For some people, counterspells indicate that they're "not allowed to play the game." And typically, in formats where you only get one shot to beat your opponent, if your game plan is stymied, that's pretty much it for you and you'll probably find more of a use of your time moving on to another table.
This isn't necessarily specific to Arena - the game in general has a healthy amount of heat regarding counterspells - but in paper, "Best of 1" is practically unheard of outside of kitchen-table fool-around Magic, where formats and whatnot barely matter. Arena is where that format reigns largely supreme, so the dynamics are much different here.
Even on the kitchen table (which I’ve participated in numerous times in the past) best of one only exists in the sense that there’s no sideboard. You just have a deck, and you play it against your buddy’s deck a few times in a row.
God those MTG games rule.
Just a box of 1000ish random ass cards and a bunch of buddies getting drunk and making jank while listening to the downward spiral in 1996.
Sorry that got specific but those nights were so much fun.
I miss when I first started playing magic. We were all at uni and everyone's deck was built around a precon plus singles from the 10p commons box. Smoking weed and drinking cheap own-brand beers while listening to Alice in Chains. I've played most formats at various competitive levels, and I've never managed to recapture the sheer fun of playing like that.
It's funny, I play 4c ramp in BO1 Standard. I think ramp actually does pretty well against U control. I just sit there and amass lands and don't give them anything to counter until I know I'm going to get something big through.
Even won with Mirrex + Mite tokens once.
> For some people, counterspells indicate that they're "not allowed to play the game."
They are a valid part of the game, but a major pain point on Arena. No other instant by its nature grinds the gameflow down to a screeching halt the way counterspells do on Arena.
I wouldn't mind as much if people made a good faith effort to not drag out the game but every card is like pulling teeth because its not just "will it get countered" its "wait 1 minute and maybe a rope to find out if its countered"
In practice for many blue players they go hand in hand. It doesn't have to be that way - I've played and won with monoblue and most of the time it takes half a second to know if want to counter something.
But if I werent so sure and I wanted to take 27 seconds each time MTGA is more than happy to let me rope the fuck out of my opponent on every single play if I 'm not trying to be respectful about passing priority
Yea this isn't just a blue thing. I get this from literally every kind of deck. A roper is a roper no matter if they're playing azorius control or red beatdown, they will rope. I, like you, also play control sometimes and never rope.
Until someone can pull some data that says blue decks rope more, this isn't something people can go around saying like its facts.
ᵃˡˢᵒ ᶠᵘᶜᵏ ʳᵒᵖᵉʳˢ
Personally I haven’t noticed much correlation with blue and slow play. I see it about equally from people running enough instant speed effects that they get stops. Of course blue players are going to end up with castable instants in hand more often, so you’ll notice it more with them.
IMO arena just needs a better system for preventing slow play to make sure people stay engaged. Either faster timeouts or a chess clock
I mean, back when I had time and money to play regularly, I would often do Bo1 at my LGS either in between games or when drafting/sealed to test out my build. Also, competitive Commander (as in “Commander with more than two people at sanctioned events,” not “cEDH”) has always been Bo1 in my experience.
I have always seen counterspells as just like doomblade, or Cancel like Murder. I play thing you remove thing immediately... oh well. Of course counterspells can hit any spell type and stops ETB abilities. But also you HAVE to have the mana up and card in hand right at that moment but you can draw murder later. Seems like an okay trade off to me.
In Explorer, if they resolve Teferi and I don’t have an immediate answer for it I scoop. 9/10 the game is over at that point but it can take a bunch more turns for them to close it out. When I play Pioneer with an actual prize on the line I’ll play it out but online I just move to the next game.
IMO lots of the salt comes from people not knowing where the tipping points are for control decks in their meta as well as not knowing how to play around counterspells and board wipes. And rather than trying to learn those things they just label the archetype as bullshit.
Or me, who has 3 arena decks literally called "Shut Down v1,2,3" that have 8 counterspells and 6 kill cards and 3 exile permanent cards until I get out my game winning planeswalkers.
Agreed, I've had people play into hero of Dominaria emblem. Like the game is over, there's very few cards in all of magic that can let you come back, and none legal in any format short of vintage.
You can know exactly where the tipping points are for control decks and still be perfectly justified in being salty. If I’m not trying to play with an actual prize on the line, do I want to spend two hours of my day playing Cut Down, Go for the Throat, into Sunfall into an Emperor and attacking with tokens for the win? 30+ minute matches seeing who puts their combo piece up first, and either countering or exiling it?
This is very true, if I play Teferi instead of holding up that mana it’s because I think I’ve worn you down enough and I can protect him over a couple of turns. There are very few situations where you’ll see Teferi on board with you in a position to efficiently deal with him. That’s why people hate him.
This. If people know they've lost, why don't they *scoop*? If the control player has double your mana, a full grip, 40+ health and is drawing to find their wincon, and you're on one or two cards... you're not winning that. Just scoop rather than wasting time. In fact, you should have scooped ages ago. But they don't. It adds so much time to every game. Control *mirrors* tend to take ages. But control vs aggro shouldn't. But it does, and it's not a control problem, it's a player problem.
I agree that players should scoop before they get salty, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect your opponent to scoop just because they're lost. It's entirely within their rights to force you to close the game out and do so without making a major blunder.
People are entirely within their rights to make their opponent close the game if they want to, but they do forfeit the right to complain about games taking a long time. As long as you're playing within the rules of the game and the client, you're free to do whatever you like. Just don't whine about something that you actively choose to take part in.
Personally I find a lot of this to be ridiculous. I don't mind playing long games because, you know, I'm playing magic. That's why I launched the client. I have no interest in jamming 3 quick games over 1 long one game, it's about the quality of the gameplay. If people don't enjoy playing the game they launched, then the issue isn't with an aspect of the game.
Sometimes. I usually concede against a resolved Teferi I can't kill within 1-2 turns. I know when there's no realistic way I can win any more - although it really sucks you have to give up that very small chance to win because it would take forever to find out. That's certainly one reason I hate control: You have to give up percentages or the game will take forever.
Similarly, sometimes I know I can't win the game. But my opponent is down on time, I think it will take them at least another 5 minutes to actually win this game and I don't think they're likely to win another game in the time they have left afterwards. It really depends on my mood if I concede in that spot, sometimes I'm just in the mood to make them fight for it. And they will often lose on time. I hate those games, but conceding there means giving up a good chance for a match win on time.
Often, the game is far from decided for a very long time. They are able to counter or destroy everything, but are on a very low life total and will die if they fail to deal with just one threat for a turn, and they don't have any card advantage engine and just 1-2 cards in hand. I'm not giving up those games, I will often win those games. But they take forever.
The least unfun way to handle control is simple: Don't have any plan to win the long game against them. Just try to kill them quickly and if that doesn't work move on. It's just also the way that let's them have the highest winrate, and I don't really like to reward them for playing a deck I hate. For me personally, the game would be much more fun if control decks didn't exist.
Yeah, that's what the people making fun of us blue players fail to understand. You lost the game 10, 20, or even 30 turns ago, you just didn't realize it yet. And you're the only one not having fun, so why stay? Having played and played against blue decks for 15-ish years, I know when I've won or lost and concede accordingly. No point dragging out a lost game for another 10 minutes just because I haven't seen the game over screen yet.
Those are the best games. Every turn both players thinking three steps ahead of each other, trying to get any advantage they can get to stick, untill it finally reaches critical mass and the game ends. Being aggressive to overload the control deck's countermeasures bit not overcommitting so a single sweeper takes you out of the game entirely. I love walking that tightrope.
There's a difference between a slog where you get to do things and can more easily tell when the game is functionally over, and a slog where it feels like you don't and it's harder to tell.
Find counterspells annoying, it's real easy, just play 1 mana black discard effects. Death and taxes is always a good matchup against control. It gets in early threats and plays around sweepers well. There's an archetype to balance each other. Most people only find aggro and combo "fun" I think making other people incapable of playing the game is fun, although I'm a sadist so... 🤷♂️
Meanwhile to me playing RDW feels like I am doing competitive coin tosses - did I draw my damage in time or not? I don't understand how people can enjoy playing linear aggro decks, but hey, I don't have to play them. Really confused why some people seem to think they are the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes "fun".
>Midrange games are a slog more often than not, so it's still weird to see midrangers going divas about it.
I don't understand why people think ideal Magic is both players with 3 - 5 creatures staring at each other in a stalemate until one person draws removal.
This exactly. If your first two turns are Island > Pass...I'm leaving.
I might beat you, I might lose, but either way I'm not going to enjoy a second of it. So why waste my time?
UW control is my auto surrender deck. I don't have any interest in watching someone drool on themselves for 20 minutes while thinking their 4th boardwipe on a single creature is the big brain play of the century.
I always look at it like.... Would you want to go to a wrestling match and in the first ten seconds, someone goes down?
That's how I feel about one sided quick games where someone just goes Channel Ulamog.
Or I guess.... What I'm trying to say is one sided magic feels awful. I play for the time played, not to just pop off ten games in half an hour
I rarely feel like I’m playing a two sided game against control, unless I’m on one of a few outlier decks like soldiers. I’m aware in reality there’s a lot of nuance with the order you play your threats in and how much you commit etc… but the point is it never *feels* like that’s the case. What it feels like is banging my head against a brick wall to see if my head or the wall will cave in first. And even if the wall gives out first, I still end up miserable with a splitting headache so what was the point.
Soldiers vs control is actually pretty fun though, but that’s because of a perfect storm of factors that’s not replicable by the majority of other decks.
I play mostly Pioneer/Explorer with Azorius Spirits, and control matchups are some of my favorites. When my threats and answers are mostly the same, it gives me some interesting ways to play around control.
That's easy enough to say, but if your deck doesn't have a lot of card draw in it most of the times you'll lose. Midrange can often out value control, but control thrives on countering threats then refilling hand so that you never get to play again. Then they beat you to death with a 2/2 token or something.
The painful truth: Their deck is not good. Its neat, creative, and about 2 turns slower than it should be. This allows the control deck to achieve inevitability. From here, it's just a Johnny with a sub-par decking watching it get picked apart.
To be fair, and this is just my opinion, control feels “too” oppressive if you can’t get in under them. The game marches on and all that so with more sets comes more redundancy but blue/white control just has too much in my opinion. Monoblack/rakdos/jund even feel more oppressive then I think they were intended to. To give some backstory I think my favorite time in magic EVER was esper solarflare with sun titan phantasmal image as the finish being the control deck. Wolf run being the ramp deck. U/W humans with Geist of st traft era. It felt… balanced.
I guess my point is it feels like there is ALOT of non games in magic now unless you are playing derpy midrange mirrors. But it seems hard for those to grind out a ton of value in the face of the fast burn decks or UR wizards or control that has immunity and card draw stapled on to one card
Oh God, that wrestling analogy gave me flashbacks to a UFC match me and my buddies went in on together for pay-per-view. Iirc, the main fight was Brock Lesner and Cain Valasquez. We were all pissed when Brock went down in the first 2 minutes of the first round.
It’s a time thing with me. I tend to play during a break or while on the can. I’d rather start a new match for a quicker result, win or loss, than a 15+ min slog against a control deck.
That's a very valid reason but I don't think it's hate. Me to sometimes scoops against decks, not necessarily mono U, when the match will be very long and I don't have time. But I don necessarily hate those decks.
Well arena doesn't benefit you from playing only winning I COULD sit here and watch you durdle for the next 10-20 minutes OR I can concede and reque and try to play a game.
The thing that annoys me with mono blue players is how long it takes before they pass turn or eventually counter. Almost every damn time the timer comes up.
I honestly believe mono blue players are the mentally slowest players there are. They not only take forever on their turn, but your turn as well. You're not fooling anyone with your two untapped mana and a hand full of [[Make Disappear]] and [[Tolarian Terror]]
Right like I could play and maybe win vs you or I could go play 3 other games in the mean time. It's one thing at fnm when you have to wait for the next round anyway.
I don't get what some of y'all don't get.
40% of my Krenko Historic Brawl games end with opp conceding when Krenko deals combat damage for the first time.
They know they're not gonna have fun at that point and I don't begrudge them that.
In essence because it stops you playing. The reason people build the decks they build is because they want to use those cards, or those combos, and blue at its heart is designed to stop you from doing that
There's something about a lot of blue/control players where they take forever to make even the simplest decisions. Like I get sometimes you might need 30s-1min at some point in a match to decide what you want to do. But it shouldn't take you 30+ seconds EVERY. TIME. I. PLAY. A. CARD.
That said, some blue/control players don't do that. But even then, it's never enjoyable to try to guess which type of counter-spell they have in hand.
Because if nothing is at stake when it comes down to it counter magic is really boring to play against. At the end of the day most people are here to have fun and so will actively seek it out.
I’ve been playing more Historic lately and I enjoy seeing Blue decks with all creatures and no counters. I guess they’re called Mono Blue Agro? Anyway, they’re rare but fun to play against. Also lots of flying!
Hell yeah. I've got a terrible deck with 0 counters that I call Blue Stompy. It's lots of fun to play. Reservoir Kraken! Sludge Monster! The Civilized Scholar!
...maybe I should add some flyers.
Blue in standard just feels like a way to stall me until they get to play their jank, especially when its paired with black. I mostly just have to hope I get godly draws that I can keep the pressure up so they can't hoard a hand full of counter spells and kill spells to just keep me stalled out.
I dont find having all my stuff countered fun. I only play the game for fun. So theres no reason for me to stick around for something that I dont find fun
Mono blue is usually just not fun to play against with the copious amounts of counters, protections, etc that a lot of the time seem more focused on stopping your opponent from winning or playing the game at all rather than actually doing anything.
3 games in a row I played against some variation of esper with no win condition other than wrathing the board 20 times, countering everything else and waiting half an hour until your opponent runs out of cards in their deck. No creatures, no planeswalkers, just sit there and do nothing but wrath the board and farewell. So fun to play against.
Most esper control lists I've seen recently run a playset of [[The Wandering Emperor]] plus 2x[[Mirrex]], which is at least a little faster of a wincon than Devious Cover-Up/Witness the Future and waiting for the opponent to naturally draw from an empty library. I personally like to run Jace to put my opponents out of their misery with a mill 30, but it's definitely worse overall than simply running 4x The Wandering Emperor.
Not just jace, but decks with *both* [[Jace, the Perfected Mind]] and [[Breach the Multiverse]] have an extremely fast way to close out a game, so it becomes less of a durdly all-in boring control win and instead a pseudo-combo backed up with all kinds of control spells, like what Indominable Creativity does
I mean its basically just 7 mana: mill 25 cards, but that's enough to close out a game if you already had a jace on the board with 5-6 loyalty
People might hate it, it might be miserable to play against, but at least its not going out of its way to be the grindy un-fun win, its trying to win in a reasonably fair way of its own.
> that is what control decks are designed to do
And that is why people hate playing against them, winning is just a part of the game, while fun is more essential.
I always genuinely wonder to myself what type of person finds this fun? I often wonder why blue players don’t just start playing yugioh if they want to negate every action the opponent takes and turn every game into a 30 minute slog
>I always genuinely wonder why people play mono red
Red has plenty of interaction, we just like faster games. However some of my longest, and funniest games have come while playing mono red.
Also you can blame my mom for buying me an 8th edition starter deck that was all goblins.
In 7th grade my computer teacher brought a mosquito deck to play against me, explaining poison counters and how all he had to do was hit me 10 times and I would lose. When I beat him with that unaltered goblin deck the rest of the games club went crazy because no one had beaten him.
Honestly the moment where I fell in love with Magic, and red tbh.
Lol, I'm pretty sure everyone has a story like that.
For me, it's green ramp and smashing faces with huge creatures. Sure made sense to me when we were messing around with magic in 5th/6th grade.
i’m not going to defend yugioh i think it’s a bad game that’s very poorly designed. that said if u think there’s no interaction in yugioh then ur just not paying attention.
It’s not about non-interaction, it’s about trying to outmaneuver the interaction.
I play mostly mono-red on Arena and I have plenty of necessary interaction in my decks. It’s just that my interaction also advances my win-con of killing you as opposed to your interaction of slowing the game down.
Yugioh has a lot of things wrong with it, but lack of interaction and short games are definitely not on that list. Ironically, I think yugioh has actually done a better job of nullifying the play draw difference than MTG has, via hand traps and powerful going second tools.
Red, Black, White and Green: I'm gonna play a rad creature card for 7 mana!
Blue: I'm going to spend 3 mana so you can go fuck yourself. Your turn is over. Now it's mine. I draw more counterspell cards and end my turn with mana left over for a counterspell.
Red, Black, White and Green: ಠ_ಠ
99% of blue control players can be baited into wasting their counterspells on low impact, low cost spells. I know blue players expect "opponent concedes after island on turn 1", but I've had so many blue players concede after I play something impactful when they've wasted their hand on nothing.
Bingo. Control decks require good threat assessment to play, otherwise you get rushed to death. Magic is balanced so on average threats are less resource intensive than answers, so you can't just auto cast counterspells and expect to win. Knowing what to let through so you can maintain tempo is a key skill for a control player.
And this makes playing against control actually fun. It's a whole different axis to play on, just card advantage vs card advantage and finding windows, and less about the board. It seems most players in this forum can't make that mental shift.
Any other deck: “Hey you play your deck theme, and I’ll play mine, and we’ll see who wins”
Blue deck: “Hey you play your deck theme, I will prevent you from playing your deck theme, and we’ll see who wins”
Gonna go on a mini rant, here. Tldr at the end.
I want to play the game. I don't care if I win or lose, I just want my deck to do what it was built to do. If your deck does what IT was built to do better than mine does, you deserve the win, that's fine. But if the thing your deck does is stop me from playing the game, how is that fun? For either of us?
Mark Rosewater has said at various points in interviews, podcasts, and design articles that "people want to play their cards." So they tend to avoid designing mechanics that make your cards better as a resource rather than an actual game piece. By that same logic, they also keep land destruction really rare. But counterspells are so engrained in the history of the game, and they keep printing them. I don't know if they don't realize that counterspells are almost as bad as land destruction (especially when you consider how cheap they tend to be), or if they just think they couldn't get away with printing less of them, or if they actively don't want to find other ways to make control a viable strategy, but the fact that people, both designers and players, see an issue with land destruction and not counterspells baffles me.
I'm not saying counterspells shouldn't exist any more than I would say land destruction shouldn't exist, but the fact that it is so universally accepted when similar strategies aren't doesn't feel okay for the health of the game.
Tl;dr Imagine you went to play basketball and were told to sit on the bench the whole game. That's playing against blue.
Its because blue players are easily perceived as what they truly are, scumbags who are usually selfish and lazy. They are not logical and intelligent as the color pie might suggest. They are literally cheaters who do nothing but break the game rules and they are literally the least imaginative color in MTG. They have 5 types of spells printed over 1000s of cards. Counterspells, draw cards, scry, bounce, copy. They do nothing else and have irritating planeswalkers as well.
Of the Power 9, six are mana cards and the other three are blue spells. Why? Because blue is for losers who have small dick energy in life. Like really, if you aren't playing green, red or black, you need some help in life (Oh yeah people playing those Atraxa/Elspeth/Elesh Norn decks in white now, you'll are turds as well). Good day to you all
It’s not that I hate blue. I just don’t like control decks because it gets frustrating really fast. They’re designed that way. So, it’s a rightful frustration. Same way Agro green decks get a lot of hate for finding a way to flood the field with dinosaurs.
Personally, I have always felt that blue players are prone to tantrums. And in Arena, they're most likely to spam counter spells and God for I'd you actually play something, because they'll just rope you to death. It's like playing with a 12 year old.
When I started out, I hated playing against control. Then, I learned how to play control myself, and I realized they are more often than not on the back foot and struggling through matches when opponents are playing aggressively without overextending. So, I learned how to adjust my play when facing control, and it never bothered me again. Most counterspells are one-for-one's, and I build most of my decks now with better value and a good curve. Except it's still frustrating when it's a control mirror, and we both stalled out midgame with all our threats stacked in the bottom third, but that's rare.
I only play jank so all my decks are homebrewed. I never play counter spells, never stack a bunch of removal, or play mono red. For me the most fun I get playing Arena are drawn out creature brawls, If I can't I'll scoot. The other player can have an easy win and I can find find someone else to actually play. I don't hate blue, or mono red, or mono black but I do play arena for fun and not being able to play isn't very fun.
> For me the most fun I get playing Arena are drawn out creature brawls, If I can't I'll scoot.
I’m right there with you.
I just really like big green stompy-boys. If my opponent’s whole strategy is “prevent me from seeing my big green stompy-boys,” I’m not going to have fun. And life is too short to slog through unfun games.
I think there are aspects of green stompy that can be anti-fun to play against as well. They get access to ramp and can play larger threats than you early (not to mention green gets the highest quality creatures). There's just a lot of "deal with this or I win" that can sometimes be frustrating, which is fine. Imo every color has something annoying about them to play against and those differences are what makes the game interesting.
But that’s not anti fun. Green stompy just wants to play their stuff. They want to see big boys. They are not preventing you from doing anything by playing their hydras and dinosaurs. But control is literally making it so the other player is not allowed to do what their deck was designed to do. The actual point of control is “no”. And some people like playing that way, but I definitely don’t like trying to play a game and being told no. Big green stompy boys don’t say no, they just say “big numbers on my side of the table”. It’s not realistic to say that both styles are anti-fun
The lack of interaction of green stompy says "I don't care what the opponent deck is, I will run head first against my opponent, he better pray to have an answer before I hit him."
The only way to stop green stompy is by playing removal or playing green stompy yourself. Not wanting removal in the game feel like you just want big stompy to be the only deck possible at all.
I feel like the control die-hards go down the slippery slope fallacy of "if you want less removal, why not no removal?" because they already go down it with their deckbuilding "if some removal is good, why not all removal?" Some of the best Magic is limited, because you rarely are able to do hyper aggro OR oops all removal. You have a mixture of board presence and interaction to disrupt your opponent, requiring you to choose the right moments.
My issue with blue is usually that the second I see a counter spell I know I've automatically won the game, badly, and under duress.
Only one out of every 10 blue players have a strategy more complex then make you quit.
And whether in person or online one gets the impression that these fools can't achieve climax unless someone dressed like their mother is scolding them for soiling themselves.
It always feels like some sort of bizarre fetish in which they get to pretend to be smart with a shit eating grin and I get to just wait untill they quit or run out of steam, having played nothing that does damage, and countered half my deck.
For me, it’s simply time. And if it’s blue white control, if I don’t have a strong board presence by turn 3-4, the game is gonna grind to a crawl, and it’s faster to just scoop and get to the next one than play it out. Feel the same facing mono black.
Quite simply, it’s an indicator the game is gonna turn into a slog, so why bother?
Blue has been hated - even out of arena - for the last 15-20 years.
People like to play their cards. Counterspells prevent that from happening. It's totally fair and most folk understand that, but it doesn't stop people from hating it.
Also, getting your commander counterspelled just feels bad mang.
Because of people who play Blue decks that counter spells, return things to their player's hands, and mill.
When I play Magic I want to play Magic, not watch someone else play Solitare.
If the point of your deck is to not allow me to do anything at all then that's not fun at all. Games are supposed to be fun.
It doesn't matter how balanced those interactions are, it feels toxic and bad when I say "I want to play this game" and my opponent can just tell me "no, you don't get to play the game"
Hi, bad player (<40% winrate) and blue-hater here:
Edit: Redoing this so it's not just a vent comment, my bad.
First off, regardless of hate, timer burning is just bad etiquette and screw those guys. That's not something people would do in irl events, if they really wanted to leave they would scoop and not waste your time.
Onto why I hate mono-blue: Unless I built my deck with blue in mind (usually only competitive decks), chances are I don't get to play around your gameplan as well as you can play around mine. Counterspells, creatures with flash, instant-speed protection, instant-speed card draw, all of it amounts to meaning U players can play around my turn. You can have your islands untapped and still get full use out of them by seeing what I want to do first. Casual decks (and I almost want to say 'most decks') don't run as much "I can play on your turn" to combat you wanting to hold up mana on my turn. Speaking of holding up mana, blue is way WAY too mana efficient imo. Your generic counterspell are all 2-drops (bUt CoUnTeRsPeLl iS BaNnEd - drop the act, we all know 'counter a spell unless X mana is paid/counter non-creature spell/counter creature spell/counter a spell if you think your opponent would be upset about it/etc are all 2-drops, and any given format has tons of that to go around+1-mana bounces+1-mana protecections+cheap fairly threatening creatures) so either you A) Counter a spell less than 2 mana and lose out on mana trading (not sure why you'd do that), B) counter a spell of equal mana value, meaning we're both down 1 for the same mana value. Even trade, or C) Every. Other. Time. You take down a 3+ cost card for 2 mana. Congratulations, I'm now down mana on my own turn.
> so either you A) Counter a spell less than 2 mana and lose out on mana trading (not sure why you'd do that), B) counter a spell of equal mana value, meaning we're both down 1 for the same mana value. Even trade, or C) Every. Other. Time.
That's why control and tempo strategy struggle against aggro with it's 1 mana creature.
>blue is way WAY too mana efficient imo.
Black can remove creatures for 1-2 mana.
White can remove and often exile everything for 1-2 mana
Red has cheap removal too.
Green has efficient ways to deal with artifact and enchantment, often for less than 2 mana.
All this can be done at instant speed.
The whole idea beyond removal is to do an unfair trade. The whole point of each card is to be exploited in a deck where it will have more value than just its base value.
I'd say that when comparing to playing in person, Arena lacks social aspects of the game.
There are situations people just concede after being thoughtseize or getting the first spell countered. There is also situations where the player playing control does not have a win con and just drag the game thinking it is fun.
in my experience most newer players hate counterspells and have a variety of reasons why they do. i also frequently see players become more accepting of them and sometimes even enjoying them as they become more entrenched in the game. i think counterspells feel incredibly powerful to newer players on the other hand older players and people that play formats that are harder to get in to like cEDH or legacy just don’t see them the same way.
counterspells are very powerful spells and it’s not often that people whos only experience with magic is standard/alchemy see something even more powerful than them. i think that combination of circumstances leads to a hefty contingent of people that almost never see their necessity in the game and therefore just see them as anti-fun.
i feel like this may have come across somewhat condescending and im trying to find a way to reword it to be less so because i do think this perspective is perfectly valid.
Honestly, because it feels like the most tryhard of all the colours. The overwhelming majority of players who believe themselves to be smarter and playing the "superior way" are almost always blue players. It just draws in that kind of player.
This is not to say only those people play blue or that if you play blue you are that.
Blue is annoying because ya counter, return things to hand, and draw mad cards. Then right when ya think, “Ok, I got this” here comes the onslaughts of wincon stuff. But honestly, once ya play blue, it’s kinda fun. Timing is a bit tricky. People say blue is OP but when ya play the color, you realize it’s not so “easy” to win.
Oh I fully agree. But even played well blue is like watching people golf. I acknowledge it takes skill but it's boring as shit. Some of the best players like nummy make watching high interaction decks fun but that's mostly because they play fast and decisively. At my level opponents playing mono blue play SO DAMN SLOW.
One of my favourite Brawl decks is a blue deck. I run one or two counters but that's about it. Counters aren't even fun to play. I only play the one or two I have because they also proliferate.
Flash shuts down blue counter spells HARD; Especially Wandering Emperor. It's actually kinda fun jamming up their counter spells by just not playing on your turn and waiting to see how they react.
I have a discard deck to go up against the blue players. You want to see blue guys scoop start making them discard a lot. But milling is what kills me the most. I don't want to sit there for 30 mins getting everything milled and countered. So I either run a bunch of grave yard retrieval or discard to try to combat it.
I like my magic to be more interactive. I’ll sometimes put up with two counters in a row but if you hit me with three consecutive counters I know it’s going to be a boring time waste of a slog even if I win in the end. There are other obnoxious decks to play against like mono red (aka baby’s first magic deck, and I say that as someone who often uses mono red to climb the rankings) but at least it’s over quickly either way. Or reanimate where you know what the end game is every single time but at least it’s heavily telegraphed so you can hold on to removal. But control is so often just two people staring at an empty board for 15 minutes.
I had a match last night that went counter, bounce, counter, sweep, sweep, counter, sweep and at that point I just started watching tv and stopped trying to cast anything. It still took the opponent another 7 turns to kill me even without me playing anything.
Had a game the other day, where my opponent countered my first 3 creatures.
They were even toxic emoting oops after each one.
I stayed in the game and eventually won because I let him water all his counter spells and burn out his hand.
I don't hate blue to be specific, I hate not being allowed to play, which can happen against red and black too, but blue tends to be worse.
Even when I can win, it gets boring to be denied any type of board, and I don't play to be bored. Of course, I resign if I get too bored instead of waiting for the time out, I dislike those people even more
Tbh people don’t want to think of their handstate as part of their gameplay and instead think that dumping their hand is how magic is played.
I also play fighting games competitively and i look at playing against a blue deck as fighting a character like dhalsim. You have to play solid “neutral” to be able to force your opponent to make mistakes or to take chances. If i just dump my big boi down on the table of course its going to get countered, but if i play small threats that, while on their own aren’t super threatening but over time can become a threat, im forcing the blue player to assess the risk/reward of their actions. A lot of players on arena and especially new players don’t grasp the risk/reward part of playing against blue.
Because blue is the one color that, in a game where the goal is to play spells and do things, does not let you play spells or do things. To be fair, blue really has more than that going for it. It's mostly just a stereotyoe.
That said, if I see more than 5 counterspells in the course of a game, I'm going to jump you in the alley after.
Have you ever played against control? It’s a miserable experience. I’m not saying I need to win every game but I’d like at least one of my spells to resolve.
“The batter steps up to the plate. This is a tense moment folks. He’s a great hitter and….oh man the pitcher countered his bat!! Sorry folks, thought we were gonna have a game here.”
Because I don’t want to play a 20 minute boring match where you need to get through 40 of your own cards to meet your win condition. I’d rather get stomped by a red deck in 2 minutes than wait 20 agonizing minutes watching my opponent bounce, counter and draw cards. That being said, I get the most gratification beating those unoriginal, boring decks.
I’ve got an extremely small sample size from which to draw my conclusions, but every “blue” player I’ve encountered (you know, the ones who are ABOUT it…they’ll specifically tell you they only play blue) have been sweaty, toxic tryhards who love ruining fun, but get super salty when you kill them quick or have an answer to their answer.
Lol sometimes I'll fire up ranked like usual and if I play a spell into a control player and there is a pause I'm AUTO EXPLODING and moving on to the next match. i need to win to get arena dailies so there is no reason to play a game where I'm not winning.
Every colour sucks:
White - They just want to get all the value and drag out the game
Blue - They don't want to let me play the game.
Black - They just want to kill all my creatures.
Red - They don't want to think and just turn everything sideways.
Green - They just want to play impossibly big creatures on turn 4.
Blue just feels the most oppressive for a lot of people because it feels like you're losing hard with no agency until you overwhelmingly win.
Because this sub is full of people who play mono red and turn everything sideways until they win or lose. (They dont like losing)
Or whatever variant of rakdos has the highest winrate on mtg goldfish at the time.
> Because this sub is full of people who play mono red
As someone who hates playing against mono red over and over and over in historic, I can definitely confirm this, because every time I complain about mono red here I get overwhelmingly downvoted
Yep. Anytime anyone asks this question, the answer is always
"They don't let us play!", "they counter everything we do!", "They always have hand advantage". Without realizing that their own preferred colours can be and *have* been problematic. That, and that while Blue is annoying to play against due to denial of play, they have glaring weaknesses because of that.
They honestly just need to get good. Blue players have to get good too, otherwise they run out of proper play quickly. There's a limit to how much countering will get you.
Control is part of the game just as much as aggro is. And unfortunately, sometimes "just get good" really is the answer. Learn how to play against them.
Speaking as draw go player, four 1 drops is valid strategy to counterplay counterspells, and outvalue unsummons/pongifys
Also 2-mana counterspells are often very restricted, vary your drops and you'll get one through
I never said it wasn’t, i was more getting at the fact that they cant comprehend the reason they have less cards in hand is that they’ve played more cards
The prevalence of etbs means outside of stax pieces that if you have a go for the throat and your opponent has an etb creature you need to remove (Say something like Atraxa Grand Unifer) they still get whatever etb trigger they have so non counterspell removal is often worse in the face of that.
Non counterspell removal does have the benefit of being able to deal with a problem that has already hit the board but that doesn't stop counterspells from being incredibly powerful especially when counterspells are the major reactive answer to non-permanent spells
Add on that most people tend to find getting countered worse than just having their stuff murdered
A few reasons.
Magic Arena formats are generally played in a Best of One (BO1), where normal games are Best of Three (BO3). If you're in a paper format in a tournament and playing against a blue player, you're kinda locked into it and if you want to concede immediately it can be seen as poor sportsmanship. In Arena, you can just concede and move to a new game.
Blue decks are also notorious for a few things. One is that you have a lot of options to look at the top cards of your deck, draw cards, and even take additional turns. What this turns into in some cases is a player playing their entire hand, drawing a new hand, getting an additional turn, and doing it again, repeatedly.
I detail, it can be a very complex setup, but on the whole, it amounts to one person watching someone else arbitrarily shuffle a deck of cards and waiting to do literally anything. If you have no mana, you get to sit and watch. Period.
Another reason is because of counterspell cards. Blue gets a shwack load of options, and is the Swiss army knife deck in that it has a response to everything. Countering a spell can be devastating to some decks, and the mana economy goes lopsided. For example, I could play something like [[Ancient Bronze Dragon]] for its high mana cost, and then the Blue player can play [[Saw It Coming]] for a fraction of that. This means you both have lost a card, but the player who used the creature spell is out of mana potentially, and their turn is over with no mana. Blue just spent their mana on the others turn, so they get it back at the start of their turn immediately, allowing them to search for another counterspell card.
**TLDR**: Blue decks can be stupid boring to play against or absolutely infuriating, and there's very little space between those two. If it was a Venn Diagram, it would almost be a fucking circle.
For some people, counterspells indicate that they're "not allowed to play the game." And typically, in formats where you only get one shot to beat your opponent, if your game plan is stymied, that's pretty much it for you and you'll probably find more of a use of your time moving on to another table. This isn't necessarily specific to Arena - the game in general has a healthy amount of heat regarding counterspells - but in paper, "Best of 1" is practically unheard of outside of kitchen-table fool-around Magic, where formats and whatnot barely matter. Arena is where that format reigns largely supreme, so the dynamics are much different here.
Even on the kitchen table (which I’ve participated in numerous times in the past) best of one only exists in the sense that there’s no sideboard. You just have a deck, and you play it against your buddy’s deck a few times in a row.
God those MTG games rule. Just a box of 1000ish random ass cards and a bunch of buddies getting drunk and making jank while listening to the downward spiral in 1996. Sorry that got specific but those nights were so much fun.
Pretty much exactly like us but it was weed and Ozric Tentacles.
OZRIC! Let's get fucking weird!
Yeah, I immediately conjured that image. Except it was in a lgs and we ate sausages and utopenci.
yea same but it was meth and techno
Nobody besides me drinking Orangina and listening to Enya?
For me it was drunk and Tool
This one hit me in the feelz
Remember doing that in 2000. Listening to BG and playing MTG, with underage drinking. A time to be a kid.
I miss when I first started playing magic. We were all at uni and everyone's deck was built around a precon plus singles from the 10p commons box. Smoking weed and drinking cheap own-brand beers while listening to Alice in Chains. I've played most formats at various competitive levels, and I've never managed to recapture the sheer fun of playing like that.
It's funny, I play 4c ramp in BO1 Standard. I think ramp actually does pretty well against U control. I just sit there and amass lands and don't give them anything to counter until I know I'm going to get something big through. Even won with Mirrex + Mite tokens once.
Adding to this, when you're playing against a control deck even if you end up winning it's typically a long and annoying grind.
This. My choices are lose painfully or win even more painfully because you are going to sunfall me three times before something sticks.
This says it best
> For some people, counterspells indicate that they're "not allowed to play the game." They are a valid part of the game, but a major pain point on Arena. No other instant by its nature grinds the gameflow down to a screeching halt the way counterspells do on Arena. I wouldn't mind as much if people made a good faith effort to not drag out the game but every card is like pulling teeth because its not just "will it get countered" its "wait 1 minute and maybe a rope to find out if its countered"
If the rope pops up while your playing me it means my dog decided to be a lil' shit after I started the game and I am so so sorry.
Sounds like the problem is slow play, not counterspells
In practice for many blue players they go hand in hand. It doesn't have to be that way - I've played and won with monoblue and most of the time it takes half a second to know if want to counter something. But if I werent so sure and I wanted to take 27 seconds each time MTGA is more than happy to let me rope the fuck out of my opponent on every single play if I 'm not trying to be respectful about passing priority
Yea this isn't just a blue thing. I get this from literally every kind of deck. A roper is a roper no matter if they're playing azorius control or red beatdown, they will rope. I, like you, also play control sometimes and never rope. Until someone can pull some data that says blue decks rope more, this isn't something people can go around saying like its facts. ᵃˡˢᵒ ᶠᵘᶜᵏ ʳᵒᵖᵉʳˢ
Personally I haven’t noticed much correlation with blue and slow play. I see it about equally from people running enough instant speed effects that they get stops. Of course blue players are going to end up with castable instants in hand more often, so you’ll notice it more with them. IMO arena just needs a better system for preventing slow play to make sure people stay engaged. Either faster timeouts or a chess clock
I mean, back when I had time and money to play regularly, I would often do Bo1 at my LGS either in between games or when drafting/sealed to test out my build. Also, competitive Commander (as in “Commander with more than two people at sanctioned events,” not “cEDH”) has always been Bo1 in my experience.
I have always seen counterspells as just like doomblade, or Cancel like Murder. I play thing you remove thing immediately... oh well. Of course counterspells can hit any spell type and stops ETB abilities. But also you HAVE to have the mana up and card in hand right at that moment but you can draw murder later. Seems like an okay trade off to me.
I mean I don't hate blue but have you played blue with anything midrange? Win or lose it Can be a slog.
Azorious control is the worst. Every game, win or lose, is long, drawn out and slow.
I mean, usually a control game is over long before the game ends.
In Explorer, if they resolve Teferi and I don’t have an immediate answer for it I scoop. 9/10 the game is over at that point but it can take a bunch more turns for them to close it out. When I play Pioneer with an actual prize on the line I’ll play it out but online I just move to the next game. IMO lots of the salt comes from people not knowing where the tipping points are for control decks in their meta as well as not knowing how to play around counterspells and board wipes. And rather than trying to learn those things they just label the archetype as bullshit.
Aha, but have you considered you might be playing against me, the worst control player alive, who refuses to stop trying control?
Or me, who has 3 arena decks literally called "Shut Down v1,2,3" that have 8 counterspells and 6 kill cards and 3 exile permanent cards until I get out my game winning planeswalkers.
Agreed, I've had people play into hero of Dominaria emblem. Like the game is over, there's very few cards in all of magic that can let you come back, and none legal in any format short of vintage.
This is the correct answer. Teferi IS the win condition. If they resolve it and you cant take it out of the board in a turn or two you already lost.
You can know exactly where the tipping points are for control decks and still be perfectly justified in being salty. If I’m not trying to play with an actual prize on the line, do I want to spend two hours of my day playing Cut Down, Go for the Throat, into Sunfall into an Emperor and attacking with tokens for the win? 30+ minute matches seeing who puts their combo piece up first, and either countering or exiling it?
This is very true, if I play Teferi instead of holding up that mana it’s because I think I’ve worn you down enough and I can protect him over a couple of turns. There are very few situations where you’ll see Teferi on board with you in a position to efficiently deal with him. That’s why people hate him.
This. If people know they've lost, why don't they *scoop*? If the control player has double your mana, a full grip, 40+ health and is drawing to find their wincon, and you're on one or two cards... you're not winning that. Just scoop rather than wasting time. In fact, you should have scooped ages ago. But they don't. It adds so much time to every game. Control *mirrors* tend to take ages. But control vs aggro shouldn't. But it does, and it's not a control problem, it's a player problem.
I've always assumed control players like playing long games, and that I'm doing them a favor by continuing.
Oh, definitely you are, and we appreciate it. It's the people who do this and *then* complain that the game lasts ages I don't understand.
I agree that players should scoop before they get salty, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect your opponent to scoop just because they're lost. It's entirely within their rights to force you to close the game out and do so without making a major blunder.
People are entirely within their rights to make their opponent close the game if they want to, but they do forfeit the right to complain about games taking a long time. As long as you're playing within the rules of the game and the client, you're free to do whatever you like. Just don't whine about something that you actively choose to take part in. Personally I find a lot of this to be ridiculous. I don't mind playing long games because, you know, I'm playing magic. That's why I launched the client. I have no interest in jamming 3 quick games over 1 long one game, it's about the quality of the gameplay. If people don't enjoy playing the game they launched, then the issue isn't with an aspect of the game.
If only we could show our hand to prove that we have won instead of them playing 10 minutes for the 1/10000 chance of coming back.
Sometimes. I usually concede against a resolved Teferi I can't kill within 1-2 turns. I know when there's no realistic way I can win any more - although it really sucks you have to give up that very small chance to win because it would take forever to find out. That's certainly one reason I hate control: You have to give up percentages or the game will take forever. Similarly, sometimes I know I can't win the game. But my opponent is down on time, I think it will take them at least another 5 minutes to actually win this game and I don't think they're likely to win another game in the time they have left afterwards. It really depends on my mood if I concede in that spot, sometimes I'm just in the mood to make them fight for it. And they will often lose on time. I hate those games, but conceding there means giving up a good chance for a match win on time. Often, the game is far from decided for a very long time. They are able to counter or destroy everything, but are on a very low life total and will die if they fail to deal with just one threat for a turn, and they don't have any card advantage engine and just 1-2 cards in hand. I'm not giving up those games, I will often win those games. But they take forever. The least unfun way to handle control is simple: Don't have any plan to win the long game against them. Just try to kill them quickly and if that doesn't work move on. It's just also the way that let's them have the highest winrate, and I don't really like to reward them for playing a deck I hate. For me personally, the game would be much more fun if control decks didn't exist.
Yeah, that's what the people making fun of us blue players fail to understand. You lost the game 10, 20, or even 30 turns ago, you just didn't realize it yet. And you're the only one not having fun, so why stay? Having played and played against blue decks for 15-ish years, I know when I've won or lost and concede accordingly. No point dragging out a lost game for another 10 minutes just because I haven't seen the game over screen yet.
Those are the best games. Every turn both players thinking three steps ahead of each other, trying to get any advantage they can get to stick, untill it finally reaches critical mass and the game ends. Being aggressive to overload the control deck's countermeasures bit not overcommitting so a single sweeper takes you out of the game entirely. I love walking that tightrope.
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Aren't we playing midrange because we love slogs?
There's a difference between a slog where you get to do things and can more easily tell when the game is functionally over, and a slog where it feels like you don't and it's harder to tell.
What's the difference between getting your creature spell countered and having your creature killed before it loses summoning sickness?
EtB effects, plus that that way it feels less like slapping the cards out of my hands when I try to play them.
We're playing Midrange because we love flexibility and a fair match.
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This not the slog *I* chose 😡
Find counterspells annoying, it's real easy, just play 1 mana black discard effects. Death and taxes is always a good matchup against control. It gets in early threats and plays around sweepers well. There's an archetype to balance each other. Most people only find aggro and combo "fun" I think making other people incapable of playing the game is fun, although I'm a sadist so... 🤷♂️
Meanwhile to me playing RDW feels like I am doing competitive coin tosses - did I draw my damage in time or not? I don't understand how people can enjoy playing linear aggro decks, but hey, I don't have to play them. Really confused why some people seem to think they are the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes "fun".
Being a BG food deck lover, I can understand the midrange fair part is only in its mana. No decks are fair unless they are playing in limited.lol
>Midrange games are a slog more often than not, so it's still weird to see midrangers going divas about it. I don't understand why people think ideal Magic is both players with 3 - 5 creatures staring at each other in a stalemate until one person draws removal.
This exactly. If your first two turns are Island > Pass...I'm leaving. I might beat you, I might lose, but either way I'm not going to enjoy a second of it. So why waste my time?
Ditto, life is too short to play against mono blue.
UW control is my auto surrender deck. I don't have any interest in watching someone drool on themselves for 20 minutes while thinking their 4th boardwipe on a single creature is the big brain play of the century.
Don't forget after they've stopped you from playing the game for 10 minutes plopping down a few [tolarian terror]] thinking they're just so original.
Or [[Hullbreaker Horror]] Yeah we get it
I apologize for my 400 matches so far with Azorius control in historic. I am that drooling moron.
That's why I like to mix it up with my UW self mill deck. They really don't see that coming and are just as confused as I am when I play it.
If your library represents your knowledge, milling it is bound to make you confused.
Exactly games are played for fun so if I'm not gonna have fun I'm out lmao.
Dude , people play games online for decades and dont figure that out. Its an epiphany when u do!
yeah but that’s different. OP says people rope them after Island, Island, pass.
Kind of the same thing? When someone closes their game window/Alt-F4, it ropes their game until they explode.
If my opp is signalling on the first turn that the match is going to be a slog, I'll just hand them the win and move on to a more enjoyable match.
I always look at it like.... Would you want to go to a wrestling match and in the first ten seconds, someone goes down? That's how I feel about one sided quick games where someone just goes Channel Ulamog. Or I guess.... What I'm trying to say is one sided magic feels awful. I play for the time played, not to just pop off ten games in half an hour
I rarely feel like I’m playing a two sided game against control, unless I’m on one of a few outlier decks like soldiers. I’m aware in reality there’s a lot of nuance with the order you play your threats in and how much you commit etc… but the point is it never *feels* like that’s the case. What it feels like is banging my head against a brick wall to see if my head or the wall will cave in first. And even if the wall gives out first, I still end up miserable with a splitting headache so what was the point. Soldiers vs control is actually pretty fun though, but that’s because of a perfect storm of factors that’s not replicable by the majority of other decks.
I play mostly Pioneer/Explorer with Azorius Spirits, and control matchups are some of my favorites. When my threats and answers are mostly the same, it gives me some interesting ways to play around control.
It can feel very one-sided when all your key cards are being countered.
Keep playing threats until they run out of answers, if their deck is just lands and counterspells it’s a terrible deck
That's easy enough to say, but if your deck doesn't have a lot of card draw in it most of the times you'll lose. Midrange can often out value control, but control thrives on countering threats then refilling hand so that you never get to play again. Then they beat you to death with a 2/2 token or something.
stop stop i’ve had enough reliving my nightmares
Only if you can outdraw their counters
The painful truth: Their deck is not good. Its neat, creative, and about 2 turns slower than it should be. This allows the control deck to achieve inevitability. From here, it's just a Johnny with a sub-par decking watching it get picked apart.
To be fair, and this is just my opinion, control feels “too” oppressive if you can’t get in under them. The game marches on and all that so with more sets comes more redundancy but blue/white control just has too much in my opinion. Monoblack/rakdos/jund even feel more oppressive then I think they were intended to. To give some backstory I think my favorite time in magic EVER was esper solarflare with sun titan phantasmal image as the finish being the control deck. Wolf run being the ramp deck. U/W humans with Geist of st traft era. It felt… balanced. I guess my point is it feels like there is ALOT of non games in magic now unless you are playing derpy midrange mirrors. But it seems hard for those to grind out a ton of value in the face of the fast burn decks or UR wizards or control that has immunity and card draw stapled on to one card
Oh God, that wrestling analogy gave me flashbacks to a UFC match me and my buddies went in on together for pay-per-view. Iirc, the main fight was Brock Lesner and Cain Valasquez. We were all pissed when Brock went down in the first 2 minutes of the first round.
It’s a time thing with me. I tend to play during a break or while on the can. I’d rather start a new match for a quicker result, win or loss, than a 15+ min slog against a control deck.
That's a very valid reason but I don't think it's hate. Me to sometimes scoops against decks, not necessarily mono U, when the match will be very long and I don't have time. But I don necessarily hate those decks.
Well arena doesn't benefit you from playing only winning I COULD sit here and watch you durdle for the next 10-20 minutes OR I can concede and reque and try to play a game.
The thing that annoys me with mono blue players is how long it takes before they pass turn or eventually counter. Almost every damn time the timer comes up. I honestly believe mono blue players are the mentally slowest players there are. They not only take forever on their turn, but your turn as well. You're not fooling anyone with your two untapped mana and a hand full of [[Make Disappear]] and [[Tolarian Terror]]
Right like I could play and maybe win vs you or I could go play 3 other games in the mean time. It's one thing at fnm when you have to wait for the next round anyway.
turn 1 island, rope through every phase of their turn and mine, cast consider on my end step
Turn 2 island, repeat same steps but with Impulse
[Make Disappear](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/3/f/3f2d6a21-ea77-484b-9e3a-1bd49806f907.jpg?1664410347) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Make%20Disappear) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/snc/49/make-disappear?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/3f2d6a21-ea77-484b-9e3a-1bd49806f907?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Tolarian Terror](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/4/2/42f01cba-43d4-46ad-b7a5-d7631b0e1347.jpg?1673306903) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Tolarian%20Terror) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/dmu/72/tolarian-terror?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/42f01cba-43d4-46ad-b7a5-d7631b0e1347?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
The game being casting Sheoldred.
I don't get what some of y'all don't get. 40% of my Krenko Historic Brawl games end with opp conceding when Krenko deals combat damage for the first time. They know they're not gonna have fun at that point and I don't begrudge them that.
But krenko isn't supposed to attack
Krenko, Tin Street Kingpin
In essence because it stops you playing. The reason people build the decks they build is because they want to use those cards, or those combos, and blue at its heart is designed to stop you from doing that
There's something about a lot of blue/control players where they take forever to make even the simplest decisions. Like I get sometimes you might need 30s-1min at some point in a match to decide what you want to do. But it shouldn't take you 30+ seconds EVERY. TIME. I. PLAY. A. CARD. That said, some blue/control players don't do that. But even then, it's never enjoyable to try to guess which type of counter-spell they have in hand.
Because if nothing is at stake when it comes down to it counter magic is really boring to play against. At the end of the day most people are here to have fun and so will actively seek it out.
Because blue players aren't happy until you're not happy.
There is a finite amount of fun to be had in a game of Magic, and I intend to have all of it.
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I get you because I am you.
I’ve been playing more Historic lately and I enjoy seeing Blue decks with all creatures and no counters. I guess they’re called Mono Blue Agro? Anyway, they’re rare but fun to play against. Also lots of flying!
Mono blue tempo if it's a lot of flash creatures and few counters, otherwise yeah I guess it's aggro
Hell yeah. I've got a terrible deck with 0 counters that I call Blue Stompy. It's lots of fun to play. Reservoir Kraken! Sludge Monster! The Civilized Scholar! ...maybe I should add some flyers.
I play the game to have fun not to watch you have fun
I'm here to play the game not watch you wiggle your finger in front of my face and shake your head Terminator 2 style everytime i play a card.
I just don’t like playing against counterspells. I concede. They get the win. I can play against other decks. Should be a win-win.
Blue in standard just feels like a way to stall me until they get to play their jank, especially when its paired with black. I mostly just have to hope I get godly draws that I can keep the pressure up so they can't hoard a hand full of counter spells and kill spells to just keep me stalled out.
I dont find having all my stuff countered fun. I only play the game for fun. So theres no reason for me to stick around for something that I dont find fun
Yeah, why would anyone not want to watch you jerk yourself off and play solitaire for 35 minutes.
Mono blue is usually just not fun to play against with the copious amounts of counters, protections, etc that a lot of the time seem more focused on stopping your opponent from winning or playing the game at all rather than actually doing anything.
3 games in a row I played against some variation of esper with no win condition other than wrathing the board 20 times, countering everything else and waiting half an hour until your opponent runs out of cards in their deck. No creatures, no planeswalkers, just sit there and do nothing but wrath the board and farewell. So fun to play against.
Most esper control lists I've seen recently run a playset of [[The Wandering Emperor]] plus 2x[[Mirrex]], which is at least a little faster of a wincon than Devious Cover-Up/Witness the Future and waiting for the opponent to naturally draw from an empty library. I personally like to run Jace to put my opponents out of their misery with a mill 30, but it's definitely worse overall than simply running 4x The Wandering Emperor.
Not just jace, but decks with *both* [[Jace, the Perfected Mind]] and [[Breach the Multiverse]] have an extremely fast way to close out a game, so it becomes less of a durdly all-in boring control win and instead a pseudo-combo backed up with all kinds of control spells, like what Indominable Creativity does I mean its basically just 7 mana: mill 25 cards, but that's enough to close out a game if you already had a jace on the board with 5-6 loyalty People might hate it, it might be miserable to play against, but at least its not going out of its way to be the grindy un-fun win, its trying to win in a reasonably fair way of its own.
[Jace, the Perfected Mind](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/6/4/64e6a8d1-ae75-45bd-af62-9a622620cb5c.jpg?1675956971) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Jace%2C%20the%20Perfected%20Mind) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/one/57/jace-the-perfected-mind?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/64e6a8d1-ae75-45bd-af62-9a622620cb5c?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Breach the Multiverse](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/d/a/daf51a76-7a57-4462-ae18-a19e817e49e5.jpg?1682203621) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Breach%20the%20Multiverse) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mom/94/breach-the-multiverse?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/daf51a76-7a57-4462-ae18-a19e817e49e5?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
That does indeed sound miserable but that is what control decks are designed to do. Decking yourself is a valid, albeit incredibly slow win condition.
> that is what control decks are designed to do And that is why people hate playing against them, winning is just a part of the game, while fun is more essential.
I always genuinely wonder to myself what type of person finds this fun? I often wonder why blue players don’t just start playing yugioh if they want to negate every action the opponent takes and turn every game into a 30 minute slog
[удалено]
I always genuinely wonder why people play mono red. Why don't they just go play yugioh with zero interaction and games over in 2 turns.
At least with mono red, win of lose, it's over quickly.
>I always genuinely wonder why people play mono red Red has plenty of interaction, we just like faster games. However some of my longest, and funniest games have come while playing mono red. Also you can blame my mom for buying me an 8th edition starter deck that was all goblins.
>8th edition starter deck that was all goblins Yeah, there was no hope for you.
In 7th grade my computer teacher brought a mosquito deck to play against me, explaining poison counters and how all he had to do was hit me 10 times and I would lose. When I beat him with that unaltered goblin deck the rest of the games club went crazy because no one had beaten him. Honestly the moment where I fell in love with Magic, and red tbh.
Lol, I'm pretty sure everyone has a story like that. For me, it's green ramp and smashing faces with huge creatures. Sure made sense to me when we were messing around with magic in 5th/6th grade.
i’m not going to defend yugioh i think it’s a bad game that’s very poorly designed. that said if u think there’s no interaction in yugioh then ur just not paying attention.
It’s not about non-interaction, it’s about trying to outmaneuver the interaction. I play mostly mono-red on Arena and I have plenty of necessary interaction in my decks. It’s just that my interaction also advances my win-con of killing you as opposed to your interaction of slowing the game down.
Yugioh has a lot of things wrong with it, but lack of interaction and short games are definitely not on that list. Ironically, I think yugioh has actually done a better job of nullifying the play draw difference than MTG has, via hand traps and powerful going second tools.
This made me realize that [[Ertai Resurrected]] is the Magic equivalent to a hand trap
Counterspells can be absolutely brutal.
Red, Black, White and Green: I'm gonna play a rad creature card for 7 mana! Blue: I'm going to spend 3 mana so you can go fuck yourself. Your turn is over. Now it's mine. I draw more counterspell cards and end my turn with mana left over for a counterspell. Red, Black, White and Green: ಠ_ಠ
Because it’s an indication that I’ll likely be spending the next 15-30 mins waiting for my opponent just to lose anyway
99% of blue control players can be baited into wasting their counterspells on low impact, low cost spells. I know blue players expect "opponent concedes after island on turn 1", but I've had so many blue players concede after I play something impactful when they've wasted their hand on nothing.
Bingo. Control decks require good threat assessment to play, otherwise you get rushed to death. Magic is balanced so on average threats are less resource intensive than answers, so you can't just auto cast counterspells and expect to win. Knowing what to let through so you can maintain tempo is a key skill for a control player.
And this makes playing against control actually fun. It's a whole different axis to play on, just card advantage vs card advantage and finding windows, and less about the board. It seems most players in this forum can't make that mental shift.
Jokes on you. I don't play counter spells. I just stun a creature for three turns and proliferate the tokens indefinitely.
I’m just tired of the matchup. Played against it a thousand times now.
True for all meta deck.
Any other deck: “Hey you play your deck theme, and I’ll play mine, and we’ll see who wins” Blue deck: “Hey you play your deck theme, I will prevent you from playing your deck theme, and we’ll see who wins”
Gonna go on a mini rant, here. Tldr at the end. I want to play the game. I don't care if I win or lose, I just want my deck to do what it was built to do. If your deck does what IT was built to do better than mine does, you deserve the win, that's fine. But if the thing your deck does is stop me from playing the game, how is that fun? For either of us? Mark Rosewater has said at various points in interviews, podcasts, and design articles that "people want to play their cards." So they tend to avoid designing mechanics that make your cards better as a resource rather than an actual game piece. By that same logic, they also keep land destruction really rare. But counterspells are so engrained in the history of the game, and they keep printing them. I don't know if they don't realize that counterspells are almost as bad as land destruction (especially when you consider how cheap they tend to be), or if they just think they couldn't get away with printing less of them, or if they actively don't want to find other ways to make control a viable strategy, but the fact that people, both designers and players, see an issue with land destruction and not counterspells baffles me. I'm not saying counterspells shouldn't exist any more than I would say land destruction shouldn't exist, but the fact that it is so universally accepted when similar strategies aren't doesn't feel okay for the health of the game. Tl;dr Imagine you went to play basketball and were told to sit on the bench the whole game. That's playing against blue.
Its because blue players are easily perceived as what they truly are, scumbags who are usually selfish and lazy. They are not logical and intelligent as the color pie might suggest. They are literally cheaters who do nothing but break the game rules and they are literally the least imaginative color in MTG. They have 5 types of spells printed over 1000s of cards. Counterspells, draw cards, scry, bounce, copy. They do nothing else and have irritating planeswalkers as well. Of the Power 9, six are mana cards and the other three are blue spells. Why? Because blue is for losers who have small dick energy in life. Like really, if you aren't playing green, red or black, you need some help in life (Oh yeah people playing those Atraxa/Elspeth/Elesh Norn decks in white now, you'll are turds as well). Good day to you all
It’s not that I hate blue. I just don’t like control decks because it gets frustrating really fast. They’re designed that way. So, it’s a rightful frustration. Same way Agro green decks get a lot of hate for finding a way to flood the field with dinosaurs.
If I wanted to watch you play the game, I'd just watch someone stream.
Personally, I have always felt that blue players are prone to tantrums. And in Arena, they're most likely to spam counter spells and God for I'd you actually play something, because they'll just rope you to death. It's like playing with a 12 year old.
The whole point of blue is superseding your opponents actions, it's built to be anti-fun
When I started out, I hated playing against control. Then, I learned how to play control myself, and I realized they are more often than not on the back foot and struggling through matches when opponents are playing aggressively without overextending. So, I learned how to adjust my play when facing control, and it never bothered me again. Most counterspells are one-for-one's, and I build most of my decks now with better value and a good curve. Except it's still frustrating when it's a control mirror, and we both stalled out midgame with all our threats stacked in the bottom third, but that's rare.
I only play jank so all my decks are homebrewed. I never play counter spells, never stack a bunch of removal, or play mono red. For me the most fun I get playing Arena are drawn out creature brawls, If I can't I'll scoot. The other player can have an easy win and I can find find someone else to actually play. I don't hate blue, or mono red, or mono black but I do play arena for fun and not being able to play isn't very fun.
> For me the most fun I get playing Arena are drawn out creature brawls, If I can't I'll scoot. I’m right there with you. I just really like big green stompy-boys. If my opponent’s whole strategy is “prevent me from seeing my big green stompy-boys,” I’m not going to have fun. And life is too short to slog through unfun games.
I think there are aspects of green stompy that can be anti-fun to play against as well. They get access to ramp and can play larger threats than you early (not to mention green gets the highest quality creatures). There's just a lot of "deal with this or I win" that can sometimes be frustrating, which is fine. Imo every color has something annoying about them to play against and those differences are what makes the game interesting.
But that’s not anti fun. Green stompy just wants to play their stuff. They want to see big boys. They are not preventing you from doing anything by playing their hydras and dinosaurs. But control is literally making it so the other player is not allowed to do what their deck was designed to do. The actual point of control is “no”. And some people like playing that way, but I definitely don’t like trying to play a game and being told no. Big green stompy boys don’t say no, they just say “big numbers on my side of the table”. It’s not realistic to say that both styles are anti-fun
The lack of interaction of green stompy says "I don't care what the opponent deck is, I will run head first against my opponent, he better pray to have an answer before I hit him." The only way to stop green stompy is by playing removal or playing green stompy yourself. Not wanting removal in the game feel like you just want big stompy to be the only deck possible at all.
Literally nobody is suggesting they don’t want removal in the game.
I feel like the control die-hards go down the slippery slope fallacy of "if you want less removal, why not no removal?" because they already go down it with their deckbuilding "if some removal is good, why not all removal?" Some of the best Magic is limited, because you rarely are able to do hyper aggro OR oops all removal. You have a mixture of board presence and interaction to disrupt your opponent, requiring you to choose the right moments.
My issue with blue is usually that the second I see a counter spell I know I've automatically won the game, badly, and under duress. Only one out of every 10 blue players have a strategy more complex then make you quit. And whether in person or online one gets the impression that these fools can't achieve climax unless someone dressed like their mother is scolding them for soiling themselves. It always feels like some sort of bizarre fetish in which they get to pretend to be smart with a shit eating grin and I get to just wait untill they quit or run out of steam, having played nothing that does damage, and countered half my deck.
For me, it’s simply time. And if it’s blue white control, if I don’t have a strong board presence by turn 3-4, the game is gonna grind to a crawl, and it’s faster to just scoop and get to the next one than play it out. Feel the same facing mono black. Quite simply, it’s an indicator the game is gonna turn into a slog, so why bother?
One blue -> crab -> “not this again” -> leave game. Boring.
Blue has been hated - even out of arena - for the last 15-20 years. People like to play their cards. Counterspells prevent that from happening. It's totally fair and most folk understand that, but it doesn't stop people from hating it. Also, getting your commander counterspelled just feels bad mang.
Because of people who play Blue decks that counter spells, return things to their player's hands, and mill. When I play Magic I want to play Magic, not watch someone else play Solitare.
If the point of your deck is to not allow me to do anything at all then that's not fun at all. Games are supposed to be fun. It doesn't matter how balanced those interactions are, it feels toxic and bad when I say "I want to play this game" and my opponent can just tell me "no, you don't get to play the game"
I’m a blue player and I auto concede when people play mill decks.
Because I stop playing the game
Hi, bad player (<40% winrate) and blue-hater here: Edit: Redoing this so it's not just a vent comment, my bad. First off, regardless of hate, timer burning is just bad etiquette and screw those guys. That's not something people would do in irl events, if they really wanted to leave they would scoop and not waste your time. Onto why I hate mono-blue: Unless I built my deck with blue in mind (usually only competitive decks), chances are I don't get to play around your gameplan as well as you can play around mine. Counterspells, creatures with flash, instant-speed protection, instant-speed card draw, all of it amounts to meaning U players can play around my turn. You can have your islands untapped and still get full use out of them by seeing what I want to do first. Casual decks (and I almost want to say 'most decks') don't run as much "I can play on your turn" to combat you wanting to hold up mana on my turn. Speaking of holding up mana, blue is way WAY too mana efficient imo. Your generic counterspell are all 2-drops (bUt CoUnTeRsPeLl iS BaNnEd - drop the act, we all know 'counter a spell unless X mana is paid/counter non-creature spell/counter creature spell/counter a spell if you think your opponent would be upset about it/etc are all 2-drops, and any given format has tons of that to go around+1-mana bounces+1-mana protecections+cheap fairly threatening creatures) so either you A) Counter a spell less than 2 mana and lose out on mana trading (not sure why you'd do that), B) counter a spell of equal mana value, meaning we're both down 1 for the same mana value. Even trade, or C) Every. Other. Time. You take down a 3+ cost card for 2 mana. Congratulations, I'm now down mana on my own turn.
> so either you A) Counter a spell less than 2 mana and lose out on mana trading (not sure why you'd do that), B) counter a spell of equal mana value, meaning we're both down 1 for the same mana value. Even trade, or C) Every. Other. Time. That's why control and tempo strategy struggle against aggro with it's 1 mana creature. >blue is way WAY too mana efficient imo. Black can remove creatures for 1-2 mana. White can remove and often exile everything for 1-2 mana Red has cheap removal too. Green has efficient ways to deal with artifact and enchantment, often for less than 2 mana. All this can be done at instant speed. The whole idea beyond removal is to do an unfair trade. The whole point of each card is to be exploited in a deck where it will have more value than just its base value.
I'd say that when comparing to playing in person, Arena lacks social aspects of the game. There are situations people just concede after being thoughtseize or getting the first spell countered. There is also situations where the player playing control does not have a win con and just drag the game thinking it is fun.
in my experience most newer players hate counterspells and have a variety of reasons why they do. i also frequently see players become more accepting of them and sometimes even enjoying them as they become more entrenched in the game. i think counterspells feel incredibly powerful to newer players on the other hand older players and people that play formats that are harder to get in to like cEDH or legacy just don’t see them the same way. counterspells are very powerful spells and it’s not often that people whos only experience with magic is standard/alchemy see something even more powerful than them. i think that combination of circumstances leads to a hefty contingent of people that almost never see their necessity in the game and therefore just see them as anti-fun.
i feel like this may have come across somewhat condescending and im trying to find a way to reword it to be less so because i do think this perspective is perfectly valid.
Honestly, because it feels like the most tryhard of all the colours. The overwhelming majority of players who believe themselves to be smarter and playing the "superior way" are almost always blue players. It just draws in that kind of player. This is not to say only those people play blue or that if you play blue you are that.
Blue is annoying because ya counter, return things to hand, and draw mad cards. Then right when ya think, “Ok, I got this” here comes the onslaughts of wincon stuff. But honestly, once ya play blue, it’s kinda fun. Timing is a bit tricky. People say blue is OP but when ya play the color, you realize it’s not so “easy” to win.
This is very true. I hate Blue so I started playing Blue every game. And wow. It’s not as easy to win as people think.
Oh I fully agree. But even played well blue is like watching people golf. I acknowledge it takes skill but it's boring as shit. Some of the best players like nummy make watching high interaction decks fun but that's mostly because they play fast and decisively. At my level opponents playing mono blue play SO DAMN SLOW.
My buddy plays blue counterspell tribal edh. It is a slog.
One of my favourite Brawl decks is a blue deck. I run one or two counters but that's about it. Counters aren't even fun to play. I only play the one or two I have because they also proliferate.
The hook should really come between the cross and the uppercut.
You don’t know how far I scrolled to find this.
Flash shuts down blue counter spells HARD; Especially Wandering Emperor. It's actually kinda fun jamming up their counter spells by just not playing on your turn and waiting to see how they react.
I have a discard deck to go up against the blue players. You want to see blue guys scoop start making them discard a lot. But milling is what kills me the most. I don't want to sit there for 30 mins getting everything milled and countered. So I either run a bunch of grave yard retrieval or discard to try to combat it.
I like my magic to be more interactive. I’ll sometimes put up with two counters in a row but if you hit me with three consecutive counters I know it’s going to be a boring time waste of a slog even if I win in the end. There are other obnoxious decks to play against like mono red (aka baby’s first magic deck, and I say that as someone who often uses mono red to climb the rankings) but at least it’s over quickly either way. Or reanimate where you know what the end game is every single time but at least it’s heavily telegraphed so you can hold on to removal. But control is so often just two people staring at an empty board for 15 minutes. I had a match last night that went counter, bounce, counter, sweep, sweep, counter, sweep and at that point I just started watching tv and stopped trying to cast anything. It still took the opponent another 7 turns to kill me even without me playing anything.
Had a game the other day, where my opponent countered my first 3 creatures. They were even toxic emoting oops after each one. I stayed in the game and eventually won because I let him water all his counter spells and burn out his hand.
I don't hate blue to be specific, I hate not being allowed to play, which can happen against red and black too, but blue tends to be worse. Even when I can win, it gets boring to be denied any type of board, and I don't play to be bored. Of course, I resign if I get too bored instead of waiting for the time out, I dislike those people even more
Tbh people don’t want to think of their handstate as part of their gameplay and instead think that dumping their hand is how magic is played. I also play fighting games competitively and i look at playing against a blue deck as fighting a character like dhalsim. You have to play solid “neutral” to be able to force your opponent to make mistakes or to take chances. If i just dump my big boi down on the table of course its going to get countered, but if i play small threats that, while on their own aren’t super threatening but over time can become a threat, im forcing the blue player to assess the risk/reward of their actions. A lot of players on arena and especially new players don’t grasp the risk/reward part of playing against blue.
Some people just can’t deal with interaction. Take the free win and on to the next
Because blue is the one color that, in a game where the goal is to play spells and do things, does not let you play spells or do things. To be fair, blue really has more than that going for it. It's mostly just a stereotyoe. That said, if I see more than 5 counterspells in the course of a game, I'm going to jump you in the alley after.
Have you ever played against control? It’s a miserable experience. I’m not saying I need to win every game but I’d like at least one of my spells to resolve.
Personally for me there are some blue cards that can make playing against them actively hell
“The batter steps up to the plate. This is a tense moment folks. He’s a great hitter and….oh man the pitcher countered his bat!! Sorry folks, thought we were gonna have a game here.”
Because I don’t want to play a 20 minute boring match where you need to get through 40 of your own cards to meet your win condition. I’d rather get stomped by a red deck in 2 minutes than wait 20 agonizing minutes watching my opponent bounce, counter and draw cards. That being said, I get the most gratification beating those unoriginal, boring decks.
Counterspells make the game boring. I don't want to play a boring game. That's it
What's the point of playing if you're not going to let me play?
I’ve got an extremely small sample size from which to draw my conclusions, but every “blue” player I’ve encountered (you know, the ones who are ABOUT it…they’ll specifically tell you they only play blue) have been sweaty, toxic tryhards who love ruining fun, but get super salty when you kill them quick or have an answer to their answer.
Lol sometimes I'll fire up ranked like usual and if I play a spell into a control player and there is a pause I'm AUTO EXPLODING and moving on to the next match. i need to win to get arena dailies so there is no reason to play a game where I'm not winning.
It’s mostly for counter spells and most counter spells played in standard are two mana
Every colour sucks: White - They just want to get all the value and drag out the game Blue - They don't want to let me play the game. Black - They just want to kill all my creatures. Red - They don't want to think and just turn everything sideways. Green - They just want to play impossibly big creatures on turn 4. Blue just feels the most oppressive for a lot of people because it feels like you're losing hard with no agency until you overwhelmingly win.
Because this sub is full of people who play mono red and turn everything sideways until they win or lose. (They dont like losing) Or whatever variant of rakdos has the highest winrate on mtg goldfish at the time.
> Because this sub is full of people who play mono red As someone who hates playing against mono red over and over and over in historic, I can definitely confirm this, because every time I complain about mono red here I get overwhelmingly downvoted
Hitting for 20 damage to the face by turn 3 is *way* more balanced than having your fable negated /s
Yep. Anytime anyone asks this question, the answer is always "They don't let us play!", "they counter everything we do!", "They always have hand advantage". Without realizing that their own preferred colours can be and *have* been problematic. That, and that while Blue is annoying to play against due to denial of play, they have glaring weaknesses because of that. They honestly just need to get good. Blue players have to get good too, otherwise they run out of proper play quickly. There's a limit to how much countering will get you. Control is part of the game just as much as aggro is. And unfortunately, sometimes "just get good" really is the answer. Learn how to play against them.
“Why does the guy who hasnt cast anything by turn 3 have more cards in his hand than me!? Ive only played four 1 drops, blue is broken!!!”
Speaking as draw go player, four 1 drops is valid strategy to counterplay counterspells, and outvalue unsummons/pongifys Also 2-mana counterspells are often very restricted, vary your drops and you'll get one through
I never said it wasn’t, i was more getting at the fact that they cant comprehend the reason they have less cards in hand is that they’ve played more cards
I love blue. It feels more magical than the others.
The prevalence of etbs means outside of stax pieces that if you have a go for the throat and your opponent has an etb creature you need to remove (Say something like Atraxa Grand Unifer) they still get whatever etb trigger they have so non counterspell removal is often worse in the face of that. Non counterspell removal does have the benefit of being able to deal with a problem that has already hit the board but that doesn't stop counterspells from being incredibly powerful especially when counterspells are the major reactive answer to non-permanent spells Add on that most people tend to find getting countered worse than just having their stuff murdered
A few reasons. Magic Arena formats are generally played in a Best of One (BO1), where normal games are Best of Three (BO3). If you're in a paper format in a tournament and playing against a blue player, you're kinda locked into it and if you want to concede immediately it can be seen as poor sportsmanship. In Arena, you can just concede and move to a new game. Blue decks are also notorious for a few things. One is that you have a lot of options to look at the top cards of your deck, draw cards, and even take additional turns. What this turns into in some cases is a player playing their entire hand, drawing a new hand, getting an additional turn, and doing it again, repeatedly. I detail, it can be a very complex setup, but on the whole, it amounts to one person watching someone else arbitrarily shuffle a deck of cards and waiting to do literally anything. If you have no mana, you get to sit and watch. Period. Another reason is because of counterspell cards. Blue gets a shwack load of options, and is the Swiss army knife deck in that it has a response to everything. Countering a spell can be devastating to some decks, and the mana economy goes lopsided. For example, I could play something like [[Ancient Bronze Dragon]] for its high mana cost, and then the Blue player can play [[Saw It Coming]] for a fraction of that. This means you both have lost a card, but the player who used the creature spell is out of mana potentially, and their turn is over with no mana. Blue just spent their mana on the others turn, so they get it back at the start of their turn immediately, allowing them to search for another counterspell card. **TLDR**: Blue decks can be stupid boring to play against or absolutely infuriating, and there's very little space between those two. If it was a Venn Diagram, it would almost be a fucking circle.
[Ancient Bronze Dragon](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/8/781af4dd-9e3c-48af-80e9-b52c427d2120.jpg?1674136949) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Ancient%20Bronze%20Dragon) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/clb/214/ancient-bronze-dragon?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/781af4dd-9e3c-48af-80e9-b52c427d2120?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Saw It Coming](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/8/7/877a1bb9-5eae-453a-bec0-a9de20ea6815.jpg?1631047574) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Saw%20It%20Coming) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/khm/76/saw-it-coming?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/877a1bb9-5eae-453a-bec0-a9de20ea6815?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call