u/Shiro_no_Orpheus

This has become my personal pet pieve. I get that giving out up to 3 byes sucks for those grinding points at the tournament, but let's be real here, 4- and 3-player cEDH are just not the same game. We all try to brew some of the tightest, most efficient decklists ever seen, only for the entire game dynamic being shifted by a random variable?

First and foremost, some combos do not work in 3 player pods, like the ASC+OBM+FMM+Tinderwall interaction, or Tivit Timeseave combo. If you happen to try to run Tivit in your local tournament and get a 3 player pod, you have a massive disadvantage, that's not really fair.

Also, most of our decks are balanced around 4 player pods, and there are so so many staples that scale with the number of players in the pod. Etali is 25% worse for example. Cards we design entire decks around like Rhystic Study, Mystic Remora, Esper Sentinel, Smothering Tithe, Tymna or Faerie Mastermind, the top staples of the format, scale directly with the pod size. Cards like Jeska's Will, Tataru Taru, Praetors Grasp, Mnemonic Betrail and Culling Ritual also suffer from less opponents.

Meanwhile, having less opponents automatically means less interaction against you. Wheels become a lot safer if your opponents only draw 14, not 21 cards. This shifts the entire dynamic of the game, massively to the disadvantage of control decks and towards a more turbo heavy meta. In my experience, in 3 player pods, the best thing is to just jam a win as fast as possible (of course watch the pod), you are way more likely to succeed than normally.

cEDH is defined by adjusting our decks to the current meta, but 3 and 4 player pods just have a totally different meta. We all signed up for player 4 player cEDH, that was what we thought about when we brewed up the decklist, that's how we play at the LGS. Wins in 3 player pods feel undeserved, Losses feel like you barely played the game. They are boring and ruin the tournament experience for me.

I am currently reworking my [[Ms. Bumbleflower]] Bracket 3 deck. It's not supposed to be grouphug but a bant midrange pile that tries to draw a bunch of cards and win with alternative wincons while being a serious combat threat.

Two new cards came to my attention: [[Pensive Professor]], which makes all spells replace themself if I control my commander, and [[Lyla, Holographic Assistant]] from Spiderman that converts my card draw into +1/+1 counters and make all my creatures modified to profit of [[Rishkar, Peema Reengade]] or [[Kutzil, Malamet Exemplar]], even if I don't have my commander. Both fit perfectly in my strategy and fit my curve, but you may have noticed, they combo off with each other to draw my entire deck. From there on, I can cast [[Twenty-toed Toad]] and [[Swiftfoot Boots]] and swing for the win.

Usually, I would say that a combo that requires only 2 cards for a total of 7 Mana is too good for Bracket 3, but in order to win I still need 7 more Mana and I run no fastmana, so it's not a functional early game combo to just win.

So I just ask the hivemind, is this combo too strong for bracket 3 or do you think it's fine?