EDH being a sanctioned and very actively supported format has been the death of any charm it might've had before, not only because of specially tailored cards and decks, but because it has brought in every single type of player ever thanks to it oppressing any other paper format when it comes to product and events.
That's the issue - it isn't sanctioned in the sense of sixty-card constructed, for the reasons you pointed out. Stores that give out prize support, and tournaments with prize support, are doing so on their own dime and revenue, because Wizards isn't retarded enough to be blind to the fact that you'd just have people who show up, triple-team the odd-man-out in the game, and then throw the game to whoever was designated the winner and split the pot.
Rule 0 was always a cop-out from their end because they're too lazy to do anything. It works in friend groups, which already don't need it, because it translates to "don't be an antisocial autistic retard."
No, put paying 6 Mana to Anticipate at sorcery speed is fucking trash and none of the Disguises are great if you are casting them as just vanillas, and "White is the best color already" just means the best color has access to a hoser for a major mechanic of the set at uncommon.
Lol dimir is the worst color pair this format by a country mile, don't play the shit faerie and things might improve. The ones that flip on two mana except for the 2/1 lifelink are all really solid, with the one that dies into a 2/2 being middling. The dryad that fetches a land and the x/x for forests are some of the better commons and uncommons in green, which is probably the second-best individual color even if boros is top tog.
And the dog itself really isn't that good. On The Job is the far better card and is far more common when you're above diamond.
Rares are way more egregious in this set, it's very very prince
Also things that are annoying me about the set..the fucking "Utility lands" are all fucking shit. Bring back Crystal Grotto.
Think of this set like Brother's War: you have to be doing something every turn. The taplands are unplayable unless you have a ton of artifact sac synergy
That is retarded because there is no actual way to define what is Cedh power level, and anyone who isn't a faggot should be wanting to tune their deck as much as they can without breaking the Thematics of the deck.
It's hard to get random people at a store to agree on what's Cedh. It'd be easy to get a committee that supposedly makes the rules to do so. Do casuals want MLD? Do they want fast mana? Do they want infinite combos that require extreme, extreme brain power to use like "zirda makes monoliths untap for one less than they make"? No? Shove it into cEDH. What do you care? If you're tuning your deck to be the best possible, why do you care if it's now got "competitive" as a tag to it?
I'd personally be a fan of three divisions. Broadly, this third pod would ban fast mana, reserved list et all, but allow everything else: stax, mld, turn-2 infinites, etc. etc. It would take an afternoon to draft it up at most, and they could even keep the whole "rule zero" cop-out after having shit it out.
There's also literally no amount of money you can spend on your deck to force anyone to play against it in a casual format, dude.
Hulk isn't a problem, it was Flash Hulk automatically making it sac itself and instantly winning at next upkeep with Lab Man (it would use oracle now lol). If you have to set up the Hulk beforehand it's fine.
The problem was that Flash and Hulk are both extremely easy to tutor to hand, which made for an oppressive interaction that was only able to be dealt with by counters, stifle, or Shadow of Doubt to stop the tutors. Now, there's also Ashiok and Opposition Agent to stop the tutoring, Tishana's Tidebinder as a very playable stifle to blank the death trigger (simic also has one of these as a split card), and people have started teching Angel's Grace even if they lack it all.
So to say, there's more than enough tools in the modern day to deal with it. Most of the shit on the banlist could come off for competitive, like Balance. Biorhythm is another one that's got no use on there, same as Coalition Victory or Braids or so-on.
Cedh Decks are Glass Canons
Maybe if they're made by idiots, but very few of them go all-in without shittons of protection and backups.
It's like losing to turn 2 Blightsteel in Vintage Cube.
Except that you know Blightsteel is in that cube, and there's one of each card in the pool that everyone drafts from. Next draft, who knows what you'll get?
Meanwhile, Krark-Sakashima involves copying an EDH decklist. Wow, who knew copy spells could chain together infinitely with each other and there's several cards that turn that into infinite damage and infinite mana? Really galaxy-brain stuff there. Hey, did you know that a deck with four Sheoldreds in standard shits all over one with just one?
Doorkeeper Thrull is honestly a good answer to Thasa's Oracle.
Not really. So if they don't have a counter for the thrull, or removal for it, Thoracle hits the board and they don't Consultation. The way that the combo plays is that it gets Thoracle's ability on the stack, holds priority, and then casts consultation; if you blank thoracle, they haven't yet consultation'd, so they have the rest of their deck (and all of the backups) still in play.
This is why Thoracle's being equal-to zero sucks so much balls; even if you let consultation wipe their deck and then kill thoracle, they still win unless the trigger itself gets squelched.
