MTG Salvation

Hi everyone, I'd appreciate your help refining my first EDH decks. I'm just getting into the format.

I won't be playing against ridiculously competitive combo decks. I'll mostly be playing against other mono-colour tribal decks:
Thada Adel: link
Krenko: link
Ezuri: link
Ghisa:
Karn:

I am not up to date on the new cards. So if great cards came out since 2014, thanks for letting me know about them.



REMOVED CARDS:

Any additional information you can share to help make suggestions? Are you in a heavy creature meta? Do you like combos? Do you face strong combos and need to prevent them?

Yes, right now I'm building 5 mono decks and all are tribal creature-heavy decks. I'll post them up soon. My friends and I will play with these decks, so the meta is whatever I'll make it.

I like infinite mana combos, but don't like immediate win combos, since I'm looking to create a competitive yet casual fun-for-everyone game.

Thank you!

I used to have a Darien deck and I loved it. Here's a cute combo: Karma and Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth. It has great synergy with Darien because you'll be pooping out a ton of tokens at upkeep and grinding your opponents down significantly. Also, nobody ever expects it, so it will usually put in some serious work before your opponents decide to remove it.

Moved to Multiplayer Decklists.

Come up with a more coherent theme. Right now, you look like you're trying to merge three decks together. You have a deck focused around Darien, a soldier tribal deck, and a mono-W control deck. If you pick one of those and try and greatly reduce the others, sticking to the stuff that dovetails best with your main theme, you're going to find it a lot easier to make cuts.

As an example, say you're focusing on Darien. You can reduce the number of board wipes significantly. You have some reasonable defenses in a large number of chump blocking soldiers and you don't want to sweep those soldiers away too frequently. Cut board wipes down to 2-3, enough that you can find one over the course of a game and hold onto it for when you need it, but not so many that you're fighting your own deck. Austere Command is great because it's flexible, Elspeth, Sun's Champion keeps your horde of little guys around and has a use other than board wipe, and Wrath of God is a cheap one. You can always tweak that number up or down with playtesting, but it's a reasonable starting point.

You can do the same thing in other sections. Darien can make a bunch of soldier tokens, so you really don't need to play a bunch of soldier creatures. You want enough that you can function without your general on board, but jamming soldiers just because they're soldiers is going to leave you playing relatively small effects when you don't see the support for them. Captain of the Watch, Goldnight Commander, Mirror Entity, and Odric, Master Tactician are probably your best options up there, with honorable mentions to Brimaz, King of Oreskos, Catapult Master, Daru Warchief, Field Marshal, Intrepid Hero, and Ranger of Eos depending on meta and deck construction.

You have 150+ nonlands listed right now. I would try and clarify what you want the deck to do, then pick the stuff that works best with that. Be aggressive with your cuts. If something is borderline, take it out. You have to cull a lot of cards from your list right now, and you would much rather be in the position of having too few cards and trying to add back up.

There's no hard and fast numbers for how many of each effect you need, but I would aim for something on the order of 38-40 lands (assuming you end up with a number of 6+ drops), 6-10 land fetch/ramp spells/mana rocks to make sure you hit your land drops to play the bigger stuff, 6-10 card advantage spells (can work with land fetch), 6-10 ways to support small creatures between equipment and enchantments, and 10-12 removal spells. Once you get a foundation like that, fill in the rest with whatever creatures or token generators you want.

Check out mine! I love Darien, he's probably my favorite commander I run.
Mono-white is challenging to play, but very fun!
Faith's Reward has been a really fun card after someone plays a boardwipe. (and I just love the flavor of the card)
Oblation is good for removal or instant speed Divination for yourself.
Mind's Eye can also be fantastic.

@German Kid
Thanks. I cut out a lot of pillowfort cards accordingly.

@Cool Seedling
lol. Nice. I'll get the cards and give them a few runs for fun.

@Weebo,
What an epic reply. Thank you!!!
I took out a ton of stuff based on your comments & example. Lots of fine tuning left but it helped a lot.
Makes me wish EDH decks were 300-card minimum.

@Schutzwald
I added that CTRL+Z on boardwipes. Looks funny. Thanks.

Just 5 left to cut, unless I'm wrong to go with only 34 lands.

What would you cut?

Rune-tail is banned fwiw

Quote from Voxoxoxov3 »

Rune-tail is banned fwiw

No it isn't.

You're right, sorry, was thinking Erayo for some reason.

Your list looks pretty good, but I'm not sure about Gauntlet of Power in a deck that runs only 10 basic lands. Serra's Sanctum doesn't seem that good in this deck (only 5 enchantments, plus no Heliod, God of the Sun), and neither does Nomad Stadium. I'm also not too sure about Door of Destinies, since you won't actually be casting Soldier spells that often (you could alternatively name Humans, but that's not too much better. Either way, most of your creatures will be tokens). It might be better to use Honor of the Pure, Obelisk of Urd or Dictate of Heliod.

All very good points.

Took out Gauntlet of Power, Serra's Sanctum, & Door of Destinies. Put in Obelisk of Urd and Angel of Jubilation.

As for Nomad Stadium, my impression is that Darien wants all the pain lands. No?

Is 33 lands and 8 mana-fixing cards enough? Is Maze of Ith worth it over another plains?