MTG Salvation

The whole point of the deck is to resolve multiple spells with Epic. There are a few ways to do this, either with Omniscience, Fist of Suns, or Narset, Enlightened Master. The rest of the deck is ways to ramp, not die, and tutor up combo pieces.

Link to deck @ TappedOut.net

Thoughts?

I fail to see how Omniscience, Narset, or Fist would let you cast an additional spell with Epic, since Epic's effect stops you from casting spells, regardless of how. You could hold priority with one on the stack and cast the other, I suppose, but you'd need Hypersonic Dragon or Vedalken Orrery. If you're looking to stick a flash enabler and chain a couple together immediately, Dream Halls comes to mind as a second Omniscience effect. Style points for Atogatog.

Also, no Neverending Torment?

Gxmiter is saying the truth, but you should go for Progenitus in the 99 With Dream Halls you can also play Conflux, you can discard Progenitus with dream halls to search for himself + four other cards (credits for recurring Conflux) now thats jank :p.

I agree. If you want to take advantage of playing all epic cards it'd have to be one after another in response to each other. So you'd need things like Leyline of Anticipation, Hypersonic Dragon, Vedalken Orrery, etc. as previously mentioned.

Additionally, if you want to take advantage of your epic cards, you'd need to add value for them. Undying Flames removes cards from your library so I doubt you'd want that in Commander, since you're gonna be only dealing damage to one opponent at a time and losing cards to exile in the process. Neverending Torment is great as it removes lots of cards from an opponent's deck and could be used as a wincon. Speaking of which, if you'd add more value enchantments to your deck in order to make better use of Enduring Ideal, you could make a very difficult to penetrate pillow fort. That way you'd be disrupting players every turn. Since you're (hopefully) making a lot of snake tokens with Endless Swarm, you have enough creatures to chump block anything without flying, horsemanship, or trample, meaning that if you want Endless Swarm to be useful, you'd need ways to either pump your snakes or screw your opponents' creatures over (Humility, which can be tutored and free-played with Enduring Ideal). This also means that you want your hand chocked full of cards. Thus, you should add other value enchantments like Mind Unbound (which combos great with Paradox Haze). Copying these spells ups their value even more. Echo Mage, Uyo, Silent Prophet, etc. add more value to your epic cards. Uyo even has the added bonus of returning lands to your hand, making it larger for epic spells like Neverending Torment and Endless Swarm.

I give you bonus style points and kudos for wanting to make a janky pentacolored commander just to abuse all spells with epic. However, you can still keep the flavor and abuse with your epic spells if you fine tune your deck for it. Since your commander isn't really doing much besides allowing you to play spells of each color, I recommend Reaper King. Here's why:
Reaper King means that whenever a scarecrow enters play it blows up a permanent. Sure. Scarecrows. However, cheat Conspiracy into play and name "scarecrow". That means that all those 1/1 snakes that enter play are actually scarecrows that blow up permanents and can be useful for something else as well.
Other ways to add value to your deck is adding cards like Necropotence and Reliquary Tower. Nothing fattens a hand quite like Necropotence.

All in all, I love the concept, but I really believe it needs some more fine-tuning. You want to be able to pull this off as quickly as possible. If all you did was tutor and ramp you'll get a lot of people nervous and they'll start to target you regardless of what you have in play. So, in summation, my recommendation to try and efficiently pull this off:

• Use Reaper King as general in order to abuse Conspiracy.
• For consistency's sake, add more flash enablers. There're plenty out there - especially for all 5 colors.
• R is the color you'll be using less. So that allows you to have a more stable mana base. You could actually run a lot more basic lands and have ways to better ramp and get through your deck a lot quicker than simply tutoring for specific cards.
• Copy your epic spells. I assume that the sole purpose of this deck is to fire off all epic spells at once and proceed to laugh maniacally. So, what better way than to copy them? Sure, Paradox Haze does just that, but copying the spells when cast means that you really multiply those spells each turn. Copying each epic spell when cast means that you can basically quadruple each epic spell during each of your turns. Either way, you can go old-fashioned and just copy Paradox Haze (Copy Enchantment and Clever Impersonator).

Hope that was enough suggestions for ya!

I second Dovescape, it's the classic Enduring Ideal lock.

Enduring Ideal is even more broken if you have cards like Æther Flash in play. Your opponents will literally have no upside from Dovescape. No spell + no tokens.

So before I respond, I should probably have said that this is only a first draft of the list, I haven't tuned it in any way, it was more of just a “I have this idea and want to get it on paper” type list, and now I am going to tweak and tune it until I have it where I want it. I probably should have written a little bit more of an explanation when I first posted this, it would have cleared up some of the confusion.

Quote from gxmiter »

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Yeah, I know that I cant cast spells post-epic, the idea was to cast one in response to another. There are already 4 flash enablers in the list. Dream Halls over Fist of Suns is probably a good call, I originally thought against it because its symmetrical, but I suppose it helps me enough to be worth it. And Neverending Torment is in the list already, I'm going to assume that you meant to ask about the red Epic, Undying Flames, in which case it is just awful. The curve is so all over the place that it isnt a consistent source of damage, and constantly exiling my library is likely to kill me before I do anything relevant to the game.

Quote from DementedKirby »

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Before I start working through your comment, I want to say thanks for all of the feedback, as I said, this is just a rough first draft, but I would like this deck to be at least moderately successful, and responses like this are going to help me get there.

1. Flash enablers, already covered, 4 are in the list right now, I felt like that was a fine number, didn't want to go much deeper than that.

2. I definitely agree that there is room to improve on how much value I can get out of the Epic spells, and that copying them can be powerful, the issue I ran into with this is determining the correct number of slots to dedicate to this role. I have been considering Mirari because it is something of a mana sink, but it also costs 5, which is (in my opinion) a lot for something that doesn't help me reach the goal of casting Epics.

3. Humility...HOW DID I MISS THIS ONE? Its perfect. Nothing more to say.

4. Mind Unbound...I’m not a huge fan of this, especially post-epic when I am not casting spells. Having cards in hand to buff the Green or Black Epics would be good, but the threat of decking myself is real.

5. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the idea of Reaper King + Conspiracy, I will definitely be looking for a place to fit that in.

Thanks for all the thoughts, hope to hear from you again as the deck evolves.

Quote from Merricks »

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I'm sorry to say that you have misunderstood what I was going for, largely due to my short and non-descriptive description. I want to build a deck with Enduring Ideal in it, not an Enduring Ideal deck. If I wanted to build an Enduring Ideal deck I wouldn't have included other Epic spells and I would have included lock down pieces. I am not looking to make the game unplayable for the other people at the table, just change the rules of the game for myself. That said, Debtors' Knell is interesting and may end up in the list, so thank you for that.

Undying Flames is definitely garbage, I missed that Neverending Torment was already there.

I think you need some sort of protection for your flash enablers and Omniscience/Dream Halls, perhaps Privileged Position can find a slot?

sterling grove is already in the list, but something like that could probably find a home here.

I see you're worried about decking yourself with effects that elephantize your hand. Well, you're already running Wheel of Sun and Moon. Just find a suitable discard outlet (Mind Over Matter is delicious) and whenever you fear your deck is diminishing, just discard and have them back in your deck. Additionally, this is also useful to return any cards you'd rater have in your deck than in your hand (particularly due to going epic). Since you're not able to cast them unless you're cheating them in play, you'd want them in your deck anyways. Hope that helps in order for you to safely have an epic hand for your epic spells.