Readers!

About a year ago, EDHREC did its second "salt" survey to determine which cards made people the saltiest playing against them. Since talking about Salt was adjacent to, but distinct from my EDH Heat Index series, I decided to name the resulting articles "Collateral" because I was making a pun about the movie Heat. There, you're all caught up. It's been a year, and I'm back to my old tricks, referencing another Heat-adjacent Micheal Mann movie and talking about the EDH salt scores. This time around, some things changed, some things stayed the same, and there were a few shocking developments.

The 3rd (annual?) EDHREC salt survey got over 3 million votes which was pretty significant. Some improvements were made to streamline it a bit so actual played-in-EDH card showed up because if people got too many obscure draft chaff cards in a row, they got bored and stopped doing the survey. 3 million votes is a lot, and it's cool everyone participated. The background slowly changing into a picture of a salt mining operation was a nice touch (kudos to Andy from Archidekt for that one) and in general, it felt like less of a slog to participate this time around. Next year's will be even better, we hope.

For a new card printed since 2020's survey to make the list, it has to beat out an established list of some truly salinating cards. In 2020 we had cards that let players take other players' turns, destroyed lands, prevented their cards from untapping and gave the caster extra turn(s). In short, for a card to make the list in 2021 the first year it was eligible, it had to make people more upset than cards like Winter Orb and Nether Void, which is no easy feat. True, there is some recency bias going on, but there are also some other factors in the mix. A total of 17 cards that weren't on either the 2019 list or the 2020 list charted in 2021, which was sort of shocking to me, personally. Here is that list.

• Tergrid, God of Fright // Tergrid's Lantern
• Opposition Agent
• Negan the Cold-Blooded
• Dockside Extortionist
• Notion Thief
• Rick, Steadfast Leader
• Drannith Magistrate
• Torment of Hailfire
• Burning Sands
• Bend or Break
• Xanathar, Guild Kingpin
• Boiling Seas
• Force of Negation
• Oppression
• Glenn the Voice of Calm
• Fall of the Thran
• Mana Crypt

I think the older cards are just as surprising as the new ones, frankly. Are there new "things" these cards did wrong? I don't think so, but I think it is worth trying to categorize the new cards. It's possible some of these cards were near the Top 100 but didn't quite crack last year because they did the same things cards on the list do, in fact it's more than possible, it's very likely.

The "core" is large - 62 cards were included all three years which tells me there is a consensus. When the majority of the cards on any list are on all three, it's clear people know what they don't like. There were also 19 cards not from 2019 that made it on both the 2020 and 2021 lists, and that list of cards is interesting, too. If you're interested, I used this tool and clicked "text view" on the edhrec pages to get the lists formatted to enter into the comparator tool. You'll need to go through and eliminate the line break it automatically replaces a comma with, and you'll need to add names like Teferi and Narset back in because there are multiple versions of each card and the tool drops the second instance. It doesn't take that long and if you're as interested in the raw data as I was, the tool is fun to play with. I use this site and lists from EHDREC a ton in my other series. But with such a large list of cards, a full 17% of 2021's list (I did the math) unique to this year, did anything change or can we explain the big shift? Was it even a big shift? Well, kind of. There are 26 cards that were on the list in 2020 that weren't on the list in 2019 and 17 cards that only appeared in 2019, so the 17 cards that only appeared in 2021 and the 1 card that appeared in 2021 and 2019 but not 2020 (Time Warp) isn't a gigantic list in context. Is a shift occurring, or something else? Here's what I think.

Transgression: Mass, repeatable discard

How That Will Be Interpreted: Oh, so you want to be the only one playing Magic?

Commander Heat Index Score: 7/10

Notes: Oppression made the list for the first time ever for the same reason Tergrid did - because of Tergrid decks. Oppression was a card that is symmetrical and symmetry, especially when it's punishing, was never that popular before. Nicol Bolas, then Tinybones, then Tergrid made a card like Oppression much more attractive the more and more players began to be rewarded for making opponents discard. Suddenly, the card is less symmetrical since you can happily discard your own cards and play with theirs. Tainted Aether is the closest we've gotten to a card like Oppression on the list in years past and while that card is still nasty, it's got nothing on a pairing of Tergrid and a card like Bottomless Pit or Oppression. A card like Mind Twist that can wreck your whole hand isn't factoring here, but repeatable discard has become a real sore spot lately. Tergrid is getting Rule 0'd out of existence a bit, but it's still a card that pops up. I have it in the 99 of my Nath deck and when it pops up, I'm suddenly the Archenemy. It's amazing what a year, and the printing of Tinybones and Tergrid, has done for cards that didn't make the list before.

Transgression: Stealing their "advantage"

How That Will Be Interpreted: "So you're just going to play both of our cards?"

Commander Heat Index Score: 7.5/10

Notes: Notion Thief was a pretty benign card before and it was the printing and subsequent banning of Hullbreacher that got people to give it a second look and decide half a Hullbreacher was better than no Hullbreacher. Hullbreacher died so that Notion Thief could live, and while I think people have basically stopped playing Notion Thief for the same reason they didn't play it before they knew about Hullbreacher, there were a few salty months where Thief was everywhere.

Similarly, people hate when you steal their tutor. The more powerful the spell they tried to get with Opposition Agent is, or just the more they needed the card they were getting (like in the case of them cracking a fetchland) the more salty they get when you Opposition Agent. One of the reasons Crafty Cutpurse never caught on like some of these other creatures did is that while you can snag a million tokens with Cutpurse, it's usually gravy you're stealing rather than a spell or land they desperately needed. Cutpurse is also unpopular because it only works the turn you play it, unlike all of the other cards people hate more, but I really think that's a lesser factor than Cutpurse taking tokens that are less important than the cards they really needed. People get salty about you taking their cards, true, but while Mind's Dilation and Stolen Strategy have never made the list, it took a matter of months for Opposition Agent to chart.

Finally, you can sort of pair Xanathar with Tergrid in that you're allowed to play all of their spells, but I think Xanathar is charting to the sins of its 99. Xanathar is slow, expensive, targets one player, gives you one or two cards, forces you to pay mana for those cards rather than casting them for free, is difficult to play after it's removed once or twice, is impossible to ramp to effectively in those colors and was spoiled basically the week we did the survey. People don't hate Xanathar, they hate that the Xanathar deck runs Mind's Dilation, Treachery, Opposition Agent, Notion Thief, Praetor's Grasp, and Tergrid. The deck isn't good and you don't see an arguably more oppressive commander like Dragonlord Silumgar on the list at all, so let's chalk it up to recency bias and the other cards from the deck.

Transgression: Having more money than me, to a point

How That Will Be Interpreted: "What is this, Yu Gi Oh?"

Commander Heat Index Score: 8/10

Notes: A trend that emerged this year, which I'll say was due in part to reprints in Commander Legends, was players being salty at cards they can't afford. Sheldon Menery gets asked about Mana Crypt specifically and one reason it was really never considered for banning, at least initially, was that no one really had one. It didn't come up often enough for people to be salty. With a few reprintings, suddenly it's everywhere and people are starting to see the effect it has on the game. Mana Drain is another card that players just never encountered, but with it being possible to rip one out of a $4 booster coupled with the number of new players surging lately, the number of people blown out by a Mana Drain has never been higher. Add to that frustration about the price of cards like Gaea's Cradle and Gilded Drake and you have a recipe for people feeling like EDH can become a play-to-win format. It's maybe something to be conscious of as an enfranchised player, but consider the source of this data - it's people enfranchised enough to be aware of EDHREC and willing to take a survey. It's unlikely it's very new players salty about Gilded Drake's price since very new players didn't take the survey. That said, maybe the cards are hated for the same reason they're expensive - they're very good. It's hard to disentangle how much players resent how much Cradle costs from how much they resent how it tilts the table so profoundly when it hits.

But if giving a lot of players Mana Drains and Mana Crypts they couldn't access before is a problem, players didn't really do that, Wizards did. That dovetails nicely into the next point.

Transgression: Secret Lair Walking Dead

How That Will Be Interpreted: "What's next, Fortnite cards?"

Commander Heat Index Score: 9/10

Notes: I have never had anyone play a Secret Lair Walking Dead card against me and, honestly, they're not that great in EDH. Players aren't mad about how the cards play, they're mad at the cards for existing. This may or may not be the first time players have resented a card's merely having been printed but it's the first time that's the sole, unmitigated factor. Players are mad at how much Dockside Extortionist swings a game but they're furious with Rick, Steadfast Leader for being born. That's not great, and cynical cash grabs are polarizing. The fact that they sell so well isn't exactly disincentivizing Wizards from doing more, and it's going to grow as a problem. That said, people threatened to quit en masse when they changed the card border in 8th Edition, so it's hard to know what's actual dissent and what's petulant raving. I would think tens of thousands of players all giving a high score to a card they've likely never encountered in a game in a completely unrelated survey indicates people are actually unhappy and not just shouting about nothing.

The rest of the cards on the list, are harder to categorize. Fall of the Thran, Bend or Break, Boiling Seas and Burning Sands play a lot like cards that did make the list in previous years.

Drannith Magistrate doesn't really get its own category, but it joins cards like Void Winnower and Gaddock Teeg that stop players from playing their cards the way they want to or playing them at all. That's a way to win at Magic, but it's salt-inducing and it's no shock that Magistrate would chart its first year of eligibility.

I was gratified that there were quite a few new lessons to be learned from this year's salt survey despite nearly two thirds of the cards being consistent across all three lists. A lot is the same as it ever was, but 2021 saw quite a few shifts in attitudes, from old cards suddenly being more of a problem, to new cards seeming like more of a problem than they were, to cards suddenly ending up in more decks than ever before.

That does it for me this week, readers. It was gratifying to have 2 weeks off to write about what I wanted in between the relentless onslaught of new products being constantly churned out, and I'll be back next week with my first Innistrad: Team Jacob article. Until then, remember to hydrate - it's salty out there. Until next time!