Stop Turning your Commander into a Combo Piece

A wise man once told me "Yeah, sword of feast and famine is good, but I might get to keep a greatsword."

To paraphrase another MTG creator (Maldhound): "If you show up at my party and I know that 90% of the time you're a chill person, and 10% of the time you're going to take a dump on the floor, I'm going to get rid of you as fast as possible."

In all fairness to the Altraxa poison players, it is by far the most flavorful and lore accurate way to play her You might be archenemy, but perfection always comes at a cost, so all hail Phyrexia

"Stop Turning your Commander into a Combo Piece" unless you are in blue and run a shit ton of counterspells.

"figuring out ways to win that your opponents will allow you to perform the setup for" is a really good statement that I don't think I've heard of before or at least never phrases in such a way, I like it

As an additional comment on Atraxa running poison. Poison (and also commander damage) focused decks all have the same weakness in a free for all format: you are the only player at the table that can advance your win con. Everyone at the table will be doing regular damage. If you get someone to 15 hp they must be concerned about their life total, and therefor must be scared of everyone. If you get someone to 6 poison counters they only need to be concerned about you (and more specifically, how they can remove you from the game). Poison (or voltron) can be fun but only If you want to be the archenemy of the table.

Alternative title: Commit To the Bit

"A Grand Experiment in Mildly Rigged Democracy", huh? Thanks, I'd been trying to come up with a name for my Tivit deck.

Many years ago I played a game at a convention where a guy was really eager to try out his Ezuri, Claw of Progress deck. I kinda casually mentioned "oh yeah, there's a two-card infinite combo with him and Sage of Hours, have you heard of that?" His response was a "you caught me" smile and a defeated-sounding "... yeah... that's in here..." It was otherwise a fun casual +1+1 counter simic deck, but I remember feeling weird about how to handle to it since I never knew which turn he might try to trigger the combo. It's nice to have some validation for that feeling, all these years later.

More accurately "Stop turning your Commander into an 'Oops I win' combo piece in otherwise lower power decks".

Ive had a Kaalia player ask me why I blew up their boots and then killed Kaalia the following turn. Answer is, I know your deck cant do anything without the commander swinging. “So you’re not going to let me play the game” Not if you make it so easy, I guess.

You and trinket mage have cost me a lot of hours making my decks more fun to play. Thank you for that.

I usually tell people combos are easy, its defending the combos and negating other people's combos where most of your budget turns your deck into cedh.

I wanna say that your videos have changed the way I approach building decks and I'm more fulfilled by the decks I build

Another reason to not play atraxa infect is not having to deal with that one player complaining about how infect os broken in commander and needs to be twenty counters

Poison is a great alternative win con specifically because it’s out in the open. There’s only a few cards that can get you from 0-10 in a single turn so the majority of the time you have presented a clock that’s a rough equivalent to an unblockable 4/x creature hitting you once per turn. With a lot of combos your options as the opponent are to either play blue or remove the player regardless of actual threat. Visible clocks like Atraxa, although they feel bad in the moment, are far more fair than a good portion of decks solely due to that transparency.

The idea that to win a game of EDH you must devise a wincon that you're opponents will see coming and choose to allow in favor of disrupting other players. That's a very good thought that relatively concisely explains a concept I've been thinking about. The first person to pop off rarely wins assuming the decks are within similar power ranges. No one can 1v3 in a fair match. So don't play in a way that makes your opponents all agree you are the biggest threat unless you are actually ready to be the threat they see you as.

My playgroup made a rule that you have to let us know about your infinite combos before the game. This, in turn, discourages those infinite combos, as they have to say "yeah, I'm running a 2 card infinite combo with my commander" and get rightly focused down from turn 1.

This explains rather well why I split my Chatterfang deck into a combo deck that is highly tuned for said combos and a token spamming overrun deck The latter has no tutors, no infinite combos at all simply to avoid the "thing A" and "thing B" issue you mention because that was exactly what was happening to the deck for me My Master Multiplied deck has a few infinite combos, just like your example Combat Celebrant is in some of them, but all the pieces individually play into the decks strategy very well and so far it hasn't felt like it is running into the issues that Chatterfang had before

Counter Point If you play a deck, you need to understand what baggage comes with your commander even if you aren't playing an infinite. Don't cry if Tivit gets removed. I have to assume that you are playing the "good cards" from a tactics perspective. Like, I don't care that you say that you aren't playing X card. The deck will probably try to approximate what that X card does. I'm not letting Urza Lord High Artificer stick around... or Zaxara, or Jhoira, or Yawgmoth, or whatever pushed legendary you pull out.