Well... there is that.

But on the other hand, EDH wasn't meant to be 1v1. Sooner or later, you were bound to end up with a dominant general, one that is just too good compared to the others. I don't think it should be banned by EDH RC.

It's a shame people don't share the same views, or you would understand that the MTGsalvation list has Clique banned.. but tolarain academy, and rofellos still usable? lol.. And Dralnu is a good general. Definately a notch above if you know what your doing.

While i agree that Vendilion Clique is really hard to beat, i don't think that it can outrun a properly built Erayo deck. Maybe i am crazy but turn 2 i have been completely shut out not able to play even one spell, and that is with counter backup. I do think that these 2 are very obscene and should probably be taken out of EDH duels.

This is a fallacious argument simply because you believe you can take the MUC shell, copy-paste it into any blue-based general, and it will still work. It doesn't. The reason Clique is broken and Dralnu isn't mainly is because of stack control. You're stuck having to cast Dralun during your main phase, which is pretty much a death sentence against another blue-based control deck. Clique's flash + much cheaper cost means it can effectively cast everything at instant speed all the time, making sure it controls the stack the way it wants.

Dralnu is good, but he is not a kill card by himself. As a result, you have to devote slots into your main deck to actually killing your opponent. These devoted slots could be used for more countermagic and extra utility, but countering 15+ spells isn't actually a win condition unless you're banking on someone to just ragequit on MWS. Since Clique functions as a very effective win condition, there's no need for the Clique player to weigh down their deck with those types of cards. Clique decks are literally nothing but a heavy density of countermagic, card draw, some bounce, and other miscellaneous utility cards. Clique doesn't just have better stack control against wannabe MUxC decks. It also gets to run a greater volume of counterspells to make sure it wins counterwars.

This isn't even taking into account Dralnu's extreme vulnerability due to his Lich effect. If Clique gets killed some how, you just recast it again and wreck your opponent's hand once more in the process. When Dralnu gets damaged, you're busted. And before you go "LOL just counter it", I'd like to hear you say that when your Dralnu gets Banefired, targeted by Mouth of Ronom, a kicked Molten Disaster goes off, or burn spell X is paid through Boseiju.

Finally, I encourage you to play in one of the MTGS EDH tourneys that are run over there before you start immediately assuming that the ban list is flawed. For instance Rofellos actually isn't as broken as people think, mainly because people actually run 1-2 CMC spot removal that no one in multiplayer plays with. Other decks like Braids and Erayo also aren't that broken because when you remove broken fast mana like Sol Ring and Mana Crypt, they are much more "fair" generals. When Vendilion Clique is removed from the picture, you get a healthy, fostering metagame with all sorts of effective and viable strategies that don't have blue as their primary color.

Please post the optimized Clique list for testing. Also, how does such a deck not get wrecked by Boseiju, who Shelters All?

Bounce it, Clique it?

32-35 counterspells
8-9 bounce spells
9-10 card drawers
6-8 other utility cards
38-39 land

That's an optimized Clique list in a nutshell. Khymera can easily back me up on this, if you really want me to bring him in.



You play every Strip Mine effect known to man. You can also bounce Boseiju for a massive tempo gain (Clique can't target lands obsidiandice). You can easily afford to trade the loss in card advantage for the gain in tempo when you're playing a control deck with a real clock.

Any you use what in the utility spots? And what about Vexing shusher?

Control Magic + variants...
Minds eye
kite
sculpting
GOP
Lens
Top
SOFI
SOBM
etc..

cool thanks. now to put one together and test it out. I want to see if it really is as impossible to beat with a decent deck (ie one that doesn't suck vs the rest of the format) as we are saying here.

Vendilion Clique deck is very, very good in 1v1. Have only run a few games yet, but undefeated in 1v1.

IMX, the biggest problem is that it is so much faster than most of the other decks in our meta, which were constructed for multiplayer scenarios.

Joz, all the clique decks that I have ever played against have those cards. That's what makes it so dumb.


Clique is dumb in 1v1 edh. I recommend that if you comment on this thread you playtest against a really good version of the deck with a pilot who actually knows how to play it.

I consider my EDH friends to be very good players, please don't insult them in such a way; you don't know them, or their decks.

I've been thinking about this since I first read this post a couple weeks back, and all I've been able to come up with for beating the Clique would be heavy discard, monored blue hate, or some combination of the two. For the former, you'd want all the Duress/Brain Pry/Unmask effects you could find- that way, the clique player would need to use a counterspell or give you the run of their hand- a choice between "bad" and "worse" from their point of view. For the latter, you'd need the whole stable of cheap instant-speed removal- Red Elemental Blast, Pyroblast, and Combustion would be autoincludes. Red Akroma would probably make a decent general here- there's maybe three spells ever printed that can stop her from resolving, and pro blue makes targeted bounce worthless.

The problem, as far as I can tell, is that both of these ideas, to work, would have to be metagame decks to such ridiculous degrees that they'd get blown out by pretty much anything else. Discard maybe not so much if it's a 1 v 1 tourney, but both would be so focused on simply wrecking a control player that they'd roll over and die against pretty much any other strategy.

That would seem to be the Clique's big trick- not necessarily being more powerful than anything else, but requiring such a narrow strategy to fight effectively that, in a tournament, decks focused on taking them out will get eliminated by better generalist decks, which will then proceed to get blown out by the Clique.

Am I in the right neighborhood, or is this wild speculation just. . . wild speculation?

This is called the "rock-paper-scissors" complex.
Nothing ever beats everything, and something built specifically to beat something, will just get beat down by something else.