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EDH Generals- A New Agreement?

I wanted to talk about the draftsgravaganza today (short recap: awesome!) but a more pertinent issue was raised in yesterday’s post. It'a not even an April Fools joke! Too bad. When Fugie wrote that we were running out of generals I was a little confused. It was his rationale for restricting everyone to one reserved general. Taken literally Fugie can’t possibly mean what he says. After all, he has a knowledge of the cards far greater than mine, and even I know that we have only grabbed a very few, albeit excellent, generals out of the pool. So what did Fugie mean when he said we were running out? Despite the fact that it was boring as hell, I decided to try to refute Fugie’s literal statement to get at what he may have really meant. I decided to catalog the color combinations of all possible generals. Using Star City’s Spoiler Generator I went through all the possible legendary creatures. I counted manually because there was no filter that would do exactly what I wanted, namely leaving out reprints and the Un-set legends. The data is current as of Morningtide. Here is what I found.

Colorless 3

W 56
U 50
B 55
R 47
G 48

WU 13
WB 3
WR 3
WG 13
UB 13
UR 3
UG 2
BR 13
BG 5
RG 11

WUB 8
WUR 1
WUG 6
WBR 1
WBG 2
WRG 5
UBR 8
UBG 1
URG 1
BRG 6

WUBRG 8

Total 385

See Fugie? We have 385 (probably give or take a few- remember I counted manually) generals to pick from! We’re not running out at all! Heh. Now the obvious is out of the way. Let’s dig in to the real data. For simplicity, let’s exclude all the mono-colored generals as too narrow (despite the fact that we know there are some competitive one-color generals). That chops out about 256, by my count. Still 129 to choose from. Now let’s look at the two-color generals. We have wide variance among the samples. Four combinations have 13 generals to choose from, plenty. But there are also 3 two-color combinations that contain only 3 generals, and another, UG, which contains only 2. Under the old agreement, those four color combinations could conceivably be “locked out” if too many people chose to play one of them.

Now to the real gravy, the three color generals. Many of us play three color generals, since with enough fixing three colors is still quite doable and it allows us a wider range of spells to further whatever strategy we want to push. Sometimes the general is incidental to the actual deck strategy and we just need the color combination. Seems like the actual general is less important than the colors… hmmm. Let’s take a look at the data. Again we have wide variance, this time with a top end of 8 creatures for a few of the three-color combinations. On the low end we have an astounding 4 of the three-color combinations that have a mere 1 general to pick from. If I want to play WUR (and it should be no surprise that I do, since my general is Numot) then I have only one choice.

There are no four-color combinations available.

After looking at this data I propose that Fugie really meant we are running out of three-color combinations.

Let me back up his assertion. After playing lots of EDH matches I decided that the strongest color combination is WBG… but I couldn’t play that color combination because there were two possible generals and both had been claimed previously. (I could have taken one of the 8 five-color generals and only played WBG, but personally that seemed wrong.) So that’s a downside to our old agreement. Under the new proposed agreement people could still be locked out of combinations, since the one guy who reserves Oros as his one general still screws everyone else out of WBR. Still, there would be more ability to switch into different colors. When I wanted to make another 3-color deck, I wanted to include BG because my Numot deck couldn’t use those colors at all. So that reduced my options to WBG, UBG, and BRG. Like I said above, WBG was off the table. No problem, I thought. I’ll just go with UBG… wait, who took Vorosh already? Okay, so I’m down to BRG (which luckily has plenty of options). I decided to go with Sek’Kuar Deathkeeper.

Above we can see the big downside of the old agreement, but here is where we run into a potential downside of the new one. I have spent quite a bit of time making a successful deck built around Numot. In the past few days I have been really excited about building Sek’Kuar, but I can’t possibly give up Numot for the chance that Sek’Kuar will be better. I feel forced to reserve Numot. And what’s the big deal if I can’t reserve SekKuar? Well, I really like the idea of using him as a general, but I also know several other players who told me they had considered building a Sek’Kuar deck too. Now I have to face the prospect of working hard to succeed with a second general and having my work copied by someone else. I don’t know if anyone in the playgroup would do that, but they could, if I didn’t reserve Sek’Kuar. Whether or not it would be good manners to copy another player’s deck is irrelevant. That is what will have to end up happening if we want to play in the same color combinations with the same general, or we could have stuck to the old rules anyway. Maybe I’m being sensitive, but I just like the idea of knowing that the time I took to build a deck is going to pay off for me. I mean, what other format could a guy expect to NOT be copied for having a great build? It’s one more reason why EDH is so awesome; your deck really is YOURS, at least within the confines of your playgroup.
I know what Fugie is trying to do with this new proposed agreement, and I am not saying that I even disagree, at least not wholeheartedly, but I do think that there is a downside to limiting the “reserved” list to one general a person. Is that downside worth opening up color combinations to other people? Tell me what you think. I think it deserves discussion.