CommanderCast Ep 303 – Let Us Band Together
December 18, 2017
Hello everyone and welcome to CommanderCast Episode 303! We’re your weekly source for Community, Strategy, and Technology, hosted on CommanderSociety.com and our homesite: CommanderCast.com! This week it seems Mark and Adam are at it again with the…. underused combat mechanics. This wee they are joined by one of our listeners, Mike, as he attempts to bring us all around to playing with what is currently the only mechanic that gets an 11 on the Maro’s Storm Scale, BANDING!
So if you’re down with that all you have to do is click the IB!!!
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CommanderCast Episode 303
Posted: Monday, Dec. 11, 2017
Intros:
Guest: Mike
Adam
Mark
Keep up with the conversation on Facebook & Twitter.
Community:
How does banding work?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU552Z7PeAc
Why do EDH players love to try to make old, crappy mechanics work?
Mike: First, it reminds me of the Magic I played when I first started. Secondly, the older mechanics are often confusing and I like to exploit that so I gain an advantage.
Adam
- Nostalgia
- See if you can break it
- fun
Strategy:
Mike- mix banding with stuffy doll.
I blocked a 36/36 Thromok the insatiable today that had trample using a Boros reckoner and a timber wolves. Because of how banding works I got to assign all thirty six of the trample damage straight to the reckoner and kill my opponent with his own commander
Adam
Technology:
Mike – Baton of Morale, Boros Reckoner, Abu Ja’far, Squee, Goblin Nabob
Adam – Nature’s Blessing, Urza’s Avenger, Formation, Spitemare
Mark – …has nothing to add to this list.
Outtro/Contacts:
Guest contact info: u/mtgmetaman on reddit.
CommanderCast – Email: commandercast(at)gmail(dot)com // twitter: (at)CommanderCast
Rachael – Email: wiehernandez(at)gmail(dot)com // twitter: (at)HeroGirl1409
Calvin – Email: captainredzone(at)gmail(dot)com // twitter: (at)CaptainRedZone
Mark – Email: mahlerma(at)gmail(dot)com
Adam – (at)squire9999 // (at)thetrinisphere
Be sure to check out our CommanderCast Facebook page.
And a big thanks to everyone here at the CommanderCast Network. We’ll see you next week with more community, strategy, and technology. Until then, LET’S GET IT!
It really is a shame that we lost Banding in newer sets. The rules complexity never quite appeared to me. And it’s such a flavorful and inclusive way to describe what White does.
Blue? Flight. Green? Trample. Red? Haste. Black? Fear. White? Banding.
White wants its creatures to work together as a team. Having green get 6/4 tramplers and white responding with a flurry of 1/1’s and 2/2’s teaming up to engage a singular beast with strategy and tactics sounds absolutely on-point.
I suppose it’s no surprise that Tempest block lacked direct banding. In a sense, it had en-Kor which banded in an entirely different way with their innate damage sharing abilities.
Bands-with-other is such a badly designed variant of banding that in reading the current rules, it’s actually received a drastic upgrade from it’s original form. The form that suggested it cared about a quality (Such as Wolf) when in reality it only cared about other creatures with the exact same form of Bands-with-other.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/bd7a0d40c36c7f94155eb27f77346fe472e40bed9814c6500053c9ca165338ee.jpg
Dissing on Amy Weber and the Foglios? You’re making a terrible case for an Art episode.
I’m hopefully slated to be on that art episode. Taste is subjective, but I think we can recognize the craziness and eccentric style of some of the early artists as well as some of the homogenized sameness of current art and pull out the good from both. They had mentioned Drew Tucker and Richard Kane Ferguson. Some people can’t stand their style either, but I think a lot of us old fogeys have a special place in our hearts for nostalgic “bad”art.
Yeah but we keep having comments in the pod cast trying to cast art styles as bad art. Sure Amy Weber’s choice of composition is unusual, but I love how distinctive it makes her pieces. Same with Quintin Hoover and the Foglios. The ages when you could pick out more of the artists for their art there’s no way I’m making art as good as theirs.
And even something which is really simple, like Stasis? I recently had a friend make fan art of that piece.
I lightly lament that we’re in Weatherlight arc 2.0 with Jace in every picture. And I suppose there’s more attempts made to match art style with artists and a bigger budget for WOTC so that despite the spread of artists everything tries to match a single overarching image of the current world.
I guess that’s a thing folks can hope for with more core sets, see if WOTC lightens up the art direction somewhat there.
I think some of the more abstract pieces, or paintings that don’t have to match the canon and further the plot are some of my favorite. That’s kind of my style as far as art. I go allegorical or throw some symbolism in.
I can see art, past and present, where the work isn’t there, that’s part of my job. That’s not to say that spare and post modern art can’t be great or evocative, but as an artist myself, when I can visibly see the time and work that went in to piece, I’m going to appreciate it a lot more. I’m kind of getting ahead of myself as far as talking about art.
Truly, a fine episode gentlemen. I never thought I’d hear someone convincingly advocate for Baton of Morale…. but if you have a combat-oriented deck and have the slot, why not? Oh, and who knows if fairies pee from their ankles? I say roll with it, no one can disprove the theory.
Well, mission accomplished, I shall give Banding a try. It would actually work in that deck where I have stuff like you mentioned (Boros Reckoner, Stuffy Doll, Spitemare, Coalhauler Swine along with Mogg Maniac).
I think it was back before I could legally drink when I last used Banding. It didn’t seem too complicated then, but we also thought that cards like Force of Nature were cool.
Now that you’ve gone back and explained it, it’s a much more versatile and tricky mechanic than I ever imagined.
Judi Dominoq