MTG Salvation

So fellows, I'm new to this website, but not the game. What is the best mono-green edh you've seen. I would like to compare mine to them, if you guys don't mind sharing.

It's hard to top a well-built Azusa, Lost but Seeking, but I daresay I feel that Omnath, Locus of Mana and Titania, Protector of Argoth are in the same tier, if somewhat weaker and more fragile. Ezuri, Renegade Leader is the strongest for mono green elves, but that's almost its own archetype.

In terms of mono colors, I'd probably rate mono green and mono black as about the same power level, with mono blue the strongest. I do love playing mono green, though. It makes games go fast when it's turn two and you have six lands and ten power on the board.

Azusa has always been somewhat inconsistent for my taste. She doesn't scale very well to large tables, and running enough lands to consistently drop 3/turn leads to inconsistency issues when it comes to seeing the rest of your deck - generally, 1 or 2 counterspells can put you into topdeck mode, which is not where you want to be. Omnath and Titania are extremely fragile.

My favorite list with a proven track record is probably Yisan. While he's a little expensive to start, you can generally win within ~2-4 turns of him entering the battlefield, and the strategy isn't as "all-in" as the above three. He fights through counterspells and disruption with relative ease. I also like Ezuri for similar reasons.

I also feel that my Freyalise list can play with the best of them (wins ~T4-T6 and does well vs disruption; I've managed to put up pretty good results against competitive Animar, Azusa, Ezuri, Narset, Yisan, Zur, etc), but I'd rather not be the guy who claims his unproven brew is the best.

None of these are as good as say Competitive Azami, but competitive blue control generals are really in a league of their own.

TL;DR - Yisan, Ezuri (Freyalise if you want to listen to my inane ramblings). Azusa, Omnath, and Titania are overrated for their extreme fragility to be maybe .5 of a turn faster some of the time.

Generally, I feel that generals that can stand up to a little disruption are more powerful than "all-in" generals. If you really want an all-in strategy, nothing's going to compare to the raw power of strategies like Ad Naus, Hermit Druid, etc. Not saying that these generals hold a candle to those decks, but if you're not playing one of those decks, your deck should combat on an axis that those decks don't (namely, being resilient to hate/disruption).

Azusa was the most powerful deck my group ever had going. Turn 4-5 Eldrazi were the norm and you had every wasteland to put the screws to greedy decks. It would basically play out like arch enemy when the deck was fully going.

I feel like Yisan deserves mention just for being a tutor general. He and Freyalise are probably the most flexible for any given MP meta.

Ezuri is extremely dangerous because he is essentially Craterhoof Behemoth in the commander zone for one of the most supported tribes in the game; there is a reason Elves see play in virtually every format. I've been running an aggro-combo list (soon to be adjusted) and I don't even know what the hell I'm doing with him half the time. I still stumble into victories.

I can't count the amount of times I've lost to Azusa. And frankly, Omnath is also quite monstrous.

Quote from Shokatshin »

Ezuri is extremely dangerous because he is essentially Craterhoof Behemoth in the commander zone for one of the most supported tribes in the game; there is a reason Elves see play in virtually every format. I've been running an aggro-combo list (soon to be adjusted) and I don't even know what the hell I'm doing with him half the time. I still stumble into victories.

There is also Seton, Krosan Protector, who is like a Heritage Druid in command zone. Playing him focuses a bit more on Druids, but plays very similar. Also he has Gilt-Leaf Archdruidas card draw and wincondition.

Azusa, Lost But Seeking, Omnath, Locus of Mana, Ezuri, Renegade Leader, Seton, Krosan Protector, and Yeva, Nature's Herald all play very, very well as commanders and are probably considered the top 5 that mono-Green has to offer. Baru, Fist of Krosa, Kamahl, Fist of Krosa, Melira, Sylvok Outcast, and Titania, Protector of Argoth, and Freyalise, Llanowar's Fury all strike me as powerful commanders capable of being really good depending on the build. If anyone told me that they thought any of those 10 was the "best" mono-green commander, I would not argue too much.

Azusa certainly felt the most ridiculous deck I ever built in mono-green by an enormous margin. Things like Recycle and Horn of Greed... well, you get the picture.

To put it in perspective, I have also played Nylea, God of the Hunt (devotion shenanigans), Sasaya, Orochi Ascendant (an ocean of mana), Seshiro the Anointed (snake tribal), and Titania, Protector of Argoth (landfall/sacrifice shenanigans).

Azusa is by far the strongest and most consistent mono-green general. She's fast. And as long as her land base is intact, she is a threat to KO the table. During her heyday she dominated games in my meta. Friends were shaking their heads in disbelief the first weekend I brought her out; we played a lot of games, and I don't remember her losing. Of course things changed as my playgroup adjusted. Like friends building 2 Marath decks. That's a really bad matchup for any creature-based list. I don't think Azusa can be considered tier 1. But she will always be fun to play.

The general I've been brewing with is Yisan, the Wanderer Bard. It is one of the best in the group of LGS in the nearby cities down here on the coast. It's a pretty consistent turn 3-5 win...just need to make it faster to compete with the best edh deck down here, being The Mimeoplasm.

I will post my list whenever i figure out how to use these tools.

I'm going to throw Reki, History of Kamigawa into the ring as a contender for most competitive. I had a list I was brewing that I discontinued, not because it couldn't tear decks apart, but because it made me feel bad to play it. Reki enables you to take really really long turns that ultimately win, but aren't guaranteed (same as any storm based win).

You can probably make him a really fun general to play too, both for you and your opponents, because he just oozes flavor. You just have to be careful not to turn him into a storm based win con general.

Azusa can be devastating, but she's so fragile. If you blow up a draw engine, that really hurts. What are you going to do with a lot of lands when you nothing to do with them? She was definitely the boogeyman of the format when I first started. She wasn't the best, but was pretty strong. She gets blown out of proportion, because many people don't(or didn't) have removal to stop her. She's the best in a solitaire fast combo meta. Otherwise I'm not sure. Green doesn't have a lot of strong durable commanders. Most of the time the deck folds when the commander or draw engine is gone. Even though Azusa isn't great in a competitive meta I think she's still the best mono green general.

The biggest threat to Mono Green once it starts firing is board wipes that kill off all its creatures. That's why Kamahl is and has always been the best Mono-Green against competitive metagames. Azusa is strong too, but she tends to wreck less competitive tables better than people with finely tuned decks.
/biased.

Once Azusa's board is wiped she can just grind with Eye of Ugin. It isn't the fastest strategy but it does require opponents to answer it. The largest problem with mono-green is it doesn't interact with the stack and doesn't have enough hate to disrupt opponents' gameplans. The only reason Azusa is semi-competitive, and a better option over other mono-green generals, is she can knock people out before they can wipe the board and even if they do she still has a tremendouse resource advantage.

I've never run Azusa, but I know that it tends to play more like a combo deck. In 1v1 at least, both Ezuri and Omnath are very easy to build in a way that feels quite oppressive.

my favorite green deck is Yeva elves, instant speed elves, recovering super fast from board wipes,opponent's eot comboing... it's just so much fun in mono g

I'll Second Kamahl as a phenomenal commander. All it takes is one time of someone wrathing with Kamahl out and everyone at the table will usually learn to leave their boardwipe at home.
Secondarily, Kamahl's animate land ability + Powder Keg set at 0 can usually convince everyone else to scoop 'em up.

I've played Azusa, I've played Rofellos when he was legal. Yisan is better than either of them. Bold statement, I know. However, I've tuned my list to goldfish wins on turns 5-6 literally every game. Yisan has the advantage of being entirely draw independent apart from the initial lands to cast him and he can abuse the Partial Paris mulligan system more so than most to almost guarantee casting him on turn two. There are a few limited windows to distupt him, but the same an be said about both of the aforementioned generals as well. Namely a counter or spot removal on turn 2 or a wrath on turn 4, otherwise, forget about it. That being said, he has an incredibly linear strategy, but there are a few places where he can afford to tutor up answers to the board state without diverging from his path to victory. Note that Yisan decks have been winning French 1v1 tournaments, kudos Moondust, and it doesn't matter how many opponents there are because his wins come with damage in the hundreds that can be split to each opponent as necessary.

I'm a big Omnath fan, and I almost always tutor up Kamahl as wrath insurance. Xaios's primer is a great deck and a pretty good place to start, even if you end up with a different general. Most mono-green decks are pretty similar.

Yisan

I seen a Kamahl, Fist of Krosa be good. It's hard because they go back to being normal land so it's immune from sweepers at sorcery speed.

There's a big difference between 1vs1 and multiplayer. The amount of removal, hate, and disruption is many times higher in multiplayer. When your general is a tutor on a stick expecting to get multiple activations from Yisan is a bit farfetched. If you sit across from a decent Marath list I'd like to see how well Yisan does.

Quote from Swift2210 »

There's a big difference between 1vs1 and multiplayer. The amount of removal, hate, and disruption is many times higher in multiplayer. When your general is a tutor on a stick expecting to get multiple activations from Yisan is a bit farfetched. If you sit across from a decent Marath list I'd like to see how well Yisan does.

It was never my intention to suggest otherwise. I recognize that 1v1 and multiplayer are different animals entirely, but I would argue that the amount of spot removal in a dedicated 1v1 deck is likely just as saturated as multiple multiplayer decks since multiplayer scenarios typically put such a high premium on mass removal. I don't know if it just requires playing the deck, or if my "meta" is very insular, but it has been my experience that getting multiple activations is not at all "farfetched". I'm seeing the same decks that I'm sure most everyone does...Karador, Mimeoplasm, Narset, Sharuum, Azusa, you get the picture, and I've found resounding success with Yisan, moreso than I ever did with my own Azusa or Rofellos decks.

That being said, something like Rofellos could be more devastating with a nut draw...Turn 2 Rofellos into Turn 3 Primeval Titan into Turn 4 Kozilek, but it's just that, draw dependant, and even so it is not much faster than Yisan's critical turn, and WAY less consistent.

Marath is one of the tougher matchups, but not awful either. Marath on the play is much better than Marath on the draw assuming they have a mana accelerant on turn 1. A lot of the time I will go for Phyrexian Revoker on Yisan's second activation if I'm staring down Marath. Even if they successfully deal with Yisan, you are still running a very capable monogreen deck that can pull off the same victories that are typically seen in non-Yisan monogreen decks. It just so happens that Yisan enables the monogreen deck better than all of the competitors in my expierience.

Yeva, Nature's Herald is my go to commander for mono green. Turning any greeb creature ETB into instants can be really powerful and having flash is just as good if not better than having haste.

Rofellos


But really in my experience Omnath, Azusa, Kamahl, Yeva, Ezuri, and Titania are all very strong and basically on the same level IMO. Omnath is fast and the commander is a legit threat, Azusa is faster, Kamahl is a removal deterrent, Yeva greatly improves your ability to respond to the board, Ezuri is great tribal, and Titania rebuilds very quickly and has explosive potential.

I built Titania because I enjoyed the more controlling spin she allows you to put on G while still being able to go all in and kill everyone.