I would consider myself relatively new to EDH. I have had a single deck that I have tweaked and modified while slowly collecting pieces for over the past ten years or so, but until about a month ago I had never sat down at a table and played the deck. There just hasn't been any interest in my area until the past year or so. I have always had a vague idea of the kinds of things you just don't do when playing commander, and the relative power levels of decks. So, I get why you don't windmill slam an [[Armageddon]] on turn four and spend the next hour struggling to close out the game or durdling with everyone back at square one. Commander is a mostly casual format about playing the cool cards you enjoy, and cards that read "people stop playing commander" generally feel pretty bad. So, this is the social contract, you know that if you are sitting down to play a game of commander that you can expect people to respect your time and not play super oppressive and hateful things and in turn you didn't sleeve those cards up either.
I have always since I began playing and collecting magic some twenty years ago had a deep fondness for [[Stasis]]. Every aspect of the card seems to exist outside the realm of what magic is and I love it for that. The art is so unusual, the effect is so oppressive and unfun to play against, and there aren't a lot of other cards that can do what stasis does. Neither of the two decks I have built for commander run it though. So I have a bit of internal conflict. I see commander as this wild west sandbox where you get to play all the cool stuff you want, and I want to play this card. At the same time though, I know that if I sit down at a table of strangers and play a deck built around this card that I would very quickly become the most unpopular player in the store. I've already felt this disdain when playing my older deck. The power level of the deck is likely somewhere in the higher rankings, and what it does happens very quickly and looks threatening. So even if I make conscious decisions to slot out some of the more game-breaking cards and intentionally making sub-optimal plays, someone who has played against it before will hate me out of the game as much as possible, and I honestly don't blame them for that.
Some of the things that I have done when trying to manage this social give and take is to gauge the competitive level of the table so I'm not playing my high tier Azusa deck and instead bring out a much weaker deck. I also set the expectations that when I'm hitting a [[Tooth and Nail]] entwined on turn two or three that I'm not grabbing Eldrazi titans, or a vorniclex and I've intentionally left out cards like [[Hall of Gemstone]] or [[Choke]]. Is setting the expectations and gauging the table's feelings about playing a heavy stasis build the best way to go about it? It also seems to me that if I say "hey, I'm playing a deck built around stasis" and the table says that's cool I am going to get hated out of the game very hard.
So how would you navigate the social contract to be able to play this card? Or do I just not get to play this card unless I can find a cEDH table?
TL;DR - I am a sociopath who for some reason likes to play Stasis, but I don't want to be a jerk for playing it at tables and would like your opinion on how best to play this card.
Submitted October 02, 2019 at 08:41PM by TheVainestsafe https://ift.tt/2n3LT2k
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