For the sake of argument, let's consider the deck for a moment:

Black Lotus
Smallpox
Nether Spirit

Going first, they have to have a deck that can win against a recurring 2/2 with 2 cards. Otherwise you win or tie.
Going second, they have to be able to get rid of black lotus AND put down a threat OR they have to be able to put down 2 sufficiently big enough threats to deal with nether spirit that are not reliant on land to keep going.


I may be missing some interactions, but that's what most of the matchups are going to come down to isn't it? You have a really good chance to win or tie?



There are enough other decks like this that black lotus limits variety a little bit by being such a force in the meta. At least, that's my opinion. Everytime I google 3CM, about a third of the decks run it due to how good it is. To the point that when it comes to strategy "counters black lotus" is a viable upside. I mean, yes, it makes more things viable. But they are viable decks that all include 1 or 2 black lotus while also pushing out a lot of slower decks.

Yeah, Lotus is a powerful enabler, which is why some us like to keep it around, you can put it in a ton of different decks, probably more than the decks you can play without it at all.

As for decks that beat Lotus-smallpox-Nether Spirit, my pet deck is Island-Daze-Chronomaton which 4-1s the Nether Spirit deck. Mox Pearl-Glint Hawk-Path to Exile 6-0s it. Mishra's Worksop-Ensaring Bridge-Scalding Tongs 2-2s with it, and a ton of decks 3-3 it. It is a viable and powerful deck, but it faces a lot of stiff competition.

I don't understand how some of that works.

I go second. Mox Pearl, Glint Hawk, Path to Exile is your deck

How do you win if you've played your glint hawk?

for the record, banning lotus just means you use peat bog with smallpox and slow down a turn, which often doesn't matter. but as Dr. D says, there's plenty of decks that beat it. (the most obvious is simian spirit guide-artifact blast-any free win con. another popular one is swamp-shrieking affliction-rakdos cackler.) you just have to be expecting it.

Whoops, forgot about pox again, I do that sometimes. Yeah, they just 2-2 each other.

The more I learn about the format, the less fun it sounds.

see, to me this reads like "over 20% of decks run islands". yeah, a lot of different decks run lotus, but that doesn't make them not different decks.

anyway, this isn't that important. it's pretty likely someone in a banning position will kill off lotus for next season anyway: it has plenty of enemies. I just don't agree with them.

That is because you haven't found anything degenerate for yourself yet, it is hard to do that with plain ol' Vanilla, but that is why we have the ban list and the Alt rounds. The beginning is just to give you a baseline of what decks should be doing.

What happened with that post that had all the old results and decks. The last time I almost joined up I was using that to spin myself up.

3CM is intimidating for newbs because of the regular players historic knowledge of decks and crazy interactions.

Is there a non terrible way to use magus of the moon?
I Always wondered about that, also I chose the deck I'll play.

while lotus is unbanned, he will whiff against a lot of decks, while lotus is banned, then he could be decent, but you would probably still lose a fair amount on the draw.

give it a try and find out

3CM is a terrible game and i have never played it before.

I feel like I need an explanation of what constitutes a "fun" format or game of Magic for you. What we're describing is essentially as pure of a rock-paper-scissors format as you can get, with no variance (manascrew, etc) and almost infinite room for innovation. I feel we have either explained this poorly, or that I personally do not understand your definition of fun. I don't mean this in a bad way, I'm genuinely curious; everyone has a different "fun" and I would like to understand what yours is.

I also feel I should point out that I'm not listing those qualities as holy grails of funness. They're just how the format works. Variance can be fun, adding miracle pulls and occasional frustration gives a little spice to the moment and makes for great stories. High innovation can be daunting, even unpleasant if you feel like you have to anticipate things no one has even though of yet all the time. Again, just curious what qualities of the game you find fun, and why you feel that 3CB does not reflect them.

^^ It sounds like rock-paper-scissors level of rote memorization without any real variance whatsoever. More specifically, it sounds like spending a month to play 4 games of rock-paper-scissors. Granted it's technically 4 rock-paper-scissors round robin tourneys, but ones that take you 10 to 20 minutes to participate in across the entire month if you have some idea of what people are going to pick.

It also sounds like it's going to take 2 or 3 months of this to have some idea of how to compete, if not much longer.

There's a link in the first post to the previous seasons, each of which have links to all of their rounds.

the meta is very rarely actually RPS. sometimes alt formats are bad and they let it happen, but vanilla never is. there's a lot of decks, each of which lose to different things. yes, if you can successfully guess what other people will play you can pick the deck that does best against the field, but there's a lot more options than you seem to think, and the banning process introduces a lot of variance as well.

Mjack, people have been playing and enjoying this game for over a decade on places like MTGS. That you think you've cracked the nut on this being especially shallow or random before even reaching your first results phase is ludicrous. Just see how it plays out rather than try to chicken little the whole thing by trying to tell us the sky we've had above us for years is suddenly about to fall because you see things somehow more lucidly than we do.

To answer this question directly, and maybe clear up some misunderstanding of the meta, no.

As razor and Dr D mentioned, lots of decks 6-0 or 4-1 this deck. Shelldock 6-0s it, Lotus/Lotus/Grave Titan 3-3s it, most anything that beats Lotus 6-0s, Hawk/Pearl/Mana Tithe 6-0s it. Heck, Storage Land/Eldrazi/3rd card can probably 6-0 with the right Eldrazi and third card. So that's an instance of the existence of a Lotus deck making a very, very slow deck a viable meta call.

Shelldock doesn't 6-0 it. It 2-2s. If Shelldock plays its game and hides an Eldrazi away, the Smallpox player plays Smallpox in that intervening turn (after hiding Eldrazi away, before redrawing the LED) causing the Shelldock to get sacced leaving the Eldrazi stuck forever in exile. It's a standoff. If SmallpoxDeck is fool enough to play Smallpox while ShelldockDeck still has a full hand, SmallpoxDeck loses. If ShelldockDeck is fool enough to play Shelldock while SmallpoxDeck still has Smallpox in hand, ShelldockDeck loses. So neither one advances the game and the staring contest results in a 2-2.

Hawk/Pearl/Tithe is a similar standoff (at least, with SmallpoxDeck on the play). With SmallpoxDeck on the play, it will just play Black Lotus on T1 and pass turn. After that, Tithe can no longer kill the Lotus, and since the Lotus provides one more mana than Smallpox requires, Tithe doesn't prevent Smallpox either. If HTP plays the Hawk, Smallpox will kill it and win. So HTP doesn't play the Hawk (heck, doesn't play anything); Smallpox doesn't play either (playing Smallpox while the opposing hand is full just causes Tithe to be discarded then Hawk gets played to win a damage race). 4-1.

Storage land doesn't like smallpox much at all. Storage Land / Eldrazi / 3rd only succeeds if the 3rd is a land that can take the sac to leave the storage land around. But then the Nether Spirit most likely gets to attack 10 times before the Eldrazi lands.