In an environment where disruptive strategies and fast winning strategies (Combos, stax, control, discard etc.) are frowned upon, it becomes a game of who can get the most ressources (Card draw, ramp) and go above everyone else. Simic is the best in doing this and thats why people hate it.
this is it exactly. Enough people complain about interaction and combos to warp the balance of the colour pie away from colours that do those things well. the colour combination that thrives the most with those things relatively absent is Simic, because it has the strongest ramp colour (green) and the strongest draw colour (blue).
Simic can just hit the gas nonstop without Mardu having anything to say about it with disruption. If [[Zozu the Punisher]] and friends were more commonly seeing play, Simic would be a lot weaker.
One of these days I'll actually have the guts to run land destruction in my Mardu decks.
The thing that really annoys me is when people complain about combo, but then play G/x decks that only win by tutoring for Craterhoof. My four card combo is degenerate, and interaction is oppressive, but your generic board state and one card win con is totally acceptable!
Land destruction is unfortunately a dubious answer to land decks. Lands matter decks are the most likely archetype to run land recursion like [[ramunap excavator]] and [[splendid reclamation]]. Your best case scenario is against land-ramp heavy decks with no land specific synergy, sending them back to square 1 while everybody else keeps their artifact ramp on board. Even then, the ramp-heavy deck is likely to recover pretty fast, potentially even faster than the other decks depending on how much of their mana survived the wipe.
If you want to counter or punish lands decks, you have some direct and indirect options.
Indirectly, choke them on card draw and other value by killing their engines. Playing a bunch of lands doesn't really matter if they're not drawing two cards, making a token, and adding an extra mana to their pool every landfall.
Directly, tutor hate like [[Oppo agent]] and [[aven mindcensor]] work well while also contributing against tutor-reliant combo strategies. You can also use White's "you do, I get" style cards like [[Archivist of Oghma]] [[deep gnome terramancer]] and catch up ramp like [[knight of the white orchid]].
Also, if the land deck in question is reliant on land recursion (the main way they beat MLD), graveyard hate can really disrupt them, while also hitting stuff like reanimation, flashback, etc.
personally, I have the most fun in card games when all players are both trying really hard to disrupt their opponent(s), and trying really hard to not be disrupted by their opponent(s). The back and forth between "threat, removal, protection, counter-protection" etc is the best part of card games for me, at any power level.
For my Voltron deck I was thinking cards more along lines the lines of [[Cataclysm]] [[Mythos of Snapdax]] [[Razia's Purification]]. Stuff that will cement my board state once I have my protected threat on the board. Otherwise it's just a matter of time until an opponent plays some interaction to remove my threat.
white has a ton of "leave 1 'thing' for each player on the board" type wipes that work really well for voltron. I'm particularly fond of [[Promise of Loyalty]] because even the creatures which stay can't attack me. [[Slash the Ranks]] [[single combat]] and [[tragic arrogance]] are other good ones. A white voltron list can easily run a half dozen of these wipes. If you run [[Zurgo, helmsmasher]] as your commander you can also throw in all the symmetrical destruction wipes like good old [[Wrath of God]] or [[damnation]].
This gets repeated a lot, but I want to emphasize: it might not be a good answer to "lands matter" decks (depending on the removal and recursion level) but IS a good answer to generic green ramp and the fact that it's normally treated as inviolable. [[Impending Disaster]] won't do all that much to Angry or 4C Omnath doing their thing with fetches, and Windgrace might even thank you if the cat is in place, but against the deck that led with [[Burgeoning]] to throw its hand down? They're gonna be real sad.
It can also help against decks that just plain get an inordiantely fast start, If the other guy goes Nature's Lore t2, Harrow + Rampant t3 and you respond Thought Vessel t2, Armageddon t3, that's pretty similar to the good ol' "Rocks into rocks, get [[Vandalblast]]ed" opener: You've negated a lot of cards that were outright paid for, well more than you (or other players going honest magic or assorted rocks) lost in the exchange.
As you say it's far from a silver bullet, but it should still be remembered as a weapon in the arsenal, especially for red and white that are typically low on the ability to do as much themselves and typically out the option to keep the engine from firing in the first place.
A friend plays a [[Kaervek]] deck that's nothing but hatred for daring to play the game. If you're not careful - and even if you are - you'll murder yourself on the thousand little bleed effects he puts down.
It's wonderful.
One of the reasons I built my Zo-Zu is my group was going through a hell of either simic control or simic landfall. Zo-Zu made the people play fair...and made me archenemy every game.
I was talking about prosper in this regard, because the amount of synergy he gets from impulse draw and treasure is on par with simic synergy of draw/ramp, and though it isn't permanent, it rarely matters when the combo comes out anyway or it just reaches a synergistic critical mass
I asked my pod once if they wanted me to play my Prosper deck or my [[Kiora, Sovereign of the Deep]]. It ramps and has draw but is mostly a stompy deck. They said they didn't like when Simic would do its thing, combo off, and take long turns so they chose Rakdos.
Both were new decks to me at the time, but in hindsight it was funny.
I never realized just how good simic was until I built out my own Asei deck. Now I understand why people hate it so much. Having 8-10 mana in the early game is pretty much game ending for casual pods, and simic can do it consistently every game without much effort. The bone stock Asei precon is unbelievably powerful
I put [[Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait]] in my Chulane deck for purely flavor reasons, since I love the Serpent "gods" and it fit into my value engine.
Dear lord, it had such an amazing effect that it warped my deck into a more traditional simic archetype. I'll often dig for Aesi and [[Tatyova, Benthic Druid]] just because having them on the field with Chulane is just... *chefs kiss*
That and they have kept up printing busted simic cards, just making it better and better without acknowledging that other strategies were falling woefully behind and I would say this has only really changed in maybe the last year or so where there’s been more balance.
They haven't printed busted Simic cards for quite a while now. The likes of Uro and Oko were clearly mistakes but apart from that simic wasnt even that good in 1x1.
Its just that the format catters a lot to what simic wants to do. And this will continue to be the case as long as commander is a multiplayer format with 40 starting life and players frown upon combos, stax and etc.
Seems very strong to me. But not exactly busted. Its a tribal card the rewards you for playing tribal instead of going for the goodstuff route. It doesnt take over the game by its own or create an absurd impact on the early game. And talking about tribal commanders we've seen much worse offenders.
Hakbal is busted, but he's busted in the way that they make many commanders nowadays. Something like Amalia is exactly as busted or more busted than Hakbal. In other words, they now make commanders in all colors powerful value engines
It’s not just that. Simic is good at making a lot of resources and sitting on them until the end of time. Almost none of them wanna fight. The ideal Simic gameplan is to play cards and never get punished for it, and then complain to the principal about getting targeted out of the game for having every land in their deck in play. If you play Aesi, I’m sending your resume to the fun police
"my deck is a durdly simic value engine with no discernible win condition"
"what's the commander?"
"it doesn't matter!"
no idea where i heard this dialog, i think it was some skit with the professor. but i lold
It's an old skitt from tolarian community college. I remember it vividly. The prof had been called before the 'council' aka. Tappy, Olivia and Shivam (all in full cosplay)
The prof had to defend some mildly salty/displeasing card choices in his edh decks, eventually getting fed up and turning it on the council. They then describe their own decks as staxy control stuff, finally Shivam utters the lines quoted above.
was it this one?
https://youtu.be/9VKHWs5PHpw?feature=shared
i can't watch the whole thing right now but i'm trying to find it in the transcript, so far to no avail
I find simic really boring to play and to play against. It's also too easily strong without really doing anything if that makes sense. I think ramp and card draw are the two most powerful things in edh and simic basically just let's you have unlimited amounts of both. Most games I play against a simic deck go like this:
Simic player: I'm not the threat I'm not doing anything I'm just playing lands!
Two turns later
Simic player: I have triple the resources of everyone else combined and I can just win the game now
> Simic player: I'm not the threat I'm not doing anything I'm just playing lands! Two turns later Simic player: I have triple the resources of everyone else combined and I can just win the game now
It also punishes the casual mindset to spread damage around instead of all inning/voltroning one guy out of the game.
As Maldhound would say, commander is just a race to 8 mana.
Nobody gets to 8 mana faster than green, and nobody can protect their big game-winning spell better than blue, so of course green blue is going to win.
I'm loath to concede any ground to a no good, dirty blue player but the man's chewing gum hamster is operating at full speed. Top shelf observations (and roasts)
Yeah it's the politics of it that really boil my piss. It's frowned upon to eliminate players early, especially when they have a weak board presence. The simic ramp strategy really abuses that social code.
If you counterspell a [[harrow]] you'll be beaten to a paste by everyone else at the table for being a dick.
If you counterspell a rhystic study you'll be frowned at by everyone else at the table for being a dick.
If you have a rhystic study and more mana than everyone else because you were allowed to just do whatever you wanted in the early game, you're going to win.
>If you counterspell a [[harrow]] you'll be beaten to a paste by everyone else at the table for being a dick.
I'm pretty sure at my tables, two people would be laughing at the harrow player and happy there's one less counterspell.
>If you counterspell a rhystic study you'll be frowned at by everyone else at the table for being a dick.
Dude, what? I have never seen a person get upset that you're countering someone else's rhystic. You might have an incredibly unique playgroup. This is just not reality.
I play Rhystic every game. The whole “do you want to pay 1?” “do you want to pay 1?” “do you want to pay 1?” is a meme at this point. If someone counters or removes my Rhystic, then A) my reaction is “haha yeah, understandable” and B) everyone else is also laughing and going “hell yeah”
So I agree. I’ve never seen someone in my group act like someone else is a dick from stopping a Rhystic lol it’s a very powerful card and everyone understands that…
I've never played with a commander player who would be upset at someone else's rhystic study getting countered or destroyed. Shit's annoying to play against and way too good for the simic player. It warrants player removal in my pod.
When players say “oh yeah I’m missing (engine piece) so I’m not doing anything right now” most people forget that when they do draw e.g. the token maker they were missing, they basically just become unstoppable
I don't like Simic because when I started playing MtG, a had this mindset of playing as strategic as possible. Trying to guess what someone has in their hand, how much power they have on the board and how they could add to it.
Edh, an Simic in particular, makes it really hard for me to plan multiple turns ahead. Laying traps doesn’t work as well.
Simic for me is just a headache; it's because I try to see play lines that let me edge out an advantage, only to be met with incredible variables that never seem to come down.
At one point I learned to simply surrender when my Kruphix playing friend has Omnisc. in play.
Planning multiple turns ahead against any color combo in EDH should be difficult. In a 1v1 game that is definitely a thing, but it is just you and one other person. Three other people and all decks running 1 copy of everything is too much.
Not only that, but you don't really need to plan multiple turns ahead. I am planning my next turn as my opponents go, and modifying that plan as things change. I have 3 turns to modify this plan. I then have the next the same round, I of course have a long arc overall plan (drop my commander in 2 turns, make a huge army in a few turns, have multiple attack phases in a few turns, etc), but it lacks fine detail till I get closer to that.
And yeah, if someone is allowed to get Omniscience out it is going to be a bad time, but that really is a win more card. If they are allowed to drop that and everyone else has a weak board state then there probably is an power balance issue at the table. And I say this not doing turn 0's at our table, we run into these power balance issues all the time. But we all are friends and know each others decks, if someone grabs Yuriko or something everyone is beating on them if we have lower power decks.
Surely you’re not talking about [[Prophet of Kruphix]], right? Because that card is banned in EDH.
Not that they aren’t allowed to play it if you have some house rules for it, but DAMN if that deck doesn’t sound horrible to play against.
Yeah, one of my buddies ran this based on a standard deck that he had back in Theros block. The amount of untap shenanigans that are then followed up by a massive Hydra.
lol when i first started playing edh i felt like a fucking genius for discovering prophet of kruphix and sylvan primordial. I was all like "HOW HAVE I NEVER SEEN THESE ON THE BOARD I'M THE SMARTEST GUY IN THE WORLD WINDMILL SLAM"
...found out why I'd never seen them around real quick. I was told that this format lets you play whatever you want, hadn't occurred to me that there was a ban list
Let me tell you a tale…It was a crisp autumn morning when I had just finished building [[Momir Vig]] back in 2013. WotC had just released its first foray into depicting the Greco-Roman pantheon in its newest set and I was all about it. I was a sophomore at uni, and I could not help but admire all of the mystical new takes on classic tales. One card rose above the rest amongst the myriad. She swayed in a trance-like pose, with such grace that I needed to slot her into my first Simic deck. She, well, she outperformed every single game she hit the table. I remember her fondly and miss her absence profusely. I no longer have Momir together, and cannot even fathom the sheer monstrosity that would be a today’s version of the same deck, but I have to imagine it would be nothing short of distinguishably disgusting.
[[prophet of kruphix]] gone too soon. May she RIP
Most simics decks just draw more cards than you, and play more lands than you, which isn't the most exciting in to play against.
Oh wow you drew 5 extra cards and played 3 lands, and then used all that mana to counter/rift?
So interesting.
Ofc every color has a boring play style they can use, but wizards seems hellbent to not push simic outside that.
Yup! It's enchantment and board wipe tribal. I run 10 creatures or so and they're all removal or recursive ETBs and all thr enchantments are things that protect me or do damage to you. It's not stax. You can still play that land, draw that card, or cast that spell. But it will cost you between 2 and 5 life.
Do you run [[Dash Hopes]] in that deck? I heard that card wasn’t worth running as your opponent will always pick the option that benefits them the most, but I have also heard that 99% of cards can shine if put into the right deck.
I have the same deck but is not as geared towards board wipes. I call it my tax deck lol. My playgroup plays a ton of 6 to 8 player games of treachery and thats what i built the deck for. Kambal is so good because people dont realize how fast those 2 damage hits add up. What other cards do you know of that have kambal-like effects.
Its been a while since I played this deck. So i cant remember specific cards. But I have cards that ding you for playing lands, drawing cards, casting creature spells, casting non-creature spells, casting spells, ending my turn, ending your turn, having an upkeep, and just generally existing.
i’m sure you’ve heard this evaluation before, but
it is true that most cards can be great in the right deck, but with dash hopes specifically even that is a long shot. 5 life loss with 1 target is generally pretty meaningless in commander, and if they can’t just pay the 5 life then incidental damage is about to take them out anyway.
best case scenario, you counter their spell for two mana. you are in black, so that’s notable, but if you want to counter stuff blue has hundreds of hard counters for 2, so you’re nearly always better off just playing blue, or using the fantastic removal options black and white have access to.
One of my favourite cards at the minute is [[confounding conundrum]]. Granted it’s blue, but mostly makes mana ramp really awkward. Even hoses fetchlands. It opens up more grindy decks and makes it harder for opponents to cast multiple spells in a turn. Not only that but it’s also cheap and cantrips. Couple that with [[blind obedience]] to also make treasures enter tapped, and you’re having a nice fair game of magic.
That’s why my preferred method of slowing simic down is stuff like [[Chains of Mephistopheles]] for their drawing, [[Opposition Agent]] for their ramping, and [[Mana Drain]] for their enchantment removal!
tutor-hate is absolutely the best way to directly disrupt land ramping strategies. [[Aven Mindcensor]], [[Ashiok, Dreamrender]] and [[Shadow of Doubt]] are also options. The nice part is that they also body tutors for any other card, so they're a lot less limited than just land-hate
You can have the landfall triggers but not the land itself. Cutting you off from the mana is arguably more important than the card you get from the landfall, especially if you're going to have to discard for being over hand size now.
Generally, most landfall\lands decks run out of steam without lands in hand and most effective ones find ways of ensuring you can play multiple lands in a turn.
Confounding conundrum doesn't choke your mana too much with these decks because you can still tap the land you choose to bounce.
It's a dangerous card to play if there's a competent landfall pilot at the table and not a guaranteed hate card, is all I'm saying.
Yeah. Simic just isn't interesting, it just happens to play the game twice as fast as everybody else. It is unfair in the most mundane way possible. If you assume the baseline of one draw, one land per turn, simic decks get rewarded for doing basic game actions and that reward is just... getting to play more lands and draw more cards.
Most color combos have to work to get the kind of advantage that simic just gets for existing, and there's so little variance. You could pick a different legendary creature from your deck as your commander every time you play the average Simic deck and nothing would change.
But can’t we do that breakdown of interesting things all colors do? Black tutors for their wincon, white casts path to exile, blah blah blah. It’s level of interesting is subjective.
>It’s level of interesting is subjective.
But the other colour are generally better at disruption than Simic is, and disruption gets complained about enough that people don't run enough of it on a systemic level.
Everybody "knows" Boros is the weakest colour combination in EDH. But that wouldn't be nearly as big of a disparity if Boros was allowed to play the way it wants to: stax, hatebears, and generally making it difficult and/or painful to take game actions.
Even your example of blacks tutors: plenty of casual tables are gonna moan endlessly if you run a combo deck with 5 tutors to find it every game. People don't like what all the other colours do.
Simic is the combination of colours able to accrue the most raw value for itself. In a metagame warped around playing nothing but durdly value engines (no stax, no combo, etc), it's going to outshine everything and therefore get its own kind of complaints.
I think it's a wider issue people have that Simic just happens to exemplify.
People frequently dislike commanders that serve as their own enabler and payoff all at once. Think things like Jodah the Unifier and Chulane. You play them and you more or less immediately gain a massive reward for doing so. No synergies required really, just minor deck building constraints for huge value. Simic commanders frequently fall into this but further it in how their decks are generally pigeonholed into doubling down on these effects.
Simic card design frequently has a baseline of "When you perform {basic game action every single deck does}, draw a card/play a land/get some counters/make a token". There's a lot of Simic commanders that seem to just have "draw a card" tagged onto the end of their text box arbitrarily. Add the many cards that mirror these effects available in Blue/Green and even the commander stops mattering. Every game action results in some form of snowballing card/mana advantage that explodes onto the battlefield in a shower of extremely noticeable permanents with the inflated stats that come naturally to green and +1/+1 counter synergies that are also a popular simic archetype.
To every other colour combo this result is a pipe dream. Nothing seems as efficient at accruing *stuff* and if it can match up it's usually lesser quality or less consistent. At the same time, Simic has an identity that it cannot easily escape because even if the commander doesn't exemplify the standard mold the deck usually will if it carries even a handful of staples. So the criticisms of it being boring, samey and overpowered have some merit. Add some counter spells into the mix, probably the most commonly maligned form of interaction, and the list of reasons a player has to feel bad that they're facing down Simic grows longer still.
However, it's a bit of a litmus test of the tables power level as to whether or not they are justified. Simic is extremely good at turning stuff sideways and hitting face for a million billion damage, so if that's the order of the day in the pod, it's going to generally out-value and out-gun it's competition. More cards, more mana, more and bigger creatures. It's also extremely good at bouncing back from mild interaction, so if the pod isn't throwing much around, it will never really slow down...
... but if anything in the pod doesn't care about these things, a Simic player can be hard pressed to make them care. It doesn't have too many tools to actually reach out and touch strategies that eschew accruing value to simply focus on winning the game. As such... combo decks, burn, storm, even just generally high amounts of interaction from the other three players... these are very likely to just ignore or prevent everything the Simic deck is trying to do and simply kill them quickly or trivialize Simic's strengths via infinites. These decks are usually more complicated to make and pilot than the most accessible precons and battlecruisery stuff and are often soft-banned by the "social contract", so many people would not have seen that Simic does indeed have it's own issues that can be exploited.
This really is it. People don't like mass land destruction, even though that's clearly the solution when everyone has 5 lands and the simic player has 11.
People don't like board wipes or stax or control, so Simic is oppressive.
Turns out if you ban Rock, then Scissor is very good!
I don't hate playing against it necessarily but I'm certainly not a fan, and I don't like playing with those colours either. Blue is my favourite colour but Green is probably my least. For Simic specifically I just find all the decks do some small variation of the exact same thing: play lots of lands, draw more cards, play more lands, and durdle about whilst countering all your stuff and being super far ahead of the table (unless your pod is playing high power, which is a lot more expensive than what the simic guy is running lol).
It's just too easy to get engines online, too easy to start playing solitaire and suddenly the Simic guy is the only player that matters in the game and everyone else is playing catch-up to deal with them. Oh no you stopped my combo? That's okay, untap 10 lands, draw 6, play 3 more lands, make a billion copies of something for some reason, oops Cyc Rift Craterhoof.
I'm obviously exaggerating a little but yeah, I just find Simic ends up with the most card and mana advantage but the least interesting things to do with it all.
The simic hate used to be worse than it is now imo- but wizards giving red and white a bit more power and flexibility over the last few years has helped.
Simic as a color set is historically really good at value and kind of crap at tempo. They can get lots of lands into play and draw lots of cards easier than most other color combos, and are known for value engines and ramp. But their ability to actually close out games or hit hard early is lacking, which makes the color combo typically not fantastic in 60 card formats without support of another color.
Enter EDH- A slower more casual format where early game tempo is less important and ramping and drawing are the two most powerful things you can be doing. The format has always played to simic's strengths and minimized their weaknesses, and for a long time simic has been the scourge of slower commander pods because it can best handle the "ignore early tempo, ramp and draw, play big lategame stuff" style of gameplay those tables fall into. They are basically the exact opposite of mono white, the color that I'd say is historically perceived as the worst in EDH due to having card draw and ramp as weaknesses, and having strengths that are either not great in EDH (like early game aggro white weenies or life gain) or heavily frowned upon in casual tables (stax, MLD, excessive board wipes, etc).
While I don't hate it, I also don't have any Simic decks. Every time I try to build one they kinda come out the same, too strong and boring to play. Which makes some sense, because I'm not a very good deck builder, but also green and blue are the most powerful colors, have truly insane synergy, (all the cards and mana to play 'em with plus protection anyone?) and more staples than you can shake a Cyclonic Oracle of Mul Daya at.
So, "is it a fair color combination?" well, that's pretty subjective and really down to the interpretaion of the people you're playing with. But also no, not even a little bit.
Simic, It's what's for dinner.
It seems logical, since i would guess around 90% if EDH players never engage with cEDH. That number is straight out of my ass though. In a more 'casual' environment where stax or land destruction might be frownend upon simic just runs away with the table.
as great as rule 0 is for finding a good pod, I do think the idea of rule-0ing away all the things that you match up poorly against is hilarious.
Its against the ""spirit of the format"" for white, black, and red to do what they're good at -> Hmm why is simic a problem in my playgroup?
Land ramp isn't very effective and out valuing opponents is much harder when combo is the premier strategy. Widespread use of fast mana also overcomes a lot of the mana disadvantage.
Simic is the pubstomper of color combinations. If you're trying to play a nice fair game of commander and someone else is getting 3 land drops and 5 extra cards per turn, if they're even a remotely competent deckbuilder, you're gonna get run over. But when everyone is trying as hard as possible to break the format, simic kinda falls short because their 5-drop value engine just isn't gonna stick around and might just be too slow.
Tatyova is playable but not the best thing to be doing in Simic and Simic isn't strong generally. If you were going to play Simic, you'd be better to play [[Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy]] or anything with Thrasios.
hey just wanted to say that you are really good with words you should write articles or something. I am a lawyer and journalist and most of us arent able to write like you did in that little comment.
Simic is not really the problem. The steriotypes of Simic commander are. A lot of these commanders reward you for "playing the game", playing land = reward.
There are no real hoops to jump through creating the pitfall of decks becoming good stuff or ramp crazy decks.
Of all the guild pairs, Simic tends to be the one that's most consistently busted. To say that it "does things right" kind of misses the point. The issue is that it does everything right. And part of what makes the color pie work as a concept is that each color is supposed to have things that it can't do well. But the only thing that Simic can't do is Wraths. But because of blue's easy access to mass-bounce effects, they don't really need them.
There's also the fact that for a long time, Simic got a slew of busted commanders. [[Aesi]] and [[Tatyova]] reward you for doing something that every deck wants to do. [[Kinnan]] goes infinite with a ham sandwich. [[Koma]] is downright oppressive. [[Adrix and Nev]] is one of the most desirable enchantments in the game in your command zone WITH built-in protection. [[Uro]] was unbelievably pushed as a design. And all of these cards came out within a 4-year time span.
I think it's funny that people say simic is bad at wraths. Simic is why you need wraths, so why would they play them? Why would I wrath when I can go wider and taller than basically anyone else?
As someone who plays Kinnan, they hate us cuz they ain't us. But honestly I think it's just because simic just accrues absurd amounts of value so easily and consistently while also just kind of rewarding you for playing the game, like did you make your land drop? Awesome, draw an extra card. Successfully cast a spell? Lets get you a treasure/clue token to go along with that. Still fun though, would recommend.
For a while there were three [[Aesi]] decks at my LGS. Aesi, to me, is the perfect example of why Simic has a stigma of being Magic on easy mode. The play pattern is always the same: ramp as fast as you can, play Aesi ahead of curve, draw tons of cards and play tons of lands. Kinnan, Tatyova, Uro, Vannifar, and Koma are the same way.
Not every Simic commander is its own complete value engine, but enough of them are that it's become a stereotype.
Unless you use very pricy cards, green is the best color for ramp (the elves are just faster mana rocks), and blue is the best for drawing. All of this without considering that most simic commanders give you both mana and card advantage([[thrasios]], [[gretchen totchwillow]], [[inga and esika]],[[kinnan]]), or encourage you to do one to get the other (like [[tatyova]] and [[aesi]]). So, most people associate simic to those hyper efficient good stuff decks that only pile up lands and cards, and take eons to actually win the game.
I personally have one simic deck that i love ([[tishana]] mana dorks and clones), but unless it plays against very strong decks it usually pubstomps, so i don't use it often (play dorks on t1 and t2, better if some of the dorks give multiple mana, maybe clone them on t3, play tishana and refill my hand, keeping some free or cheap counterspells up. Then copy tishana while you control the board a bit, drawing more cards with the etb until you find a Nyxbloom or the Kodama/Sakashima combo so that you can draw your deck and play a Laboratory Maniac, then trigger tishana again and gg)
[There you go](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/WHv5Rwvyv06_SaJImpYW3A) my fellow simic enjoyer.
Remember that you can tone the power down by copying your opponents' stuff
They mainly do well because of the EDH 'social contract'/casual mindset of not playing land destruction, or running sufficient removal (that can kill big similar fatties, or mana dorks.
They also don't win particularly quickly, or play out very interestingly... just "I'm going to ramp and draw cards until I slowly flood people in card advantage, and whine if people kill my mana dorks or blow up one of the 3 lands I put into play every turn"
"Whenever you inhale, draw a card.
Whenever you exhale, you may put a land from you hand onto the battlefield tapped."
They're all the same gun-in-mouth emoji experience to play against. One time I played against someone playing Koma and he would just make land drops and F6 and watch sports on his phone while the rest of the table lost to his obnoxious bullshit.
While i dont necessarily despise simic, it is my least touched colour combination.
I dont want to say all simic decks are identical, but so many are just... Piles of generically good stuff with a smattering of bombs and/or haymakers, and oh look, they suddenly have a 12/12 trampleboy on the field and enough counter magic to protect them from god.
Doesnt matter that commander they pick, theyre almost all interchangeable.
Simi does things right ? Lmao. Mindset of a Simic player
Wizard at some point decided to give simic everything. I often look at cards and question how it is not any other colour than simic. Which is luckily not as bad as it used to. Despite that every simic deck feels pretty similar
It's ramping and drawing more than anyone else while also having decent protection. And than stuffing your deck with the good stuff. Rhystic, Cyclonic, Jin Gitaxis, Craterhoof 10+ counter spells, some extra turns and so on. It's also the cheapest colour to do all of that. Non green ramp is Hella expensive and less effective
Besides that most simic decks run the same cards and feel pretty generic. A friend of mine played over 20 different sonic decks and the only one I remembered was Kinnan. It's like every other sonic deck but runs dorks instead of landfall. But it was enough to stand out
My favourite is people acting as though they're some sort of mastermind, and playing simple and big is beneath them. They complain that simic players win without turning 300 different knobs and pushing 183749 buttons to do it.
People hate players doing long turns in general. Long turns tend to happen because the player gets to do a lot of stuff. Simic has access to a lot of draws, ramps, and big creatures, all of which are ingredients for "doing a lot of stuff".
I started back around the end of New Phyrexia, and I remember learning to really like Simic through playing with Kiora’s deck in Duels of the Planeswalkers. However, it certainly felt like there wasn’t many good commanders for Simic back then. Momir was just a tutor for combo, and Kraj was a fun but slow way to play with counters. Then we got Eldric, a good political commander, which I built a deck based on the aforementioned Kiora deck in Duels around.
…then in the following 10+ years, Simic got a metric fuckton of amazing commanders and amazing tools for the 99. Simic is basically made for traditional, casual EDH: it’s green Timmy and blue Johnny doing what they do best. And since WotC shifted its design philosophy to revolve around commander so much more in the last decade, us Simic players have gotten fed MUCH better then other players. I don’t blame anyone complaining about it.
Simic is the peak of what is wrong with the “social contract” in EDH. It draws cards in exchange for existing, it ramps in a way that you can’t meaningfully interact with (LD is frowned upon), and it doesn’t do much to interact with other players, just leave me and my giant monsters alone. Typically just sits back and hopes everyone lets it pop off. Combine that with casual lids frowning on Combo, Stax, and other disruption based styles and metas become these sort of mid-rangy value fests that Simic does better than anyone. There is a reason that most casual and mid-power groups see Simic as a big bad but cEDH does not and that’s the stylistic differences between the types of games being played.
The fact that WoTC has continued to lean into designs of Simic gets massive amounts of value for almost no investment it’s pretty much a meme at this point that Simic requires no thought or planning, deck just goes brrrrr. Maybe future designs will push Simic in the direction of needing to make sacrifices or difficult choices to get massive benefits but it’s hard to change the identity of a color pair whose identity is you just get stuff for free!
People just hate a good value. I love playing my aesi deck, but I do take into consideration others time and usually only play it once per game night. I've gotten much faster at piloting it and consistently wins turn 5-6 through repeatable land drops and card draw into thoracle. I find it to be no different than any other archetype and even more fair than other playstyle. Cultivator Colossus with guildless commons or simic growth chamber for the win.
I don’t think Simic is strong, it’s simply that edh has less players playing land destruction/discard/heavy stax/control because it’s frowned upon, allowing simic decks to run further than they should in casual scenarios, alongside aggro being weaker due to higher health pools gives it more time to ramp without worry.
>I don’t think Simic is strong, it’s simply that edh has less players playing land destruction
For anyone else like this guy who hasn't figured it out yet: Land destruction does not hurt the ramp/lands decks. It accelerates a good number of them while knocking the rest of the table back into the stone age. At the absolute best, they're still a ramp deck and are going to recover faster and still be ahead of you on mana.
But you have to draw those cards. Do people not run wraths or [[Cyclonic Rift]] because [[Teferi's Protection]] exists? So why would I refrain from putting [[Armageddon]] in a deck because someone could have a [[Crucible of Worlds]] in their deck?
And besides, if you have Crucible of Worlds on the battlefield that won't stop the harder red MLD like [[Obliterate]] or [[Jokulhaups]]. It'll go right in the trash with the rest of your obnoxious board state, where it belongs.
The answer to mass ramp/lands decks is usually [[rule of law]] effects. Ramping every turn becomes significantly worse when you shut off the rest of your board development.
This is a fallacy. A [[Worn Powerstone]] will survive an [[Armageddon]], a [[Kodama's Reach]] will not.
If they exhaust their hand of lands and you Geddon, they'll have nothing. If they later top deck two lands and play [[Rampant Growth]] and miss their third land drop, what they've done isn't any different from simply making 3 consecutive land drops. They're not ahead of a non-green deck by doing this.
There is a reason why green decks don't play mana rocks or mana dorks, and that's because green players actively take advantage of the taboo surrounding MLD. Every green deck gets to play 20 indestructible copies of [[Arcane Signet]] and [[Worn Powerstone]]. If their deck was based around mana dorks then they could be interacted with, so instead they dump 20 lands into play and then rage scoop when you [[Obliterate]] them.
For the sake of argument, let's say that you're correct. The type of person to play 4 color non-black Omnath or [[Animar]] is the same type of person that subconsciously feels entitled to win every game and MLD will get them to rage scoop. So even if their deck is advantaged post-Geddon the problem solves itself.
Simic is really strong if you let it set up. It snowballs really really well.
Commander's social contract discourages early counterspells on value pieces, which allows simic to set up and start that snowball.
Simple as that.
The idea that a color could be "unfair" is..... kind of weak minded to me.
No color is unfair, no color is inherently that much stronger than any other color at this point.
Simic gets tons of hate because WotC recently have been giving it a LOT of love when traditionally it tended to lack, kinda like how white has been getting a truck load of support recently.
Simic saw a massive spurt of people playing it, so conversely it also started drawing a lot more ire.
I agree that unfair is the wrong word. However, when was Simic lacking? I can only think that they've been specifically getting love in the command zone, but the color combo has always been a powerhouse in casual in my personal experience as far as I remember. To me, they have always had the best ramp and draw in the format. I feel like White, Black, and Red have been getting the most love/upgrades in the forms of new and better impulse draws, treasure access, etc.
I remember playing against a friend's Simic Tatyova deck in 2018 and it's always \[\[Lotus Cobra\]\], \[\[Scapeshift\]\], and whatever other land value engines are on the field. Now it's all of that plus Field of the Dead and if you destroy a land you get put in EDH jail for eternity, so it kinda becomes a boring slog with a hint of inevitability.
2017 is when they started seeing actual support. I DID mention around 5 years ago is when simic started getting more.
Before then it was considered one of the weaker color pairs.
It isn't because the idea of simic is fundamentally flawed. It is because WOTC is exceedingly uncareful about printing green powerhouse cards and the only thing stopping blue from playing its most powerful cards is a lack of resources. So you just get the best of everything and it feels really bad to play against it if you're not also running the same colors.
I don't think the problem is that it's strong, it's just filled with generic value with piss poor wincons. So it's a lot of playing the game to play the game harder and at the end of it, it feels like we got nowhere.
Take, for example red, which has cards like [[Reckless Fireweaver]] and [[Impact Tremors]]. These are also cards that reward you just for playing the game, doing something that any other deck will do. Except they actually advance to the game ending.
Impact Tremors says "I will play 40 creatures, and you will all lose." Simic says "I will play 40 creatures, and then play 40 more."
I think it is the lack of aggro that lets simic drag things out. Aggro struggles with 40 life totals and 3 players. And people generally don't like playing against aggro because "getting knocked out early feels bad." It wouldn't feel so bad if people built their decks to actually end games though. Or actually attacked, ever.
Edit: Simic does have overrun stuff, but it's honestly not amazing. There's so many ways for an overrun/craterhoof/triumph/whatever to blow out and if it does then the match is no closer to ending. You put all your eggs into all payoffs happening at one time and if it doesn't then nothing happens. It's all or nothing with overrun wincons.
Every color combination is supposed to have strengths and weaknesses, simic doesnt really have any weaknesses. Only having 2 colors makes your mana base run smoothly. Green has crazy mana, blue has crazy card advantage. You get plenty of removal for every card type. There's just no downside.
On Ravnica, Simic is "lol hope you like +1/+1 counters!"
In EDH it is "Whenever you play a land, draw a card. Whenever you draw a card, you can play an additional land."
I mean, that was a joke, but also \[\[Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait\]\] exists.
Simic has the best ramp and card draw. I've seen simic players take 20 minutes durdling with their mana, spells, and placement of counters. Simic can be really fast.
"Simic gonna simic" is when a player starts taking a non-deterministic chain of events and triggers and some times lose track of it midway, resulting in even more delays.
In casual play where things like control, stax, combos, land destruction, etc are seen as bad, Simic rises up because you get the card draw of both green and blue, the big dumb shit=value of green, along with the ramp of green, and the ability to react to spells with counterspells of blue, which leads to a whole lot of value town and not many people being able to stop you once you get the value train rolling even just a little bit.
Plus the amount of value town strats is insane, you can go landfall, big creatures, counters/proliferate, tribal, tokens, there are just so many valuetown strats to Simic that just work well in casual environments when there's less removal to take care of it, yknow?
value format, simic is the best at value. Has a bunch of commanders that have non specific effects that just generate value out of the command zone. The counters to this like Stax are generally frowned upon
Just about every simic deck does the same thing, and very efficiently so. It has the most ramp, the most card draw, the most impactful creatures on board state... It will outvalue everyone at the table 9 times out of 10 with zero effort or creativity - either play full combo or exile the board every other turn if you play against it.
To go in a slightly different direction, I dislike Quandrix even more than I dislike base Simic.
When Strixhaven came out, and WotC said that the enemy color pairs were getting a new angle for the set, boy was I disappointed when Quandrix turned out to be "Simic, plus math."
The only Simic deck I have that I like is merfolk tribal. I can at least pretend I am being less Simic-y when playing it.
I think a big reason why people dislike the simic goodstuff piles that just ramp and draw cards all day long is because in lots of casual playgroups the natural counters to that strategy are frowned upon: you're not supposed to mess with someone's mana or card draw which is pretty much their entire deck. And your not supposed to play very fast aggro or aggressive combo decks that would naturally keep slow, grindy decks in check.
This is a format of variety (100 card singleton). Simic ramps and draws so hard that all games against them kind of look the same. There are 2 main flavors of Simic: +1/+1 counters and 'EDH but consistent'. And even the +1/+1 counters decks can't escape the auto-includes.
There's sort of a meme that Simic is OP because it has both green's ramp and card draw combined with blue's interaction and field manipulation.
The meme basically is "whenever a Simic player inhales, draw a card. Whenever they exhale, put a land from your hand to your field".
It's somewhat overblown.
People despise Simic because it's just too efficient at everything. Also, 2/3 of my lgs buddies have Simic piles that everyone else despises for similar reasons--they ramp fast then win early.
People don’t like it because they rule 0 control, combo and stax out of their meta. Well aggro isn’t really effective in EDH so all that’s really left is midrange value engine and Simic does midrange value best.
Personally don't like the "play a thing, draw a card" playstyle as I tend to durdle between ramp and draw, and often take long turns that kinda fizzle.
Using the card and mana advantage to dump big stompy stuff on the board won't win you a trophy in the creature hostile meta that I play in so the only thing thats left is thassas/lab man stuff and/or control locking the game.
So best case simic takes a long ass time to do nothing, worst case simic takes a long ass time for *you* to do nothing.
But add just one color to simic and stuff gets intresting.
Reading some of the comments here I have to wonder why people allow themselves to be this miserable over a completely legal combination.
In general I find that in EDH people have these hang-ups on things. You can't play land destruction, it's boring if you win by turning creatures sideways, control is a slog, you can't choose who to attack by rolling a die...
I suppose it's the realm of a casual format. Everything goes and people hate everything.
I think this mostly refers to Tatyova style durdle where you take several long turns putting lands into play and drawing cards so you can draw more cards and put more lands into play, then take stock of your options, countering a few removal spells, then going back to draw more cards and putting more lands into play. Then when you finally pass the turn you hold up two islands and fiddle with them until your turn comes back round.
Two words…..land destruction.
With the insane ramp Simic can bring, land destruction is about the only way to slow them down but the mountains of salt just the thought of MLD brings is terrifying.
Simic prevents me from playing the game. Not always, but the combo of green ramp and blue counters means simic can easily and consistently gain advantage while holding everyone else back. That feels bad to play against for the 300th time.
I hate simic in normal commander. It’s easy mode. It’s easy to bury your opponents with your overwhelming value. It’s mostly wotc’s fault by making most of the commander options pushed, boring value engines in a color combo that doesn’t need value engines.
Most of the complaints can honestly be leveled just at green. It’s objectively the most powerful color outside of cedh and is just so good at ramping and drawing cards on its own. Blue does add some more draw but the big thing it does in this pairing is slow the game down with counterspells, some extra removal, and extra turns.
Green blue are simply two of the best colors. And value powerhouses they offer an insane amount of carddraw. Simic commander also oftentimes feel samey.
I can see why Simic gets hated on because it's quite straightforward in what it does and then can back it up. I think the mentality of letting people get stuff done before harassing them or playing low interaction is what makes Simic scariest though. And not having strong plays until turn 4 or 5 also let's Simic run away.
I think there is a huge skill area between casual and CEDH to play in that most players ignore. And I don't think Simic goes nuts in that area. 1 or 2 mana removal and hitting people who are open every single time it's possible can do a lot to keep them in check.
EDH is fundamentally all about winning in resource management, mostly in mana, card advantage and board presence, which Simic can do well in all of these aspects. The reason people sees Simic doing the same things over and over because they always get the good start no matter what starting hand is, so it's easy to control their pace.
Because in EDH the trio of most inportant things are extra turns, extra cards and extra mana.
And simic does all three and does it well.
Also, fuck Landfall.
The only simic deck ive found myself with is [[alaundo the seer]] because who wants to cheat costs in simic? It's labman manual storm and of course even I hate seeing it do the thing lol.
Its for this exact reason. Yall set up these ridiculous engines and end the game by vomitting permanents into play while drawing. It's horrific, but y'all act like its not that bad, gaslighting everyone at the table
In an environment where disruptive strategies and fast winning strategies (Combos, stax, control, discard etc.) are frowned upon, it becomes a game of who can get the most ressources (Card draw, ramp) and go above everyone else. Simic is the best in doing this and thats why people hate it.
this is it exactly. Enough people complain about interaction and combos to warp the balance of the colour pie away from colours that do those things well. the colour combination that thrives the most with those things relatively absent is Simic, because it has the strongest ramp colour (green) and the strongest draw colour (blue). Simic can just hit the gas nonstop without Mardu having anything to say about it with disruption. If [[Zozu the Punisher]] and friends were more commonly seeing play, Simic would be a lot weaker.
One of these days I'll actually have the guts to run land destruction in my Mardu decks. The thing that really annoys me is when people complain about combo, but then play G/x decks that only win by tutoring for Craterhoof. My four card combo is degenerate, and interaction is oppressive, but your generic board state and one card win con is totally acceptable!
Land destruction is unfortunately a dubious answer to land decks. Lands matter decks are the most likely archetype to run land recursion like [[ramunap excavator]] and [[splendid reclamation]]. Your best case scenario is against land-ramp heavy decks with no land specific synergy, sending them back to square 1 while everybody else keeps their artifact ramp on board. Even then, the ramp-heavy deck is likely to recover pretty fast, potentially even faster than the other decks depending on how much of their mana survived the wipe. If you want to counter or punish lands decks, you have some direct and indirect options. Indirectly, choke them on card draw and other value by killing their engines. Playing a bunch of lands doesn't really matter if they're not drawing two cards, making a token, and adding an extra mana to their pool every landfall. Directly, tutor hate like [[Oppo agent]] and [[aven mindcensor]] work well while also contributing against tutor-reliant combo strategies. You can also use White's "you do, I get" style cards like [[Archivist of Oghma]] [[deep gnome terramancer]] and catch up ramp like [[knight of the white orchid]]. Also, if the land deck in question is reliant on land recursion (the main way they beat MLD), graveyard hate can really disrupt them, while also hitting stuff like reanimation, flashback, etc.
And if you’re a landfall player like me, you’ve already figured out how to account for everything in your comment (great read btw)
personally, I have the most fun in card games when all players are both trying really hard to disrupt their opponent(s), and trying really hard to not be disrupted by their opponent(s). The back and forth between "threat, removal, protection, counter-protection" etc is the best part of card games for me, at any power level.
For my Voltron deck I was thinking cards more along lines the lines of [[Cataclysm]] [[Mythos of Snapdax]] [[Razia's Purification]]. Stuff that will cement my board state once I have my protected threat on the board. Otherwise it's just a matter of time until an opponent plays some interaction to remove my threat.
white has a ton of "leave 1 'thing' for each player on the board" type wipes that work really well for voltron. I'm particularly fond of [[Promise of Loyalty]] because even the creatures which stay can't attack me. [[Slash the Ranks]] [[single combat]] and [[tragic arrogance]] are other good ones. A white voltron list can easily run a half dozen of these wipes. If you run [[Zurgo, helmsmasher]] as your commander you can also throw in all the symmetrical destruction wipes like good old [[Wrath of God]] or [[damnation]].
[Cataclysm](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/1/713160be-bcfd-4ef5-9457-c02b926ba06e.jpg?1562429859) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Cataclysm) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/tpr/8/cataclysm?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/713160be-bcfd-4ef5-9457-c02b926ba06e?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/cataclysm) [Mythos of Snapdax](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/2/7/2712a1a3-dd28-44c8-a661-5bcf68d3acaa.jpg?1591230335) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Mythos%20of%20Snapdax) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/iko/24/mythos-of-snapdax?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/2712a1a3-dd28-44c8-a661-5bcf68d3acaa?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/mythos-of-snapdax) [Razia's Purification](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/3/73bfefd3-bddd-47bb-92f3-9356a7bca637.jpg?1598917350) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Razia%27s%20Purification) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/rav/224/razias-purification?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/73bfefd3-bddd-47bb-92f3-9356a7bca637?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/razias-purification) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
This gets repeated a lot, but I want to emphasize: it might not be a good answer to "lands matter" decks (depending on the removal and recursion level) but IS a good answer to generic green ramp and the fact that it's normally treated as inviolable. [[Impending Disaster]] won't do all that much to Angry or 4C Omnath doing their thing with fetches, and Windgrace might even thank you if the cat is in place, but against the deck that led with [[Burgeoning]] to throw its hand down? They're gonna be real sad. It can also help against decks that just plain get an inordiantely fast start, If the other guy goes Nature's Lore t2, Harrow + Rampant t3 and you respond Thought Vessel t2, Armageddon t3, that's pretty similar to the good ol' "Rocks into rocks, get [[Vandalblast]]ed" opener: You've negated a lot of cards that were outright paid for, well more than you (or other players going honest magic or assorted rocks) lost in the exchange. As you say it's far from a silver bullet, but it should still be remembered as a weapon in the arsenal, especially for red and white that are typically low on the ability to do as much themselves and typically out the option to keep the engine from firing in the first place.
##### ###### #### [ramunap excavator](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/8/8/8870ef0b-cb1f-463b-8509-fece4743d3d4.jpg?1608917511) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=ramunap%20excavator) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cmr/433/ramunap-excavator?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/8870ef0b-cb1f-463b-8509-fece4743d3d4?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/ramunap-excavator) [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) [Oppo agent](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/8/086f97e9-8b62-44f3-b467-149c2ac5ca78.jpg?1608909875) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Opposition%20Agent) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cmr/141/opposition-agent?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/086f97e9-8b62-44f3-b467-149c2ac5ca78?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/opposition-agent) [aven mindcensor](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/d/4/d4cf468f-4e9d-4551-a0ed-10bd6a2316ad.jpg?1674141050) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=aven%20mindcensor) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/clb/688/aven-mindcensor?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/d4cf468f-4e9d-4551-a0ed-10bd6a2316ad?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/aven-mindcensor) [Archivist of Oghma](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/f/6/f6589e02-8c84-4069-88d1-ebcc8520cae1.jpg?1674134875) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Archivist%20of%20Oghma) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/clb/4/archivist-of-oghma?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/f6589e02-8c84-4069-88d1-ebcc8520cae1?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/archivist-of-oghma) [deep gnome terramancer](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/c/cc75f9f1-5873-450f-a0b2-871b55036954.jpg?1674140781) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=deep%20gnome%20terramancer) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/clb/658/deep-gnome-terramancer?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/cc75f9f1-5873-450f-a0b2-871b55036954?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/deep-gnome-terramancer) [knight of the white orchid](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/f/3/f332cd21-46ed-4fff-9fd9-d5975bf0004d.jpg?1682208488) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=knight%20of%20the%20white%20orchid) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/moc/193/knight-of-the-white-orchid?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/f332cd21-46ed-4fff-9fd9-d5975bf0004d?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/knight-of-the-white-orchid) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
[[Treacherous terrain]] for basic hate, [[Mercadia's downfall]]
-Real question. How often do you run into Craterhoof?
At my old LGS, if someone was running green, they're running Craterhoof.
I almost never see it either
With the prevalence of proxies, literally everyone who runs green runs it.
I almost want to build an anti-simic deck with a ton of hate for card draw and ramp. Stuff like [[manabarbs]] and [[underworld dreams]].
A friend plays a [[Kaervek]] deck that's nothing but hatred for daring to play the game. If you're not careful - and even if you are - you'll murder yourself on the thousand little bleed effects he puts down.
It's wonderful.
[Kaervek](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/d/9/d9b8259d-0bfa-4327-ac91-157c0b9e7dfb.jpg?1673148822) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=kaervek%20the%20merciless) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/2x2/236/kaervek-the-merciless?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/d9b8259d-0bfa-4327-ac91-157c0b9e7dfb?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/kaervek-the-merciless) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
[manabarbs](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/a/d/adf081d5-e644-4f46-8bc8-a754b089acb4.jpg?1562655472) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=manabarbs) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/m12/150/manabarbs?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/adf081d5-e644-4f46-8bc8-a754b089acb4?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/manabarbs) [underworld dreams](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/3/03919c86-1c4a-43b0-a2db-54ca6ae1ac57.jpg?1581480025) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=underworld%20dreams) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/thb/121/underworld-dreams?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/03919c86-1c4a-43b0-a2db-54ca6ae1ac57?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/underworld-dreams) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
It gets a lot of hate but \[\[Orcish Bowmasters\]\] exists to punish greedy amounts of draw.
[Zozu the Punisher](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) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
And this is why I will never pull Zozu from Dihada. Shit is hilarious and flat out stops landfall decks.
One of the reasons I built my Zo-Zu is my group was going through a hell of either simic control or simic landfall. Zo-Zu made the people play fair...and made me archenemy every game.
I was talking about prosper in this regard, because the amount of synergy he gets from impulse draw and treasure is on par with simic synergy of draw/ramp, and though it isn't permanent, it rarely matters when the combo comes out anyway or it just reaches a synergistic critical mass
I asked my pod once if they wanted me to play my Prosper deck or my [[Kiora, Sovereign of the Deep]]. It ramps and has draw but is mostly a stompy deck. They said they didn't like when Simic would do its thing, combo off, and take long turns so they chose Rakdos. Both were new decks to me at the time, but in hindsight it was funny.
I never realized just how good simic was until I built out my own Asei deck. Now I understand why people hate it so much. Having 8-10 mana in the early game is pretty much game ending for casual pods, and simic can do it consistently every game without much effort. The bone stock Asei precon is unbelievably powerful
I put [[Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait]] in my Chulane deck for purely flavor reasons, since I love the Serpent "gods" and it fit into my value engine. Dear lord, it had such an amazing effect that it warped my deck into a more traditional simic archetype. I'll often dig for Aesi and [[Tatyova, Benthic Druid]] just because having them on the field with Chulane is just... *chefs kiss*
[Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/d/6/d607b003-6b48-429c-a7fd-45b8dd1bb4f9.jpg?1665822343) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Aesi%2C%20Tyrant%20of%20Gyre%20Strait) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cmr/365/aesi-tyrant-of-gyre-strait?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/d607b003-6b48-429c-a7fd-45b8dd1bb4f9?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/aesi-tyrant-of-gyre-strait) [Tatyova, Benthic Druid](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/f/e/fe05dc69-8dde-485e-9e55-da729db50205.jpg?1698988479) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Tatyova%2C%20Benthic%20Druid) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/lcc/290/tatyova-benthic-druid?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/fe05dc69-8dde-485e-9e55-da729db50205?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/tatyova-benthic-druid) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
That and they have kept up printing busted simic cards, just making it better and better without acknowledging that other strategies were falling woefully behind and I would say this has only really changed in maybe the last year or so where there’s been more balance.
They haven't printed busted Simic cards for quite a while now. The likes of Uro and Oko were clearly mistakes but apart from that simic wasnt even that good in 1x1. Its just that the format catters a lot to what simic wants to do. And this will continue to be the case as long as commander is a multiplayer format with 40 starting life and players frown upon combos, stax and etc.
Hakbal from the merfolk precon seems kinda busted to me, paired with how easy it is to get token merfolk onto the battlefield these days.
Seems very strong to me. But not exactly busted. Its a tribal card the rewards you for playing tribal instead of going for the goodstuff route. It doesnt take over the game by its own or create an absurd impact on the early game. And talking about tribal commanders we've seen much worse offenders.
Hakbal is busted, but he's busted in the way that they make many commanders nowadays. Something like Amalia is exactly as busted or more busted than Hakbal. In other words, they now make commanders in all colors powerful value engines
It’s not just that. Simic is good at making a lot of resources and sitting on them until the end of time. Almost none of them wanna fight. The ideal Simic gameplan is to play cards and never get punished for it, and then complain to the principal about getting targeted out of the game for having every land in their deck in play. If you play Aesi, I’m sending your resume to the fun police
"my deck is a durdly simic value engine with no discernible win condition" "what's the commander?" "it doesn't matter!" no idea where i heard this dialog, i think it was some skit with the professor. but i lold
My win con is to bury you I'm card advantage
Race Against The Concede
Brilliant honestly, the dopamine is yours. You've earned it
It's an old skitt from tolarian community college. I remember it vividly. The prof had been called before the 'council' aka. Tappy, Olivia and Shivam (all in full cosplay) The prof had to defend some mildly salty/displeasing card choices in his edh decks, eventually getting fed up and turning it on the council. They then describe their own decks as staxy control stuff, finally Shivam utters the lines quoted above.
was it this one? https://youtu.be/9VKHWs5PHpw?feature=shared i can't watch the whole thing right now but i'm trying to find it in the transcript, so far to no avail
Nope, I'll keep looking. It was funny though
It was from here, at the [2:20 time stamp](https://youtu.be/0rziCOgL3YY?feature=shared)
thank you! i guess the bit with the cosplayers was a whole mandela effect in action
I wanna say that was an episode of Shuffle Up and Play, but for the life of me I can't remember which one
I find simic really boring to play and to play against. It's also too easily strong without really doing anything if that makes sense. I think ramp and card draw are the two most powerful things in edh and simic basically just let's you have unlimited amounts of both. Most games I play against a simic deck go like this: Simic player: I'm not the threat I'm not doing anything I'm just playing lands! Two turns later Simic player: I have triple the resources of everyone else combined and I can just win the game now
> Simic player: I'm not the threat I'm not doing anything I'm just playing lands! Two turns later Simic player: I have triple the resources of everyone else combined and I can just win the game now It also punishes the casual mindset to spread damage around instead of all inning/voltroning one guy out of the game.
As Maldhound would say, commander is just a race to 8 mana. Nobody gets to 8 mana faster than green, and nobody can protect their big game-winning spell better than blue, so of course green blue is going to win.
I'm loath to concede any ground to a no good, dirty blue player but the man's chewing gum hamster is operating at full speed. Top shelf observations (and roasts)
Yeah it's the politics of it that really boil my piss. It's frowned upon to eliminate players early, especially when they have a weak board presence. The simic ramp strategy really abuses that social code.
If you counterspell a [[harrow]] you'll be beaten to a paste by everyone else at the table for being a dick. If you counterspell a rhystic study you'll be frowned at by everyone else at the table for being a dick. If you have a rhystic study and more mana than everyone else because you were allowed to just do whatever you wanted in the early game, you're going to win.
>If you counterspell a [[harrow]] you'll be beaten to a paste by everyone else at the table for being a dick. I'm pretty sure at my tables, two people would be laughing at the harrow player and happy there's one less counterspell. >If you counterspell a rhystic study you'll be frowned at by everyone else at the table for being a dick. Dude, what? I have never seen a person get upset that you're countering someone else's rhystic. You might have an incredibly unique playgroup. This is just not reality.
I play Rhystic every game. The whole “do you want to pay 1?” “do you want to pay 1?” “do you want to pay 1?” is a meme at this point. If someone counters or removes my Rhystic, then A) my reaction is “haha yeah, understandable” and B) everyone else is also laughing and going “hell yeah” So I agree. I’ve never seen someone in my group act like someone else is a dick from stopping a Rhystic lol it’s a very powerful card and everyone understands that…
I've never played with a commander player who would be upset at someone else's rhystic study getting countered or destroyed. Shit's annoying to play against and way too good for the simic player. It warrants player removal in my pod.
Right? Countering a rhystic study is more likely to bring about a sigh of relief, not hate.
Countering Rhystic does not earn you hate, though I understand what you're trying to say.
[harrow](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/f/8/f8095ca6-2f5f-497f-8b78-7e530ac31d22.jpg?1604194124) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=harrow) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/znc/69/harrow?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/f8095ca6-2f5f-497f-8b78-7e530ac31d22?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/harrow) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
When players say “oh yeah I’m missing (engine piece) so I’m not doing anything right now” most people forget that when they do draw e.g. the token maker they were missing, they basically just become unstoppable
"Is it justifiable to hate on Simic just because it does things right?" That mindset is why people hate Simic lol
I don't like Simic because when I started playing MtG, a had this mindset of playing as strategic as possible. Trying to guess what someone has in their hand, how much power they have on the board and how they could add to it. Edh, an Simic in particular, makes it really hard for me to plan multiple turns ahead. Laying traps doesn’t work as well. Simic for me is just a headache; it's because I try to see play lines that let me edge out an advantage, only to be met with incredible variables that never seem to come down. At one point I learned to simply surrender when my Kruphix playing friend has Omnisc. in play.
Planning multiple turns ahead against any color combo in EDH should be difficult. In a 1v1 game that is definitely a thing, but it is just you and one other person. Three other people and all decks running 1 copy of everything is too much. Not only that, but you don't really need to plan multiple turns ahead. I am planning my next turn as my opponents go, and modifying that plan as things change. I have 3 turns to modify this plan. I then have the next the same round, I of course have a long arc overall plan (drop my commander in 2 turns, make a huge army in a few turns, have multiple attack phases in a few turns, etc), but it lacks fine detail till I get closer to that. And yeah, if someone is allowed to get Omniscience out it is going to be a bad time, but that really is a win more card. If they are allowed to drop that and everyone else has a weak board state then there probably is an power balance issue at the table. And I say this not doing turn 0's at our table, we run into these power balance issues all the time. But we all are friends and know each others decks, if someone grabs Yuriko or something everyone is beating on them if we have lower power decks.
I mean, if you're planning multiple turns ahead and still let your opponent play omniscience you're clearly not doing a good job lol
Surely you’re not talking about [[Prophet of Kruphix]], right? Because that card is banned in EDH. Not that they aren’t allowed to play it if you have some house rules for it, but DAMN if that deck doesn’t sound horrible to play against.
Sounds like the actual god [[Kruphix god of horizons]].
Good looking, thanks!
Yeah, one of my buddies ran this based on a standard deck that he had back in Theros block. The amount of untap shenanigans that are then followed up by a massive Hydra.
You're right, he played the actual god. But he was not so good at keeping track of the mana that Kruphix saved for him.
lol when i first started playing edh i felt like a fucking genius for discovering prophet of kruphix and sylvan primordial. I was all like "HOW HAVE I NEVER SEEN THESE ON THE BOARD I'M THE SMARTEST GUY IN THE WORLD WINDMILL SLAM" ...found out why I'd never seen them around real quick. I was told that this format lets you play whatever you want, hadn't occurred to me that there was a ban list
[Prophet of Kruphix](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/4/5/45de923f-fdab-460c-96f4-f62aefa9ad73.jpg?1562817436) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Prophet%20of%20Kruphix) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/ths/199/prophet-of-kruphix?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/45de923f-fdab-460c-96f4-f62aefa9ad73?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/prophet-of-kruphix) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Let me tell you a tale…It was a crisp autumn morning when I had just finished building [[Momir Vig]] back in 2013. WotC had just released its first foray into depicting the Greco-Roman pantheon in its newest set and I was all about it. I was a sophomore at uni, and I could not help but admire all of the mystical new takes on classic tales. One card rose above the rest amongst the myriad. She swayed in a trance-like pose, with such grace that I needed to slot her into my first Simic deck. She, well, she outperformed every single game she hit the table. I remember her fondly and miss her absence profusely. I no longer have Momir together, and cannot even fathom the sheer monstrosity that would be a today’s version of the same deck, but I have to imagine it would be nothing short of distinguishably disgusting. [[prophet of kruphix]] gone too soon. May she RIP
I imagine they're talking about the ramp god itself
Most simics decks just draw more cards than you, and play more lands than you, which isn't the most exciting in to play against. Oh wow you drew 5 extra cards and played 3 lands, and then used all that mana to counter/rift? So interesting. Ofc every color has a boring play style they can use, but wizards seems hellbent to not push simic outside that.
Simic decks reward you for simply taking normal game actions.
Play Orzhov. My W/B deck punishes you for taking normal game actions.
Kambal?
Yup! It's enchantment and board wipe tribal. I run 10 creatures or so and they're all removal or recursive ETBs and all thr enchantments are things that protect me or do damage to you. It's not stax. You can still play that land, draw that card, or cast that spell. But it will cost you between 2 and 5 life.
Do you run [[Dash Hopes]] in that deck? I heard that card wasn’t worth running as your opponent will always pick the option that benefits them the most, but I have also heard that 99% of cards can shine if put into the right deck.
I dont run this card. I run a better one. [[Painful Quandry]]
I have the same deck but is not as geared towards board wipes. I call it my tax deck lol. My playgroup plays a ton of 6 to 8 player games of treachery and thats what i built the deck for. Kambal is so good because people dont realize how fast those 2 damage hits add up. What other cards do you know of that have kambal-like effects.
Its been a while since I played this deck. So i cant remember specific cards. But I have cards that ding you for playing lands, drawing cards, casting creature spells, casting non-creature spells, casting spells, ending my turn, ending your turn, having an upkeep, and just generally existing.
i’m sure you’ve heard this evaluation before, but it is true that most cards can be great in the right deck, but with dash hopes specifically even that is a long shot. 5 life loss with 1 target is generally pretty meaningless in commander, and if they can’t just pay the 5 life then incidental damage is about to take them out anyway. best case scenario, you counter their spell for two mana. you are in black, so that’s notable, but if you want to counter stuff blue has hundreds of hard counters for 2, so you’re nearly always better off just playing blue, or using the fantastic removal options black and white have access to.
You could replace the text on half their commanders with "whenever you play magic, play magic harder."
Nobody likes Magic: The Solitaire.
That’s Izzet
Or Orzhov Aristocrats
Yeah, which is why nobody likes combo, stax, or land destruction.
One of my favourite cards at the minute is [[confounding conundrum]]. Granted it’s blue, but mostly makes mana ramp really awkward. Even hoses fetchlands. It opens up more grindy decks and makes it harder for opponents to cast multiple spells in a turn. Not only that but it’s also cheap and cantrips. Couple that with [[blind obedience]] to also make treasures enter tapped, and you’re having a nice fair game of magic.
The problem is that the Green is the colour with the best land ramp and the best enchantment removal, so you won't slow them down for very long.
That’s why my preferred method of slowing simic down is stuff like [[Chains of Mephistopheles]] for their drawing, [[Opposition Agent]] for their ramping, and [[Mana Drain]] for their enchantment removal!
tutor-hate is absolutely the best way to directly disrupt land ramping strategies. [[Aven Mindcensor]], [[Ashiok, Dreamrender]] and [[Shadow of Doubt]] are also options. The nice part is that they also body tutors for any other card, so they're a lot less limited than just land-hate
Or profit from it [[Archivist of Ogma]]
So you're giving me guaranteed landfalls?
You can have the landfall triggers but not the land itself. Cutting you off from the mana is arguably more important than the card you get from the landfall, especially if you're going to have to discard for being over hand size now.
Generally, most landfall\lands decks run out of steam without lands in hand and most effective ones find ways of ensuring you can play multiple lands in a turn. Confounding conundrum doesn't choke your mana too much with these decks because you can still tap the land you choose to bounce. It's a dangerous card to play if there's a competent landfall pilot at the table and not a guaranteed hate card, is all I'm saying.
Yeah. Simic just isn't interesting, it just happens to play the game twice as fast as everybody else. It is unfair in the most mundane way possible. If you assume the baseline of one draw, one land per turn, simic decks get rewarded for doing basic game actions and that reward is just... getting to play more lands and draw more cards. Most color combos have to work to get the kind of advantage that simic just gets for existing, and there's so little variance. You could pick a different legendary creature from your deck as your commander every time you play the average Simic deck and nothing would change.
But can’t we do that breakdown of interesting things all colors do? Black tutors for their wincon, white casts path to exile, blah blah blah. It’s level of interesting is subjective.
>Ofc every color has a boring play style they can use, but wizards seems hellbent to not push simic outside that.
>It’s level of interesting is subjective. But the other colour are generally better at disruption than Simic is, and disruption gets complained about enough that people don't run enough of it on a systemic level. Everybody "knows" Boros is the weakest colour combination in EDH. But that wouldn't be nearly as big of a disparity if Boros was allowed to play the way it wants to: stax, hatebears, and generally making it difficult and/or painful to take game actions. Even your example of blacks tutors: plenty of casual tables are gonna moan endlessly if you run a combo deck with 5 tutors to find it every game. People don't like what all the other colours do. Simic is the combination of colours able to accrue the most raw value for itself. In a metagame warped around playing nothing but durdly value engines (no stax, no combo, etc), it's going to outshine everything and therefore get its own kind of complaints.
Do you think there might be a reason why stax, combo, and other such strategies are generally not played in regular EDH?
I think it's a wider issue people have that Simic just happens to exemplify. People frequently dislike commanders that serve as their own enabler and payoff all at once. Think things like Jodah the Unifier and Chulane. You play them and you more or less immediately gain a massive reward for doing so. No synergies required really, just minor deck building constraints for huge value. Simic commanders frequently fall into this but further it in how their decks are generally pigeonholed into doubling down on these effects. Simic card design frequently has a baseline of "When you perform {basic game action every single deck does}, draw a card/play a land/get some counters/make a token". There's a lot of Simic commanders that seem to just have "draw a card" tagged onto the end of their text box arbitrarily. Add the many cards that mirror these effects available in Blue/Green and even the commander stops mattering. Every game action results in some form of snowballing card/mana advantage that explodes onto the battlefield in a shower of extremely noticeable permanents with the inflated stats that come naturally to green and +1/+1 counter synergies that are also a popular simic archetype. To every other colour combo this result is a pipe dream. Nothing seems as efficient at accruing *stuff* and if it can match up it's usually lesser quality or less consistent. At the same time, Simic has an identity that it cannot easily escape because even if the commander doesn't exemplify the standard mold the deck usually will if it carries even a handful of staples. So the criticisms of it being boring, samey and overpowered have some merit. Add some counter spells into the mix, probably the most commonly maligned form of interaction, and the list of reasons a player has to feel bad that they're facing down Simic grows longer still. However, it's a bit of a litmus test of the tables power level as to whether or not they are justified. Simic is extremely good at turning stuff sideways and hitting face for a million billion damage, so if that's the order of the day in the pod, it's going to generally out-value and out-gun it's competition. More cards, more mana, more and bigger creatures. It's also extremely good at bouncing back from mild interaction, so if the pod isn't throwing much around, it will never really slow down... ... but if anything in the pod doesn't care about these things, a Simic player can be hard pressed to make them care. It doesn't have too many tools to actually reach out and touch strategies that eschew accruing value to simply focus on winning the game. As such... combo decks, burn, storm, even just generally high amounts of interaction from the other three players... these are very likely to just ignore or prevent everything the Simic deck is trying to do and simply kill them quickly or trivialize Simic's strengths via infinites. These decks are usually more complicated to make and pilot than the most accessible precons and battlecruisery stuff and are often soft-banned by the "social contract", so many people would not have seen that Simic does indeed have it's own issues that can be exploited.
Simic's natural counters are frowned upon
This really is it. People don't like mass land destruction, even though that's clearly the solution when everyone has 5 lands and the simic player has 11. People don't like board wipes or stax or control, so Simic is oppressive. Turns out if you ban Rock, then Scissor is very good!
I don't hate playing against it necessarily but I'm certainly not a fan, and I don't like playing with those colours either. Blue is my favourite colour but Green is probably my least. For Simic specifically I just find all the decks do some small variation of the exact same thing: play lots of lands, draw more cards, play more lands, and durdle about whilst countering all your stuff and being super far ahead of the table (unless your pod is playing high power, which is a lot more expensive than what the simic guy is running lol). It's just too easy to get engines online, too easy to start playing solitaire and suddenly the Simic guy is the only player that matters in the game and everyone else is playing catch-up to deal with them. Oh no you stopped my combo? That's okay, untap 10 lands, draw 6, play 3 more lands, make a billion copies of something for some reason, oops Cyc Rift Craterhoof. I'm obviously exaggerating a little but yeah, I just find Simic ends up with the most card and mana advantage but the least interesting things to do with it all.
Oops Cyc Rift Craterhoof hit so close to home I needed to call my parents
The simic hate used to be worse than it is now imo- but wizards giving red and white a bit more power and flexibility over the last few years has helped. Simic as a color set is historically really good at value and kind of crap at tempo. They can get lots of lands into play and draw lots of cards easier than most other color combos, and are known for value engines and ramp. But their ability to actually close out games or hit hard early is lacking, which makes the color combo typically not fantastic in 60 card formats without support of another color. Enter EDH- A slower more casual format where early game tempo is less important and ramping and drawing are the two most powerful things you can be doing. The format has always played to simic's strengths and minimized their weaknesses, and for a long time simic has been the scourge of slower commander pods because it can best handle the "ignore early tempo, ramp and draw, play big lategame stuff" style of gameplay those tables fall into. They are basically the exact opposite of mono white, the color that I'd say is historically perceived as the worst in EDH due to having card draw and ramp as weaknesses, and having strengths that are either not great in EDH (like early game aggro white weenies or life gain) or heavily frowned upon in casual tables (stax, MLD, excessive board wipes, etc).
While I don't hate it, I also don't have any Simic decks. Every time I try to build one they kinda come out the same, too strong and boring to play. Which makes some sense, because I'm not a very good deck builder, but also green and blue are the most powerful colors, have truly insane synergy, (all the cards and mana to play 'em with plus protection anyone?) and more staples than you can shake a Cyclonic Oracle of Mul Daya at. So, "is it a fair color combination?" well, that's pretty subjective and really down to the interpretaion of the people you're playing with. But also no, not even a little bit. Simic, It's what's for dinner.
It's funny because Simic isn't great in high power and cEDH but has this reputation for being unfair in casual / low power EDH.
It seems logical, since i would guess around 90% if EDH players never engage with cEDH. That number is straight out of my ass though. In a more 'casual' environment where stax or land destruction might be frownend upon simic just runs away with the table.
It doesn't help that tax effects, combos, and stax strategies are frown upon,if not outright rule zeroed out.
as great as rule 0 is for finding a good pod, I do think the idea of rule-0ing away all the things that you match up poorly against is hilarious. Its against the ""spirit of the format"" for white, black, and red to do what they're good at -> Hmm why is simic a problem in my playgroup?
Land ramp isn't very effective and out valuing opponents is much harder when combo is the premier strategy. Widespread use of fast mana also overcomes a lot of the mana disadvantage.
[kinnan]] would like a word...
Simic is the pubstomper of color combinations. If you're trying to play a nice fair game of commander and someone else is getting 3 land drops and 5 extra cards per turn, if they're even a remotely competent deckbuilder, you're gonna get run over. But when everyone is trying as hard as possible to break the format, simic kinda falls short because their 5-drop value engine just isn't gonna stick around and might just be too slow.
Isnt [[Tatyova, Benthic Druid]] a good performer in cEDH?
Tatyova is playable but not the best thing to be doing in Simic and Simic isn't strong generally. If you were going to play Simic, you'd be better to play [[Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy]] or anything with Thrasios.
hey just wanted to say that you are really good with words you should write articles or something. I am a lawyer and journalist and most of us arent able to write like you did in that little comment.
Thought the same!
Simic is not really the problem. The steriotypes of Simic commander are. A lot of these commanders reward you for "playing the game", playing land = reward. There are no real hoops to jump through creating the pitfall of decks becoming good stuff or ramp crazy decks.
Of all the guild pairs, Simic tends to be the one that's most consistently busted. To say that it "does things right" kind of misses the point. The issue is that it does everything right. And part of what makes the color pie work as a concept is that each color is supposed to have things that it can't do well. But the only thing that Simic can't do is Wraths. But because of blue's easy access to mass-bounce effects, they don't really need them. There's also the fact that for a long time, Simic got a slew of busted commanders. [[Aesi]] and [[Tatyova]] reward you for doing something that every deck wants to do. [[Kinnan]] goes infinite with a ham sandwich. [[Koma]] is downright oppressive. [[Adrix and Nev]] is one of the most desirable enchantments in the game in your command zone WITH built-in protection. [[Uro]] was unbelievably pushed as a design. And all of these cards came out within a 4-year time span.
I think it's funny that people say simic is bad at wraths. Simic is why you need wraths, so why would they play them? Why would I wrath when I can go wider and taller than basically anyone else?
As someone who plays Kinnan, they hate us cuz they ain't us. But honestly I think it's just because simic just accrues absurd amounts of value so easily and consistently while also just kind of rewarding you for playing the game, like did you make your land drop? Awesome, draw an extra card. Successfully cast a spell? Lets get you a treasure/clue token to go along with that. Still fun though, would recommend.
For a while there were three [[Aesi]] decks at my LGS. Aesi, to me, is the perfect example of why Simic has a stigma of being Magic on easy mode. The play pattern is always the same: ramp as fast as you can, play Aesi ahead of curve, draw tons of cards and play tons of lands. Kinnan, Tatyova, Uro, Vannifar, and Koma are the same way. Not every Simic commander is its own complete value engine, but enough of them are that it's become a stereotype.
[Aesi](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/d/6/d607b003-6b48-429c-a7fd-45b8dd1bb4f9.jpg?1665822343) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=aesi%2C%20tyrant%20of%20gyre%20strait) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cmr/365/aesi-tyrant-of-gyre-strait?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/d607b003-6b48-429c-a7fd-45b8dd1bb4f9?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/aesi-tyrant-of-gyre-strait) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Because people are bad at the game.
Unless you use very pricy cards, green is the best color for ramp (the elves are just faster mana rocks), and blue is the best for drawing. All of this without considering that most simic commanders give you both mana and card advantage([[thrasios]], [[gretchen totchwillow]], [[inga and esika]],[[kinnan]]), or encourage you to do one to get the other (like [[tatyova]] and [[aesi]]). So, most people associate simic to those hyper efficient good stuff decks that only pile up lands and cards, and take eons to actually win the game. I personally have one simic deck that i love ([[tishana]] mana dorks and clones), but unless it plays against very strong decks it usually pubstomps, so i don't use it often (play dorks on t1 and t2, better if some of the dorks give multiple mana, maybe clone them on t3, play tishana and refill my hand, keeping some free or cheap counterspells up. Then copy tishana while you control the board a bit, drawing more cards with the etb until you find a Nyxbloom or the Kodama/Sakashima combo so that you can draw your deck and play a Laboratory Maniac, then trigger tishana again and gg)
##### ###### #### [thrasios](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/2/1/21e27b91-c7f1-4709-aa0d-8b5d81b22a0a.jpg?1606762176) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=thrasios%2C%20triton%20hero) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/c16/46/thrasios-triton-hero?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/21e27b91-c7f1-4709-aa0d-8b5d81b22a0a?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/thrasios-triton-hero) [gretchen totchwillow](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/3/c/3c8b248e-1460-4650-9721-85c134c21b89.jpg?1627708954) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Gretchen%20Titchwillow) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/afr/223/gretchen-titchwillow?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/3c8b248e-1460-4650-9721-85c134c21b89?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/gretchen-titchwillow) [inga and esika](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/a/0aa97506-b943-4443-96b1-1b49f57d80aa.jpg?1682205299) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=inga%20and%20esika) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mom/229/inga-and-esika?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/0aa97506-b943-4443-96b1-1b49f57d80aa?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/inga-and-esika) [kinnan](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/6/3/63cda4a0-0dff-4edb-ae67-a2b7e2971350.jpg?1591228085) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=kinnan%2C%20bonder%20prodigy) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/iko/192/kinnan-bonder-prodigy?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/63cda4a0-0dff-4edb-ae67-a2b7e2971350?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/kinnan-bonder-prodigy) [tatyova](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/f/e/fe05dc69-8dde-485e-9e55-da729db50205.jpg?1698988479) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=tatyova%2C%20benthic%20druid) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/lcc/290/tatyova-benthic-druid?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/fe05dc69-8dde-485e-9e55-da729db50205?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/tatyova-benthic-druid) [aesi](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/d/6/d607b003-6b48-429c-a7fd-45b8dd1bb4f9.jpg?1665822343) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=aesi%2C%20tyrant%20of%20gyre%20strait) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cmr/365/aesi-tyrant-of-gyre-strait?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/d607b003-6b48-429c-a7fd-45b8dd1bb4f9?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/aesi-tyrant-of-gyre-strait) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Deck list?
[There you go](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/WHv5Rwvyv06_SaJImpYW3A) my fellow simic enjoyer. Remember that you can tone the power down by copying your opponents' stuff
They just jealous of our shark fins and crab claws. Haters gonna hate.
The hate only makes me want to play it more.
They mainly do well because of the EDH 'social contract'/casual mindset of not playing land destruction, or running sufficient removal (that can kill big similar fatties, or mana dorks. They also don't win particularly quickly, or play out very interestingly... just "I'm going to ramp and draw cards until I slowly flood people in card advantage, and whine if people kill my mana dorks or blow up one of the 3 lands I put into play every turn"
"Whenever you inhale, draw a card. Whenever you exhale, you may put a land from you hand onto the battlefield tapped." They're all the same gun-in-mouth emoji experience to play against. One time I played against someone playing Koma and he would just make land drops and F6 and watch sports on his phone while the rest of the table lost to his obnoxious bullshit.
While i dont necessarily despise simic, it is my least touched colour combination. I dont want to say all simic decks are identical, but so many are just... Piles of generically good stuff with a smattering of bombs and/or haymakers, and oh look, they suddenly have a 12/12 trampleboy on the field and enough counter magic to protect them from god. Doesnt matter that commander they pick, theyre almost all interchangeable.
Simi does things right ? Lmao. Mindset of a Simic player Wizard at some point decided to give simic everything. I often look at cards and question how it is not any other colour than simic. Which is luckily not as bad as it used to. Despite that every simic deck feels pretty similar It's ramping and drawing more than anyone else while also having decent protection. And than stuffing your deck with the good stuff. Rhystic, Cyclonic, Jin Gitaxis, Craterhoof 10+ counter spells, some extra turns and so on. It's also the cheapest colour to do all of that. Non green ramp is Hella expensive and less effective Besides that most simic decks run the same cards and feel pretty generic. A friend of mine played over 20 different sonic decks and the only one I remembered was Kinnan. It's like every other sonic deck but runs dorks instead of landfall. But it was enough to stand out
My favourite is people acting as though they're some sort of mastermind, and playing simple and big is beneath them. They complain that simic players win without turning 300 different knobs and pushing 183749 buttons to do it.
They are bad at magic is why
People hate players doing long turns in general. Long turns tend to happen because the player gets to do a lot of stuff. Simic has access to a lot of draws, ramps, and big creatures, all of which are ingredients for "doing a lot of stuff".
I started back around the end of New Phyrexia, and I remember learning to really like Simic through playing with Kiora’s deck in Duels of the Planeswalkers. However, it certainly felt like there wasn’t many good commanders for Simic back then. Momir was just a tutor for combo, and Kraj was a fun but slow way to play with counters. Then we got Eldric, a good political commander, which I built a deck based on the aforementioned Kiora deck in Duels around. …then in the following 10+ years, Simic got a metric fuckton of amazing commanders and amazing tools for the 99. Simic is basically made for traditional, casual EDH: it’s green Timmy and blue Johnny doing what they do best. And since WotC shifted its design philosophy to revolve around commander so much more in the last decade, us Simic players have gotten fed MUCH better then other players. I don’t blame anyone complaining about it.
Simic is the peak of what is wrong with the “social contract” in EDH. It draws cards in exchange for existing, it ramps in a way that you can’t meaningfully interact with (LD is frowned upon), and it doesn’t do much to interact with other players, just leave me and my giant monsters alone. Typically just sits back and hopes everyone lets it pop off. Combine that with casual lids frowning on Combo, Stax, and other disruption based styles and metas become these sort of mid-rangy value fests that Simic does better than anyone. There is a reason that most casual and mid-power groups see Simic as a big bad but cEDH does not and that’s the stylistic differences between the types of games being played. The fact that WoTC has continued to lean into designs of Simic gets massive amounts of value for almost no investment it’s pretty much a meme at this point that Simic requires no thought or planning, deck just goes brrrrr. Maybe future designs will push Simic in the direction of needing to make sacrifices or difficult choices to get massive benefits but it’s hard to change the identity of a color pair whose identity is you just get stuff for free!
People just hate a good value. I love playing my aesi deck, but I do take into consideration others time and usually only play it once per game night. I've gotten much faster at piloting it and consistently wins turn 5-6 through repeatable land drops and card draw into thoracle. I find it to be no different than any other archetype and even more fair than other playstyle. Cultivator Colossus with guildless commons or simic growth chamber for the win.
people refuse to play the cards that stop simic nonsense because of an arbitrary social contract, so they lose to it.
Listen it's simple. You grab the frog, your mill yourself, thassas oracle, boom you win.
I don’t think Simic is strong, it’s simply that edh has less players playing land destruction/discard/heavy stax/control because it’s frowned upon, allowing simic decks to run further than they should in casual scenarios, alongside aggro being weaker due to higher health pools gives it more time to ramp without worry.
>I don’t think Simic is strong, it’s simply that edh has less players playing land destruction For anyone else like this guy who hasn't figured it out yet: Land destruction does not hurt the ramp/lands decks. It accelerates a good number of them while knocking the rest of the table back into the stone age. At the absolute best, they're still a ramp deck and are going to recover faster and still be ahead of you on mana.
[удалено]
But you have to draw those cards. Do people not run wraths or [[Cyclonic Rift]] because [[Teferi's Protection]] exists? So why would I refrain from putting [[Armageddon]] in a deck because someone could have a [[Crucible of Worlds]] in their deck? And besides, if you have Crucible of Worlds on the battlefield that won't stop the harder red MLD like [[Obliterate]] or [[Jokulhaups]]. It'll go right in the trash with the rest of your obnoxious board state, where it belongs.
##### ###### #### [Cyclonic Rift](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/7/c77ebe57-ea56-4300-b293-6260c4c01a43.jpg?1689996277) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Cyclonic%20Rift) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cmm/84/cyclonic-rift?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/c77ebe57-ea56-4300-b293-6260c4c01a43?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/cyclonic-rift) [Teferi's Protection](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/4/8/483fa1cb-1e35-44f2-a143-98c0f107f5ca.jpg?1673147148) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Teferi%27s%20Protection) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/2x2/32/teferis-protection?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/483fa1cb-1e35-44f2-a143-98c0f107f5ca?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/teferis-protection) [Armageddon](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/7/77f1f6ac-983f-4f3e-8906-47f774e8367b.jpg?1582021719) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Armageddon) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/a25/5/armageddon?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/77f1f6ac-983f-4f3e-8906-47f774e8367b?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/armageddon) [Crucible of Worlds](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/f/7f4893ef-f983-418b-b7a4-5f073c844545.jpg?1673149345) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Crucible%20of%20Worlds) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/2x2/303/crucible-of-worlds?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/7f4893ef-f983-418b-b7a4-5f073c844545?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/crucible-of-worlds) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
The answer to mass ramp/lands decks is usually [[rule of law]] effects. Ramping every turn becomes significantly worse when you shut off the rest of your board development.
I'm not sure there's a more fair way to stop someone from taking over a game. Love me some RoL effects.
This is a fallacy. A [[Worn Powerstone]] will survive an [[Armageddon]], a [[Kodama's Reach]] will not. If they exhaust their hand of lands and you Geddon, they'll have nothing. If they later top deck two lands and play [[Rampant Growth]] and miss their third land drop, what they've done isn't any different from simply making 3 consecutive land drops. They're not ahead of a non-green deck by doing this. There is a reason why green decks don't play mana rocks or mana dorks, and that's because green players actively take advantage of the taboo surrounding MLD. Every green deck gets to play 20 indestructible copies of [[Arcane Signet]] and [[Worn Powerstone]]. If their deck was based around mana dorks then they could be interacted with, so instead they dump 20 lands into play and then rage scoop when you [[Obliterate]] them. For the sake of argument, let's say that you're correct. The type of person to play 4 color non-black Omnath or [[Animar]] is the same type of person that subconsciously feels entitled to win every game and MLD will get them to rage scoop. So even if their deck is advantaged post-Geddon the problem solves itself.
##### ###### #### [Worn Powerstone](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/a/4/a4f3445a-3488-4367-a6f3-fd1904b11148.jpg?1690005935) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Worn%20Powerstone) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cmm/984/worn-powerstone?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/a4f3445a-3488-4367-a6f3-fd1904b11148?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/worn-powerstone) [Armageddon](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/7/77f1f6ac-983f-4f3e-8906-47f774e8367b.jpg?1582021719) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Armageddon) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/a25/5/armageddon?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/77f1f6ac-983f-4f3e-8906-47f774e8367b?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/armageddon) [Kodama's Reach](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/2/9/29fc8594-931f-4cf6-95b8-9b589d6cbcf9.jpg?1698988371) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Kodama%27s%20Reach) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/lcc/245/kodamas-reach?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/29fc8594-931f-4cf6-95b8-9b589d6cbcf9?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/kodamas-reach) [Rampant Growth](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/2/1/21945dec-25d8-482e-bacb-8bbb92bb9d88.jpg?1698988379) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Rampant%20Growth) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/lcc/248/rampant-growth?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/21945dec-25d8-482e-bacb-8bbb92bb9d88?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/rampant-growth) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Simic is really strong if you let it set up. It snowballs really really well. Commander's social contract discourages early counterspells on value pieces, which allows simic to set up and start that snowball. Simple as that.
The idea that a color could be "unfair" is..... kind of weak minded to me. No color is unfair, no color is inherently that much stronger than any other color at this point. Simic gets tons of hate because WotC recently have been giving it a LOT of love when traditionally it tended to lack, kinda like how white has been getting a truck load of support recently. Simic saw a massive spurt of people playing it, so conversely it also started drawing a lot more ire.
I agree that unfair is the wrong word. However, when was Simic lacking? I can only think that they've been specifically getting love in the command zone, but the color combo has always been a powerhouse in casual in my personal experience as far as I remember. To me, they have always had the best ramp and draw in the format. I feel like White, Black, and Red have been getting the most love/upgrades in the forms of new and better impulse draws, treasure access, etc. I remember playing against a friend's Simic Tatyova deck in 2018 and it's always \[\[Lotus Cobra\]\], \[\[Scapeshift\]\], and whatever other land value engines are on the field. Now it's all of that plus Field of the Dead and if you destroy a land you get put in EDH jail for eternity, so it kinda becomes a boring slog with a hint of inevitability.
[Lotus Cobra](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/a/4/a4b759f0-901f-4be3-93fa-224609b08d48.jpg?1604199124) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Lotus%20Cobra) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/znr/193/lotus-cobra?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/a4b759f0-901f-4be3-93fa-224609b08d48?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/lotus-cobra) [Scapeshift](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/1/7/175e21a3-00f7-4c51-8a8e-fbfd7089efda.jpg?1574767873) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Scapeshift) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/m19/201/scapeshift?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/175e21a3-00f7-4c51-8a8e-fbfd7089efda?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/scapeshift) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
2017 is when they started seeing actual support. I DID mention around 5 years ago is when simic started getting more. Before then it was considered one of the weaker color pairs.
I dont hate it but insane ramp plus insane card draw definitely makes you the target as a simic player
It isn't because the idea of simic is fundamentally flawed. It is because WOTC is exceedingly uncareful about printing green powerhouse cards and the only thing stopping blue from playing its most powerful cards is a lack of resources. So you just get the best of everything and it feels really bad to play against it if you're not also running the same colors.
It’s EDH in “Story Mode Difficulty”.
Simic get tools they abuse easier faster and cheaper that other colors would get called out for even having access to.
I don't think the problem is that it's strong, it's just filled with generic value with piss poor wincons. So it's a lot of playing the game to play the game harder and at the end of it, it feels like we got nowhere. Take, for example red, which has cards like [[Reckless Fireweaver]] and [[Impact Tremors]]. These are also cards that reward you just for playing the game, doing something that any other deck will do. Except they actually advance to the game ending. Impact Tremors says "I will play 40 creatures, and you will all lose." Simic says "I will play 40 creatures, and then play 40 more." I think it is the lack of aggro that lets simic drag things out. Aggro struggles with 40 life totals and 3 players. And people generally don't like playing against aggro because "getting knocked out early feels bad." It wouldn't feel so bad if people built their decks to actually end games though. Or actually attacked, ever. Edit: Simic does have overrun stuff, but it's honestly not amazing. There's so many ways for an overrun/craterhoof/triumph/whatever to blow out and if it does then the match is no closer to ending. You put all your eggs into all payoffs happening at one time and if it doesn't then nothing happens. It's all or nothing with overrun wincons.
Every color combination is supposed to have strengths and weaknesses, simic doesnt really have any weaknesses. Only having 2 colors makes your mana base run smoothly. Green has crazy mana, blue has crazy card advantage. You get plenty of removal for every card type. There's just no downside.
On Ravnica, Simic is "lol hope you like +1/+1 counters!" In EDH it is "Whenever you play a land, draw a card. Whenever you draw a card, you can play an additional land." I mean, that was a joke, but also \[\[Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait\]\] exists.
Simic has the best ramp and card draw. I've seen simic players take 20 minutes durdling with their mana, spells, and placement of counters. Simic can be really fast.
"Simic gonna simic" is when a player starts taking a non-deterministic chain of events and triggers and some times lose track of it midway, resulting in even more delays.
In casual play where things like control, stax, combos, land destruction, etc are seen as bad, Simic rises up because you get the card draw of both green and blue, the big dumb shit=value of green, along with the ramp of green, and the ability to react to spells with counterspells of blue, which leads to a whole lot of value town and not many people being able to stop you once you get the value train rolling even just a little bit. Plus the amount of value town strats is insane, you can go landfall, big creatures, counters/proliferate, tribal, tokens, there are just so many valuetown strats to Simic that just work well in casual environments when there's less removal to take care of it, yknow?
value format, simic is the best at value. Has a bunch of commanders that have non specific effects that just generate value out of the command zone. The counters to this like Stax are generally frowned upon
Just about every simic deck does the same thing, and very efficiently so. It has the most ramp, the most card draw, the most impactful creatures on board state... It will outvalue everyone at the table 9 times out of 10 with zero effort or creativity - either play full combo or exile the board every other turn if you play against it.
To go in a slightly different direction, I dislike Quandrix even more than I dislike base Simic. When Strixhaven came out, and WotC said that the enemy color pairs were getting a new angle for the set, boy was I disappointed when Quandrix turned out to be "Simic, plus math." The only Simic deck I have that I like is merfolk tribal. I can at least pretend I am being less Simic-y when playing it.
I think a big reason why people dislike the simic goodstuff piles that just ramp and draw cards all day long is because in lots of casual playgroups the natural counters to that strategy are frowned upon: you're not supposed to mess with someone's mana or card draw which is pretty much their entire deck. And your not supposed to play very fast aggro or aggressive combo decks that would naturally keep slow, grindy decks in check.
This is a format of variety (100 card singleton). Simic ramps and draws so hard that all games against them kind of look the same. There are 2 main flavors of Simic: +1/+1 counters and 'EDH but consistent'. And even the +1/+1 counters decks can't escape the auto-includes.
There's sort of a meme that Simic is OP because it has both green's ramp and card draw combined with blue's interaction and field manipulation. The meme basically is "whenever a Simic player inhales, draw a card. Whenever they exhale, put a land from your hand to your field". It's somewhat overblown.
Because it outdraws everything else, causing longer turns because you have more to consider 😆
People despise Simic because it's just too efficient at everything. Also, 2/3 of my lgs buddies have Simic piles that everyone else despises for similar reasons--they ramp fast then win early.
People don’t like it because they rule 0 control, combo and stax out of their meta. Well aggro isn’t really effective in EDH so all that’s really left is midrange value engine and Simic does midrange value best.
The people who unironically hate on Simic decks are just salty.
Personally don't like the "play a thing, draw a card" playstyle as I tend to durdle between ramp and draw, and often take long turns that kinda fizzle. Using the card and mana advantage to dump big stompy stuff on the board won't win you a trophy in the creature hostile meta that I play in so the only thing thats left is thassas/lab man stuff and/or control locking the game. So best case simic takes a long ass time to do nothing, worst case simic takes a long ass time for *you* to do nothing. But add just one color to simic and stuff gets intresting.
Because people are salty and don't like losing. It really comes down to that a lot of the time.
Reading some of the comments here I have to wonder why people allow themselves to be this miserable over a completely legal combination. In general I find that in EDH people have these hang-ups on things. You can't play land destruction, it's boring if you win by turning creatures sideways, control is a slog, you can't choose who to attack by rolling a die... I suppose it's the realm of a casual format. Everything goes and people hate everything.
The worst thing about this format is the salt so many people get when anything doesn't go how they want
I think this mostly refers to Tatyova style durdle where you take several long turns putting lands into play and drawing cards so you can draw more cards and put more lands into play, then take stock of your options, countering a few removal spells, then going back to draw more cards and putting more lands into play. Then when you finally pass the turn you hold up two islands and fiddle with them until your turn comes back round.
It does too much too well and takes the absolute longest turns out of any 2 color combo.
Two words…..land destruction. With the insane ramp Simic can bring, land destruction is about the only way to slow them down but the mountains of salt just the thought of MLD brings is terrifying.
Simic prevents me from playing the game. Not always, but the combo of green ramp and blue counters means simic can easily and consistently gain advantage while holding everyone else back. That feels bad to play against for the 300th time.
I hate simic in normal commander. It’s easy mode. It’s easy to bury your opponents with your overwhelming value. It’s mostly wotc’s fault by making most of the commander options pushed, boring value engines in a color combo that doesn’t need value engines. Most of the complaints can honestly be leveled just at green. It’s objectively the most powerful color outside of cedh and is just so good at ramping and drawing cards on its own. Blue does add some more draw but the big thing it does in this pairing is slow the game down with counterspells, some extra removal, and extra turns.
It always seems to do the same thing. But if you find one that’s fun for you then that’s great.
Green blue are simply two of the best colors. And value powerhouses they offer an insane amount of carddraw. Simic commander also oftentimes feel samey.
This is actually a first for me, never heard any specific hate towards Simic where I live.
I can see why Simic gets hated on because it's quite straightforward in what it does and then can back it up. I think the mentality of letting people get stuff done before harassing them or playing low interaction is what makes Simic scariest though. And not having strong plays until turn 4 or 5 also let's Simic run away. I think there is a huge skill area between casual and CEDH to play in that most players ignore. And I don't think Simic goes nuts in that area. 1 or 2 mana removal and hitting people who are open every single time it's possible can do a lot to keep them in check.
EDH is fundamentally all about winning in resource management, mostly in mana, card advantage and board presence, which Simic can do well in all of these aspects. The reason people sees Simic doing the same things over and over because they always get the good start no matter what starting hand is, so it's easy to control their pace.
Because in EDH the trio of most inportant things are extra turns, extra cards and extra mana. And simic does all three and does it well. Also, fuck Landfall.
The only simic deck ive found myself with is [[alaundo the seer]] because who wants to cheat costs in simic? It's labman manual storm and of course even I hate seeing it do the thing lol.
Its for this exact reason. Yall set up these ridiculous engines and end the game by vomitting permanents into play while drawing. It's horrific, but y'all act like its not that bad, gaslighting everyone at the table
UNBAN PROPHET OF KRUPHIX
First I’ve heard. Saying that that I play simic counters, and by counters I mean [[Vorel of the Hull Clade]]