meta-dependent, so your mileage may vary, but I didn't get very far trying to win in multiplayer using either strategy. It should be noted that these decks were pretty casual and I'm sure a big issue was a lack of card draw in both of them. Card draw isn't fun or flavorful and it's still something I neglect when I'm deckbuilding so a better deckbuilder might easily conclude that my lack of success with these decks was as much my fault as it was an indication that infect isn't strong.
My Sidar / Ravos Infect Deck on TappedOut.net
My takeaway: The size of your average infect creature is so small that increasing the count to 20 would probably make infect completely unplayable in EDH.
Blightsteel Colossus I've run a few golem decks in my time including a Reaper King tribal golems & splicers that ran Blightsteel Colossus as one of its top-end threats. I currently have a Padeem deck built around mind control effects and artifacts that runs it. While Blightsteel is always scary, in our league we play with 13 infect counters and as a result it doesn't have quite the same impact. It isn't a kill on its own but it also never gets ignored when it hits the table.
If we were playing with 10 as our infect count, Blightsteel Colossus would probably be an auto-include in any deck able to cheat creatures into play. It would definitely see more play.
The basic problem of course is that you can't run this big fellow as your commander. While he may be immune to Krosan Grip, the format is full of instant speed exile and you even see the occasional fog. If he gets exiled you probably won't see him again that game.
Don't get me wrong - Blightsteel Colossus is amazing, even when you're playing with an infect number higher than 10 - but on his own he doesn't make infect a viable strategy in Multiplayer EDH. All the same issues apply to him that applied to Skittles. You may be able to kill a few players but chances are good someone can deal with it before you finish the job. He is an argument for the count to be raised above 10. If our goal is to have long, interesting games and that's why we have higher life totals, putting the number up past where Blightsteel Colossus is an instant kill makes all the sense in the world.
My takeaway: If the format is intended to be a casual, social one, having the infect count be higher than 11 so Blightsteel Colossus isn't an insta-kill makes a lot of sense.
Infect Shenanigans
My experience with Skithiryx and with Sidar/Ravos doesn't mean I haven't won games using infect. There are lots of nasty things you can do in EDH using infect without running any infect creatures whatsoever.
Triumph of the Hordes is a wonderful little sorcery that can turn a wide board into a lethal board if it isn't answered or your attack isn't fogged. Tainted Strike can turn a big attacker into a lethal one and it doesn't even have to be your creature. Corrupted Conscience can steal the biggest dude on the table and will often give you a lethal threat that simply has to be dealt with.
My current favorite infect shenanigans are enchantments like Phyresis and Glistening Oil, which will give a creature infect at a very low cost. If the creature is big enough and you hit it with Chandra's Ignition you're probably going to win the game. That's been my go-to wincon for my Ramos, Dragon Engine deck and it's won about half of its games so far.
Creatures like The Mimeoplasm probably also belong in the category of fun infect shenanigans.
Mim lets you exile two creatures from graveyards and he becomes one of them with +1/+1 counters equal to the power of the other one. Any strong Mim deck will probably run Skithiryx, but another classic Mimeoplasm kill is to have him become a copy of Blackcleave Goblin with 13 +1/+1 counters from Death's Shadow. If you cast him and any of your opponents don't have blockers, fogs or removal, someone's going to die.
A strong deck with infect as one of many things in its "bag of tricks" can certainly do well in Commander, but the key point is that it's like having another tool in your swiss army knife. You're not trying to win every game with infect. It's more like a "combo" strategy than it is like a "normal" EDH strategy.
My takeaway: EDH is the format of broken things. Just because you can combine infect cards with other cards in the format doesn't much affect my opinion about the infect count. By their very nature shenanigans are clever plays that require setup and forethought. If anything I would hate to remove the effectiveness of infect shenanigans from the format by making the infect count too high, so I guess I would have to file this under "reasons not to double the infect count".
Infect in League Play I've played lots of infect, but it's worth asking what I've observed in the hundreds of EDH League games I've been involved in over the past few years.
While I don't have hard numbers to back this up, my lasting impression is that infect isn't a problem.
Our league does NOT run our infect count at the official 10 poison counters. We required 15 for over a year, and eventually reduced it to 13. Even at 13 poison counters we haven't seen an upsurge in the use of infect. Every month you do see a few infect kills and the occasional table kill but it's far less prevalent than voltron, aggro and combo.
I am planning on having our league vote on moving from 13 infect down to 10, but I honestly do not expect that vote to pass.
My takeaway: Nobody complains about infect when it's at 15, and so far nobody is complaining about infect now that we're using 13. The league is free with no prizes, so for us I think it works but I understand that "nobody is complaining" may not be the best barometer of whether or not a rule is appropriate for a format.
The Psychology of Commander
One of the things I try to pay attention to is how much fun players are having and how often someone in my league or playgroup gets salty. EDH is a multiplayer, social format, and if we're coming together with no other goal than to have fun, it behooves anyone responsible for organizing games to pay attention to whether or not the group is succeeding at that goal.
Most players dislike losing. What players hate way more than losing is being the first player eliminated when the game winds up being a really long one. Players knocked out early often resent having to sit around and do nothing until the rest of the game wraps up. While pretty much any strategy can result in one player having a salt-inducing early exit, I don't think there is any strategy quite as good as infect for making this happen.
That doesn't mean infect shouldn't be allowed. It's an essential part of the EDH landscape. I do think it helps explain why the league I run was so happy to play at 15 poison for so long, and why there is currently no outcry to have it lowered from 13 down to the official number of 10 poison counters. I may bring it up for a vote at the end of the month just to see what people think. My guess is that if they did vote it down to 10, we might see a rash of infect decks and a drop in the number of players who think the league is "fun".
My takeaway: If the prevailing sentiment among many players is that infect makes the format less fun, that doesn't mean it should be doubled. I think it should be increased from 10 just because getting killed early and sitting around isn't fun and infect does lend itself to making that happen a lot.
The Slippery Slope
If you double the infect count simply on the basis of the life total being doubled, one could make a pretty strong argument that it would be irresponsible to stop there. After all, most cards in Magic were designed for games with a 20 life total. If we're doubling our life total AND doubling the infect count, shouldn't everything else with a specific life total be adjusted accordingly?
I can't tell you how many times I've been "Sorin Markov'ed" or "Magister Sphinxed". All these cards should be adjusted if that's the game we're playing.
One might well argue that cards like Lava Axe and Lightning Bolt were ALSO designed for games with 20 life. Shouldn't all of these cards be included in our project to Make EDH Great Again?
This is the quintessential "slippery slope" where one seemingly reasonable argument opens the door for another, and another, and the next thing you know we might as well just be playing with 20 life, 10 infect, and no "special treatment" card list. It's not realistic to suggest we develop yet another list of cards that have to be dealt with separately when they are played in Commander.
The five cards above would just be the tip of the iceberg. Cards that are truly busted in EDH go on the banlist. Everything else - well, that's why we run counterspells, removal and our own shenanigans.
My takeaway: Doubling the infect count because the life total is doubled makes a certain amount of sense, but it would logically follow that lots of other cards should also be "fixed". Grapeshot for 1 damage or for 2 if you're playing EDH? That way lies madness.
The "Swamp Mosquito" Problem
There are old cards that say on them "If a player has ten or more poison counters, he or she loses the game."
One could argue that these cards are playable in the format, so we can't increase the number from 10. We're stuck.
On the other hand, these cards are old and don't see much play. Lots of cards have "Oracle text" that changes the way they are played away from the actual text on the card. The Rules Committee can do whatever they want, so while this is an argument to keep it at 10, it isn't the the final word on the subject.
My takeaway: Maybe I'm crazy but I'd love to see the poison count increased with the caveat that if any of these old cards are on the battlefield they will change it to 10 for as long as they are in play. It would add a wrinkle to the game, would let us play these cards "as-is" and would make them special and meaningful in a way they really aren't right now.
The Reality Check
It's easy for me to sit on my couch, write about my experiences playing EDH, and to assume that I have any idea what the average Commander player thinks. The reality is that I don't - but it's easy to do a reality check.
While online polls aren't the perfect way to get the opinion of the huge worldwide community of EDH players, it's a place to start. I decided to pose the question to one my favorite EDH facebook groups Magic The Gathering EDH-Commander. I wanted to offer options from 10-20 but Facebook polls don't allow for more than 10 options so I wound up asking what they would increase the poison count to, if they had to increase it. I suggested that anyone wanting to leave it at 10 should just pick 11 and we'll be able to figure it out.
The discussion that resulted was a good one, and the results aren't particularly surprising. At the time of this writing, 7am Sunday morning, the poll had been up for a few days and the results were clear.
IF THE POISON COUNT IN EDH HAD TO BE
INCREASED IT SHOULD BE CHANGED TO
Apparently the simple argument that life total is doubled, so poison count should be doubled is a compelling one. My own vote for 13 only got one other vote. It should be noted that the majority of respondents did NOT want the poison count doubled, and of those votes the majority was for 11, which means that leaving it at 10 would probably make them even happier. The middle ground of 15 infect was also very popular, bringing in the third highest vote total.
My takeaway: If the majority want it to NOT be doubled, and the two largest remaining voting blocks are split between 11 (or leaving it at 10) and 15, my own vote of 13 seems about right, even if only one other person shared that thought with me. Changes this big should be incremental. We've been at 10 for so long, it would make more sense to nudge it up a little and see how things go rather than just doubling it.
The Mark Rosewater Problem
I've been writing this blog since the beginning of the year and I never imagined I'd write a sub-section called "The Mark Rosewater Problem", but here we are. The issue is not that Mark has a lifetime of experience in Magic, nor is it that he has a huge platform with his blog and his position in the community. The problem isn't even that he seems to think the poison count should be raised to 20, to reflect the doubling of our life totals for EDH.
The problem is simple.
Mark Rosewater doesn't play enough Commander.
He may dabble in it but his words, "I don't play a lot of Commander" tell us everything we need to know. He didn't even remember that the multiplayer life total is 40, nor did he care enough to go into a discussion of how it might be appropriate to treat infect in one-on-one EDH differently from multiplayer. It's a discussion worth having, but it should be had with players who play lots of Commander, against lots of different decks, in lots of different places. To take any one player's meta and make far-reaching changes that would affect everyone in the format would be short-sighted.
That doesn't mean Mark isn't entitled to speak his mind, but it does mean that anything he tries to add to any discussion about the format should be taken with a huge grain of salt (shown above).
If Mark Rosewater cares about what should be done in regards to poison and its place in EDH, he can talk to players with experience in the format. I'm sure he could assemble a lunch meeting at WotC headquarters and get a lively discussion going with players who actually play Commander. There would probably be lots of opinions and I'd be willing to bet that the majority would not support doubling the infect count. I'd also bet that some would argue that it should be increased - just not to 20.
In Mark's defense, he explicitly said that he doesn't understand why infect isn't at 20, or at an "appropriate" number. It should also be noted that his comment about EDH was something of a tangent in the middle of a long and rambling podcast. It should come as no surprise that it was neither well thought out nor supported by any research.
My answer for Mark and for everyone who wants to double the infect count is simple:
In Multiplayer EDH, you can easily get "hated off the table" for playing any strategy that can win the game too quickly or too effectively. This explains why combo players, infect players, and even people running certain "notorious" commanders get killed first with no explanations and no apologies.
The infect threats in Magic are generally smaller than your average "viable" creature in the format and there are more players likely to have answers to them in the form or removal or boardwipes. Politics also comes into play - opponents may well save each other rather than see someone get knocked out by a pumped-up Skithiryx and have to sit around until the next game starts. Having a friend of yours both be happy and in your debt is no small thing in a "social format" of Magic.
Multiplayer is a strange and wonderful thing and while I have no problem increasing the infect count above 10, I firmly believe that doubling it would be an irresponsible overreaction to something that genuinely isn't a problem in our format.
- Stephen Johnson
There you go, Mark. There's your answer. Increasing it isn't crazy or stupid, but I don't think going higher than 13 or maybe 15 would be "appropriate" and there's a very strong argument that we should leave well enough alone.
Will Mark read this blog post?
Probably not. If he did, would he assemble such a group and find out what "real" Commander players think? I would hope so, but we'll probably never know. I should note that I have enjoyed his podcast immensely and am deeply grateful for what he has contributed to the game and to the community that had grown up around Magic the Gathering. I just don't think he should spout off about things he doesn't know about with quite so much carelessness.
If I Were on the Rules Committee...
This is the question I've been driving towards with all of my takeaways, and my answer should come as no surprise. What would I do if I were on the Commander rules committee?
I would argue for the following rule:
In the Commander format if a player has thirteen (13) or more poison counters, he or she loses the game.
If a permanent on the battlefield states that a player dies at 10 poison counters, it will kill any player with 10 or more poison counters as a state based action.
I'm sure there's a better way to phrase that, but you get the idea. Fortunately for you, for my inbox, and for my sanity, I'm not on the Rules Committee.
If our league votes to reduce it to 10 and players turn out to be happy with it (both are big IFs), I may have to change my tune but for now I'm pretty firmly in the camp that increasing it to 20 is insane, increasing it to 15 is overkill, but leaving it at 10 isn't good. The prevalence of 13 as an "unlucky number" and infect being a thematically "icky" way to die makes me happy to use that number as my own answer to the question of what to use for an infect count in EDH.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, the fate of the Commander format is in the capable hands of Sheldon Menery and the EDH Rules Committee. They manage the banlist and make decisions about such things as how many poison counters should be used to eliminate a player. I've said in the past that I wouldn't want to have to choose which cards to ban and I'm probably happier not having to make this decision as well.
As for my own decks, I am currently working on a rebuild of my Skilttles deck but so far I haven't gotten enough games in with the latest version to be able to determine whether or not it's going to work. The revisions I've made include adding more removal and sweepers and replacing small infect creatures with deathtouch blockers to try to discourage anyone from attacking me. It's a work in progress and I'm definitely excited to see how it does. If it continues to kill a few opponents but not actually win games, I'll probably put the Blight Dragon into a Scion deck, as it pairs nicely with Moltensteel Dragon.
In our EDH league I generally play the same deck all month long and in October I often play a "scary" deck. There's nothing scarier than infect, so if our league does vote to bring it down to 10, it will be a worthwhile experiment to see if in a month of games I can manage to clear a whole table using infect.
On a side note, I'm playing Ramos this month in our League. I had won 2 out of 4 games and was at the top of our league's rankings going into play yesterday but ran into a bit of a buzzsaw in the form of a Meren deck that I got stuck playing against in both rounds. I don't have any significant graveyard hate in my current build and once he got his engine going, we were all pretty screwed. Meren didn't win round one but was a huge factor in keeping me from being able to combo off in both games. By some minor miracle the other players who were right behind me in points didn't have great days either, so I'm in a position to be able to win my first month since February if I can manage to win a game or two on the 30th when we wrap up our month.
Whether or not you agree with my own "final answer" to the question of infect, I hope I brought more nuance and detail to the discussion of infect's place in EDH than the podcast that inspired this week's writing. I doubt the rules committee will change it but it was fun to dive deep into the topic and explain my own position and how I got to it.
Thanks for reading and see you next week!