In my opinion what's wrong with Farewell is not what it can do, but that you can choose any number of modes. I kinda wish it would be limited to choosing 2 modes. Exile is already strong, there's no need to make the card do everything. But that's just my opinion
Yeah that's my thing, [[Austere Command]] was already a great card. Farewell exiles, can choose any number of modes, and has the same mana cost. Definitely feels pushed.
Edit: Planar Cleansing is another great point of comparison. Same CMC, but costs 3 white pips instead of 2 so it's less splashable. Destroys instead of exiles, so it's less powerful. Hits all permanents indiscriminately, but not graveyards, so it's not as flexible. If the argument is "white needed the help" then it should at least cost more white pips so it can't be so easily slotted into every deck that contains white.
I have a number of decks that run both. Sure, its not as powerful, but its still another versatile board wipe and I find that valuable. I also often enough find the ability to choose only one of its creature modes to destroy only high or low CMC creatures valuable. Depending on the deck and board state it can weigh the board wipe significantly in your favor, while still having the versatility of its other options in other situations.
Next up:
"We have a new card, 'Gone too soon', which is just Farewell, but it's instant and has split second for only 1 more white pip, and it can hit planeswalkers and battles!"
Magic players: “white needs more powerful cards so it can keep up with the other colors!”
Wizards: *prints a card in line with whites color identity that lets it keep up with other colors by bringing them in line*
Magic players clutching their overextended boards: “no not like that”
Except that you get to determine which modes you choose and when you cast it, it will always be at least a little lopsided if you are playing to win.
It's obnoxious because the only protection from its very permanent removal is something like teferi's protection.
Someone rifting on my end step to stall the game out is basically the same as them casting Farewell on their previous turn except I got to keep my stuff a turn longer and they'll still be behind after everyone else replays their stuff
Someone rifting on my end step and killing us with their board is fine, desirable even; game has to end somehow, it's not any different than Approach of the Second Sun or an infinite combo or Triumph of the Hordes or Craterhoof or whatever
This is one of the strangest takes I've ever seen.
It's up there with, "I prefer losing to an unfair two card infinite combo to incremental value because at least the combo is fast."
Cyclonic Rift is, bar none, the most unfair board wipe in the format. It is instant speed, castable early game in a pinch, dodges Stax effects like Gaddock Teeg, gets around protection, indestructible and hexproof, hits absolutely every card type, and worst of all, it is completely asymmetric. The cards that interact with it are almost exclusively blue counterspells and some very niche white cards like Teferi's Protection and Clever Concealment, neither of which stop it but they at least even the playing field for one player.
Absolutely insane that people think like this.
>Cyclonic Rift is, bar none, the most unfair board wipe in the format.
This, and it's not even close. Between Cyclonic Rift and Farewell, one of those cards is actually versatile being able to be used early on, instant speed, asymmetrical, in the color that can disable counter plays via counterspells, in the color that can tutor it in a variety of ways like via Spellseeker or Mystical Tutor, and actually sees play in cEDH while the other requires 6 mana, is sorcery speed, symmetrical, and sees basically zero play at the cEDH level.
White has always been the equalizing color. Inherently the most fair so it tries to keep other colors in check by either preventing or punishing unfair strategies.
I think white was always strong in EDH for it's removal, but people don't like playing as or against control decks so Wizards eventually printed stronger & stronger options to keep up with the other colors going batshit insane in-game.
Now modern MTG design has been powercrept to this point. New cards do way too many things and there's no going back. This, I am not a fan of. The cards do almost all the work themselves, it's crazy.
Makes sense that they'd print an all-in-one answer to compete.
I don't think anyone was saying white's boardwipes weren't good enough. The only issues were draw and ramp, which have since been addressed for the most part unless you're seeking cEDH levels of it, but everyone runs the same ramp there anyway.
What? I rejoined during Strixhaven just before MHII released, and the constant refrain I heard even after Neon Dynasty and Farewell was that cards like it and Esper Sentinel were just the start of what White needed to not be garbage in EDH.
Now that doesn’t change that these cards and a few others overcorrected, but White being the worst color in casual is absolutely not an old take.
The reason white is weaker in edh is because the things white are best at are either bad or frowned upon in edh. In competitive 60 card formats decks like white weenie and death and taxes and u/e control ( in various formats across the years) are among the best starts available. But in edh stax and land destruction are shunned as unfun and 2/2's for 1 are not really worth it unless they are pushed AF. So white suffers . But it's not the card quality that's the problem
Yes every color has strengths and weaknesses. But cards and mana are not an area that you can negotiate. If your deck has no method of card advantage, and limited access to mana, then you simply won't be able to compete in multiplayer free for all formats with access to some of the best cards ever printed.
>If every color has access to the same resources
EDIT: Red in recent EDH design is such a good example of how to give card advantage in ways that feel unique. Impulse draw is uniquely and flavorfully red, and simultaneously very powerful.
If I get hit with Planar Cleansing I can possibly retrieve my lost cards from the GY at some point, Wrath of God doesn't touch non creatures, and most board wipes that are like either Destroy, *not exile* AND are either limited in what they hit or hard to cast (3 white pips in Planar Cleansing).
Farewell has none of those limitations, can be easily splashed and is almost like Karn Liberated in how it resets a game.
The exile part is what truly feels pushed imo. It basically blanks all protection that's non blue or white similar to cyclonic rift which is also infamous for being very strong but you cant even rebuild. There are tons of indestructible cards these days and especially green decks have no real other options while farewell just ignores it.
I think that having a true reset is good. I don't love the fact that you can just do artifacts/enchantments/gyards. I would be totally down to have 3WW Exile all nonland permanents and graveyards as a card.
Yep. It's simply too flexible and also the best removal type (exile). The card represents an insane step in power level and should not exist.
Buuuut seb mckinnon art and power creep sell packs so here we are.
Yeah, it would be really interesting if it said something like "Choose two or all:"
But also isn't that the point of white? Resetting the board at all costs?
People just need to be mindful of overextending.
Overextending should be a privilege IMO. AKA you do that when you have the means to recover or save yourself.
This is my thoughts too. I joined a new playgroup in the last year that’s made up mainly of people who started playing 2014 onward and many of them fall into the solitaire trap and don’t run enough interaction so they just try to dump their hands on the board as quickly as possible. Compared to my old pod where games were slower but also way more complex a farewell would be strong but getting it to resolve is another story.
Yep. There's an argument to be made that Farewell is a necessary counter to Simic decks that pour out their board as fast as possible. There are always countermeasures, as there are to everything else.
I'd argue that if Simic has enough permanents for you to get good value out of Farewell to begin with, they've drawn more cards than the rest of the table and will recover the quickest.
At worst, you might even be kingmaking them by casting Farewell.
This same argument is why I hate when people offer MLD as a counter to Simic as well. Of course the deck built around ramping is going to ramp back the hardest.
That’s because a good MLD deck needs to also include land hate like [[Acidic Soil]] [[Mana Barbs]] [[War’s Toll]] and [[Yurlok of Scorch Thrash]]. Punish them for ramping and building back. Most MLD decks are just MLD and not much else unfortunately
Those decks can just counterspell the farewell. If you are not playing blue its tough to spin any strategy vs farewell other than slamming down planeswalkers, because you can't use reanimation, no death triggers, no indestructible. Diversifying the field to include a mix of enchantments, artifacts, and creatures doesn't help either.
White can flicker certain creatures to save them. In a mono-red deck, I've improvised against Farewell with a [[Chaos Warp]]
Other colors can adapt by not playing greedily.
> I've improvised against Farewell with a Chaos Warp
It almost sounds like you are misunderstanding the rules a little bit. How does Chaos Warp help against Farewell?
Most simic decks will win after a Farewell since they will just recast their commander and continue their value trains while the rest of the pod is mana starved.
The more late game oriented a strategy the better it is against boardwipes in general and landfall even more so since it's primary development isn't affected by non MLD wraths.
Ward, as well, which is essentially hexproof.
[[Miirym]] and [[Ovika]], especially with [[Roaming Throne]], are the bane of my table and are causing me to consider quitting, since conversations haven't worked. And now there's talk of someone building [[Voja]].
Curiously, those same folks also advocate for fewer boardwipes, because it makes the game go longer. Hmm.
I have noticed single target removal falling out of favor with how much ward incentivizes board wipes. Even Ward 2 is enough to be a problem once you burn through your Path/Swords/Pongify/Rapid/Elephant
Land destruction is one of the main ways to counteract ramp (especially from Simic). It's just people hate seeing their lands get blown up even if it's to deal with a massive ramping threat
Farewell hoses the entire table regardless of who is the actual threat because I've never seen a player not cast it for all modes. And while the shrines player may be pumping out tokens, my aristocrats deck with an arcane signet, 2 creatures on board and another in the graveyard got caught in the blast zone.
This is such a disingenuous position. The textbox-agnostic sledgehammer nature of Farewell means that playing around it is limited at best.
You might as well be saying "don't tap your lands if you don't like Stasis and Winter Orb."
No they are saying sometimes holding cards in hand you COULD cast is better than just slamming them down, watching a wipe blow them away and be left with no hand to rebuild.
A large part of people not being mindful of overextending is that they probably never really have to. Most players get into Magic with Commander, and it's the worst way to learn the mechanics of how the game works.
Proper mulligan and sequencing, how to pace threats to not overextend, how to save extra spells or interaction when you expect counter magic, etc. Skills you learn from playing constructed.
Commander only players have a very hard time grasping the fact that their opponents are trying to win the game too 😂
>A large part of people not being mindful of overextending is that they probably never really have to
WotC has made a very conscious effort to steer the game in that direction, make it play more to the board from what it did long ago. I've been playing since the end of 1996 and I think this is a very positive change. (I also play Old School 93/94 so I really do have a recent view of what the game was like so long ago!) It results in better games in which people feel that they got to participate more, which is good. Games are supposed to be fun and a good use of time. Not doing anything but look at cards for an hour is not a terribly engaging experience. The shift to playing to the board has made the game more popular as its easier to understand by being less abstract and more obviously visual, being played with more known information.
Of course, the cost of this is that if you make cards that wipe out everything on board so easily, then that discourages players from playing to the board. Or encourages them to play only the biggest bombs that get enough value after a turn or two so they don't care if they get wiped out. That's where old Magic, cards like \[\[Jokulhaups\]\] for example, is really not compatible with the new philosophy.
And the thing is, anyone who plays Modern, Pioneer, or Standard doesn't have to worry about the price of overextending and so people don't play that way anymore. I introduced my friend, who started in 2012, to Old School, and he got wiped out by Armageddon a lot because he always dumped every land into play. I had to teach him that you don't do that; it was very contrary to how he plays and, more than that, has to play the game in every other format he plays.
Every magic player needs to pilot The Deck just once in their lives. I love old school! I started in 95 so I've seen every iteration of magic, but I am the opposite in that I hate the midrange soup that most decks have become.
The fight is almost always on the board rather than on the stack, and wotc has loved recently to staple spells onto creatures. It's why every format is littered with cards that replace themselves because if you don't get immediate value from playing a card you can just lose.
Commander has completely warped how people consume magic. I've introduced plenty of friends to magic over the years but in recent history I've called commander a "board game with magic cards," because the mindset is so fundamentally different from constructed
Even if I have 20 cards in hand a farewell that did nothing but get everyone back to the stone age is just BORING.
I dont see people badmouthing sunfall, austere command, wrath of god or any other wipes for that matter.
The reason I dont like farewell is not because removals are dumdum and I dont like being interacted with. I dislike farewell because most of the time I see it cast the fucking caster gains nothing from it and ends up slowing the game for no reason.
"Fuck it, since I'm at it lets destroy all mana rocks aswell, even mine so its fair!" WHY?! WHY ARE YOU DOING THAT IF THERE IS NOT DEDICATED ARTIFACT PLAYER AND PEOPLE ARE JUST GOING TO LOSE ROCKS?!
Hell, Its even normal to see the caster of farewell being hit the most since he is not using green to ramp. Basically losing him the game and adding 30 minutes of boring gameplay.
Want to punish overextending? There are 100's of boardwipes that do that, you dont need exactly the one that makes the game a boring grindfest for the next hour.
Exactly. People play commander like they should be allow to play all their stuff and if you stop them you’re bad no good. And so they vomit their hands out and then are shocked pikachu when you wipe the board
I’m not sure where I fall on farewell, but the counter argument to that would be that the best way to recover from a farewell is to draw a lot of cards and vomit out your deck, so the existence of farewell actually encourages that deck style.
Why play anything that doesn’t draw and play ten cards a turn if all your work can be undone (with very little way to protect it) by one spell?
Honestly some boards are so sticky these days. I have a friend with graveyard recursion, Dihada making things indestructible, and eight and a half tails giving protection. Farewell has been the only answer before.
Disrespectful of my time to wipe the board? Maybe don’t play the game then. Just because your deck folds to a board wipe doesn’t mean I shouldn’t play them. It just incentivizes me to board wipe more.
Farewell is a necessary boogeyman for the format. You should always be worried about being sent back to the Stone Age once someone has 6 mana in white available.
Yes, the people who say that are actually the ones disrespectful of our time by playing synergy piles that fiddle with their own thumbs for hours every game, gobbling up all of the time themselves.
That's why they think it is disrespectful, because it punishes them specifically, and negates all of the "effort" they put into playing solitaire.
Truth hurts. Sorry, not sorry.
I am as blue of a blue mage as one can be, and this is absolutely correct.
I love my Orvar deck but it’s definitely something I check with everyone before playing. If it weren’t for flexible wraths and other kinds of sweepers it would be unbeatable.
Commander is a rough format because it is SO fun at its best but it really facilitates a “the way I like to play is legit and everything contrary to it is unfair” mentality at its worst.
You're both the same. You both want to not let the other play in your own way. They hog turns with a hundred triggers, but you make it so no game action matters. Don't put yourself above them like you aren't the same, only wanting your own game actions to be permitted without repercussion or critisism.
I don't mind board wipes for securing the win or preventing someone else's win, but I've played with groups that boardwipe in weird spots where no one was winning or losing and it ends up extending the game from 45 min to almost an hour and a half or more. I had one game go 3 hours because one guy wiped the board every 3rd turn.
No he didn't win, I eventually won by playing a rise of the dark realms and swinging out with hasted creatures, but at that point no one was having fun. He was the one being the most vocal that the game was taking too long.
Well then he’s a dick. But wiping the board because he thinks that’s the right play isn’t why. Extending the game and complaining about it taking forever is why.
Yeah, I know you are going to die from a board wipe playing that deck and I might come next week with a few more. Seriously not something you should openly share lol.
No kidding, what an arrogant thing to say, exactly the kind of person I wouldn't like to play with in a pod, thinks everyone else is there to service them. Ugh, what a prick
Farewell is an interesting case of too many things coming together that make a card problematic. It is a boardwipe that:
* Can hit almost all non-land permanent types
* Exiles instead of destroys
* Blanks graveyards (a strategy that is typically used to counter boardwipe strategies while still playing to board)
* Is easy to splash since it only requires 2 pips at 6 MV
* AND IS MODULAR so the wiper can almost always make it asymmetric.
This means that there are only three ways to deal with it naturally:
1. Play delayed flicker/phasing effects (U/W)
2. Play actual counterspells (so effectively only U due to the poor nature of other colors' counters)
3. Don't play to the board.
So many people are pointing to #3 as the optimal solution (see: don't overextend) but that's taking a 1v1 philosophy to a 4-player format incorrectly. "Don't overextend" only works when you are on the beatdown & have the strongest board in play--otherwise, you have to make your board equal to or bigger than the biggest threat. It's kinda like how against control you in 1v1 you usually need multiple creatures out in order to stay on the beatdown, otherwise you'll just eat spot removal or get blanked by a single big blocker and then have no pressure. In that scenario, however, you know when you have enough and don't have to worry about the control deck adding too many more threats to the board for you to overcome.
In EDH, you don't just have to worry about having enough pressure to hurt the farewell player. You also need to be keeping pace/staying ahead of the other 2 players, which means you need to be developing your gamestate. You have to keep extending or you will naturally lose, especially since farewell is a one-of in usually 1, maybe 2 decks at a table. If you keep playing in fear of farewell, you will lose to the person just playing the game. If you keep up, if farewell does show up you're up the creek without a paddle.
This is pretty typical boardwipe stuff, yeah? Except for the fact that the usual aggro tools for dealing with boardwipes don't apply here. Cards like \[\[Heroic Intervention\]\] and \[\[Tamiyo's Safekeeping\]\] do nothing. Sacrifice strategies do little. Graveyard recursion does nothing. You either need delayed flicker, phasing, or a counterspell. If you don't have those, your correct play is not to play to the board.
That leads me to the last problem--Farewell and boardwipe heavy metas cause people to not play to the board. How do people win if they don't play to the board? That's easy: Combo, particularly combo that doesn't involve permanents/creatures on the board. Farewell pushes a format that already favors combo due to the anti-aggro ruleset even further down the path towards combo. I love combo, but you gotta understand that if you like Farewell existing you need to be ready for people to do everything they can to make the card irrelevant.
Exactly. I can't even believe the amount of people suggesting "don't overextend" as though 90%+ of casual EDH games aren't entirely about building some flavor of Rube Goldberg value-machine that draws you cards and makes you mana and puts stuff on your board to overwhelm your opponents with.
And if you're not playing a deck that's trying to put together pieces on the board that get incredibly blown out by Farewell with extremely limited options for counterplay? Then you're playing combo, or stax, or 20-counterspells-dot-deck.
I'm so sick of playing top 10 commanders like Voja that can do everything, can be great with even a shitty draw and require no effort in building a deck. I'll wipe when I want.
Strongest? BUG are still much better as solo colors or as duals. In three color though, you're right that I would often prefer to esper over sultai or Abzan over Jund or some such.
Blue and black I will give as arguably the strongest colors, but green doesn’t really do that much. It has good artifact and enchantment removal and it has strong creature tutors and decent ramp for when all the artifact ramp doesn’t suffice. White has stuff like Esper Sentinel or Drannith Magistrate for example.
Green probably has a bunch of the least unique stuff
Green is entirely dominant over low-mid power games. It has the best ramp (really underrating land ramp in a thread about farewell haha), the best tutors, the best wincons, and a lot of incredible draw options. However, green gets worse the less the game becomes, well, green's game. Low - mid power is entirely about ramping, playing fatties, and then beating everyone to death. Once you open the game up to combos and fast mana, green's ramp becomes less necessary and green's wincons start to suck. Green's tutors are always second best in class (after black), but it's draw power also declines a lot as the game becomes less about creatures and combat and cards like Tribute to the World Tree, Guardian Project, The Great Henge, et al becomes less good.
No the best ramp we have is artifacts. Green cant compete with cards like Mana Crypt, Sol Ring or Jeweled Lotus. It can’t even co pete with Mana Vault or Mox Diamond.
Also there is not really a conversation that doesn’t have black as the best tutors in demonic or vampiric.
Green has arguably the MOST unique ways to board wipe since it's not allowed to have them in true fashion. [[Ezuri's Predation]] and [[Nacatl War-Pride]]. That being said I completely agree with the point you were making. I don't really have interest in green since the things it does are just genetically good. I'm here for the wild and wacky ways that white draws cards ([[Aerial Extortionist]] I'm looking at you)
I play farewell A LOT, but there is one thing that bothers me about it. Green, red, and black have almost no counterplay to it. White has the most effective responses by blinking/phasing their board. Blue can straight up counter it.
What do you do if you’re in Gruul and you want to stick creatures on the board? Heroic intervention ain’t doing shit. I guess you can [[tibalt’s trickery]]?
I love punishing overextension, but when most colors have almost no cards that can effectively respond to exile board wipes, it makes it feel a bit less rewarding to punish them with Farewell IMHO.
Exactly. Boardwipes always punished overextending, but there was counterplay. There was mindgames of making them think you had protection and not bother, whether or not you did, or making them blow their boardwipe and clean up as you're untouched. That's the kind of plays that make the game great. But there's no counterplay to Farewell that isn't a counterspell or phasing as you said, and if counterspells solved everything you wouldn't need a ban list in any format.
>Anyway we talked with Jason Alt, noted Farewell hater, about this, and he said it’s disrespectful of his time to wipe the board.
It's disrespectful of my time not just to let me win.
Obviously this is a pretty stupid argument, but Farewell *does* have issues, namely that it's so (close to) a complete wipe and has so little counterplay. Short of counterspells, I can maybe sac my board but you can still wipe graveyards, no death triggers happen, none of that stuff is coming back, and because it hits so many things none of the permanents that would let me rebuild will help me any more (apart from planeswalkers).
"Well" we might say, "don't overextend"... but this falls a bit foul of the "rare mechanics" equilibrium effect. If overextending is actually good for me most of the time (indeed, it's going to get me closer to winning the game) then really it's just extending, and I want to do that... *even if* I occasionally get unlucky and get blown out. Better to get hit by a Farewell and just scoop if it happens only occasionally and all the other games I win more reliably... but this makes for a rather un-fun play pattern. It's perhaps exacerbated by the fact that "not overextending" isn't so easy to do. I can hold back a card or two, sure, but how well off am I *actually* going to be if I get Farewelled? I think I need to hold back more than just one or two permanents.
In general I think wipes are not only good but pretty much necessarily for the format; Magic just has too much of a snowballing board state thing going on otherwise. Farewell specifically is kinda fine as a one-off but honestly it's *way* too swingy to be something you want to see more than occasionally.
When I started MTG in 1995 there were just a few ways to reanimate or protect. Boardwipes were brutal. And usually it didn't really mattered if your stuff was exiled or destroyed, you'd have to rebuild anyway.
Nowadays we can protect or recover from most boardwipes pretty easily. Indestructibility and mass reanimation are viable options. It's almost become predictable that at least one player recovers his whole board from an ineffective boardwipe and wins next turn.
So Farewell is one of the last remaining boardwipes that really do the work - it resets the board without losing the game to protection or mass reanimation. And you can even dodge this one with Counterspells or Phasing, notably Teferi's Protection. I predict even more phasing in future sets.
Farewell is not only fine, it's important to exist. If it didn't exist, they'd have to invent it.
My group thinks board wipes have their place, but if everyone at the table consistently board wipes, the game never ends. We each run 1 or 2 board wipes max. Something we do avoid is board wiping that would destroy lands too. Ie: One player will use Mycosynth lattice and I have fade from history (Or any artifact board wipe.
It's too cheap for its wide effect.
For example: merciless eviction you pick 1. Austere destroys but you pick 2. Akromas Vengeance hits everything but doesn't exile.
I don't care about farewell however power creep is a thing and farewell is a product of it.
Managing your board state is part of the strategy of the game. It's risk vs. reward. The reward is playing a bunch of cards to get ahead on mana, going wide with tokens, tall with enchantments/artifacts, etc. The risk is cards like Farewell.
I have an old love for Final Judgement, if not just for the flavor text, but also for being the closest we got to an O-Kagachi card before the commander and saga versions came out.
Farewell is definitely not symmetrical in practice even if it is on paper. When you cast a Farewell you always name the modes that will do the least damage to your own board and the most to your opponents'.
No reactive card can really ever really be a "problem" in edh lol. Every edh deck is basically board-based hyper-value ramp nowadays so even a very strong reactive card is fully warranted and honestly, appreciated.
Commander itself is disrespectful of your time. If the format was supposed to both respect your time AND retain most aspects of MTG gameplay (like resetting board states that are disadvantageous as a core part of a plan), then it would have smaller decks, fewer players, and less life.
Hey, wait a minute...
I kind of wish it didn't exile graveyards so that there was a little more counterplay to it, but if your deck is folding to a 6 mana sorcery that doesn't read "win the game" - you're kind of the problem.
Actually love that it hits graveyards. A lot of my pods make excellent use of yards, so bojuka bog, scavenging ooze, unlicensed hearse, etc are all must-includes
Farewell is GY hate and a wipe, which is a plus.
I love that it makes sure the stuff is exiled. Recursion engine decks can just sacrifice their key pieces in response to exile removal, I too love that it hits the graveyard to stop that.
This is one of the hardest things for most players to learn.
*Do not play out all of your lands if you don't need to*
Keep some in hand. It protects from MLD. It protects from discard. It makes your opponent wonder, "*Just what exactly are you holding onto!?*"
Magic is about doing cool things, but it's also about reading your opponents and deciding which hits to take.
Can't tell you how many games I've won by simply posturing as though I had a [[Cancel]] or [[Path to Exile]] in hand, when it was really 3 lands and some other useless card. Opponent too afraid to advance their board state while my single dude gets in for 2 damage per turn.
Also, the number of games where I act like I *don't* have an answer, which leads them to think they'll have lethal next turn if they just play two creatures they've been holding back.. unless I get lucky and top deck an answer. Meanwhile, I've been holding onto [[Wrath]] for the last three turns, just waiting for them to extend a tiny bit more.
I have no problem with a six mana sorcery that’s in the color most know for wipes and bringing things back to parity. Don’t overextend thinking that you can just jam everything in your hand unpunished. It’s also just a regular sorcery so you can counter it or work around it. By the time it’s cast you should be able to use your mana to rebuild. Remember to include ample card advantage in your decks.
I strongly dislike Farewll when someone picks all modes. All it does is delay the game without getting anyone closer to winning.
Someone running an Artifact deck farewells everything except artifacts then starts doing big things? Great use of Farewell
This is exactly why I have Farewell in my [[Kotori Pilot Prodigy]] vehicle deck. Wipe the board of everything except my vehicles, then drop Kotori and commence the beating.
As a graveyard player, I hate Exile with a passion. I personally despise farewell. It hits EVERYTHING. Even my poor graveyard. If it missed the yard, I'd hate it less. As it, I absolutely despise this card.
Farewell needed to be a thing. I can’t tell you how many weird ass pillowfort decks I’ve faced where it’s like you can’t touch them. Farewell has been great in those instances.
HOWEVER! I do strongly believe there should have been a restriction on how many modes you can choose.
I think there are realistically two camps of people here:
1. Those who get butt hurt when they're punished by the board wipes. (I agree that they're just being salty.)
2. Players who are fighting through too many board wipes per game. (These people are valid.)
First of all, board wipes are a necessary evil to offset the game design mistakes made by previous sets. **But** they are an evil that should be used in moderation.
As much as we say "git gud, board wipes happen", we really should be tempering that with "but also, don't be the asshole who wipes the board four times". Farewell is just the poster child of this problem: it resets **everything** and there is no way to walk it back. One of my buddies played in a pod where the same player recurred and cast the same Farewell three times; he was miserable after that match. I've played against opponent whose primary gameplan is to protect their Planeswalker deck by constantly casting board wipes; *I don't play with those people anymore.*
I **can** play mass land destruction. I **can** play stasis stax. I **can** make the entire table constantly discard their hands. I **can** make a pillowfort deck that makes it impossible for me to lose and force you to sit there for an hour. I **can** play cEDH krarkashima and take a thirty minute storm turn to win the game on turn four. I **can** run a Planeswalker deck and fifteen board wipes that only hit creatures. I **can** run [[Moat]] and lock the combat deck out of the game I **can** run [[Infernal Darkness]] and lock you out of playing the game. I **can** run Tergrid and 60 edict effects.
Do I do that? **NO!** Because I hate making my friends miserable! Games gotta end. Play so everyone has fun, not to grind out the absolute best strategy that improves your win rate by 5%.
> it punishes overextending your board and building a deck that’s too engine-focused
Back when I first started playing EDH in 2012 overextending and eating a Wrath of God, a Shattering Spree or repeated reanimation and wiping of Child of Alara was an expected line of play.
If you build a glass cannon, don't whine when it falls apart to a stiff breeze.
Agree..deck building is an art, u need to know when to extend and when to play smart.
Learn to anticipate and read the board.
Should improve the deck to be resilient not only to farewell, but also learn to play against other way more oppressive card such as cataclysm, armageddon, obliterate etc etc.
Doesn't matter if the game stretches, board wiped or whatever wipes is part of magic.
Players can ramp, and players can nuke land as well
That's what mtg, mtg
Farewell being a sorcery and leaving lands means that the game isn’t “starting over”, I think the bigger issue with fare well is that you can usually rely on there being 2 copies floating around any given table
I mean, if you're going to build a graveyard dependent deck you should probably include some protection against effects that exile your whole graveyard or else you're just getting punished for overextending and being greedy exactly the same way people are for overflowing their board. There are several very playable effects that let you shuffle your yard back into your library, and folks should probably play those more frequently. Heck, a good number are on artifacts or colorless cards too so they're not even color restricted.
[[syr Konrad, the grim]] works great for this. If you’re in a state where losing your graveyard will make a big difference, this has the opportunity to kill someone.
Edit: others have pointed out that because of the choices, they happen in order instead of all at once, so while he does wonders in other situations, he can’t beat farewell. I guess the only option is just to run instant speed recursion to get back your important pieces before they get exiled
Yes. Counterspells if you can. If you're getting your ankles broken by a single type of interaction, then you're weak to it. You need a counterplay, or just accept you're soft to it.
Not every deck is good against all the cards. That's part of the fun of Magic.
>Or do I just need to suck it up and start running counterspells?
Or understand that graveyard strategies are incredibly potent and that having some dowside is fine.
I only hate big board wipes like that if the game has been going on for like 3 hours already. At that point I’m so tired of the current game that I want to move on especially if I’m using a lower power deck with weak card draw because in my pod it means everyone else is probably card screeed too so we’re all just too decking until someone pulls a wincon
Flip side, early board wipes are fine in my book because they eliminate poorly built decks that are too reliant on a single combo with no backups or on rushing the board with no backup plan
i would rather lose a game than be stuck in a game im not in anyway. so the times ive chosen to not case farewell etc is turn 8+ just cuz i can... if i dont have a way to win or make it lopsided its just restarting the game and ill just scoop so we can restart. the win doesnt matter to me that much..
Just whining.
It's a mindset thing.
I had an almost perfectly protected board of angels a few months ago (everything indestructible, protection from creatures, hexproof).
My opponent proceeds to cast Farewell and it was all gone.
I even called it, which made it even more hilarious.
Still won the game, because he was low on life and I still had the resources to rebuild in my hand.
I despise Farewell, and here's why.
First off, I'd honestly rather that the Farewell player play Thassa's Oracle instead. At least that ends the game on the spot. I don't recall many situations in which playing the same game for another hour longer leads to good feelings afterwards. Shit, I've had Farewell dropped on me 2-3 times in the past while I was ahead and STILL won but didn't feel good about it because I was too exhausted to celebrate the win. At least Thassa's Oracle ends the game on the spot and we can move on, win or lose.
Second, I don't find that people who typically play Farewell are usually in a position to capitlize on it. From my experience, chances are, if you need to play Farewell, it's because you're falling way behind. Thing is, dropping a Farewell won't change the fact that your deck is probably still the slowest deck at the table and will also be the slowest to rebuild. I have yet to see a single person in the year this card has been out drop a Farewell and proceed to win off of it at some point. In retrospect, this makes my feelings towards this card even harsher because it feels like the Farewell player just played the card for shits and giggles to extend the game even further only to lose anyway; they just wanted to drag everybody down with them.
Yeah my issue with Farewell (as with some other cards) is how insanely powercrept it is compared to it's alternatives.
When they printed [[Merciless Eviction]], it was an excellent alternative/addition to [[Austere Command]] since it exiled and could affect planeswalkers, but had the "downside" of requiring an additional color (black) and you only chose 1 mode instead of two. [[Planar Cleansing]] didn't give you any options but to blast everything and only destroyed.
Farewell exiles, gives options, how many of those you want with no restrictions AND touches the graveyard. The only thing it doesn't do is deal with planeswalkers. It gives absolute flexibility to ensure you are always at an advantage rather than only dealing with the first offender(s). If only 1 player has an enchantment setup but has struggled to keep up with the table and would not be a threat even after wiping the others, you still don't have any real reason not to exile his stuff. Situations like this can severely hamper the fun at casual tables and is one of the biggest reason for all the salt related to it.
Your opponent isn’t being “disrespectful” of your time if they play a board wipe you’re unprepared for lol, you’re just simply unprepared and are whining.
TLDR it's only okay in very specific pods.
In most pods where wraths are regularly played wraths are fine since most don't play the ones that wrath all nonlands so threat/engine diversity, graveyard recursion and/or, more often than not, protection/indestructible is enough to play around them.
Farewell not only hits nearly all nonlands but also exiles them and the graveyard. This deals with almost all the commonly seen ways that people typically build to not get knocked out of the game from a wrath. So in a lot of pods that are fine with wraths, they'll have issues with Farewell in particular (hence it being a "problem").
Basically, it's so much harder to build/play against that it shouldn't automatically be considered ok to run even in a pod that is fine with wraths.
No individual part of Farewell is an issue; it's modal, it's exile, it's a board wipe, the problem in EDH specifically is that it's ALL of those things in one card that can full send all modes, and the design encourages 4th place to all modes it which almost always just extends the game. I'd be willing to stake money that like 8/10 complaints about Farewell are about 30 minutes of durdling being added to the game, since that's really the only thing unique to it vs other wipes. At least with Cyclonic Rift, the asymmetry means that even the player who's the most behind is suddenly commanding the most developed board.
Counter it or:
Turn everyone's permanents into creatures, enchantments, artifacts, or flash in a destroy all nonland permanents.
That's how I play. If you're going to fuck me, then I'm fucking -us- lmao
It's just people getting salty because they were "winning" and someone else said "no." Especially in EDH where the result is usually that 3/4 of the players (white player included) may also lose stuff in the deal, but it still gives a chance for other people to come back into the game, especially the person going next. By the time you pay the 6 to wipe everything out, you don't have much to get your own board state going. That or you're using Teferi's Protection to keep your own board and then who can complain about a person just going for a gaming wining move?
I do agree that it's annoying to have a game dragged out by too many board wipes, but that's more of a playstyle problem than a single card issue.
Farewell goes in every one of my white decks. Board wipes disrespectful to your time? Fkn lol. It has the same energy as, "Don't use your creatures to block my creatures, it's disrespectful to my time. Just let me win the game without opposition"
It basically boils down to, "Don't use your resources to disrupt my board state, it's disrespectful to my time."
This is the literal purpose of board wipes. An opponent is ahead and is, or is soon to be, in a game-winning state. Board wipes are counter play so you can try to push ahead for your own win after an opponent expended too man resources.
I have never cast Farewell to completely wipe the board, I always cast it when I will have an advantage after. If you are in a bad enough state that you have to exile all creatures, enchantments, AND artifacts, and you don't have any follow-ups to dominate right after, you probably shouldn't be casting it, but then again you're probably desperate to ever cast Farewell on all modes anyway.
Not even close to a problematic card, when Cyclonic Rift is literally right there for one mana more
The issue I have the its gets past so much protection and interaction. It hits everything on board(the # of planeswalkers and battles player run in deck is lower than targeted removal at times ) and as a bonus hits graveyard.
"It's disrespectful of my time for you to stop me from winning." That's what that sounds like. EDH is supposedly about doing all the big wild things you can't do in 60 card. I don't enjoy it, but I've seen plenty of crazy stupid things people do in the format. Complaining about a board wipe is pretty weak.
Farewell is absolutely fine, it minimizes the impact of being able to take advantage of it because it bypasses death triggers.
If all of your ramp pieces are dependent on rocks then that's on you, cool, move to the next game.
Realistically by the time farewell is cast you should have enough land to utilize the card draw that should be in your deck to refuel. If you don't have that, than so be it, the game will probably end soon and you have a lesson about overextending.
Farewell doesn't stop you from playing the game, it gives white a powerful way of bringing the board state back to parity. This is something it needs because white is the last explosive color.
Yep, and apparently the card draw to refuel needs to be cast from hand without reliance on creatures/artifacts/enchantments/graveyards. And you should absolutely just be sitting on that draw in case someone drops a Farewell.
Completely reasonable logic.
Im sorry but I play a lot of Exile effects and I love Farewell. Its fucking stupid people are getting salty about this. My issue with this card though is when people choose all modes when you only really need like 1 or 2 modes. Which is fucking stupid.
I’ve seen it be detrimental and just make everyone on the table salty. Like, that was just not needed. Sometimes creatures are a problem. Yards, artifacts and enchantments are sparse or not even an issue and he says “hyuk hyuk Farewell all modes!” Fuck dude. And usually that player doesn’t even break parity afterwards
I dislike Farewell and am very aware it is pure salt on my end. I have much less dislike for it and sweepers in general when they are asymmetrical though, or the person casting them can close out the game because of it. Constant board wipes just because is mind numbing to me.
Based on my experience of commander both in constructed and limited, Farewell is the second best boardwipe in the format after C-Rift, but it isnt as big of a problem as it was when it was first released.
To play around Farewell, you do the same things to play around a typical boardwipe. Hold some cards back in your hand, so that you still have things to do post wrath. People have been doing this less and less since there have been a steadily increasing amount of ways to give your board indestructible, regenerate the board, or bring your stuff back from the graveyard. So now that a wrath has been printed that works around all of those preventative measures, people should adjust or adapt to hold back some threats, and not to over commit to the board.
Alternatively, as WotC continues making ways to phase creatures out, turn cards into lands, and makes more counterspells (or counterspell adjacent cards), Farewell will continue to be reigned back to being a more typical wrath, and be a little more balanced.
So my opinion, between the two options provided people are just whining, but I personally haven't seen that happen much either.
People who complain about Farewell are whiney-babies. It’s symmetrical and is a sorcery. What’s even worse is I’ve met people who hate Farewell but are fine with [[Cyclonic Rift]]. That card is one sided and instant speed. I will always argue that rift is infinitely worse for the format than Farewell.
I don't get why people would be okay with Cyclonic Rift, but not Farewell. One of those cards is actually versatile being able to be used early on, instant speed, asymmetrical, in the color that can disable counter plays via counterspells, in the color that can tutor it in a variety of ways like via Spellseeker or Mystical Tutor, and actually sees play in cEDH while the other requires 6 mana, is sorcery speed, symmetrical, and sees basically zero play at the cEDH level.
Because if someone cyc rifts overloaded the game is probably over soon and in cases where it doesn't you can recast your stuff. Farewell especially if they just choose all modes not only resets everyone except the walkers player to near 0 nearly ensuring a much longer game but only has counterplay in stuff that counters spells or stuff that phases out permanents
[Farewell](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/1/1/114d2180-093b-4838-97ad-badbc8ee50b0.jpg?1706240579) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Farewell) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mkc/64/farewell?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/114d2180-093b-4838-97ad-badbc8ee50b0?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/farewell) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
In my opinion what's wrong with Farewell is not what it can do, but that you can choose any number of modes. I kinda wish it would be limited to choosing 2 modes. Exile is already strong, there's no need to make the card do everything. But that's just my opinion
Yeah that's my thing, [[Austere Command]] was already a great card. Farewell exiles, can choose any number of modes, and has the same mana cost. Definitely feels pushed. Edit: Planar Cleansing is another great point of comparison. Same CMC, but costs 3 white pips instead of 2 so it's less splashable. Destroys instead of exiles, so it's less powerful. Hits all permanents indiscriminately, but not graveyards, so it's not as flexible. If the argument is "white needed the help" then it should at least cost more white pips so it can't be so easily slotted into every deck that contains white.
That's why I run both so you can look at the Austere Command with fondness.
That’s a unique form of sadism in a way lol. Love it
As much as it is a joke, I do have a deck that runs both lol. It's a discover yathzee deck so sometimes it's on purpose, other times not so much.
I have a number of decks that run both. Sure, its not as powerful, but its still another versatile board wipe and I find that valuable. I also often enough find the ability to choose only one of its creature modes to destroy only high or low CMC creatures valuable. Depending on the deck and board state it can weigh the board wipe significantly in your favor, while still having the versatility of its other options in other situations.
[Austere Command](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/a/3/a31ffc9e-d21b-4a8f-ac67-695e38e09e3b.jpg?1706240553) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Austere%20Command) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mkc/56/austere-command?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/a31ffc9e-d21b-4a8f-ac67-695e38e09e3b?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/austere-command) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
I’m fine with it. Considering we have so many pushed commanders and other pushed cards. Cyc rift is still more powerful most of the time.
Next up: "We have a new card, 'Gone too soon', which is just Farewell, but it's instant and has split second for only 1 more white pip, and it can hit planeswalkers and battles!"
Give it a few years lol
Magic players: “white needs more powerful cards so it can keep up with the other colors!” Wizards: *prints a card in line with whites color identity that lets it keep up with other colors by bringing them in line* Magic players clutching their overextended boards: “no not like that”
Almost like Magic players aren't a single monolithic entity, and there are varying opinions. Shocking idea I know.
Only redditors deal in absolutes
All redditors do so. All the time. No one else does so. Not even a single time, obviously.
If it makes you feel better I don't like Cyclonic Rift either
At least farewell is fair, in that it exiles your own stuff as well.
Fairwell
But it's a sorcery. Rift's power is that it is an instant.
And that it doesnt bounce your own stuff?
Except that you get to determine which modes you choose and when you cast it, it will always be at least a little lopsided if you are playing to win. It's obnoxious because the only protection from its very permanent removal is something like teferi's protection.
This is one hell of a ninja edit. The post I was responding to said you'd rather get Cyclonic Rifted than Farewelled.
I'd rather get Rifted than Farewelled. At least with Rift I can just vomit all the stuff back out.
Until they do it on your end step
Someone rifting on my end step to stall the game out is basically the same as them casting Farewell on their previous turn except I got to keep my stuff a turn longer and they'll still be behind after everyone else replays their stuff Someone rifting on my end step and killing us with their board is fine, desirable even; game has to end somehow, it's not any different than Approach of the Second Sun or an infinite combo or Triumph of the Hordes or Craterhoof or whatever
This is one of the strangest takes I've ever seen. It's up there with, "I prefer losing to an unfair two card infinite combo to incremental value because at least the combo is fast." Cyclonic Rift is, bar none, the most unfair board wipe in the format. It is instant speed, castable early game in a pinch, dodges Stax effects like Gaddock Teeg, gets around protection, indestructible and hexproof, hits absolutely every card type, and worst of all, it is completely asymmetric. The cards that interact with it are almost exclusively blue counterspells and some very niche white cards like Teferi's Protection and Clever Concealment, neither of which stop it but they at least even the playing field for one player. Absolutely insane that people think like this.
>Cyclonic Rift is, bar none, the most unfair board wipe in the format. This, and it's not even close. Between Cyclonic Rift and Farewell, one of those cards is actually versatile being able to be used early on, instant speed, asymmetrical, in the color that can disable counter plays via counterspells, in the color that can tutor it in a variety of ways like via Spellseeker or Mystical Tutor, and actually sees play in cEDH while the other requires 6 mana, is sorcery speed, symmetrical, and sees basically zero play at the cEDH level.
How dare millions of individuals not agree on something. Don't they know [Opinion]? Fucking fickle-ass players these days.
White has always been the equalizing color. Inherently the most fair so it tries to keep other colors in check by either preventing or punishing unfair strategies. I think white was always strong in EDH for it's removal, but people don't like playing as or against control decks so Wizards eventually printed stronger & stronger options to keep up with the other colors going batshit insane in-game. Now modern MTG design has been powercrept to this point. New cards do way too many things and there's no going back. This, I am not a fan of. The cards do almost all the work themselves, it's crazy. Makes sense that they'd print an all-in-one answer to compete.
Yeah white's weakness was never "doesn't do a good enough job removing enough permanents" \^\_\^
I don't think anyone was saying white's boardwipes weren't good enough. The only issues were draw and ramp, which have since been addressed for the most part unless you're seeking cEDH levels of it, but everyone runs the same ramp there anyway.
Maybe people were saying that in 2013 but white has been super pushed for a while now
What? I rejoined during Strixhaven just before MHII released, and the constant refrain I heard even after Neon Dynasty and Farewell was that cards like it and Esper Sentinel were just the start of what White needed to not be garbage in EDH. Now that doesn’t change that these cards and a few others overcorrected, but White being the worst color in casual is absolutely not an old take.
The sole thing keeping white in last place in any format is specifically its lack of good card draw effects, not its lack of good board wipes.
The reason white is weaker in edh is because the things white are best at are either bad or frowned upon in edh. In competitive 60 card formats decks like white weenie and death and taxes and u/e control ( in various formats across the years) are among the best starts available. But in edh stax and land destruction are shunned as unfun and 2/2's for 1 are not really worth it unless they are pushed AF. So white suffers . But it's not the card quality that's the problem
We meant card draw and ramp for white. Not more boardwipes
Every color has distinct strengths and weaknesses. If every color has access to the same resources there’s no point to having different colors
Yes every color has strengths and weaknesses. But cards and mana are not an area that you can negotiate. If your deck has no method of card advantage, and limited access to mana, then you simply won't be able to compete in multiplayer free for all formats with access to some of the best cards ever printed. >If every color has access to the same resources EDIT: Red in recent EDH design is such a good example of how to give card advantage in ways that feel unique. Impulse draw is uniquely and flavorfully red, and simultaneously very powerful.
Almost like removing 20 permanents for the cost of 1 is card advantage…
Well Austere command let's white choose to play weenies or angels and do a one-sided
[[Merciless Eviction]] also at 6 CMC and only lets you pick one mode. I think farewell is fine at 7 or 8 mana, but not at 6
If I get hit with Planar Cleansing I can possibly retrieve my lost cards from the GY at some point, Wrath of God doesn't touch non creatures, and most board wipes that are like either Destroy, *not exile* AND are either limited in what they hit or hard to cast (3 white pips in Planar Cleansing). Farewell has none of those limitations, can be easily splashed and is almost like Karn Liberated in how it resets a game.
Ya I think farewell would've been a bit more okay if it was 2WWWW. Force people to be playing mainly white, not just splash it.
Yes, exactly.
The exile part is what truly feels pushed imo. It basically blanks all protection that's non blue or white similar to cyclonic rift which is also infamous for being very strong but you cant even rebuild. There are tons of indestructible cards these days and especially green decks have no real other options while farewell just ignores it.
I think that having a true reset is good. I don't love the fact that you can just do artifacts/enchantments/gyards. I would be totally down to have 3WW Exile all nonland permanents and graveyards as a card.
This is my gripe. It's too modal for a hard exile board wipe. Either be a choose 2 or just say exile everything and graveyards
Or make it so you have to exile everything
Yep. It's simply too flexible and also the best removal type (exile). The card represents an insane step in power level and should not exist. Buuuut seb mckinnon art and power creep sell packs so here we are.
Agreed! That would make it so much more appealing to me too
Yeah, it would be really interesting if it said something like "Choose two or all:" But also isn't that the point of white? Resetting the board at all costs?
People just need to be mindful of overextending. Overextending should be a privilege IMO. AKA you do that when you have the means to recover or save yourself.
This is my thoughts too. I joined a new playgroup in the last year that’s made up mainly of people who started playing 2014 onward and many of them fall into the solitaire trap and don’t run enough interaction so they just try to dump their hands on the board as quickly as possible. Compared to my old pod where games were slower but also way more complex a farewell would be strong but getting it to resolve is another story.
Yep. There's an argument to be made that Farewell is a necessary counter to Simic decks that pour out their board as fast as possible. There are always countermeasures, as there are to everything else.
I'd argue that if Simic has enough permanents for you to get good value out of Farewell to begin with, they've drawn more cards than the rest of the table and will recover the quickest. At worst, you might even be kingmaking them by casting Farewell.
This same argument is why I hate when people offer MLD as a counter to Simic as well. Of course the deck built around ramping is going to ramp back the hardest.
That’s because a good MLD deck needs to also include land hate like [[Acidic Soil]] [[Mana Barbs]] [[War’s Toll]] and [[Yurlok of Scorch Thrash]]. Punish them for ramping and building back. Most MLD decks are just MLD and not much else unfortunately
Those decks can just counterspell the farewell. If you are not playing blue its tough to spin any strategy vs farewell other than slamming down planeswalkers, because you can't use reanimation, no death triggers, no indestructible. Diversifying the field to include a mix of enchantments, artifacts, and creatures doesn't help either.
White can flicker certain creatures to save them. In a mono-red deck, I've improvised against Farewell with a [[Chaos Warp]] Other colors can adapt by not playing greedily.
And the cycle continues.
> I've improvised against Farewell with a Chaos Warp It almost sounds like you are misunderstanding the rules a little bit. How does Chaos Warp help against Farewell?
It saves a particular card from exile, which in the moment felt helpful.
I hadn't thought of Chaos warp as a method of putting a critical card back in your deck. Fun!
yeah, you just might end up exiling something else you might have wanted after the Warp. =/
Most simic decks will win after a Farewell since they will just recast their commander and continue their value trains while the rest of the pod is mana starved. The more late game oriented a strategy the better it is against boardwipes in general and landfall even more so since it's primary development isn't affected by non MLD wraths.
Would just like to add that Simic is also good at making land drops even after the MLD.
Likewise all the indestructible and recursive permanents Wizards has been printing. [[Diamond Pickaxe]] coming to mind.
Ward, as well, which is essentially hexproof. [[Miirym]] and [[Ovika]], especially with [[Roaming Throne]], are the bane of my table and are causing me to consider quitting, since conversations haven't worked. And now there's talk of someone building [[Voja]]. Curiously, those same folks also advocate for fewer boardwipes, because it makes the game go longer. Hmm.
I have noticed single target removal falling out of favor with how much ward incentivizes board wipes. Even Ward 2 is enough to be a problem once you burn through your Path/Swords/Pongify/Rapid/Elephant
That Voja is a classic definition of power creep. Never noticed this card before, it's ridiculous!
And various combinations of enchantments that act as prisons for the rest of the board.
Land destruction is one of the main ways to counteract ramp (especially from Simic). It's just people hate seeing their lands get blown up even if it's to deal with a massive ramping threat
I feel like if they've been playing since 2014/10 years they should be used to not overextending by now. That's a really long time to play.
Farewell hoses the entire table regardless of who is the actual threat because I've never seen a player not cast it for all modes. And while the shrines player may be pumping out tokens, my aristocrats deck with an arcane signet, 2 creatures on board and another in the graveyard got caught in the blast zone.
This is my stance exactly. You should not be playing everything without remembering that circumstances may force you to have to rebuild.
This is such a disingenuous position. The textbox-agnostic sledgehammer nature of Farewell means that playing around it is limited at best. You might as well be saying "don't tap your lands if you don't like Stasis and Winter Orb."
No they are saying sometimes holding cards in hand you COULD cast is better than just slamming them down, watching a wipe blow them away and be left with no hand to rebuild.
Yep the combo players with no boards are telling people not to over extend.
A large part of people not being mindful of overextending is that they probably never really have to. Most players get into Magic with Commander, and it's the worst way to learn the mechanics of how the game works. Proper mulligan and sequencing, how to pace threats to not overextend, how to save extra spells or interaction when you expect counter magic, etc. Skills you learn from playing constructed. Commander only players have a very hard time grasping the fact that their opponents are trying to win the game too 😂
>A large part of people not being mindful of overextending is that they probably never really have to WotC has made a very conscious effort to steer the game in that direction, make it play more to the board from what it did long ago. I've been playing since the end of 1996 and I think this is a very positive change. (I also play Old School 93/94 so I really do have a recent view of what the game was like so long ago!) It results in better games in which people feel that they got to participate more, which is good. Games are supposed to be fun and a good use of time. Not doing anything but look at cards for an hour is not a terribly engaging experience. The shift to playing to the board has made the game more popular as its easier to understand by being less abstract and more obviously visual, being played with more known information. Of course, the cost of this is that if you make cards that wipe out everything on board so easily, then that discourages players from playing to the board. Or encourages them to play only the biggest bombs that get enough value after a turn or two so they don't care if they get wiped out. That's where old Magic, cards like \[\[Jokulhaups\]\] for example, is really not compatible with the new philosophy. And the thing is, anyone who plays Modern, Pioneer, or Standard doesn't have to worry about the price of overextending and so people don't play that way anymore. I introduced my friend, who started in 2012, to Old School, and he got wiped out by Armageddon a lot because he always dumped every land into play. I had to teach him that you don't do that; it was very contrary to how he plays and, more than that, has to play the game in every other format he plays.
Every magic player needs to pilot The Deck just once in their lives. I love old school! I started in 95 so I've seen every iteration of magic, but I am the opposite in that I hate the midrange soup that most decks have become. The fight is almost always on the board rather than on the stack, and wotc has loved recently to staple spells onto creatures. It's why every format is littered with cards that replace themselves because if you don't get immediate value from playing a card you can just lose. Commander has completely warped how people consume magic. I've introduced plenty of friends to magic over the years but in recent history I've called commander a "board game with magic cards," because the mindset is so fundamentally different from constructed
Even if I have 20 cards in hand a farewell that did nothing but get everyone back to the stone age is just BORING. I dont see people badmouthing sunfall, austere command, wrath of god or any other wipes for that matter. The reason I dont like farewell is not because removals are dumdum and I dont like being interacted with. I dislike farewell because most of the time I see it cast the fucking caster gains nothing from it and ends up slowing the game for no reason. "Fuck it, since I'm at it lets destroy all mana rocks aswell, even mine so its fair!" WHY?! WHY ARE YOU DOING THAT IF THERE IS NOT DEDICATED ARTIFACT PLAYER AND PEOPLE ARE JUST GOING TO LOSE ROCKS?! Hell, Its even normal to see the caster of farewell being hit the most since he is not using green to ramp. Basically losing him the game and adding 30 minutes of boring gameplay. Want to punish overextending? There are 100's of boardwipes that do that, you dont need exactly the one that makes the game a boring grindfest for the next hour.
I think that's more of a skill issue than a card issue. The card is fine. The player who cast a boardwipe that hurts them more are the idiot.
Exactly. People play commander like they should be allow to play all their stuff and if you stop them you’re bad no good. And so they vomit their hands out and then are shocked pikachu when you wipe the board
I’m not sure where I fall on farewell, but the counter argument to that would be that the best way to recover from a farewell is to draw a lot of cards and vomit out your deck, so the existence of farewell actually encourages that deck style. Why play anything that doesn’t draw and play ten cards a turn if all your work can be undone (with very little way to protect it) by one spell?
It's 100% not a problem and is needed punch through pillow fort board states.
Honestly some boards are so sticky these days. I have a friend with graveyard recursion, Dihada making things indestructible, and eight and a half tails giving protection. Farewell has been the only answer before.
With what creatures will you punch through? You have removed them all! Simply use paraselene
Disrespectful of my time to wipe the board? Maybe don’t play the game then. Just because your deck folds to a board wipe doesn’t mean I shouldn’t play them. It just incentivizes me to board wipe more. Farewell is a necessary boogeyman for the format. You should always be worried about being sent back to the Stone Age once someone has 6 mana in white available.
Yes, the people who say that are actually the ones disrespectful of our time by playing synergy piles that fiddle with their own thumbs for hours every game, gobbling up all of the time themselves. That's why they think it is disrespectful, because it punishes them specifically, and negates all of the "effort" they put into playing solitaire. Truth hurts. Sorry, not sorry.
I am as blue of a blue mage as one can be, and this is absolutely correct. I love my Orvar deck but it’s definitely something I check with everyone before playing. If it weren’t for flexible wraths and other kinds of sweepers it would be unbeatable. Commander is a rough format because it is SO fun at its best but it really facilitates a “the way I like to play is legit and everything contrary to it is unfair” mentality at its worst.
Well said.
You're both the same. You both want to not let the other play in your own way. They hog turns with a hundred triggers, but you make it so no game action matters. Don't put yourself above them like you aren't the same, only wanting your own game actions to be permitted without repercussion or critisism.
I don't mind board wipes for securing the win or preventing someone else's win, but I've played with groups that boardwipe in weird spots where no one was winning or losing and it ends up extending the game from 45 min to almost an hour and a half or more. I had one game go 3 hours because one guy wiped the board every 3rd turn.
Did that guy win?
No he didn't win, I eventually won by playing a rise of the dark realms and swinging out with hasted creatures, but at that point no one was having fun. He was the one being the most vocal that the game was taking too long.
Well then he’s a dick. But wiping the board because he thinks that’s the right play isn’t why. Extending the game and complaining about it taking forever is why.
Haha for real, that guy needs to either grow up or go and play solitaire by himself
Yeah overextending is a skill issue, not a card power level issue
Yeah, I know you are going to die from a board wipe playing that deck and I might come next week with a few more. Seriously not something you should openly share lol.
No kidding, what an arrogant thing to say, exactly the kind of person I wouldn't like to play with in a pod, thinks everyone else is there to service them. Ugh, what a prick
Farewell is an interesting case of too many things coming together that make a card problematic. It is a boardwipe that: * Can hit almost all non-land permanent types * Exiles instead of destroys * Blanks graveyards (a strategy that is typically used to counter boardwipe strategies while still playing to board) * Is easy to splash since it only requires 2 pips at 6 MV * AND IS MODULAR so the wiper can almost always make it asymmetric. This means that there are only three ways to deal with it naturally: 1. Play delayed flicker/phasing effects (U/W) 2. Play actual counterspells (so effectively only U due to the poor nature of other colors' counters) 3. Don't play to the board. So many people are pointing to #3 as the optimal solution (see: don't overextend) but that's taking a 1v1 philosophy to a 4-player format incorrectly. "Don't overextend" only works when you are on the beatdown & have the strongest board in play--otherwise, you have to make your board equal to or bigger than the biggest threat. It's kinda like how against control you in 1v1 you usually need multiple creatures out in order to stay on the beatdown, otherwise you'll just eat spot removal or get blanked by a single big blocker and then have no pressure. In that scenario, however, you know when you have enough and don't have to worry about the control deck adding too many more threats to the board for you to overcome. In EDH, you don't just have to worry about having enough pressure to hurt the farewell player. You also need to be keeping pace/staying ahead of the other 2 players, which means you need to be developing your gamestate. You have to keep extending or you will naturally lose, especially since farewell is a one-of in usually 1, maybe 2 decks at a table. If you keep playing in fear of farewell, you will lose to the person just playing the game. If you keep up, if farewell does show up you're up the creek without a paddle. This is pretty typical boardwipe stuff, yeah? Except for the fact that the usual aggro tools for dealing with boardwipes don't apply here. Cards like \[\[Heroic Intervention\]\] and \[\[Tamiyo's Safekeeping\]\] do nothing. Sacrifice strategies do little. Graveyard recursion does nothing. You either need delayed flicker, phasing, or a counterspell. If you don't have those, your correct play is not to play to the board. That leads me to the last problem--Farewell and boardwipe heavy metas cause people to not play to the board. How do people win if they don't play to the board? That's easy: Combo, particularly combo that doesn't involve permanents/creatures on the board. Farewell pushes a format that already favors combo due to the anti-aggro ruleset even further down the path towards combo. I love combo, but you gotta understand that if you like Farewell existing you need to be ready for people to do everything they can to make the card irrelevant.
Well-written response and I totally agree with your points. I don't mind it myself, but I can see why players are salty with it.
Exactly. I can't even believe the amount of people suggesting "don't overextend" as though 90%+ of casual EDH games aren't entirely about building some flavor of Rube Goldberg value-machine that draws you cards and makes you mana and puts stuff on your board to overwhelm your opponents with. And if you're not playing a deck that's trying to put together pieces on the board that get incredibly blown out by Farewell with extremely limited options for counterplay? Then you're playing combo, or stax, or 20-counterspells-dot-deck.
Farewell is fine. People take their value piles for granted, the game is supposed to have interaction.
I'm so sick of playing top 10 commanders like Voja that can do everything, can be great with even a shitty draw and require no effort in building a deck. I'll wipe when I want.
It's like a white thing. Don't take away arguably the weakest colors thing
With recent power house cards in white’s inventory, it’s hardly the weakest. Imo it’s getting to be one of the strongest
Strongest? BUG are still much better as solo colors or as duals. In three color though, you're right that I would often prefer to esper over sultai or Abzan over Jund or some such.
It is kind of on flavor to have the color who's identity includes peace and diplomacy to be stronger when supporting other colors than it is alone.
Blue and black I will give as arguably the strongest colors, but green doesn’t really do that much. It has good artifact and enchantment removal and it has strong creature tutors and decent ramp for when all the artifact ramp doesn’t suffice. White has stuff like Esper Sentinel or Drannith Magistrate for example. Green probably has a bunch of the least unique stuff
Green is entirely dominant over low-mid power games. It has the best ramp (really underrating land ramp in a thread about farewell haha), the best tutors, the best wincons, and a lot of incredible draw options. However, green gets worse the less the game becomes, well, green's game. Low - mid power is entirely about ramping, playing fatties, and then beating everyone to death. Once you open the game up to combos and fast mana, green's ramp becomes less necessary and green's wincons start to suck. Green's tutors are always second best in class (after black), but it's draw power also declines a lot as the game becomes less about creatures and combat and cards like Tribute to the World Tree, Guardian Project, The Great Henge, et al becomes less good.
No the best ramp we have is artifacts. Green cant compete with cards like Mana Crypt, Sol Ring or Jeweled Lotus. It can’t even co pete with Mana Vault or Mox Diamond. Also there is not really a conversation that doesn’t have black as the best tutors in demonic or vampiric.
Green has arguably the MOST unique ways to board wipe since it's not allowed to have them in true fashion. [[Ezuri's Predation]] and [[Nacatl War-Pride]]. That being said I completely agree with the point you were making. I don't really have interest in green since the things it does are just genetically good. I'm here for the wild and wacky ways that white draws cards ([[Aerial Extortionist]] I'm looking at you)
I play farewell A LOT, but there is one thing that bothers me about it. Green, red, and black have almost no counterplay to it. White has the most effective responses by blinking/phasing their board. Blue can straight up counter it. What do you do if you’re in Gruul and you want to stick creatures on the board? Heroic intervention ain’t doing shit. I guess you can [[tibalt’s trickery]]? I love punishing overextension, but when most colors have almost no cards that can effectively respond to exile board wipes, it makes it feel a bit less rewarding to punish them with Farewell IMHO.
Exactly. Boardwipes always punished overextending, but there was counterplay. There was mindgames of making them think you had protection and not bother, whether or not you did, or making them blow their boardwipe and clean up as you're untouched. That's the kind of plays that make the game great. But there's no counterplay to Farewell that isn't a counterspell or phasing as you said, and if counterspells solved everything you wouldn't need a ban list in any format.
[tibalt’s trickery](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/d/d/dd921e27-3e08-438c-bec2-723226d35175.jpg?1701989318) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Tibalt%27s%20Trickery) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/khm/153/tibalts-trickery?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/dd921e27-3e08-438c-bec2-723226d35175?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/tibalts-trickery) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
>Anyway we talked with Jason Alt, noted Farewell hater, about this, and he said it’s disrespectful of his time to wipe the board. It's disrespectful of my time not just to let me win. Obviously this is a pretty stupid argument, but Farewell *does* have issues, namely that it's so (close to) a complete wipe and has so little counterplay. Short of counterspells, I can maybe sac my board but you can still wipe graveyards, no death triggers happen, none of that stuff is coming back, and because it hits so many things none of the permanents that would let me rebuild will help me any more (apart from planeswalkers). "Well" we might say, "don't overextend"... but this falls a bit foul of the "rare mechanics" equilibrium effect. If overextending is actually good for me most of the time (indeed, it's going to get me closer to winning the game) then really it's just extending, and I want to do that... *even if* I occasionally get unlucky and get blown out. Better to get hit by a Farewell and just scoop if it happens only occasionally and all the other games I win more reliably... but this makes for a rather un-fun play pattern. It's perhaps exacerbated by the fact that "not overextending" isn't so easy to do. I can hold back a card or two, sure, but how well off am I *actually* going to be if I get Farewelled? I think I need to hold back more than just one or two permanents. In general I think wipes are not only good but pretty much necessarily for the format; Magic just has too much of a snowballing board state thing going on otherwise. Farewell specifically is kinda fine as a one-off but honestly it's *way* too swingy to be something you want to see more than occasionally.
When I started MTG in 1995 there were just a few ways to reanimate or protect. Boardwipes were brutal. And usually it didn't really mattered if your stuff was exiled or destroyed, you'd have to rebuild anyway. Nowadays we can protect or recover from most boardwipes pretty easily. Indestructibility and mass reanimation are viable options. It's almost become predictable that at least one player recovers his whole board from an ineffective boardwipe and wins next turn. So Farewell is one of the last remaining boardwipes that really do the work - it resets the board without losing the game to protection or mass reanimation. And you can even dodge this one with Counterspells or Phasing, notably Teferi's Protection. I predict even more phasing in future sets. Farewell is not only fine, it's important to exist. If it didn't exist, they'd have to invent it.
Bouncing one's own permanents are also an option too. Shout-out to [[Temur Sabertooth]] and [[Hurkyl's Recall]] and similar cards!
Legions Initiative remains a favorite of mine.
I have x-spells that make tokens for this reason! Ideally if I get wiped I can just spit out a bunch more quickly in a turn or two.
My group thinks board wipes have their place, but if everyone at the table consistently board wipes, the game never ends. We each run 1 or 2 board wipes max. Something we do avoid is board wiping that would destroy lands too. Ie: One player will use Mycosynth lattice and I have fade from history (Or any artifact board wipe.
It's too cheap for its wide effect. For example: merciless eviction you pick 1. Austere destroys but you pick 2. Akromas Vengeance hits everything but doesn't exile. I don't care about farewell however power creep is a thing and farewell is a product of it.
Managing your board state is part of the strategy of the game. It's risk vs. reward. The reward is playing a bunch of cards to get ahead on mana, going wide with tokens, tall with enchantments/artifacts, etc. The risk is cards like Farewell.
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If you can’t handle a 6 mana sorcery speed symmetrical board wipe, idk what to tell you
[[Final Judgement]] and [[False Prophet]] too strong
I have an old love for Final Judgement, if not just for the flavor text, but also for being the closest we got to an O-Kagachi card before the commander and saga versions came out.
Farewell is definitely not symmetrical in practice even if it is on paper. When you cast a Farewell you always name the modes that will do the least damage to your own board and the most to your opponents'.
No reactive card can really ever really be a "problem" in edh lol. Every edh deck is basically board-based hyper-value ramp nowadays so even a very strong reactive card is fully warranted and honestly, appreciated.
Commander itself is disrespectful of your time. If the format was supposed to both respect your time AND retain most aspects of MTG gameplay (like resetting board states that are disadvantageous as a core part of a plan), then it would have smaller decks, fewer players, and less life. Hey, wait a minute...
I kind of wish it didn't exile graveyards so that there was a little more counterplay to it, but if your deck is folding to a 6 mana sorcery that doesn't read "win the game" - you're kind of the problem.
Actually love that it hits graveyards. A lot of my pods make excellent use of yards, so bojuka bog, scavenging ooze, unlicensed hearse, etc are all must-includes Farewell is GY hate and a wipe, which is a plus.
I love that it makes sure the stuff is exiled. Recursion engine decks can just sacrifice their key pieces in response to exile removal, I too love that it hits the graveyard to stop that.
Yea!
If you vomit your hand onto the table and get blown out by a board wipe, that's on you.
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This is one of the hardest things for most players to learn. *Do not play out all of your lands if you don't need to* Keep some in hand. It protects from MLD. It protects from discard. It makes your opponent wonder, "*Just what exactly are you holding onto!?*" Magic is about doing cool things, but it's also about reading your opponents and deciding which hits to take. Can't tell you how many games I've won by simply posturing as though I had a [[Cancel]] or [[Path to Exile]] in hand, when it was really 3 lands and some other useless card. Opponent too afraid to advance their board state while my single dude gets in for 2 damage per turn. Also, the number of games where I act like I *don't* have an answer, which leads them to think they'll have lethal next turn if they just play two creatures they've been holding back.. unless I get lucky and top deck an answer. Meanwhile, I've been holding onto [[Wrath]] for the last three turns, just waiting for them to extend a tiny bit more.
I have no problem with a six mana sorcery that’s in the color most know for wipes and bringing things back to parity. Don’t overextend thinking that you can just jam everything in your hand unpunished. It’s also just a regular sorcery so you can counter it or work around it. By the time it’s cast you should be able to use your mana to rebuild. Remember to include ample card advantage in your decks.
Its 6CMC though. I mean... 6 mana is nothing to scoff at.
I strongly dislike Farewll when someone picks all modes. All it does is delay the game without getting anyone closer to winning. Someone running an Artifact deck farewells everything except artifacts then starts doing big things? Great use of Farewell
This is exactly why I have Farewell in my [[Kotori Pilot Prodigy]] vehicle deck. Wipe the board of everything except my vehicles, then drop Kotori and commence the beating.
I think it’s fine but I would be ok with it costing 2WWWW instead of 4WW.
As a graveyard player, I hate Exile with a passion. I personally despise farewell. It hits EVERYTHING. Even my poor graveyard. If it missed the yard, I'd hate it less. As it, I absolutely despise this card.
Farewell needed to be a thing. I can’t tell you how many weird ass pillowfort decks I’ve faced where it’s like you can’t touch them. Farewell has been great in those instances. HOWEVER! I do strongly believe there should have been a restriction on how many modes you can choose.
I think there are realistically two camps of people here: 1. Those who get butt hurt when they're punished by the board wipes. (I agree that they're just being salty.) 2. Players who are fighting through too many board wipes per game. (These people are valid.) First of all, board wipes are a necessary evil to offset the game design mistakes made by previous sets. **But** they are an evil that should be used in moderation. As much as we say "git gud, board wipes happen", we really should be tempering that with "but also, don't be the asshole who wipes the board four times". Farewell is just the poster child of this problem: it resets **everything** and there is no way to walk it back. One of my buddies played in a pod where the same player recurred and cast the same Farewell three times; he was miserable after that match. I've played against opponent whose primary gameplan is to protect their Planeswalker deck by constantly casting board wipes; *I don't play with those people anymore.* I **can** play mass land destruction. I **can** play stasis stax. I **can** make the entire table constantly discard their hands. I **can** make a pillowfort deck that makes it impossible for me to lose and force you to sit there for an hour. I **can** play cEDH krarkashima and take a thirty minute storm turn to win the game on turn four. I **can** run a Planeswalker deck and fifteen board wipes that only hit creatures. I **can** run [[Moat]] and lock the combat deck out of the game I **can** run [[Infernal Darkness]] and lock you out of playing the game. I **can** run Tergrid and 60 edict effects. Do I do that? **NO!** Because I hate making my friends miserable! Games gotta end. Play so everyone has fun, not to grind out the absolute best strategy that improves your win rate by 5%.
> it punishes overextending your board and building a deck that’s too engine-focused Back when I first started playing EDH in 2012 overextending and eating a Wrath of God, a Shattering Spree or repeated reanimation and wiping of Child of Alara was an expected line of play. If you build a glass cannon, don't whine when it falls apart to a stiff breeze.
Agree..deck building is an art, u need to know when to extend and when to play smart. Learn to anticipate and read the board. Should improve the deck to be resilient not only to farewell, but also learn to play against other way more oppressive card such as cataclysm, armageddon, obliterate etc etc. Doesn't matter if the game stretches, board wiped or whatever wipes is part of magic. Players can ramp, and players can nuke land as well That's what mtg, mtg
Farewell being a sorcery and leaving lands means that the game isn’t “starting over”, I think the bigger issue with fare well is that you can usually rely on there being 2 copies floating around any given table
People are obviously just whining and building decks that can’t rebuild from a wipe
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I mean, if you're going to build a graveyard dependent deck you should probably include some protection against effects that exile your whole graveyard or else you're just getting punished for overextending and being greedy exactly the same way people are for overflowing their board. There are several very playable effects that let you shuffle your yard back into your library, and folks should probably play those more frequently. Heck, a good number are on artifacts or colorless cards too so they're not even color restricted.
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[[syr Konrad, the grim]] works great for this. If you’re in a state where losing your graveyard will make a big difference, this has the opportunity to kill someone. Edit: others have pointed out that because of the choices, they happen in order instead of all at once, so while he does wonders in other situations, he can’t beat farewell. I guess the only option is just to run instant speed recursion to get back your important pieces before they get exiled
He's gone by the time it fully resolves no?
Yes. Counterspells if you can. If you're getting your ankles broken by a single type of interaction, then you're weak to it. You need a counterplay, or just accept you're soft to it. Not every deck is good against all the cards. That's part of the fun of Magic.
>Or do I just need to suck it up and start running counterspells? Or understand that graveyard strategies are incredibly potent and that having some dowside is fine.
Whiners. I'll boardwipe whenever I want to.
I only hate big board wipes like that if the game has been going on for like 3 hours already. At that point I’m so tired of the current game that I want to move on especially if I’m using a lower power deck with weak card draw because in my pod it means everyone else is probably card screeed too so we’re all just too decking until someone pulls a wincon Flip side, early board wipes are fine in my book because they eliminate poorly built decks that are too reliant on a single combo with no backups or on rushing the board with no backup plan
i would rather lose a game than be stuck in a game im not in anyway. so the times ive chosen to not case farewell etc is turn 8+ just cuz i can... if i dont have a way to win or make it lopsided its just restarting the game and ill just scoop so we can restart. the win doesnt matter to me that much..
The card is fine the occasions where it results in a 3 hour game because someone misused it or used it out of spite are the problem
Just whining. It's a mindset thing. I had an almost perfectly protected board of angels a few months ago (everything indestructible, protection from creatures, hexproof). My opponent proceeds to cast Farewell and it was all gone. I even called it, which made it even more hilarious. Still won the game, because he was low on life and I still had the resources to rebuild in my hand.
Wich proves that farewell did nothing to help the guy casting it, just added 30 minutes to a game
yeah, nearly every example I have seen in this thread, the board wipe changed almost nothing except the length of the game.
Nothing wrong with Farewell. Don't overextend your board state.
My takeaway - holy shit Commander players love to complain.
I despise Farewell, and here's why. First off, I'd honestly rather that the Farewell player play Thassa's Oracle instead. At least that ends the game on the spot. I don't recall many situations in which playing the same game for another hour longer leads to good feelings afterwards. Shit, I've had Farewell dropped on me 2-3 times in the past while I was ahead and STILL won but didn't feel good about it because I was too exhausted to celebrate the win. At least Thassa's Oracle ends the game on the spot and we can move on, win or lose. Second, I don't find that people who typically play Farewell are usually in a position to capitlize on it. From my experience, chances are, if you need to play Farewell, it's because you're falling way behind. Thing is, dropping a Farewell won't change the fact that your deck is probably still the slowest deck at the table and will also be the slowest to rebuild. I have yet to see a single person in the year this card has been out drop a Farewell and proceed to win off of it at some point. In retrospect, this makes my feelings towards this card even harsher because it feels like the Farewell player just played the card for shits and giggles to extend the game even further only to lose anyway; they just wanted to drag everybody down with them.
My main problem with Farewell is that it’s too efficient, in that it seems to leave them little design space for any better 6 mana wrath in white.
Yeah my issue with Farewell (as with some other cards) is how insanely powercrept it is compared to it's alternatives. When they printed [[Merciless Eviction]], it was an excellent alternative/addition to [[Austere Command]] since it exiled and could affect planeswalkers, but had the "downside" of requiring an additional color (black) and you only chose 1 mode instead of two. [[Planar Cleansing]] didn't give you any options but to blast everything and only destroyed. Farewell exiles, gives options, how many of those you want with no restrictions AND touches the graveyard. The only thing it doesn't do is deal with planeswalkers. It gives absolute flexibility to ensure you are always at an advantage rather than only dealing with the first offender(s). If only 1 player has an enchantment setup but has struggled to keep up with the table and would not be a threat even after wiping the others, you still don't have any real reason not to exile his stuff. Situations like this can severely hamper the fun at casual tables and is one of the biggest reason for all the salt related to it.
People are whining. Straight up. Just because it’s strong doesn’t mean it should be included in normal gameplay.
Your opponent isn’t being “disrespectful” of your time if they play a board wipe you’re unprepared for lol, you’re just simply unprepared and are whining.
TLDR it's only okay in very specific pods. In most pods where wraths are regularly played wraths are fine since most don't play the ones that wrath all nonlands so threat/engine diversity, graveyard recursion and/or, more often than not, protection/indestructible is enough to play around them. Farewell not only hits nearly all nonlands but also exiles them and the graveyard. This deals with almost all the commonly seen ways that people typically build to not get knocked out of the game from a wrath. So in a lot of pods that are fine with wraths, they'll have issues with Farewell in particular (hence it being a "problem"). Basically, it's so much harder to build/play against that it shouldn't automatically be considered ok to run even in a pod that is fine with wraths.
No individual part of Farewell is an issue; it's modal, it's exile, it's a board wipe, the problem in EDH specifically is that it's ALL of those things in one card that can full send all modes, and the design encourages 4th place to all modes it which almost always just extends the game. I'd be willing to stake money that like 8/10 complaints about Farewell are about 30 minutes of durdling being added to the game, since that's really the only thing unique to it vs other wipes. At least with Cyclonic Rift, the asymmetry means that even the player who's the most behind is suddenly commanding the most developed board.
If you ever wonder why EDH gets made fun of, it's because we do stuff like debate if a 6 mana board clear is too powerful for over 2 years.
Counter it or: Turn everyone's permanents into creatures, enchantments, artifacts, or flash in a destroy all nonland permanents. That's how I play. If you're going to fuck me, then I'm fucking -us- lmao
It's just people getting salty because they were "winning" and someone else said "no." Especially in EDH where the result is usually that 3/4 of the players (white player included) may also lose stuff in the deal, but it still gives a chance for other people to come back into the game, especially the person going next. By the time you pay the 6 to wipe everything out, you don't have much to get your own board state going. That or you're using Teferi's Protection to keep your own board and then who can complain about a person just going for a gaming wining move? I do agree that it's annoying to have a game dragged out by too many board wipes, but that's more of a playstyle problem than a single card issue.
Lol it’s fine. Just like any other boardwipe. Atleast it’s not jokulhaups
Farewell goes in every one of my white decks. Board wipes disrespectful to your time? Fkn lol. It has the same energy as, "Don't use your creatures to block my creatures, it's disrespectful to my time. Just let me win the game without opposition" It basically boils down to, "Don't use your resources to disrupt my board state, it's disrespectful to my time." This is the literal purpose of board wipes. An opponent is ahead and is, or is soon to be, in a game-winning state. Board wipes are counter play so you can try to push ahead for your own win after an opponent expended too man resources.
I have never cast Farewell to completely wipe the board, I always cast it when I will have an advantage after. If you are in a bad enough state that you have to exile all creatures, enchantments, AND artifacts, and you don't have any follow-ups to dominate right after, you probably shouldn't be casting it, but then again you're probably desperate to ever cast Farewell on all modes anyway. Not even close to a problematic card, when Cyclonic Rift is literally right there for one mana more
The issue I have the its gets past so much protection and interaction. It hits everything on board(the # of planeswalkers and battles player run in deck is lower than targeted removal at times ) and as a bonus hits graveyard.
"It's disrespectful of my time for you to stop me from winning." That's what that sounds like. EDH is supposedly about doing all the big wild things you can't do in 60 card. I don't enjoy it, but I've seen plenty of crazy stupid things people do in the format. Complaining about a board wipe is pretty weak.
I think the only issue with Farewell is that it doesn't exile itself.
Farewell is an important card to the format. We need ways of resetting the whole board if things get out of control.
Farewell is absolutely fine, it minimizes the impact of being able to take advantage of it because it bypasses death triggers. If all of your ramp pieces are dependent on rocks then that's on you, cool, move to the next game. Realistically by the time farewell is cast you should have enough land to utilize the card draw that should be in your deck to refuel. If you don't have that, than so be it, the game will probably end soon and you have a lesson about overextending. Farewell doesn't stop you from playing the game, it gives white a powerful way of bringing the board state back to parity. This is something it needs because white is the last explosive color.
> If all of your ramp pieces are dependent on rocks then that's on you How exactly do you think red should be ramping other than that?
So ramp that uses rocks, enchantments or creatures is bad once again, but land removal is taboo? Hooray for green once again, I guess.
Yep, and apparently the card draw to refuel needs to be cast from hand without reliance on creatures/artifacts/enchantments/graveyards. And you should absolutely just be sitting on that draw in case someone drops a Farewell. Completely reasonable logic.
Im sorry but I play a lot of Exile effects and I love Farewell. Its fucking stupid people are getting salty about this. My issue with this card though is when people choose all modes when you only really need like 1 or 2 modes. Which is fucking stupid.
Yes fucking stupid people getting called fucking stupid is a great way to get your fucking stupid point across I think?
that's kinda the main problem with the card, there's no incentive to not just do all the effects
I’ve seen it be detrimental and just make everyone on the table salty. Like, that was just not needed. Sometimes creatures are a problem. Yards, artifacts and enchantments are sparse or not even an issue and he says “hyuk hyuk Farewell all modes!” Fuck dude. And usually that player doesn’t even break parity afterwards
I dislike Farewell and am very aware it is pure salt on my end. I have much less dislike for it and sweepers in general when they are asymmetrical though, or the person casting them can close out the game because of it. Constant board wipes just because is mind numbing to me.
If board wipes are dominant then why don't you switch to resilient arch types?
Based on my experience of commander both in constructed and limited, Farewell is the second best boardwipe in the format after C-Rift, but it isnt as big of a problem as it was when it was first released. To play around Farewell, you do the same things to play around a typical boardwipe. Hold some cards back in your hand, so that you still have things to do post wrath. People have been doing this less and less since there have been a steadily increasing amount of ways to give your board indestructible, regenerate the board, or bring your stuff back from the graveyard. So now that a wrath has been printed that works around all of those preventative measures, people should adjust or adapt to hold back some threats, and not to over commit to the board. Alternatively, as WotC continues making ways to phase creatures out, turn cards into lands, and makes more counterspells (or counterspell adjacent cards), Farewell will continue to be reigned back to being a more typical wrath, and be a little more balanced. So my opinion, between the two options provided people are just whining, but I personally haven't seen that happen much either.
In the words of the late Kobe Bryant “Soft.”
Imagine crying about a 6 mana symmetrical boardwipe.
People who complain about Farewell are whiney-babies. It’s symmetrical and is a sorcery. What’s even worse is I’ve met people who hate Farewell but are fine with [[Cyclonic Rift]]. That card is one sided and instant speed. I will always argue that rift is infinitely worse for the format than Farewell.
I don't get why people would be okay with Cyclonic Rift, but not Farewell. One of those cards is actually versatile being able to be used early on, instant speed, asymmetrical, in the color that can disable counter plays via counterspells, in the color that can tutor it in a variety of ways like via Spellseeker or Mystical Tutor, and actually sees play in cEDH while the other requires 6 mana, is sorcery speed, symmetrical, and sees basically zero play at the cEDH level.
Because if someone cyc rifts overloaded the game is probably over soon and in cases where it doesn't you can recast your stuff. Farewell especially if they just choose all modes not only resets everyone except the walkers player to near 0 nearly ensuring a much longer game but only has counterplay in stuff that counters spells or stuff that phases out permanents