Thassa's OracleThassa's Oracle | Art by Jesper Ejsing

We've all salted out before; it's a unifying experience in the game of Commander. No matter what you love about the game, we all, sooner or later, have a moment where our mood shifts for the worse due to some element of the game.

Why?

I've tried to explore this. Where I started was with EDHREC's 100 Saltiest Cards. My logic in looking here was to understand what these cards have in common. Maybe if I could find that connection, I could get to the heart of this universal experience.

Denial

Initially, I thought the concept must be about denial. Players don't like feeling like they can't participate in the game. If you deny them an untap step or the ability to take meaningful game actions, then salt might ensue.

This definitely isn't wholly it, by leagues, but I want to explore this theory first. Cards like StasisStasis, Winter OrbWinter Orb, and Vorinclex, Voice of HungerVorinclex, Voice of Hunger are undeniably salt inducing and have some of the highest salt score cards in the list.

What about denial is upsetting? I want to get deeper. I want to get philosophical. Being able to take game actions is one of the quintessential parts of the game. Counter magic and removal is part of the game too, though. When we sit down to play, what we enjoy is disruption as much as acceleration, at least fundamentally. It's part of what we love. We just don't like when disruption happens to us, and even that isn't true for all players.

Personally, I love being stopped over and over and still winning. It makes it feel earned. It makes me feel accomplished.

Messing with a players' ability to tap lands is different though. Counter magic or removal feels like interruption, not locking another person out. Counter magic ideally stops one thing or a moment of an opponent's turn. Mass land denial stops players for many turns. It's simply more effective.

Why is that so upsetting? Why is it universally upsetting?

I'll turn on my psychological brain for a second. Magic: The Gathering's Commander is a game that likely requires a time investment of 1+ hours. During this time, due to the nature of being able to effectively play and manage your win, you must be vigilant and assessing. Things are changing and evolving all the time, changing how your cards affect the game.

Commander requires vigilance and time.

Imagine investing that kind of care to your possibility of enjoyment and be denied it. You'd like to play. You want the vigilance and time in order to vie for a win, to take meaningful game actions. Someone in the game, in order to protect their win, forces you into inaction - irrelevant vigilance: taking a turn out of obligation. It rips the fun and purpose away from the very essence of the game. If you can't play, what can you enjoy?

I don't mean to moralize Stax. I think it's a relevant, and in some respects essential, strategy in Magic. Stax even has a huge history (you can read about it here). I'm simply noting why people tend to feel some type of way about it.

Efficiency

I'm always surprised by what I see on the EDHREC Salt List next, after mass land denial. It's cards like Nadu, Winged WisdomNadu, Winged Wisdom, Thassa's OracleThassa's Oracle, and The One RingThe One Ring. This is both surprising, yet not surprising. I've often salted out myself about an infinite combo, which share some similarities with these cards.

What's surprising is how universal this feeling is. These cards are just efficient. They're simply cards printed in the game that work well; they're some of the best cards in the game. All have, at some point, seen play in cEDH.

What about efficiency is upsetting? I want to think deeper about this. These cards don't stop you from playing. Playing good cards seems perfectly reasonable to me. Why do we hate to see other's succeed? Aren't we all making our decks as efficiently as we can make them, within our means, most of the time?

What about seeing another player manage this is salt inducing? It's not actually as simple as I'm making it sound.

"Within our means" is a huge point here - not the only point, but worth noting. Magic is an expensive hobby. Some of these all-star cards will cost you a pretty penny to run. There's this class division between the haves and the have-nots in this game. Not everyone feels comfortable proxying - though it's a solution to this.

Financial limitation isn't something to ignore. It's upsetting to think what stops you from winning, or effectively participating in a game, is how much money you make. No one wants to fight a wallet. We don't like to feel powerless, helpless, in a hobby meant to bring joy and inclusiveness.

This isn't the only point of contention here, though. It's not just class divide that makes these cards salt inducing. There's the simple fact that these cards warp the game. When someone plays a Thassa's OracleThassa's Oracle, it usually means the game is over if you don't have the CounterspellCounterspell or Force of WillForce of Will. There's something so final about this card. The One RingThe One Ring is not too dissimilar. It doesn't end the game, but warps the advantage towards that player so much that any other player has to struggle to come out from under it.

Aren't we all are trying to win? Why does it matter what we play? Why does that get our briefs in a bunch? Well, the game is meant to feel like equal stakes and ability. That's why the Commander Bracket system exists and why the power scaling before it existed. We all best enjoy the game when we feel we have an equal enough footing; we know decks are diverse and thus it's complicated to balance them - but still.

We want to know there is a purpose to the struggle, a purpose to the playing. Sometimes a game is so overwhelmingly disparate in power that it becomes impossible. Hence the salt, justifiably.

Again, I'm not moralizing playing strong cards and paying for them. That's a whole other article that I'll likely be asked to avoid writing about because of honest and true contentiousness. I'm not saying its bad or good paying for cards. Just understand that the difference is contentious, especially when that card warps the play patterns so much that the game becomes extremely one-sided.

Conclusion

This conclusion is going to be a whopper. What was my point in writing all of this? First, I wanted to normalize this feeling we get when games upset us. Second, and more importantly, I needed to talk about that to explain how we should be coping with these kinds of emotions.

We've all experienced: passive aggressive comments; complete silence and poorly blocking; withdrawal from the game; or rage, unbridled and direct, scooping up their cards and storming off.

I really want to hold your hand and suggest that all of these behaviors are annoying, but the reasons behind them are pretty valid. Most of these are the most common ways players salt out, but most of these aren't really harmful. Now if someone starts knocking over other people's stuff, insulting people, cussing them out, then I would say that's not healthy or acceptable.

Maybe to some extent, any aggressive behavior aside from excusing yourself isn't exactly appropriate. But taking your stuff and leaving is a great way to protect your piece of mind. It's valid not to want to play with people who upset you.

All the methods of salting out are ways people cope with indirectness. I'm a firm believer in directness. If you don't like something, say exactly that.

But that's not really necessarily feasible for everyone. Some people might not feel comfortable directly naming their feelings. They might not even know how to name what they're feeling. And these other methods of indirectness - salt - don't necessarily hurt anyone else. Obviously everyone is different and these methods might bother you, but you're also free to leave the situation as well.

All I'm saying is, I've noticed moralization against some of these methods of coping. Calling them childish or even going as far as invalidating getting upset about a card game at all as if it's beneath them. The number of people who salt outnumbers the people who don't, in my experience playing this game for almost a decade now. That means salting out is normal.

Why are we making people feel bad for something that's perfectly normal? Why are we trying to mold how a person responds to this kind of stimuli if the response is self soothing and not harmful? I stress the not harmful part; not all coping behaviors are acceptable.

This is not my normal, open to critique self. I feel this so passionately that I won't budge on one fact. I might allow critique about why we salt out, or even about how we handle it, but I won't allow people to take away the ability to feel something about this game.

Players should be allowed to get angry, sad, or even hurt by something they invest a great deal of time, thought, creativity, and money into. I stand by this. But as always, if you're looking for a fight on Blue Sky hit me up. I'm @strixhavendroout there.

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