MTG Salvation

I'm not sure where else to ask this but I've noticed this forum has really slowed down, threads go for a long time without posts, new threads are pretty rare, I figure EDH isn't by any means losing popularity as a format - where's all the discussion gone? Is there some new forum everyone's flocking to? If so, I'd appreciate if someone could point me in that direction. Would like to see what sorts of new things people are making, get ideas. There's very little of anything new on here lately.

I built Zedruu awhile back as a pure chaos deck. Didn't go over well, everyone hated playing against that. Got the need to play a chaos deck out of my system, though. Since then, I completely rebuilt it as a much more traditional donation deck. It's fun for both me and my opponents, but not very strong. It's a good deck for political multiplayer games, but it just can't keep up with certain strategies sometimes. That's okay though, having fun is more important than winning.

Some pet cards I recommend that I run in my version:
Nevermore - This card can get you a lot of hate if you name a commander, which sometimes is just a necessary evil to keep things under control, but I usually find it a godsend for preventing things like Bane of Progress in particular from being cast.
Frenzied Fugue - It's a cute card that doesn't bother my opponents, but it's quite strong.
Fractured Identity - There are so many crazy plays this can lead to. Super fun.
Show and Tell - A pet card with high risk but high fun factor.
Divergent Transformations - My Zedruu strategy involves helping my opponents while keeping myself safe in my pillowfort. This gets rid of problem creatures that might attack me at instant speed while replacing the reduced boardstate so I can still try to steal the entire board later with cards like Mob Rule or Insurrection.

Thantis, the Warweaver

When I first saw this commander, I didn't think much of it, because I hadn't realized the strategy it lends itself to would have the perfect niche in my metagame. I was actually considering building a Mathas, Fiend Seeker deck that would try to manipulate the game in a similar style before I decided 'hmm, if I ran green instead of white, I'd have access to better sources of mana and niche cards more suited to my metagame'. So I took a look at the Jund commanders and then realized that Thantis was the perfect commander to tackle my metagame, which is heavy on aggro strategies right now and has its greatest problems with several reanimator aggro decks all owned by the same player, where games often turn into archenemy against that player with them still winning 50% of the games anyway.

In a sense, I built Thantis as the answer to all of that, though I was already interested in making a combat manipulative deck concept in general before I even got that far. It also borrows inspiration from Gahiji, Honored One decks because I used to have one that just wasn't as good as I hoped, essentially backfiring on me in every way, though I still liked some of the cards it could run such as the Hunted creature variants and Oath of Druids. Bonus of running black is I can run some very amusing cards like Endless Whispers and Sower of Discord with great effect.

I built this deck for a casual to high-end but moderately strong multiplayer environment where we typically play a variant of kingdoms running 5-6 different players, so it's not meant to be fast or cutthroat. Decks in my group can often be pretty optimized and sharp in capabilities, but they typically aren't looking to combo out in the most efficient or earliest way possible. As such it's tuned up and balanced in most regards, and has a lot of strong interactions. It's politically oriented and packing lots of threats and ways to manipulate the game, without giving too much to my opponent's favor, unless if you count the few enchantments that could be regarded as group hug cards, which are risky but I think have a perfect home in this deck.



Notes on some card choices:
Why the group hug cards? Mana Flare, Heartbeat of Spring, Rites of Flourishing, Oath of Druids
I'm running these because it frees up space in my deck I would need more for if I wanted to have only self-benefiting ramp, card draw, and tutoring. These are, as I well know, all double-edged swords, but given my multiplayer games are very politically oriented, and this deck is well suited to deterring backlash, I can get away with using them.

Why not more token generation? It's my expectation that my opponents will need no additional help being threatening to begin with, so I want to give them things sparingly. Rite of the Raging Storm as well as the trifecta of Hunted creatures are enough, I don't want to make it too easy for them to get through my defenses by giving them too much.

Why not more ways to force combat? I'm not worried about redundancy. Even without Thantis in play, i think the deck will still be able to manipulate the game in my favor. Fumiko the Lowblood can serve as backup, though. Disrupt Decorum is actually played around annoyingly often when I use it in my Zedruu deck. Thantis forces the issue of combat a bit more sternly.

Why no self-recursion? I'm not trying to play a reanimator strategy, so I have cards like Mikaeus, the Unhallowed because I want to keep my creatures in play. Endless Whispers hugely screws with my opponent's reanimator/sacrifice decks, but it also keeps my effects in play. I don't mind my opponents getting some of my creatures if they die, I've got fog effects and Homeward Path available to me. I think that if someone knows how my deck plays, they'll know they're better off attacking someone else even if they take my creatures. I've already got cards like Xantcha, Sleeper Agent that are meant precisely for this, too. Macabre Mockery is in my deck as a fun tricky card but also as a way to pull cards like Brawn and Wonder in particular out of an opponent's graveyard at instant speed because there is one deck where someone has won way too many games due to them.

Various other notes:
Rakdos Charm and Trespasser's Curse - These two cards are in this deck because they are hard answers to the most threatening decks in my metagame. Those decks like to have big graveyards and produce many, many creature tokens, and these punish exactly that very effectively.
Tree of Perdition is also in here on purpose because it not only fits well with Thantis as a defender that stays out of combat, but it also deals with lifegain strategies, which have been a problem for me in my metagame.
Dragonlord Atarka and Furyborn Hellkite - These are costly to cast, but I'm running them mainly with the intent to drop after combat in my second main phase, to use defensively, but also offensively if needed.
Triumph of the Hordes - It closes out the game if needed, and plays well with cards like Hornet Queen and Avenger of Zendikar.

Hope you all like the deck!

Played a 4 player game with my Nekusar, the Mindrazer deck a couple days ago. Another player was playing Kynaios and Tiro of Meletis group hug, so things got a bit ridiculous. I was disrupted a fair bit but managed for keep the pressure on, and after drawing 8 cards on my upkeep due half-in-part to that person playing Kynaios and Tiro of Meletis, I had the easiest Nekusar combo I've every had in hand. Tainted Strike on Nekusar, Winds of Change, Twincast on Winds of Change. Everyone taking about 14 infect damage. The Kynaios and Tiro of Meletis player tried to evade dying with Teferi's Protection, but I was able to counter it with Swan Song.

All 4 cards were drawn by luck in tandem with each other on that turn, not tutored for or anything. 5 mana and 4 cards. i don't think my Nekusar deck will ever pull off a more mana-efficient combo again.

A lot of decks don't adhere to the 3 main archetypes perfectly. To me, an ideal metagame consists of all decks being unique to each other and filling different interesting archetypes/strategies, while also being roughly balanced with each other too. It would seem important to me that, for example, no two aggro decks are quite the same. If one person has a definitive zombie tribal deck, I'd rather see another tribe of a different sort than another zombie tribal deck, no two green decks both run craterhoof behemoth, no two players playing the same commanders, etc.

My metagame is pretty decent in those regards, but it could be better, because power levels are all over the place, big discrepancies in some cases. We've got multiple zombie tribal and dragon tribal decks, and two group hug decks.

In short, I want variety and balance in a metagame, so things are always interesting/different every game.

A long time ago, a friend of mine played Trade Secrets in a couple of games in his deck. Not sure if it was banned back then, but even though it resulted in some really ridiculous stuff, we all had fun with it. I'm actually kind of sad it's banned, even if it's ridiculous. As far as etiquette goes, it was never a problem for us.

As far as cards I've played myself that have been banned:
Prophet of Kruphix - understandably, this thing warped my entire meta until it was banned, everyone used it in their UG decks and it was always oppressively strong.
Sylvan Primordial - I don't think this card is that bad, honestly. It never warped my metagame. Had to cut it from a deck of mine when it was banned a long time ago, but it's no big loss.

I also think Primeval Titan is fine.

Tolarian Academy could also be fine if they remade it to say something like 'Add U for each artifact creature you control'. Still able to do strong stuff and you could get it to make you a big pile of mana under the right conditions like combining it with Smothering Tithe or Myr Battlesphere just like Serra's Sanctum or Gaea's Cradle can do similar things with similar cards. I figure a redone card like that could be released no problem if alongside a couple new cheap instant-speed land destruction spells, something that says 'Exile target nonbasic land or artifact, then exile this card' for only W.

I really like seeing new commanders pop up that suddenly make a bunch of otherwise 'bad-for-edh' cards suddenly good because of some unusual effect. Keeps me on my toes trying to anticipate what weird but bad card might have a home in a future deck some day. I've bought numerous mediocre or 'bad' single cards for this reason, anticipating a day when some commander will turn that card into an essential powerhouse piece in combination with it.

Venser, Shaper Savant - Great for lots of blue decks. Not only can it bounce any permanent of yours or an opponent's, it can also stop spells even if they say 'uncounterable'.
Goreclaw, Terror of Qal Sisma - Good for any green deck running big creatures.
Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker - Good in many decks that contain red and etb creatures.
Braids, Conjurer Adept - Show and Tell on a stick. I think it can fit in well in most chaos or theft-focused decks.

Others that are more niche that I use in the 99 of my decks that may not have places in most other decks:
Surrak Dragonclaw - Decent sized body, makes my creatures uncounterable and serves as one of several trample enablers for my Maelstrom Wanderer deck.
Seizan, Perverter of Truth - Helps out my Nekusar deck.
Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind - Along with Curiosity and Psychosis Crawler, it is an alternate win-condition of sorts. I can also combine it with Notion Thief if I don't want to kill my opponents with their own cards, though doing so is very situational and I'd only do it if I'm not hurting myself with my own Spiteful Visions.

Last night I won 2 out of 2 games with Maelstrom Wanderer.

First game was 3 person free for all, though more people were present, 3 of us arrived late while 4 were already playing a game when we arrived. Figured we'd have a quick game while we wait for them to finish theirs. Game was fairly typical and normal. Once I had the mana for it, I used Wanderer and cascaded into value creatures, utilized double damage from a Dictate of the Twin Gods I had played earlier, and had added benefit from copying an opponent's Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite twice (on different occaisions during the game) with two different clone cards. Game was settled decisively, nothing broken happened, just value.

~~~

Second game was 7-person free for all. (Yes, my group is a bit nuts and we've even done it with 8 players before.)
As the only two decks with me were Wanderer, or Zedruu, I picked Wanderer because with a whopping 7 players, my Zedruu deck would have ensured we'd still be playing the same game well into the early morning, and Wanderer could end things if the game went on too long otherwise.

Played for a bit, cascaded several times over and became a huge threat on the board with about a dozen creatures in play, but too risky to swing anything at anyone because there were too many other players and I didn't have my damage doubling cards, and no one has done anything to me so I've got no payback to make yet. So instead I waited, and the board was wiped to no one's surprise. Then the game comes around a couple rotations of turns and the mono-green eldrazi player has started exiling 20 cards apiece from people's decks with Ulamog and copies of it via Helm of the Host. He rightly targets me because he knows what's in my deck and nicks one of 3 pieces that enable the dreaded Kiki-Jiki combo (Pestermite) that I've done many times, but instead it kinda backfires when it gets to my turn.

Thanks to a group huge player, I'm drawing two cards a turn, and from earlier, I have scroll rack in play. I draw into Time Warp. Cool, that helps. I immediately use it, play Dictate of the Twin Gods (not that it matters later), and go to next turn. On that turn, I by sheer luck draw into the only other extra turn spell in the deck, Temporal Mastery. I cast it for it's miracle cost, cast my commander, steal the Eldrazi-player's Eldrazi Conscription enchanted Asuza with a cascaded Zealous Conscripts and nearly kill him then and there in retribution for exiling 20 cards of my deck. At this point I'm thinking I won't be able to pull off a Kiki-Jiki combo since I already played Zealous Conscripts, lost Pestermite to exile, and have no tutors, but it's still remotely possible. Even if I did, I figure everyone's seen this deck play out a dozen times, they should all be well-prepared to stop me and it'll be no big deal if I try to do it (it was also late so everyone was about ready to go home at this point anyway).

I go to my next turn. Draw a couple cards of no consequence, and decide I'll dig deeper for anything better using the Scroll Rack I've had in play all game. As a third stroke of luck, I pull Tooth and Nail out. I cast it entwined and go for Kiki-Jiki plus Clever Impersonator for good measure. Somehow, no one with open mana actually has any disruption available to stop me out of the other 6 people playing, and I make infinite Zealous Conscripts unimpeded to kill everyone. One of my opponents even had a Crystal Shard in play that would've stopped the combo for only 1 mana, but he had tapped out on his turn.

Seriously, what kind of luck is it that I must have to draw into both of my extra turn spells and THEN on top of that get Tooth and Nail at the last second, the key combo pieces survive a hefty library exile hit, and somehow not be stopped by 6 other players?

I think it's time to put this deck away for awhile, either it's too strong for my group or I'm just way too lucky.

I just put Nekusar together today (rebuilt differently after having previously played and taken it apart years ago), so I'm hoping that will prove more fair, will play that for awhile and see if I win a bit less often.

Quote from Turn30Win »

I find Auction, Worldpurge and Aurora to be much the same ilk as Worldfire and other reset cards on the banlist. Sure, you can argue the technicalities of it not being a 100% game reset, but their function if far too often something to that effect. If you have the mana to spend on dragging the game out that would otherwise be over, you have mana to spend on ending it yourself instead.

Well, Worldpurge lets people keep select cards from their previous hand and field, it doesn't change life totals, it doesn't let me win with leftover mana for some other spell, and it doesn't touch graveyards. It's quite different from Worldfire. Seems pretty fair. Goblin game was fun to resolve and I ended up hurting myself the most of everyone when I first did it.

I really want to see what a resolved Thieves' Auction ends up like, at least once. In my mind there is no way to be sure it would make the game go on longer besides resolving it - any combination of things could happen as a result. I don't see myself as trying to drag out the game, but rather just make its outcome unique and interesting. What I hope is that it inadvertently ends up helping someone with an underdog deck win the game, I'm not even worried about winning myself with this Zedruu build because that's not my primary objective, even though it has specific cards to help it do so.

Recently I played Thieves' Auction from my Zedruu chaos deck and everyone scooped. None of the smaller chaotic effects before then bothered anyone and I was doing nothing oppressive or limiting - in fact, I was only being nice to everyone, and not in a 'make the game stupid with group hug' sort of way. The whole point of that deck was to see what the game would turn out like *after* such mass chaos effects happen. The game hadn't even gone on that long and there was no reason that it necessarily would've been to my advantage in the long run. But no, no one wants to even walk through resolving that card, when it could have led to a very interesting game state. Rather bummed out about that.

I'm hoping eventually people in my playgroup will warm up to the idea of post-chaos games, because all I want is for every game to play out differently. It's probably a rather unusual group of players, as during the same game, I also played Worldpurge and Goblin Game and everyone loved those. It wasn't at all that my plays were messing up their plans with their decks, I guess it was the effort required to go through resolving TA. And yet, we have historically walked through many a 'blue turn' in other games without scooping, so I don't see why TA is anything different if chaos doesn't bother them inherently either.

Speculation/ideas thread.

So, as it currently stands, the wedges have significantly less options as commanders than the shards.

These are:

GUR - 'Temur' with 14 possible commanders.
BGU - 'Sultai' with 14 possible commanders, 15 if you count Leovold, Emissary of Trest which is banned, though I'm unfamiliar with why this happened.
URW - 'Jeskai' with 13 possible commanders. !!!
BGW - 'Abzan' with 14 possible commanders.
RWB - 'Mardu' with 17 possible commanders.

Of lesser note are these 2 shards:

RGW - 'Naya' with 18 possible commanders, 19 if you count allowances of Tamanoa which has been rarely built even though it is not legendary.
GWU - 'Bant' also is slightly behind in total options compared to the other 4 'full' tri-color selections of 21+ with only 19 possibilities.

Of each of those combinations, 8 of each are also partner combinations, which as far as I can tell haven't been very popular compared to most other single commander decks. Grixis is the most saturated in options as it leads all the tri-color decks in options available at a total of 23.

So, of what I'd like to speculate on, these questions are the following:

1. When do you think we'll see more legends drop for the first 5 mentioned combinations of colors.
2. What kinds of legends (in terms of function, flavor/theme, etc) would you like or expect to see happen in these colors?
3. How do you think they will effect the format overall when they are released?

Personally, I'm hoping for a commander product in the near future that adds at least 3 of each, and wouldn't be surprised to see some tribal support with 2/3rds of them.

Quote from tstorm823 »

To pass on the wisdom of Zedruu players passed on to me, play Pentad Prism. It gets Zedruu out a turn early and donates easy to draw more cards, there's very little reason not to play it.

Thanks, I never would've thought of that because I didn't know about that card.

I recently built my own that is all-in focused on chaos, link here:

http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/zedruus-exports-incorporated/

List of notable cards mine runs that others may wish to consider:

Emergency Powers
Worldpurge
Warp World
Scrambleverse
Thieves' Auction
Dimensional Breach (Good with Paradox Haze in particular)
Show and Tell
Braids, Conjurer Adept
Shared Fate
Knowledge Pool
Hive Mind
Confusion in the Ranks
Goblin Game

Funny thing, I just built a Zedruu deck too, and it was mentioned before in this thread.

Chaos oriented, and just as liable to kill me as anyone else. It's mainly meant for the Secret Alliance/Kingdoms EDH variant gametypes. http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/zedruus-exports-incorporated/

My idea is that, since this is a chaos deck, it can really swing games into unique places. Since I'm not at all concerned with disrupting people's plays, everyone still gets to do whatever they want, and by virtue of the chaos, if some player is doing poorly, I might end up helping them due to mixing things up. I'm also trying to insulate myself from attack with at least half a dozen pillowfort pieces, and while there's a good chance I could accidentally swap myself into something like transcendence and kill myself on the spot, I could just as well acquire an assorted mix of my opponent's permanents and win with those in some interesting way too.

Warp World and all its friends included. It takes a very different approach to 'control' than most decks, in that the 'control' if you consider there to be any at all in it, is the chaos itself. I run barely any removal, and the removal it does have is only the kind that does not detract whatsoever from the massive chaos cards I plan to cast later. It's even running cards like Show and Tell and others to enable opponents to put more things into play that I can then divvy about randomly with those big chaos bombs.

My mentality in EDH these days is 'I don't want consistency, I want interesting and memorable games to write home about'.

Might be pretty fun, thus suggesting it here.