#rulebreaker

I feel you shouldn't call it Rulebreaker.

Decks that break the rules but are tacitly accepted are as old as EDH. Playing two brother yamazakis as commanders was done before the partner mechanic was even printed. Having an Urza deck where he advances through the years every time you recast him sounds fun. Putting a fun silver border card in the list, of course. Even playing a commander that wasn't one of the original five elder dragons was "breaking the rules" at some point. WotC runs a pride event every year where everything has partner, and I know a few people that keep those decks year round for occasional play. I don't think a saheeli partnered with Huatli deck is an issue for most tables.

The protocol for these "rule zero" decks is simple: talk about it with your table. See if they're fine with it. Ironically, Rulebreaker is the opposite of that: it's playing within the rules! You don't have to disclose that and discuss it in advance (any more than usual when revealing any random commander, that is. Talk to people, folks.) It's part of the rules that you get to break them in specific ways. They're even balanced around it! As much as anything is balanced in commander. Hence why Tolabow only gets one extra color and a relatively lackluster effect.

So, sure, keep making rule zero decks if they have a compelling reason to. A reason good enough most tables will agree to let you do that playing against them. Likely one inoffensive enough to not feel like you're just cheating to gain an advantage.

Could you model some of those against existing rulebreakers? Sure, but I don't think playing all the best of X in five colors is the most compelling reason to bring to the table. "I just wanted to be able to play better cards" is usually not enough.

Rulebreaker? Sure, it's fine. I'm not too thrilled about it, 6 out of 8 of them are the most boring of designs, 1 has already been a mess, and the last one is a fun gimmick that'll generate a ton of online lists, a hundredth that amount of paper decks, and then those decks will be played one game out of fifty because it's mostly just a novelty. Or get scrapped.

"Play cards of every color that do this" isn't all that new. With all basic manabases for other colors (and a bunch of rainbow lands), you end up only playing the very best options of those other colors, because they're the ones that will be worth the inconsistency in the manabase. If they flip the game when you cast them. But those are already the same cards that see play in decks with that theme (or other themes) and those colors. So rulebreaker doesn't add much.

Tolabow is the same thing, but one step down for balance reason. It ends up being nothing special. If I wanted a spellslinger commander in blue I could add another color of spells to, I can already do that. I have access to any number of partner commanders. And if I used partners instead, I get another card in my command zone. AND potentially an additional color! Add to that the confusion of Tolabow functioning incredibly unintuitively and then receiving a day zero errata and you've got a formula for something that hurts more than it helps. Cute otter though.

Whtz is good and fun. They're the only one of these that feels like it has a good mechanical reason to exist, to me. However, I do think their popularity so far is way, way, way, way past anything reasonable. It's a fun novelty, but it's just that. And building a deck in paper with all the additional logistics of a 250 card deck box and all the sleeves and the cost of all the extra cards I expect will keep a lot of people from committing to the bit... Or to play the deck once they assembled it.

Overall though, I can't get past the distribution method. Mystery Booster is NOT a place for new legal cards in any format. This turns these new cards from a 7 out of 10 with bonus points for novelty into a 2 or 3. As far as I'm concerned with building decks, these cards do not exist, because I cannot get them in a reasonable manner. Non-exclusive reprints with treatments exclusive to collector booster 2 have fetched well north of $100. These are twice as common, but they're exclusive mechanical designs. They will be prohibitively expensive as singles. Festival in a box is not an option because the way they're sold currently is predatory bundles that sometimes get scalped and nothing else. Conventions happen regularly in one country in the world, and semi regularly in two continents out of half a dozen. So I'll never play against these except if I go to an actual magiccon at some point maybe. And I'll never play with these because I won't be able to get them. So they functionally don't exist.

Rules are for... someone else? 🤔 You won't believe what happens next!

REVIEW TOUR

RULEBREAKER (Gamebreakers 4) by Elise Faber and Author Kat Mizera at The Reading Cafe:

'The character driven premise is captivating, emotional and intriguing'

rule-breaker in platform Doctor Martens.

💛🏈 SALE ALERT 🏈💛

RULE BREAKER by Nikki Hall is on sale for $.99!!!! 

Get it here https://geni.us/rulebreaker

Link in bio @nikkihallbooks

Fake dating

Forced proximity

College football romance

Humor

HEAT

Blurb: 

Some rules were meant to be broken...

Soren

I’ve never met someone so determined to mess up her life. Vi Malone is one step away from disaster, and I can’t stop trying to save her. But maybe she can help save me. A couple of weeks posing as my girlfriend would go a long way toward fixing my battered reputation. As long as I don’t break my oldest rule—never get emotionally involved.

Vi

ik you're getting alot of questions and prolly making this worse sjwejjne

but for the sk!au, we know the boys target parents that aren't good to their kids, but do they also maybe target parents that are abusive to their spouses as well?

They do!