In a past blog post here at The Group Hug Gazette I explored the question of whether we could take away any lessons from cEDH while playing group hug. Generally I feel like the answer is no. Here is a link to the blog post. I played some pretty weird games with a hastily adapted Kinnan cEDH deck. Players scooped after I played Weird Harvest for x=20 and then dropped Tempting Worm on the table. As it turned out, no one wanted to resolve the enter the battlefield triggers!

Playing a cEDH deck at an edh table made it feel like I was playing with my food. The power levels were just too out of proportion. It made winning, which is already a touchy subject when you tell players you are playing group hug, an even more salty occurrence. But that does change when you say I have no win conditions and I simply refuse to win the game with this deck.

Throughout my travels (I have traveled around the US full time for the last 2 years) I have encountered a mixed bag of reactions to playing group hug. The unifying impression though is that people are suspicious of group hug and have felt tricked by players in the past that have downplayed their decks power level and then proceeded to destroy the table in the late game. I have talked about the difference between lying and politics in the past but many players clearly don’t separate the two concepts. I stand by the statement that if you are playing group hug winning probably shouldn’t be your main goal. The deception of these tricky players has taken its toll on almost every shop I have been to. Even my boilerplate introduction to group hug stopped working. Which goes something like this: Here is my group hug deck, it gives away resources in an attempt to benefit more from said resources so that it can win the game.

My first thought was to tame the power level down to the point that my win rate would drop very low or make my win cons very hard to achieve. Some might argue that I should just win and let the salt flow but I honestly think that commander would be a much better format if people thought of it as a group endeavor to have good fun games. The downside to dropping power level in group hug is that if all your plays help the table you can’t keep up with the table you don’t really feel like you have much impact on the late game. So that’s when I remembered how much fun piloting the Kinnan cEDHug deck had been… Until it wasn’t. So I decided to remove all win conditions from my group hug decks.

It has been really fun! You can do ridiculously powerful things and make the games go really crazy. The only thing that is necessary is to remember not to hug too hard! I have built two zero win condition group hug decks and they are both a blast to pilot! Here are their moxfield links: Kinnan Heliod

Repeat after me: Here is my winconless group hug deck, I literally refuse to win the game.