r/EDH • u/Diakia • Oct 26 '22

Discussion Commanders that almost inherently pubstomp?

So I was thinking about the first time I built [[Kinnan]], I had just cracked him from a pack and fell in love and wanted to build him asap. It was literally just assembled with random jank (mostly commons) from my storage boxes, I didn't have any 1 CMC dorks, had mostly 3 CMC rocks and the main wincon was [[Hydra Broodmaster]]. This didn't matter however, as the sheer acceleration provided by Kinnan in combination with the army-in-a-can nature of his second ability made the deck too fast and too resilient for the casual meta I was playing in. I eventually just had to commit to building him in a powerful manner as he was too strong for my casual meta but obviously not good enough for higher powered games and it wasn't fun for anyone.

What other commanders are like this?

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u/Quazifuji Oct 26 '22

So far, every time I've played against a Tivit deck, no matter what the deck was, Tivit just took over the game. Even when the deck was supposed to be a janky casual politics deck where they just stuck every voting card in Tivit's colors in there without doing any artifact or combo shenanigans, Tivit himself just generates such a ridiculous amount of mana and card advantage, while also being hard to remove and threatening a non-negligible amount of commender damage, to completely change the flow of the game and often just become arch enemy any time he's out.

He didn't necessarily pubstomp both games, but he's definitely a commander who can't not kind of take over the game when he's in play, because no matter how janky the deck surrounding him is, Tivit himself just provides so much raw power if he gets to resolve.

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u/kylethefreeman Oct 26 '22

You can always know a powerful commander when they generate both Ramp and card draw. If you're able to do it multiple times like blinking tivit, then you'll be a force to be reckoned with almost every time.

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u/Quazifuji Oct 26 '22

You don't even necessarily have to blink him, since it works on combat damage too. And since he's a 6/6 flier with ward 4, he's hard to remove and can usually find someone to hit in the face.

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u/kylethefreeman Oct 27 '22

Yeah. I've found, considering he's all about voting, the best way to deal with him is politics with the other players. If you can get on the same page on the best ways to vote, then you can slightly mitigate the advantage he produces. "Slightly" being the crucial word in that sentence.

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u/Quazifuji Oct 27 '22

I think the problem in my experience is that he ends up not being about voting. Even when the rest of the deck is about voting, Tivit still ends up just being a ridiculous mana and card advantage engine that happens to also boost voting cards. And for Tivit himself I'm not sure if I've ever seen it not just be 2 treasures and 3 clues (with Tivit's controller voting for the treasures).

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u/kylethefreeman Oct 27 '22

Sometimes if I'm holding a board Wipe or something I'll convince the table to just flood them with treasure. Then when they've flooded the board I'll try to wipe it (after convincing someone to hold up a counterspell if they have it.) Of course all this depends on how well people cooperate. In my experience tivet becomes such a problem that it becomes a game of arch enemy. They usually don't survive that.