Fixing White in EDH
Commander (EDH) forum
Posted on Sept. 22, 2020, 7:01 p.m. by mccabej140
People often complain about white being the worst colour in EDH. This is mostly due to an inability to effectively get card advantage (i.e. card draw).
Red used to be in the same boat but the impulse draw mechanic along with other innovations has really helped red while also not breaking the colour pie.
I have a proposed mechanic that will similarly help white. This mechanic is based off the +1 from Ugin, the Ineffable. The player exiles the top card off their library and creates a token creature. When the token leaves the field, the player adds it to their hand. Maybe a 2/2 is too good so let's downgrade the token to a 1/1 spirit to be on the safe side.
So basing a hypothetical card off of the existing card Light Up the Stage a potential card would be: 2 and a white for a sorcery with "Exile the top 2 cards of your library face down and look at them. Create two 1/1 spirit tokens. When a token created by this card leaves the battlefield add one of those exiled cards to your hand.
This mechanic meshes with white mechanically and thematically. It works mechanically because white is already known for making small creatures and this mechanic synergizes nicely with board wipes which white is also known for.
The mechanic also fits with white thematically as the process of drawing the card is basically rewarding the player with the card for their patience. It's basically just a slower but safer version of red's impulse draw.
Most importantly, the mechanic just "feels white"! What do you think?
Omniscience_is_life says... #3
DragonSliver9001 Buddy, did you even read what TriusMalarky said? Read their entire comment and then come back here
September 24, 2020 12:33 p.m.
RNR_Gaming says... #4
mccabej140 it's because white doesn't have representation in other formats beyond just a splash for key stax pieces or sideboard hate. Edh is the only format white has decent representation and both it's strengths and weaknesses get highlighted.
September 24, 2020 12:49 p.m.
mccabej140 says... #5
DeinoStinkus Yeah, kinnnnda disappointed with the thread honestly. Hopefully, some people were atleast intrigued by the proposed idea.
September 24, 2020 1:26 p.m.
DragonSliver9001 says... #6
Omniscience_is_life: yes i read it. you seem to think that because i disagree, i didn't read it all. pretty weird correlation to make.
September 24, 2020 1:29 p.m.
RNR_Gaming says... #7
The mechanic feels too strong. The oppurnity cost is almost non-existent. Impulse draws either need to be played that turn or the following; with the way this is worded it almost sounds like adventure but you're making a token that provides card advantage at all points in the game. Maybe its just the specific example but what you have with that is essentially Lingering Souls but without flying and you draw a card when the creature dies. Maybe if all the tokens had to die for you to get the card?
September 24, 2020 2:47 p.m.
mccabej140 says... #8
RNR_Gaming I was kinda feeling the same way honestly. I downgraded the token to a 1/1 from the 2/2 from Ugin, the Ineffable's ability but that might not have been enough. A 1/1 can still be pretty useful. I was hoping to keep the draw when the token leaves play to give the mechanic a slow but inevitable feel but maybe you're right. But on the other hand, it would atleast make sense from a flavour perspective to require you to return the spirit to the graveyard to get the draw.
Another idea I just got was to delay the draw until the endphase just to further the whole delayed gratification schtick.
September 24, 2020 3:14 p.m.
mccabej140 says... #9
DeinoStinkus Having the tokens be 0/1's is probably a good idea I think. They'd still be chump blockers but that requires an opponent to swing at you and you'd require other cards to get any real value from the token.
September 24, 2020 4:10 p.m.
TriusMalarky says... #10
It needs 2 toughness, whatever we do. Personally, if its something that's more like an enchantment that lets you pay to create one we'd be good.
September 24, 2020 4:11 p.m.
Omniscience_is_life says... #11
TriusMalarky is right, one toughness would make Skullclamp cost 4 billion dollars as I believe SynergyBuild mentioned a page prior
September 24, 2020 4:38 p.m.
mccabej140 says... #12
Good point. I honestly never considered Skullclamp haha.
September 24, 2020 4:42 p.m.
mccabej140: While I can understand that you're miffed that the thread got sidetracked, it does raise an important point here; it's important to get your basis correct.
You posted in a forum about commander where the premise was that white has a deficit on card draw compared to the other colours and that it was somehow a problem that needed fixing. The counter argument was that white's card draw is plenty fine considering the colour as a whole and the other things that it does.
Your premise was fixing a problem, not "hey, I came up with a cool new mechanic that white (and potentially others) could have" which was posted under the Custom Cards section of the forum, so the response is talking about whether there actually is a problem and if it does indeed need fixing. Context matters and we (as in all of us, myself included) can get caught up wasting a lot of time and energy trying to fix problems that don't actually exist.
If you're keen on the mechanic and think that it's got potential, I would recommend that you keep developing it. But some feedback on the design idea:
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For a white ability, your tokens should have at least 1 power. I doesn't make sense for white, a martial colour to make tokens which have no teeth.
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Exiling cards off the top of your library so you can play them is actually quite a red mechanic. The red design is very much a "use it or lose it" attitude which fits with the colour scheme.
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If you do want to adapt this to white, I would have the ability only every exile 1 card, however it can create multiple tokens. When at least one of them dies/leaves the battlefield, then you can flip the exiled card. This way you're not giving white the ability to dig super deep but your are giving them token, which is a white thing.
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Skullclamp exists and is a very strong card, but don't be afriad of its existence. There are lots of cards which are broken with clamp, that's the fault of clamp, not your card. It's like saying that Elspeth, Sun's Champion + Skullclamp become a card draw beast. Of course it does, but that's not becuase of Elspeth.
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Figure out how the mechanic gets triggered. Are you going to tie it to ETBs, or mainly instants/sorceries? Are you going to have repeatable versions of it on a card?
Those would be my thoughts on the ability itself. I would also recommend creating a new thread over in the Custom Cards forum and don't talk about this "fixing white", just talk about the mechanic. I would also look into the ability not just being white, you might have white/blue and white/red cards which can do this too.
September 24, 2020 9:54 p.m.
dingusdingo says... #14
Whew lots of thoughts in this thread.
First: Card advantage has been identified time and time again as extremely important to winning. Number of cards drawn by a player is the single best indicator of who will win in a 1v1 game of Magic. This is why Ancestral Recall is a $3000 card, even though it does the same thing as Concentrate just at a cheaper mana cost. I think that the color pie has been used for a long time by a designer I don't care for (cough Mark Rosewater cough) to justify lazy design because he doesn't like to imagine settings further away than Limited. Card advantage isn't just important, it is practically the cornerstone of competitive play. The EDH card pool is most similar to Vintage of all the other formats, due to the ban list and the cards available, no matter how much people wish to gripe about "muh competitive EDH". When you look at Vintage decks, the vast majority of them include blue, and rarely white (the most white deck being Thought Knot Seer stax, relying on eldrazi mana base and splashing white for pretty much just Thalia).
Second: White does have card advantage, but most of it is addition by subtraction. If you spend 1 card and remove 2 cards on the board, you have just gained +1 card advantage. This is seen in White with the massive amount of board wipes, from Wrath of God forwards. White has board wipes for creatures, artifacts, enchantments, and even a couple that impact cards in hand. As previously said in this thread, these cards require careful timing and strategy in order to get advantage from these cards. Compare to a card like Brainstorm, which always functions regardless of board state. While there are great times to Brainstorm (before a shuffle for example), there is rarely a bad time to Brainstorm. The same cannot be said for Wrath of God or other wipes, which perform better when you are behind and significantly worse when you are ahead.
Third: The raw card draw that White has is limited in scope or costly in mana. You can't just pay to draw a card, like you can any number of ways with . Most of the card draw requires deck build arounds, conditions on the board, or are just flat out heinously expensive to draw cards (such as Bygone Bishop, 5 mana before you even get the first card). The amount of white card advantage cards that are 1 or 2 mana cost are extremely small, being limited to a couple tutors and some conditional land advantage, not even land ramp. This is really what people mean when they say "White doesn't have good card advantage". If the card draw isn't in the 1-3 mana range, it is almost always too costly in opportunity cost to be worth a slot in your EDH deck.
Fourth: To address the OP, I wouldn't give White impulse type effects. I'd lean more into giving white a handful of small cantrips in the 1-2 mana range. I wouldn't make a white version of Brainstorm, but I sure would endorse a white version of Opt. Conditional card draw is neat, but I think deck building could be opened greatly just by giving white cards that say "Draw cards". I could also get behind a card like Glimpse of Nature except change "creature" to "enchantment". I also believe Cultivate would make a wonderful white card, and I could even be talked into Nature's Lore with "plains" instead of "forest" with a heavier mana weight in the cost. I think white has been left by the wayside, with designers still thinking white weenie and UW control as the only ways to design for the color.
September 26, 2020 10:20 p.m.
mccabej140 says... #15
dingusdingo You made a lot of very good points there. Thanks for the imput. I 100% agree that R&D struggles to design interesting white cards. They pretty much said as much when they explained their reasoning for not giving white or red inscription cards for the inscription cycle in Zendikar Rising.
The card designers seem to be really hesitant to give white cards with the word "draw" in them so the idea was to come up with a mechanic that effectively let white draw with out actually saying draw to get around that obstacle. But you're right, if R&D could just get over that hangup that would be a best case scenario.
And I didn't go into my opinion on white ramp but I will here since you brought it up. To me agriculture is much more white than green from a flavour perspective. With farming you're essentially taking nature and taming it to better serve society (classical white). The side of me that cares about flavour really wishes that white had land enchantments to reflect this idea.
September 27, 2020 12:26 p.m.
TriusMalarky says... #16
dingusdingo your first point is mostly true. Technically, in any game, it's all about the action economy. Card advantage, mana advantage, racing, etc. are all just different ways to generate advantage, and in the end it comes down to the action economy. That's one reason Magic is so complicated: it's "action economy" is different based on what decks are in the match, and even what players.
The color pie is imbalanced in card advantage and that's something that should be fixed. Personally, card draw should be a more fundamental mechanic that every color just has but it can't work that way in Magic. Instead, we have to look at ways to give white back its action economy advantages.
Wraths are still the best here, as they are one card to make multiple of your opponents preparations(playing a creature is rarely an actual action -- attacking is) null and void. What we need is more elaboration on white's design spaces. It's just sad that the community hated stax and tax effects out, when those are some of the best advantages white has ever had.
mccabej140 says... #1
Whenever someone mentions white being a weak colour its usually in reference to EDH. As far as I can tell white is pretty strong in most other formats.
September 23, 2020 10:54 p.m.