@Sonnet666 Leinahtan certainly didn't seem to take any exception to my response.

@Leinahtan, I like it. All really solid suggestions. The only ones I'm not really a fan of are Arcum and Selvala. I still feel Arcum's speed and resiliency make him worthy of Tier 1. If anything, the mulligan gave him a slight buff since he's cheap to cast and can combo out with little or no reliance on his hand. As for Selvala, every stax list I've seen for her, while fairly strong, wasn't anywhere near as strong as Derevi, Brago, or Teferi Walker: the defining Tier 1 stax commanders. Ultimately she seemed to play as a slightly faster, less consistent Captain Sisay, who is currently Tier 2. Everything else you suggested I'm fully behind though.

After doing some goldfishing I am shocked to say it, but I agree with Leinahtan, and can see Selvala, Explorer Returned being being a borderline tier 1 general in a pure combo deck with maybe some stax elements mixed in. She facilitates the obvious infinite mana elf combo's with Umbral Mantle. She can abuse Aluren + Cloudstone Curio and Temur Sabertooth for infinite etb triggers and Yisan, the Wanderer Bard into Wirewood Symbiote to Priest of Titania to Mirror Entity for infinite untaps and mana. She also allows enchantment and artifact tutoring with Academy Rector, Enlightened Tutor and Stoneforge Mystic. She can abuse Reveillark and friends and can even do a poorman's Boonweaver Giant combo with Altar of Dementia as the sac outlet/win condition. After throwing these elements together from the ashes of my Omnath, Locus of Mana elfball combo deck "Bring out the Gimp" (which is admittedly not optimized and likely not the strongest way to play omnath, but still consistenty plays my entire deck by turn 5-6), I found her to be a full turn faster in most cases and the shell is still very much a work in progress. Her downside of helping the table is potentially all thats keeping her in the upper tier 2 range.

Oh and Mirror Entity makes Wild Pair even more efficient at assembling combo pieces.

How is Obzedat, Ghost Council tier 6???? It is actually really powerful. Probably tier 3.

Tier four, maybe. He's just so worthless. What are you going to do, Angelic Chorus with him to trigger your Well of Lost Dreams? I don't really feel compelled to go into detail, here. I don't mean to be rude or anything, but he's just bad, okay?

Emracool_the_Aeons_Torn, I'm sorry, but that's simply not true.

It's a vanilla 5/5 for 5 that drains a minimal amount of life and pops in and out of the battlefield. Great in Standard, abysmal in a 40 life multiplayer format.

Unless you build your deck around him. Have you even played the deck?

At least better than Ghost Council of Orzhova which is in tier 5.

Sonnet hit the nail on the head about Obzedat, Ghost Council. In a format where you have to get through 120 life to win, a 5/5 with largely useless evasion for 5 that drains an opponent for two might as well be a basic land in the Command Zone (the original definition of tier 5-6 power levels). The fact that he generates incidental lifegain is largely irrelevant, as there are half a dozen WB and Esper commanders that do that much better than OGC. No need to test the deck. At best it's WB goodstuff with a nearly useless Commander in the zone.

Ghost Council of Orzhova is T5 (I believe this was my suggestion in the first place) because it can act as dedicated sac outlet for , which is good for reanimator strategies. That way it is still contributing to your deck's strategy in a meaningful way, even if it's bad.

Alright, here's something that may be received badly, but really needs to be changed.

Hermit Druid: Tier 1 to Tier 2.

"Whoah!" I hear you say. "Isn't Hermit Druid, like, the best deck in the format since forever?"

No. Hermit Druid is certainly a good deck, which can win some games, but the deck has a few problems.

1. Glass Cannon-ness. The deck is basically a one-card combo. Play Hermit Druid, protect it, activate it, win. However, that's not always the case. Players have removal, counterspells, gravehate, and stax cards. If one of them resolves and kills your druid, counters your Dread Return, exiles your graveyard, kills your Lab Maniac/Nooze, or has nearly any piece of interaction, you're screwed. The fact that the deck's entire game can be dismantled by countering a single card that gets exiled after being countered makes it very fragile. While the deck will run lots of counters, it's unlikely that you'll be able to have more than one, and be able to use them to counter the entire table's hate.

2. Poor Backup Plan. The deck's problem is that once your graveyard is in your library, it's kind of hard to win when every turn you might lose. The deck's backup plan is usually flashbacking Memory's Journey, then using Pull from Eternity to get it back. The deck then loops those until it can beatdown with Scion. Not that great. Other decks have much better backup plans. Brago can win through Stasis with combat damage. Derevi has Sakashima. Zur has the High Tide Tendrils win if its Doomsday gets countered. Heck, even Prossh can 3-shot people. While Scion has the surprise Moltensteel + Skithryx combo, that only kills one person at best. Since the deck is so fragile, I'm doubtful that Hermit Druid can win if the combo gets disrupted.

3. Vancouver Mulligan. The deck lost a lot after Partial Paris was removed. Now, if they get a hand that's Land, Land, Land, Land, Land, Land, Druid, they may want to keep it anyway. If they get a hand that's Land, Land, Land, Mox Diamond, FOW, Blue card, and Spell Pierce, that's a great hand, but it doesn't have Druid or a tutor. With partialing, they'd usually just ship back a land and the blue card, and get maybe a Vampiric Tutor, maybe a Muddle. However, now, they'd have to lose the interaction and ramp that's critical in this deck. If you can't find Druid or doesn't have Druid, you'll probably have to ship the entire hand back. This prevents the deck from getting the interaction that it needs to prevent a blowout. This is a problem for the deck.

All these add up to a deck that is super glass-cannony, dies to any interaction, and has a hard time working around dedicated hate. Add that to the fact that more people know about it, compared to a deck like Yisan, which makes people target it, makes it hard for it to be able to compete in a competitive environment.

This is just my personal opinion. I believe that the deck should be demoted to tier 2. Thanks for reading.

I agree actually, played a hermit Druid deck the week before last where I killed his T2 Druid and then landed a Blood Moon, for the rest of the game he sat there with a disgruntled look on his face playing nothing.

If I can do that with my Feldon deck it stands to reason that any deck with halfway decent stax/control options shouldn't have a problem. One track wins are bad.

Sadly, we haven't found an effective way to list specific 5C combo decks out individually. Scion of the Ur-Dragon is more or less the official front for all 5C combo builds. And even if Druid is worthy of demotion, there's still 5 color Ad Nauseam, Omni-Rector, etc, so Scion won't be moved down.

Ohthenoises, that sounds like a really poor Hermit Druid deck. They're typically supposed to pack back-up win cons.

Hmm. I happened to bring up this list on the CompetitiveEDH Subreddit. Two flaws that were immediately brought up were the placements of Yisan, the Wanderer Bard and Nin, the Pain Artist. Yisan has already been brought up quite extensively and it's more or less agreed by all that he needs to be moved up to Tier 2. Nin was brought up way back when the List was first being reworked from the original, but ended up being shunted aside and forgotten. Logically she should be Tier 2, as she has a highly useful ability that functions both in the early game and serves as a win condition when paired with infinite mana (see Oona, Queen of the Fae and Tasigur, the Golden Fang). She's definitely on par with many of the current Tier 2 commanders when optimized. Sample Optimized Decklist by User1971. I vote she be moved up to Tier 2.

Also, @Leinahtan: Have I by any chance seen you over on the cEDH subreddit? You share a lot of opinions that are popular over there. Your thoughts on Jarad, Hermit Druid, and several other cards seem very similar to Razzlox's.

sonnet666 a resolved Blood Moon against a 5c deck with no basics means that they are limited to red and colorless for getting rid of an enchantment or winning the game aside from mana rocks which are sometimes shunned since the combo is so cheap mana wise. Typically that spells game over since red and colorless have VERY few things that can touch it. (Chaos Warp and All Is Dust to name two off the top of my head [I know, eww All Is Dust but..])

He DID have backup wincons but without the ability to make mana of a useful color he was locked out of the game.

Regardless my point only rests in that if a simple blood moon from a deck that admittedly isn't perfectly tuned (I can has Gauntlet of Might?) can stop some variants in their tracks then what could a dedicated stax/control/combo deck do?

Frankly, Blood Moon is simply an incredibly good card in competitive circles. I've built a UWR show-and-tell control/MLD deck that often wins because of Blood Moon. It definitely isn't amazing--the show-and-tell win is essentially a three card combo with Omniscience and Enter the Infinite, and the only backup wincon is Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker + Pestermite (Fun Fact: Imperial Recruiter can search for both of these, as well as Magus of the Moon), and the deck runs twenty-two basics, which is far from ideal in terms of fixing, but, even with all those flaws, the deck has such redundancy in being able to search out Blood Moon or Magus of the Moon that it still has great game against Damia, Sage of Stone or Hermit Druid. The commander was Numot, the Devastator--mostly because I didn't want to play fucking Narset. Oh, and I'm not advocating that Numot be moved up, either--he's right where he belongs.

Ergo, I think your specific story has less to do with the relative power of Hermit Druid than it has to do with the relative power of Blood Moon--intertwined though the subjects may be. Really, it's the best card you could possibly be packing against Hermit Druid decks, but even barring that, it's still incredible.

Eh, that's fair.

Ohthenoises, yeah, good point. I wasn't thinking.

NarejED, I'm a little skeptical of those two.

First, that Nin list looks super scatterbrained. The main strategy seems to be generating infinite colorless with a Basalt/Rings combo, dumping your mana into Nin killing herself or some other creature to draw your deck, then using your mana to drop Goblin Cannon and kill the table. So what purpose does Staff of Domination serve? There are no creatures that combo with it if you don't already have infinite mana. What about Darksteel Forge or Mycosynth Lattice? Just because they go good with artifacts? Blightsteel Colossus? Or Devastation? There are also very few creatures to draw cards off of early game with Nin. When you look at the list like that it doesn't really seem optimized.

Also, / is one of the worst color identities for board control, and there's very little in that list to mitigate that. It's very unlikely you'll always have mana up to counter things that nerf your strategies.

As for Yisan, yes, he's powerful, but he's also highly predictable if you know the deck, and taking out his main enablers (Wirewood Symbiote, Seedborn Muse) slows him down considerably, since up until Seedborn Muse you're practically locked into a particular chain of creatures.

We should probably move these two out of T4, but I'm not sure if they're good enough to make T2.

They're both significantly stronger than a good chunk of the Commanders currently in Tier 2, ESPECIALLY after the rule change that hit high-cost commanders so hard. If that's not enough to move a Commander up, then this list is going to stagnate very, very quickly.

Yisan is somewhat predictable, but he's by no means locked into a single line of play. He he plays numerous answers to multiple types of threats at all CMCs up to 4. From Caustic Caterpillar, to Sylvan Safekeeper, to Phyrexian Revoker. I doubt you've seen anything resembling an optimized list if you think he's locked into any specific card choices. I would investigate them more. Landdestruction.com has a fairly nice build for him. Ultimately, he ends up playing in a similar manner, and having similar weaknesses, to Arcum Dagsson. Both are highly self-contained and can toolbox a slew of answers and/or combo out single-handedly. The only difference is Arcum is faster and in a slightly stronger color identity. When all is said and done, they're about 1 Tier of power apart.

My mistake on the Nin deck list. I should have evaluated it better. It is indeed flawed. I rescind it as an example. Still, that hardly changes Nin's power. You're focusing on the wrong thing.

Not sure what you're talking about when you said / has some of the worst board control. Red offers Blasphemous Act, Vandalblast, Thoughts of Ruin, and numerous other wipes of various forms, along with a few targeted removal spells like Chaos Warp. Blue has the single best board wipe in EDH (Cyclonic Rift), as well as a veritable slew of mass bounce effects from Sunder to Wash Out. Admittedly not every one is worth slotting into every deck, there are plenty of for every deck strategy from Izzet combo to control nontheless.

Red has very few efficient answers and more than half of them only hit artifacts; blue has trouble dealing with things permanently if it can't counter them on the way in. Not saying they don't have a few great cards, but out of all the color identities, they're the weakest in this respect.

And your argument for Yisan makes me like him even less. My understanding was that you would use cards that untapped him to get more than one verse counter a turn until you can Seedborn Muse and go into turbo drive, but if you're planning on grabbing a single creature a turn though, he seems abysmally slow.

Anyway, if the mulligan change hit high cost commanders really hard, do you think there are any T2 commanders that might need to be demoted?

Just thinking through what an optimal Nin list could look like, I'll concede she's probably T2. The fact that she comes down so early and looks non-threatening helps her case a lot.

sonnet666 Yisan is not dependent on Seedborn Muse to put multiple creatures in play each turn. What mono green does well is untap effects and produce mana. When you include big mana producing dorks which most good yisan builds I've seen do he can toolbox for specific answers while at the same time advancing his board at an alarming pace. As soon as he has a mana dork in play that taps for four or 5 mana ex. Priest of Titania or Voyaging Satyr or Karametra's Acolyte just to name a few he can infinitely untap as soon as you play an Umbral Mantle or Temur Sabertooth. He can consistently combo off on turn four or five. He is clearly tier 2.

sonnet666: Yisan usually isn't predictable. Wirewood Symbiote is usually my 1-drop for slower games, but usually I like going the Sakura-Tribe Scout into Scryb Ranger route, especially in multiplayer. The Wirewood Symbiote into Elvish Visionary can be good, but not as fast as my route, as it lets you activate Yisan multiple times a turn. While getting Seedborn Muse is nice, it's not that important. If Seedborn is ever removed, you can double-activate to get two 6 drops. The deck is really versatile, being able to randomly combo off turn 4, or hate out your opponents and eventually win through Craterhoof. I'm building Yisan on a budget IRL, forgoing most of the stax package in favor of more hate cards for my meta, like Tajuru Preservers for that Thraximundar guy, and Dosan for this annoying Arcanis player. The deck is so versatile, able to work around hate easily. Most stax pieces are useless against a deck that doesn't cast spells often, and combo decks can be taken out with the right silver bullet. The deck has great combo potential, great midrange beatdown, and the general is a tutor on a stick that can find the right card for any situation.

Also, I do go on /r/competitiveedh a lot.