MTG Salvation

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Daxos the Returned

Enchantment Speed Bumps Galore

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The Deck Ranking

Based on a defunct Avacyn primer

General Attributes

• Quick Game Likeness - quick? I'd never, good sir!
• Newbie Feasibility - might be uncomfortable with the symmetric non-mana resource denial at first, but it should click pretty fast
• Commander Dependency - Daxos and his token hordes are the most reliable way to close out games
• "Scare" Rating - "Daxos is so bad" - DarkSword moments before getting shrekt and ignore-listing me on Cockatrice, 2016
• Multiplayer Mode - needs a period of under the radar resource development not offered by 1v1, but can put up a fight if the draw is right
• Expensiveness - don't let the DeckStats pricegun deceive you as my build is fully decked out, while a lot of your power lifters are cheap

Game Play Attributes

• Acceleration - big rather than fast; some mana rocks to smooth out the early game, and fat mana options for later on
• Library Searching - three unconditional tutors, plus a few more for enchantments and lands
• Board Control - a solid helping of removal, comes in instant, enchantment and wrath flavours
• Spell Control - surprisingly high for an Orzhov shell, proactive disruption via discard and Rule of Law
• Card Advantage - everybody discards and Rule of Laws while you churn out bodies, also sports some solid draw engines
• Linearity - the dying moments of a game likely include three digits of power in spirit tokens, but the journey differs every time
• Combo Potential - no infinites whatsoever, occasionally does silly finite stuff with Skybind + big mana or a Bolas Rock

The Deck's Strengths

• A derpy commander in the wrong colours, making unthreatening speed bump plays that eventually add up to a surprising amount of advantage.
• Voltron? Storm? Reanimator? Pesky creatures, be they tall or wide? There likely is an answer somewhere in the 99, and a tutor to get it.
• Skybind allows for all sorts of crazy stuff to happen, from the generation of an army out of nowhere to incidental stax resistance.
• Your Bane of Progress just melted my board? Well, at least I can still make five 7/7s to compensate.
• Incremental spell/hand disruption makes it increasingly awkward to answer your shenanigans.
• You haven't lived until you resolve a 10+ enchantment Replenish, especially if constellation becomes involved.
• You can put on a slow-motion Leovold + Puzzle Box impersonation with Thoughtrender Lamia.
• Held up interaction mana but nothing worthy came? Just sink it into spirit production without missing a beat.
• Gaining 72 life per swing while everybody else has to pay 14 per attacker only to have it die on impact? Sure, why not.
• I have "gotten there" on the back of Daxos with Sword of Rampant Growth.

The Deck's Weaknesses

• There are both better enchantress commanders and better Orzhov commanders, even if Daxos offers a unique spin on the idea.
• Doesn't have green. Just imagine Elemental Bond or Primal Rage with Daxos, not to mention the standard Gx enchantress stuff...
• Rather slow, and fragile in the early game - if your meta clocks in around turn 4-5, you're gonna have a bad time.
• Daxos himself is a bear, and easy to keep down if desired. You have to rely on his apparent badness and other people making splashier plays.
• Related to the above, Keranos, God of Storms and Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite are your natural predators. Thankfully, you have removal.
• You have almost as bad a time against Aura Shards and Austere Command as the rest of your enchantress brethren.
• Whilst the path varies, the typical end result is three digits of spirit token power. Nowhere near the most varied game ender on the block.
• Some of the hate options may feed other decks at the table, such as the discard fuelling reanimator strategies.
• Occasionally becomes rather light-hearted with its life total, whilst lifegain is quite sparse in the 99.
• ...some games, you just don't get to play Skybind

Other Commander Options

Orzhov

• Karlov of the Ghost Council - Daxos's accompanying commander product legend friend is an objectively stronger option, and comes with a surprising amount of explosiveness. A tuned voltron shell with some multi-trigger lifegain (think Soul Warden et al. for the low end, and Righteous Cause as the curve topper) is sure to result in a quick clock.
• Ayli, Eternal Pilgrim - Another aggressively costed option with built in Diamond Valley and Vindicate galore. Find a sweet spot of ramp, lifegain and token production and you should be in control of most happenings soon enough. There's a cool value town/combo primer you can check out.
• Athreos, God of Passage - Whilst people are quite liberal with their life totals, they get leery pretty quickly when something like Athreos repeatedly makes advances onto it. This makes the Orzhov God a sturdy recursion engine, making good use of all sorts of cheap utility dudes. He's seen some renewed popularity lately thanks to a Shadowborn Apostles Game Knights build.
• Teysa, Orzhov Scion - Lends herself very well to all sorts of enter/leave the battlefield shenanigans and probably offers the greatest build flexibility of the viable Orzhov commanders. There's a solid primer on her on the forums, so go check it out if you think she might be more up your street.
• Teysa Karlov - Teysa's newer iteration is a design that most expansion legends should aim for. There's explicit support for the set's mechanic, but it's worded robustly enough to allow for various other shenanigans. Oh yeah, and it's also in the wrong colour combo for what it supports, given reanimator's tendencies to be GBx. The conceptual parallels with Daxos are striking, and I'd likely be building her if I didn't already have this deck going on.
• Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter - A high-end option that can convert disposable bodies into a surprise burst of ridiculous commander damage or removal. Or, better yet, the latter after the former. Combine with some sturdy recursion to make the threshold on "disposable" far more lenient.

Enchantress

• Tuvasa the Sunlit - Hey look, a literal actual enchantress commander! The most Daxos-like thing to exist, as you get payoff from getting your enchantment action on with her around and she comes with a game-ending outlet based on overall enchantment ground charted. Had I not sold my soul to Daxos pretty firmly way before C18 hit the shelves, I'd have almost certainly built this bugger.
• Kestia, the Cultivator - A somewhat unusual direction for an enchantress deck, encouraging some sort of go-wide enchantment creature/aura build. When you do bust out auras in EDH, you're typically getting your voltron on and not spreading them around a field of stuff. In return, you get an asymmetric faux-Edric with a bunch of hoops to jump through to make it happen. If that's not EDH, what is?
• Estrid, the Masked - The face card of the C18 deck is interesting and versatile, yet actually not that enchantment'y. Coming with a Replenish-like ultimate is cute and all, but it's not going to come online too reliably outside of Chain Veil combos. The plus encourages land auras, while the minus suggests a miserable wrath slog that could even potentially encroach on the MLD taboo.
• Gaddock Teeg - A brutal, hateful little thing that warps the rules of the game. Suddenly Austere Command doesn't look as scary. Amass a dense field of low-cost value enchantments as enchantresses refuel your grip and a variably sized hatebear splash further trips up your foes.
• Karametra, God of the Harvest - What if I told you that you could literally have an indestructible enchantment as your commander in GW? Now now, hold your horses, the actual body that it comes with encourages a different style of deck altogether, but sometimes having a bonus enchantment to proc all the value town synergies is nice enough. The dissonance between what an enchantress deck wants to do versus what a Karametra deck wants to do is something I could never get over, but she does have a nontrivial enchantress following.
• Dragonlord Dromoka - Having an uncounterable Grand Abolisher in the command zone is quite tasty, and lends itself well to milking all those delicious enchantress synergies without unexpected turbulence. The fact she's a massive, evasive body doesn't hurt either when it comes to closing out games.
• Uril, the Miststalker - However, in the raw closing-games-out department, nobody on this list dishes out as much damage as Uril. Enchantresses are happy to refill your grip as you serve up thick platters of cheap, potent auras (Rancor et al.), and soon enough you have a big mean hexproof one-shotting machine. Just watch out for them Fleshbag Marauders...
• Sigarda, Host of Herons - Trades off Uril's explosiveness for not being soft to Fleshbag Marauders (and other effects of that ilk). Doesn't naturally gravitate to enchantments as heavily as her predecessor, but her staying power lets you slap down some auras on her with confidence. There's a very nice primer on the use of Sigarda as an enchantress commander with a splash of aura voltron.
• Angus Mackenzie - Mister Fog-on-a-stick lends himself incredibly well to all sorts of extremely defensive pillow fort mayhem, usually with a good helping of enchantments. Given the fact he's in what may well be the best colour combination for this type of deck, there's nothing stopping you branching out of the pillow shell and using Angus himself as an emergency survival panic button.
• Zur the Enchanter - Whilst the colour combination is a bit subpar from a purely enchantment perspective as green got replaced by black, the fact Zur brings a constant stream of tutoring makes him one of the most feared commanders across the whole board. Quickly assemble all sorts of nastiness, be it Rest in Peace + Energy Field, Bitterblossom + Contamination, or just Necropotence to dig unreasonably deep into your 99 for whatever you may need. See, enchantments have the potential to be pretty freaking good in this format!
• Heliod, God of the Sun - A mono white Daxos-like oddity who can generate 2/1s for four mana. Making bodies on demand is good as it helps close out games, and enables instant speed constellation value at times that make Skybind delightfully wonky. If only the bodies and colour range could be better... oh wait, they can be, and we're here to talk about it

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The following subsections feature a sizeable list of options for each card group, including cards I currently run, cards I ran in the past and cards that will likely never grace my 99. My opinion isn't be-all, end-all, and whilst I can voice my thoughts on Humility and Contamination that doesn't mean you can't come up with some angle where they will work.

Saving Money

Seeing how I've been constantly toying with the list since Daxos got printed in 2015, I've managed to pick up a number of expensive utility pieces for it along the way. However, I paid quite a bit less for them than you'd have to do now as the secondary market has become even crazier than usual in 2018. The good news is that you can capture most of the deck's performance just fine without all the insane money pieces - Skybind, Doomwake Giant, Thoughtrender Lamia, True Conviction, Extinguish All Hope and Razaketh, the Foulblooded aren't going to break the bank. You'll just need to field a slightly different supporting cast. The most expensive thing that's key to the deck's functioning would be Cloudstone Curio at about 15 bucks a pop. Its flexibility is ridiculous and nothing else even attempts to replicate it.

The easiest place to shave money are the various vanity cards, largely concentrated in the mana base - the primer 99 is fully decked out with fetches, a Scrubland, and a Crucible of Worlds to complement it with a Mana Crypt on the side. There's no denying that having this sort of setup is ideal, and occasionally Crucible can dig you out of some pretty patchy situations or get you surprising value off your progressive discard, but it's easily the most needless money sink in the list. For years, I made do with a perfectly competent mana base with more basics and a Temple of Silence, plus a different rock in place of the Crypt. However, attacking most of the other expensive multicolour lands (Reflecting Pool, Godless Shrine, Fetid Heath) can ultimately result in the deck becoming clunkier in operation as there's hardly a long list of alternative enter untapped options. If you take out the fetches, keep an eye on Brought Back - one of its operation modes is ramp, and it might become less desirable with that aspect of it turned off. The most superfluous pimp bit of all is Chains of Mephistopheles. Slot in Uba Mask immediately, or devote the space to something else entirely.

The deck likes its mana big, and the current iteration places a lot of faith in its lands to get it there. Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx won't break the bank, and you should get it. Cabal Coffers + Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth are pricier, but they also form the most resilient of the big mana generators and are commonly found in Bx builds. As such, you should still be able to get decent mileage out of them if you go your separate ways with Daxos. Serra's Sanctum is mind-numbingly expensive, and only shines in enchantment decks. It's one hell of a land and gave the list a ridiculous performance boost when it was introduced, and it comes with a mighty blessing from yours truly, but it's a heck of a commitment to spend this much on a cardboard with a fraction of the utility of Urborg + Coffers. If you scale back on the big mana lands, Deserted Temple and Weathered Wayfarer may peter out a bit, keep an eye on them in testing. However, it should be noted that Daxos is very mana hungry, and you will probably need to upgrade your mana rock count to compensate. This may adversely affect performance as you will become susceptible to getting said rocks shot out from under you, sending you back to the stone age.

Some expensive utility options are Demonic Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, Enlightened Tutor, Land Tax, Toxic Deluge, Replenish and Teferi's Protection. A benefit of forking out for the tutors is that they're ubiquitous and will always find a home anywhere you want to put them in the corresponding colours. Given the vastly inferior nature of budget options, a somewhat unconventional suggestion would be to replace them with Diabolic Revelation if forced to, trading earlier reactivity for a potent late-game blowout. A hefty X will set up an endgame to the standard of Razaketh. Land Tax is similarly utilitarian, and can lend its value hand to everything from the most comatose goodstuff to broken glass jank heaps. Toxic Deluge is probably the best wipe in the format (only really contested by Blasphemous Act), offering ridiculous play flexibility, and will also slot in effortlessly into any deck that has black in it. Replacements have to decide between reset level (Wrath of God) or alpha potential (Winds of Abandon? Plague Winds?!). Replenish's less suave younger brother Open the Vaults can stand in if need be, but will be noticeably inferior. Teferi's Protection is a super kooky one-off effect, and replacements like Faith's Reward are not even the Open to Protection's Replenish boggling gamut of possibility. As such, you may be better off using the slot for something else. Thankfully, most everything else is cheap! No Mercy is less essential and you could sub it out for some other utility/defensive enchantment of your choice. Sensei's Divining Top depends on a number of shuffle effects to truly shine, and most of this deck's shuffles have just been listed in the last few paragraphs as opportunities to save some money. Bolas Rock may also start bricking more often.

1. Ramp/Land Drops
Daxos is mana hungry, got to keep them lands/rocks flowing. Land-based ramp is preferred as it's harder to interact with, but some choice mana rocks, preferably of the enter untapped variety, can be a solid boost too.


2. Tutors
Somewhere within the 99, a card likely lurks that can answer whatever is going on right now.


3. Constellation Toolbox
Enchantments hit the battlefield, stuff happens. Daxos makes this work at instant speed.


4. Card/Spell Economy
Daxos offers spirit making as a useful way to offload mana. Keep people off cards/spells to further amplify this fact, and make it more difficult to interact with you. But yeah, don't shake a stick at actually drawing some cards yourself either, or manipulating your topdeck for maximum gain.


5. Removal
Orzhov is incredible at removing things, and removing things is good. Comes in enchantment flavour too!


6. Non-Removal Answers
All sorts of proactive protection, tempo hits and hate cards that don't really fit into the other categories. Miscellaneous tech ho!


7. Combat-Related
General category for everything that makes it less pleasant to swing into you or makes you swing better into others.


8. Wraths
Sometimes stuff needs to go boom. Often this is followed by you rebuilding at a disproportionate pace.


9. Recursion
Pick up the fallen pieces and keep going like nothing happened.


10. Lands
At the foundation of every reasonably playable deck sits a reasonably playable mana base. We're missing out on a lot of good lands as we're an enemy pairing, but you can still piece together something pretty sensible. My build runs a Scrubland and all the fetches as I've gradually pulled out all the stops for a pet deck that's been around since 2015, but for the longest time I made do with a setup that topped out on a Godless Shrine and Fetid Heath.

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Deck Strategy in Shellnut

• The majority of the deck's games end on the back of spirit tokens generated by Daxos.
• The spirits become permanently "anthemed" whenever you cast an enchantment, allowing you to focus your actions on all sorts of proactive and reactive lines of play. At the same time, your game-ending inevitability softly clicks up in the background.
• You're in it for the long haul, and you know it. Take it slow, slide under the radar. Don't pull a turn three Skybind unless you can feel the aura of the Gods of Magic shining down upon you. And even then, check three times.
• However, even though your game plan involves the turns likely going into double digits, you're not entirely useless in the early game. Hurl removal judiciously, earning some brownie points from the rest of the table.
• If you get your paws on a draw, non-Thoughtrender Lamia discard or Rule of Law variant enchantment, aim to get them out ASAP. Not quite "before Daxos" quick usually, but quick enough to hopefully catch everybody with their pants down and make adjusting a bit more difficult. They also tend to bait removal, making follow-up plays more secure.
• Daxos is just a bear, it's easy to kill him. If you smell a game where he's gonna die time and time again, try to get some protection for him out of the 99. If that's not gonna work, sculpt your mana base, play Daxos and immediately cast an enchantment without passing priority. That'll set up a counter to milk for value once everybody whittles down their options a bit.
• If there's something permanently messing up Daxos's day (think Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite, Linvala, Keeper of Silence or something), you're WB, you have removal, use it. There are quite a few answers to stuff in this deck.
• Only go for a game-warping power play when you have the real estate to support it. There's usually no point to chasing out Skybind or Thoughtrender Lamia when you just used everything on your board to make them happen. Someone will kill them and you will cry. And it will be all your fault.
• One game-ending power play that doesn't need much support is Bolas Rock. A legion of spirits that you can lifelink up to mitigate the cost helps, as do various topdeck editors. You're likely to encounter both as you go along.
• It's easy to maximise damage output from your spirits - use all your mana to make them a turn ahead, and then play actual enchantments to anthem them up on your turn and swing with higher impact. Just a very basic thing to keep in mind if you don't explicitly need an enchantment down at a given moment.
• Getting wrathed is not ideal, but the easily accessible spirit swarm lets you rebuild to some extent. True, losing all your value enchantments to Austere Command is going to hurt, but you still have the power to churn out bodies on tap. The thing that hurts the most is mana denial.
• Given the slow, incremental nature of the spirit growth and the largely unthreatening enchantment plays, your wins often feel like luck to the rest of the table. Do not ruin their illusion. Repeatedly ride the scary decks' coattails to victory.

1. Early Game (Turns ~1-4)

Before you begin playing, you need a hand of some sort. The deck isn't sculpted for crutch reliance on anything in particular, so the main thing you have to pay attention to is mana. You should ideally have three lands in the starting grip, or two and a cheap rock. Three mana is where you become alive as that's how much Daxos costs, whilst around five to six is a good amount to have in the early mid game to start working on things. You also want some enchantments, obviously, of the low to medium CMC variety. As awesome as True Conviction is, if that's how you plan to get Daxos his first counter then you're gonna have a bad time most games. If you open a flexible hand with versatile tutor/removal/ramp pieces but no enchantments, you can probably get away with keeping it as well. There are plenty of enchantments in the 99, so you're likely to pull some up at some point. If you get a grip like that, don't chase Daxos out onto the field prematurely unless you need someone to pony Sword of Rampant Growth into battle.

Once the actual game commences, immediately slip under the radar. In the overwhelming majority of games this should be trivial to do, as you're WB. Other decks might explode out of the gate while you take a leisurely stroll and set up some basic stuff like the occasional mana rock. Orzhov savours the moment, apparently. However, if other people are threatening a very quick kill, you have a fair share of instant speed removal with broad applications. Sometimes one of your enchantment speed bumps may prove absolutely lethal to a particular strategy (Rule of Law's a common culprit, as are Nevermore variants if you've got 'em), if that is the case then feel free to invite them to the party. Try to trip your rapid foes up it a window of opportunity presents itself. If it doesn't, shrug it off and shuffle up for the next game. After all, you're only a fringe WB enchantress deck, there's only so much you can do.

If nobody explodes and doesn't get contained, continue your derpy early plays. You've got the impact of a kitten holding a carrot. Try to hold off casting enchantments until you have Daxos out to make the most of them, but feel free to set down all sorts of artifact/creature utility. Nothing says "I'm a silly deck, don't mind me" like a turn two Sword of Rampant Growth, which Daxos then carries to battle at someone turn four. Something else that also tends to throw people off you is following a turn three Daxos with a turn four non-enchantment, like three-drop artifacts (preferably off Thran Dynamo). I guess it's something to the effect of "wait, so you built a Daxos deck, and you don't even sling enchantments?" going into action. I'm not saying you should prioritise those over actually getting experience onto Daxos every single time, but it's a subtle ploy that sometimes lets you slide a bit further under the radar.

Your main early game goal is to ramp a bit, if possible, and crank Daxos out. This should be easy to do, as he costs three mana. If the coast is clear (stronger decks drawing attention, or nobody particularly removal-trigger-happy), feel free to churn him out turn three without backup. If you can sense that he's going to die, sculpt your board a little bit more and plop him onto a field with more mana, followed by holding priority and casting a cheap enchantment. This will get a single counter on him, making his spirit generation work at any point thereafter. This is of utmost importance in a game where Daxos will be difficult to keep around, as if a window of opportunity presents itself you need to be able to slide him in with little notice and go as wide as possible.

All in all, the early game is a time of little glamour for the deck, and you should consider it done when you have an experience counter on Daxos, with Daxos preferably on the field to make use of it. Hopefully your board also includes some mana acceleration or land fetching. Weathered Wayfarer is likely going to be doing work all game long, as you're unlikely to outramp green unless you keep getting that Sword of Rampant Growth value in addition to constantly hitting your regular land drops. You should appear a bit behind everybody else, and that's a good thing. Your time will come, and you need to lay low while you're at your weakest.

2. Mid Game (Turns ~5-9)

Things are starting to look up. You have some mana to work with, you have a grip full of relatively low cost stuff (the deck's curve tapers off heavily after 3), and it's time to lay down some speed bumps and defensive measures. All of this should ideally be done with Daxos on the field, but if you can't get him to stick and he's becoming prohibitively expensive then it's okay to miss some experience counters to "help" others start shooting blanks. You can also help him stick with Flickering Ward from time to time.

When sequencing the enchantments in your hand, keep a few things in mind - how optimally are you using your mana? How badly do you need the enchantment down? Do you need to generate some presence with spirit tokens? Balance all of the above out as best you can as you chain your plays. Typically, if you're in the possession of a spell disruption outlet that isn't Thoughtrender Lamia, you should set it down as quickly as possible. This way, you start actively digging into your opponents' options and lines of play, often leading them to prioritising developing their own boards over trying to answer you. After all, there's not all that much for them to answer - some random suboptimal commander, possibly a few spirits, a couple of enchantments of varying levels of annoying. Some people will snap and remove these speed bumps. You're okay with that - that's less removal for your game-enders further down the line. If the spell disruption outlet sticks, that's more and more incremental advantage for you with each go around the table as you potentially drum up the spirit attendance rate.

The second order of business is explicit card advantage stuff for you. Slapping down a Phyrexian Arena is good, as having more options is good. Just keep in mind that usually others having less options is even better when sequencing these. Card quality also fits here - Doom Whisperer is a good way to ensure you'll get what you need going forward, and tossing spare mana at Top is never a bad idea. After that come all sorts of defensive measures. There's not a lot of pillow fort here, but it's some of the best there is, and deterring swings into you until it's too late is a good thing to do. People won't want to pay your Ghostly Prison tax, lose a swinger to No Mercy or just have all their effort blanked by a Righteous Aura. That should buy you time to continue setting up all sorts of other speed bumps, which should be applied as needed. If there's a Xenagod, you'll likely want to plop down that Authority of the Consuls ASAP. If someone's doing graveyard shenanigans, eating the graveyard with Agent of Erebos becomes the name of the game. You have a wide variety of answers in the deck and a decent helping of tutors to help you find them.

Of course, don't forget about the stuff you started on in the early game. Diligently punch people with the Sword of Rampant Growth, amassing your lands. Play out more mana rocks, as some of the best ones are quite top-heavy. Sneak out some of the big-mana lands and flirt with recursion if needed. Cloudstone Curio makes for good removal protection, and can make the spell disruption wonderfully asymmetric if desired. Continue to apply removal where needed, as things that more or less incidentally hamper your game plan are likely to arise. A good wrath isn't bad either. Don't get completely lost in the enchantment moment as you have the capacity to interact with others around you, and you probably should. Hold back some panic button removal if you expect Aura Shards.

The end goal of the mid game is a reasonably functional board with a sizeable mana pool, some good midrange enchantments and decently sized spirits. Ideally your opponents will have been stifled a bit by now through some spell availability disruption, but simultaneously their plays should have been splashier than yours, drawing attention away from your developing board. Time to put the developed potential to use and try to run away with the game.

3. Late Game (Turns ~10+)

The transition from mid to late game usually has more to do with your mana pool, spirit size and impact of the spirits hitting the board than with any particular single play. It's the result of small incremental advantages adding up, leading to a huge amount of potential for the plays referred to as game-ending to work with, making them more likely to succeed in their game-warping ways. Some games you sneak in a Skybind turn four. Some games you drown people in 12/12 spirits without extending beyond 4 CMC of the enchantments you play.

The only cards in the 99 that effectively usher in the late game all on their own are Razaketh, the Foulblooded and Bolas Rock. When the former is combined with Daxos, the pair spits out repeatable instant speed Grim Tutors whenever desired, and the beauty of Big Ole Raz is that he also works perfectly fine with whatever is around when he resolves. I imagine that he won't be your first play, and there will be some bodies kicking around for him to chew up if needed. Even if someone predictably wraths the moment he hits, you just sac your board to him, untap with a sculpted as hell grip and have the win in the bag. And if Big Ole Raz gets to stay around unimpeded, that's a constant stream of whatever you need for a very meagre cost, entirely defeating the randomness of a 99 card singleton format. You have your whole answer toolbox at your fingertips, Teferi's Protection, all of your big mana, the standard power lifters... I'm sure you'll figure out a functional path to victory.

Meanwhile, Bolas Rock is the deck's speed cheat code, allowing you to sidestep a lot of development states and barf a board out of nowhere. In theory, this thing bricks when you hit land when you can't play a land anymore. In practice, you run a ton of shuffles and topdeck editors, so you can often find a way to keep going. It's not uncommon to pour 20-30 life into this and accrue an absolutely insane, effectively game ending board state off this thing. It helps to have a little army of spirits when you get this thing online, as the life loss can add up. This way, you can secure some lifelink, heal back up, and keep going like nobody's business. The topdeck tutors are a pretty solid synergy here, and get True Conviction quite often. Sensei's Divining Top becomes a sorcery speed Yawgmoth's Bargain. And the funny thing is that it's mainly used to skim dead stuff off the top in this form! Necropotence can play a similar support role. Bolas Rock is truly bananas in the shell, strapping a turbo boost to the game and making you feel like you're running a "proper" deck for a moment.

There's a certain five-drop enchantment that will probably show up, likely sooner than later, when you start going ham with either of those two (it's typically my second Big Ole Raz tutor, right after Serra's Sanctum). Skybind is a world of its own, a card that makes the deck come online and do insane stuff it otherwise wouldn't have the power to do. From the moment Skybind hits the field, whenever something you care about happens, think about how you could apply the flicker to improve your situation. You can bounce your own mana rocks/lands for extra mana, you can bounce other people's mana rocks/lands to fence them off mana, you can flicker anything on the field that isn't an enchantment. It opens up a ridiculous number of possibilities that can't all be written up. The card will surprise you time and time again. One of its nicer uses is that if you're trying to recuperate from a rough start and Daxos getting hated out, it enables you to easily protect him once you get him back on the field. The single experience counter, which you made sure you put on Daxos, makes sure you can flicker him as soon as he hits. A good rule of thumb is to get Skybind on the field when you'll have at least three extra mana so it can double as Daxos protection, regardless of the roughness of the start. If you add Cloudstone Curio to the mix, your stuff becomes just about impervious to removal. You can Curio enchantments back to hand if needed, and Skybind the Curio away in a similar fashion.

Other plays that could be classified as game-ending scale in power with the mana total you have available. If you have big mana rocks and/or multi-mana lands, then Skybind can break these in a ridiculous manner. Doomwake Giant will repeatedly unclog the board, making the battlefield miserable for your opponents' creatures. Thoughtrender Lamia can very quickly bring the game to a screeching halt, as your opponents are stuck topdecking... and then you get priority in their draw step, make a spirit and the constellation trigger implores them to discard what they just drew. They can respond and play the card if it's an instant, of course, but that still heavily dictates when they're allowed to make plays and what plays get through. I'm yet to lose a game where I managed to stick a Lamia for long enough to gut people's hands. It's as oppressive as the deck ever gets. True Conviction bases off critical mass alone and doesn't screw with your opponents' board/card states, but it's a similarly must-answer threat the moment it lands in the vast majority of cases. Extinguish All Hope also turns from a cute overcosted wrath to an avenue for a game-ending alpha strike.

Another thing that can usher in the resource discrepancy representative of the late game is a well-placed burst of recursion. There's something incredibly exhilarating about sneaking in a Replenish and dumping back 10+ enchantments that were answered through various means at all stages of the game. This gets understandably more insane if the constellation big hitters are also involved. Whilst less flashy, a constant stream of value off Crucible of Worlds/Phyrexian Reclamation can be yet another avenue for accruing advantage.

And that's about it. Ideally, you slid under the radar early, then set down some speed bumps to slow people down and answered some problems, only to end it all in a flurry of huge spirit tokens which may or may not have caused hilarious flickering, board wipes, graveyard exiling and hand gutting. Sometimes you get caught in the crossfire of "proper" decks, but that's okay. After all, this is a format about doing whatever you want, and the times you manage to cruise to victory on the back of a suboptimal commander in a suboptimal colour combination for the deck archetype (happens more often than you'd think) earns you a very healthy helping of swag points.

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Kudos

• Ebline - Gradually hammering me into a rudimentary template of a sensible deck builder and pilot, his knowledge matched only by his patience.
• Dominicus - More helpings of EDH zen, including the value of the discard suite and letting go of compulsive commander protection. All this in the face of finding Daxos boring. Thanks, man.
• Greendawg - Enduring various configurations of the deck in testing, and magicking up this nifty new banner.
• Damnosus - The original MTGS Daxos partner in crime, helping me see cards in a new light. Well, everything except Humility. Sorry not sorry
• The thread regulars (in particular lyonhaert and Tev) - Offering a constant presence to bounce ideas off of, keeping me motivated to have the deck strive for its best possible version even when opportunities to sling cardboard are sparse. Feels nice to not be rambling into air. WyvernSlayer slapped the "deal with it" glasses onto Daxos.
• Everybody not mentioned who provided their opinions/feedback at any point of the time-space continuum, or even made it down here. You rock!

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Where applicable, the deck change header is clickable to take you to the relevant discussion post in the thread.

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Feather, the Redeemed

Weaponised Jankmas Incarnate

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The Deck Ranking

Based on a defunct Avacyn primer

General Attributes

• Quick Game Likeness - should fit snugly within a mid power meta, has done turn 7 tablekills on good draws
• Newbie Feasibility - "Hey kid, point these instants at creatures you own and turn the bird sideways at people"
• Commander Dependency - without Feather, the list becomes a bunch of underwhelming sub-limited garbage only rescuable by a Zada variant
• "Scare" Rating - most of your mid-game plays are small and unassuming, but there is a flurry of them
• Multiplayer Mode - an interesting tradeoff - in 1v1 you can voltron easier, but in multiplayer you milk your spells more effectively
• Expensiveness - Heal tribal, the core of the deck is dirt cheap; expensive utility/support pieces result in moderate performance improvement

Game Play Attributes

• Acceleration - ridiculous mana build-up via rocks, land ramp, various engine options to milk extra value from both, and Phyrexian Altar
• Library Searching - a bunch of conditional options, with nearly all being multi-use in some form or other
• Board Control - a few staple removal spells, plus a bit of potentially reusable ETB control
• Spell Control - a smattering of protection instants designed to repeatedly keep your key creatures alive
• Card Advantage - very sturdy scry/draw dig when the deck "comes online", recycles crappy instants like a boss even when flailing
• Linearity - recycling card advantage instants will be a constant, but you can win in many different ways
• Combo Potential - Paradox Engine + Isochron Scepter + rocks usually happens after a hefty Zada top-up

The Deck's Strengths

• A cast spam deck in Boros! With actual card advantage! What's not to love?
• Various synergy pieces (ETB, voltron, heroic, cast payoff) with the spell package lead to surprisingly varied games.
• A weird, almost draw-go control play experience - hold up interaction mana, devote spare resources to card advantage.
• Ridiculous Zada, Hedron Grinder possibilities - protect your entire board with the white shield spells, plus the standard draw out the wazoo thing.
• Repeatedly shredding super cheap instants makes for kooky Paradox Engine/Phyrexian Altar abuse scenarios.
• Monastery Mentor is, arguably, the best cast spam swarmer in the entire game. A true army in a can for this deck, a great payoff for being in white.
• A fun way to make the most of the stack as you try to fiddle with the various triggers/copies to milk maximum value.
• The wall of protection instants necessary to keep the deck afloat doubles up value by granting your game plan relative immunity.
• Occasionally assembles a Paradox Engine + Isochron Scepter infinite that wins the game on the spot.
• I've won through an Ajani Steadfast emblem with a wall of 1/1s, and not even a wipe could stop me!

The Deck's Weaknesses

• Boros cuteness aside, lacks blue - you'd get a healthy dollop of extra cast spam payoff to work with.
• Very commander dependent, there's a reason Heal was only present in eight pre-Feather EDH decks on EDHREC.
• Relies on key non-creature pieces for game-ending explosiveness, and the deck can only offer a modicum of protection for them.
• Probably won't manage to hang with the big dogs, even if you ram in the hatebears.
• The protection suite is necessary for ensuring the deck's functioning, but stuff like Ephemeral Shields isn't the highest impact when you're uncontested.
• Even if doubling up protection spells for combat defences, your board state is often quite meagre if you don't get a 1/1 swarm.
• The 1/1 swarm won't help a lot if trample comes around. Refer to Monastery Mentor and Phalanx Leader for X/X swarm assembly instead.
• Will probably taper off in performance a bit if you try to focus on one of the synergy elements due to lack of card pool depth.
• The potential Feather-reusable control options (which I don't run) are quite variable in their returns, ranging from do-nothing to borderline oppressive.
• Sometimes induces mild salinity by milking Heal over and over again, while the protection serves its purpose and makes it hard to disrupt.

Other Commander Options

Boros

• Depala, Pilot Exemplar - The first instance of a Boros legend explicitly granting card advantage out of the command zone. Unfortunately, dwarves did not test particularly well as white's potential characteristic race and fell to the wayside after Kaladesh block, so wanting to get value out of the ability has you picking for scraps in two sets' worth of cards. At least new vehicles show up every now and then.
• Firesong and Sunspeaker - The first Boros legend incentivising you to look into spells rather than creatures. You cram your deck full of Hour of Devastation style effects, repeatedly mow the board, and use the resulting wicked life total to fuel Aetherflux Reservoir or Treasonous Ogre. Still struggles with Boros value related matters though.
• Aurelia, the Warleader - Nothing says Boros smash like an extra combat out of the command zone. The most popular Boros commander serves as a handy way to double up on the destruction power of your forces, and works super well with all sorts of on-combat triggers (think Hero of Bladehold for a double trouble package of the two most desirable ones) that Boros is so fond of.
• Iroas, God of Victory - The coward's way out of Boros, Iroas ensures your aggro swarm retains more relevance as the game goes on. Turns out having a wide board with menace is pretty good for pressuring people, and the fact nothing dies lets you turn various jank like Tilonalli's Summoner sideways and milk value with impunity. That, or you can just Starstorm everything after attacks.

Cast Spam

• Zada, Hedron Grinder - The go-to option for targeted cantrip abuse. Go wide via means such as Siege-Gang Commander, set Zada down, rip a cheap cantrip, repeat, have trouble differentiating your hand from your deck. It's not uncommon for General Tazri to be a five colour surrogate for getting Zada online outside the constraints of mono red.
• Shu Yun, the Silent Tempest - The most conceptually similar option to Feather, is often found running various cheap evasive/pumping scries/cantrips. Feather is a tempting include in this deck's 99, as getting repeatable Shadow Rift action sounds pretty good. Naturally gravitates towards voltron due to the sheer efficiency of the commander's combat pump.
• Talrand, Sky Summoner - Having a kickass Young Pyromancer variant out of the command zone is pretty good for getting cast payoffs. Mix up some cheap cantrips with more potent draw and whatever permission you feel like, leading to a rock solid shell of a deck. As a trade-off, you're stuck in blue and blue only.
• Niv-Mizzet, Parun - The best Niv is a fierce value engine off cheap casts, so you can take the overall ideals of Talrand but go even lower to the ground and add a touch of red support. Now each 1/2 drop instant in your hand is the equivalent of Defiant Strike/Shelter in Feather, while probably doing something else relevant! I'm pretty sure you can ram it full enough of stuff where not getting the spell back won't really hurt you. Let's be honest, you'll probably be looking for a Curiosity effect with all the dig

Multiplayer Scaling

• Marchesa, the Black Rose - A ridiculous Grixis powerhouse that can set up a value engine that pops off in each other player's turn. Combine a sac outlet with some +1/+1 counter shenanigans and you can get all sorts of ETB/death payoffs going like nobody's business. There's also a cute modular variant that makes active use of artifact creatures.
• Shirei, Shizo's Caretaker - A crappier version of the above. True, you can usually get more creatures in circulation as you don't have to worry about +1/+1 counter stuff, but you're restricted to tiny dudes. That, and if someone pops Shirei then your plan goes to hell, whereas Marchesa can typically hide in the 'yard and shrug it off. Oh yeah, and it's mono black too. Nevertheless, Shirei has some devotees.
• Ephara, God of the Polis - Ephara's clause incentivises you to pop out flash creatures and/or mana sink tokens each turn. There's no harm in a bit of Sacred Mesa or Whitemane Lion action to keep the card draw going. You could argue that this makes her the most similar to Feather of this bunch, as you can sink a bit of mana in each opponent's turn for an extra card if the right pieces come alone. Being a Theros god is pretty handy for survival purposes too.
• Patron of the Orochi - Nearly a Seedborn Muse out of the command zone, you get to untap all your forests and green creatures in everybody else's turns. A game plan with tons of mana sink activated abilities is a natural complement to the ability. If this seems up your street, check out my primer on him. For now enough alternate options, time to get back to Feather!

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The following subsections feature a sizeable list of options for each card group, including cards I currently run, cards I ran in the past and cards that will likely never grace my 99. My opinion isn't be-all, end-all, and whilst I can stray away from flicker value town or heroic tribal, that doesn't mean you can't come up with some angle where they will work.

Saving Money

In the deck attributes section, I made the claim that Feather's a very budget-friendly commander. I then proceeded to thrust a thousand plus dollar list at you. I am fully aware of the cognitive dissonance of these two, but ultimately most of the expensive cards serve as various utility pieces or win accelerators. The core that makes Feather tick is the various cheap as hell instants, plus cheap cast payoff. You'll be ok if you can't get the more expensive options, and I'll go over everything that's even slightly cuttable now.

The first point of trimming is the vanity mana base. I pulled the trigger on fetches and Mana Crypt during more affordable times, and feel fine proxying them in anything I build as I own one of each. Take 'em out, take Mox Diamond and Plateau out while you're at it. That's two thirds of the deck's cost gone, with negligible performance loss. Sure, it'd be cool to have perfect dual access for colour purposes and Duergar Hedge-Mage reliability, but you'll live Keep everything Reflecting Pool tier and cheaper, untapped lands help the deck work. Sunbaked Canyon is cash money because of artificial scarcity, and it's not like we'll use its Canopy nature as the deck likes its mana and draws effortlessly. Mana Confluence is a bit debatable, but should stick with you in future EDH adventures, which makes it a sensible purchase if you get around to it. Slot in some basics, maybe the Karoo or Temple. There are some other expensive rocks lurking in here. Chrome Mox and Mox Amber are both pretty cool, but you'll be perfectly ok if you just put in two-drop tap rocks instead. Coldsteel Heart, Star Compass, Marble Diamond and Fire Diamond (sorted on priority) should have you covered for however many slots you may want to swap. You could also consider Myr, if need be.

Taking out further expensive utility options will result in some level of performance hit to the deck, but its core engine will still be in place so it should be ultimately okay. Maybe a bit slower, maybe a bit less consistent, but still functional. A lot of the money cards synergise with each other, and can be taken out as package deals.

• Paradox Engine is extremely strong in the shell and starts the countdown from the second it lands on the table, but it also tends to die on sight against experienced opponents. Plus, every now and then you actually scry it to the bottom when given the chance to, as you just don't have the rock infrastructure in place to support it! If you take it out, Isochron Scepter loses its combo applications, but may still be worth keeping around for its sturdy utility.
• Sword of Feast and Famine is a great mana boost, but comes with a massive price tag. Stoneforge Mystic grants you access to it, along with a few other choice equipments, and loses a bit of sheen with one of its best payoffs gone. Both are pretty solid in the format, but not quite ubiquitous staples.
• The Recruiter friends are even narrower, only getting you small creatures, but help the deck find whatever nefarious weenie it may need at a particular time. Monastery Mentor is wicked good in the shell, but a rare sighting outside it. If these guys go, Phyrexian Altar becomes harder to get online, so you can consider offing it as well.

By now we're left with ubiquitous format all-stars in Smothering Tithe, Path to Exile and Enlightened Tutor. I'd recommend picking the first two up, they'll be fantastic here and will live anywhere Wx you may venture to going forward. The Tutor actually loses quite a bit of sheen if you take out the artifact power lifters, so you can save a bit of moolah on it in that case. However, it is a similarly universal include in the EDH realm.

So what would one do with all these opened slots? An angle that works pretty okay for game closing is voltron, and you can add some more support for it to try to compensate for the various avenues to victory the expensive options may have offered. There's O-Naginata, a very cool bit of equipment that costs a pittance and kicks Feather up to six power realms. Leering Emblem gives Feather double super prowess, and should make turning her into a two/three turn clock quite easy. You can slot in some additional voltron support instants in Titan's Strength, Invigorated Rampage or Brute Force. They're not currently in the shell as most of them only pump Feather without offering any additional value, and unlike protection pump isn't important enough to merit value-less spells in the current build. You could explore the other Feather synergy directions. You could, and probably should, put in Sphinx-Bone Wand. Heck, I should probably be running that in here. The world's your oyster, and you shouldn't end up with a clunker of a deck.

Protecting Feather

Another thing brought up in the deck attributes is that the list is very commander dependent. There's no debating that - without Feather around, all the value instants just happen once and go away forever. Turns out Heal isn't an EDH staple for a reason. As such, it becomes imperative to run various interaction options to ensure Feather's survival through whatever the opponents may try to throw her way. There are five broad classes of interaction effects that Boros has access to - flickering of the end-of-turn or immediate varieties, protection, indestructibility and regeneration. Let's see how these match up against each other when compared in a number of common EDH adversities, plus a few bonus utility categories:

The clear winner is end-of-turn flicker due to its ability to dodge all of the outlined interaction scenarios. After that, things become a bit more situational. Indestructibility beats all damage/destruction, succumbing to -X/-X (Toxic Deluge, Tragic Slip), exile (Merciless Eviction, Duplicant) and bounce (Cyclonic Rift). However, damage/destruction are pretty common in the format - most non-white spot removal and tons of popular wraths utilise it. Regeneration is like a strictly crappier indestructibility due to a no regeneration clause present on a number of older removal options. Insta-flicker does literally nothing against wipes, but shields against everything targeted. Protection blanks everything targeted that has a colour, but most representatives of the category are soft to the occasional Duplicant. To compensate, it offers shielding against damage wipes, which we can actually use ourselves to good effect while choosing our own wraths. A few of the options (Apostle's Blessing, Faith's Shield) come with slightly more diverse abilities, shielding non-creature permanents from harm in dire straits. This is not a bad mode to have - somehow, there's always a piece of spot removal that makes an appearance the split second Paradox Engine hits the board. Protection also comes with kooky evasion opportunities, while flickers offer ETB re-use potential.

The choice of interaction ultimately comes down to the shell. You're probably running the end-of-turn flickers no matter what. If you're after a more ETB build, it makes sense to pursue the insta-flickers en masse. However, outside those decks, the insta-flickers are quite overcosted for what they offer. Both protection (Gods Willing) and indestructibility (Sheltering Light) have one-drops that also scry on top of doing whatever they do. That's pretty cool - you still get to milk some value out of them if you don't need them for survivability purposes. There's also a two-drop protection cantrip (Shelter). By contrast, insta-flicker offers two one-drops (and a two-drop) that do nothing else, plus a three-drop cantrip. As such, I have only adopted Ephemerate and have devoted my other slots to protection and indestructibility options.

1. One Drop Cantrip Club
The One Drop Cantrip Club is really not that hard to get into - you need to cost one mana, be an instant, target a creature and draw a card. Everything else is optional, which leads to some of these really bringing their existence into question.


2. Assorted Recyclable Spells
Everything that Feather will reliably pick up that isn't part of the One Drop Cantrip Club lives here. The section is largely dominated by super cheap protection options and scry machines, as casting them for casting's sake is easy to accomplish while simultaneously feeding your synergy pieces and solidifying your game plan via card filtering.


3. Rampano
In spite of an extremely lean and mean curve, the deck's a bottomless pit of mana consumption. Each of those one-drop instants actually secretly costs one per player in the pod, if you let it, and your grip keeps growing. That means mana! Unfortunately most Boros ramp comes in the form of rocks, with whatever available land ramp scarce and quite costly for the returns, while we're striving for streamlined resource expenditure. However, the rock heaviness comes with the upside of letting us run Paradox Engine and Unwinding Clock for payoff.


4. Cast Friends
An umbrella category for all sorts of stuff that benefits from you spamming spells. These guys get stuff done, and will likely form the backbone of your victories.


5. ETB Brigade
Creatures that do useful things upon entering play have a huge presence in EDH. Feather offers the potential to recycle flicker spells, getting more value out of these options. I've kept my choices pragmatic to the core, but you could go deeper here and augment your flicker suite to match.


6. Goodstuff
All sorts of solid cards that don't fit into any of the previous categories. They help the list function. A more responsible me would run more of those. Current me can't hear him over cantrip spam.


7. Lands
Being an enemy pair is rough, as we miss out on loads of ally-only cycles. You can easily save a lot of money and shave all the fetches + OG dual and still retain functionality. There's not much wiggle room for colourless lands, you're usually stuck funnelling them into non-instant plays in your main phase. There's only so much of that you can do while holding protection.

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Deck Strategy in Shellnut

• The deck's primary aim is to get out Feather and start ramming cheap card advantage/filtering instants over and over again, sculpting a grip and a game plan.
• Said game plan can be quite varied. There are various paths to victory in the deck. You can Guttersnipe/Aria/Lazor people out. You can drown people in dudes. You can clonk people for 21 with Feather. All this is aided by ridiculous mana mediated by Paradox Engine, and to a lesser extent Phyrexian Altar. Piece something together from whatever shows up.
• Scry is good. Scry allows you to ship undesirable draws to the bottom and make your cantrips give you productive stuff you actually want. If you have the mana to support them, make active use of your scry options to milk card quality. A good general scry-dig priority list in a game state vacuum would be locating a cantrip or two, then some solid cast payoff, wrapping up with any game-ending haymakers when you have the real estate to support them.
• If in doubt, even the slightest bit of it, hold up interaction mana to the point of letting it go to waste in the end step before your untap. Keeping Feather alive is a priority, and can lead to some interesting mind games with your opponents with regards to what you choose to let them know about. Experienced foes will usually just leave you alone.
• Even if you get caught with your pants down in some exchange, it's not the end of the world. The opposition probably had to actually use cards, probably in multiples, to make it happen. There's only so much spot removal they run. You should be able to bounce pack in a bit.
• You're not particularly removal heavy. You have a few staple instants, a solitary creature wipe, and a bit of ETB destruction that you can recycle via flicker. You can assist in solving some emergencies and try to keep yourself alive through dire straits, but will be far from fun police.
• Mana makes the deck go round. You look at the 99's innards, you see the 1 cmc instant tribal and overall nonexistent curve, and find out in action soon enough this is capable of guzzling any amount of mana you can throw at it. Each of those one-drop instants can be cast in every player's turn, and the cantrips will quickly bring new friends to the party. All while holding up the vital interaction mana. Get your rocks out and look for other mana opportunities.
• Being rock-heavy is quite painful on the surface. However, repeatable cantrips tend to get you consistent land drops, and there are a few avenues in the deck (Kor Cartographer/Depression Automaton + flicker, Sword of Lotus Flip) to get land mana. Getting your rocks shot out from under you is annoying, but not typically game-ending.
• Given the various cast triggers the list has on offer, it's good to pay attention to the stack and try to maximise your value. You can respond to various individual triggers, spells, copies, what have you, and try to get maximum benefit from everything. Quite a fun thing sometimes, particularly with Aetherflux Reservoir. At the same time, the bigger the unresolved stack the harder you can get blown out by something like Cyclonic Rift...
• Sunforger is mainly used as a toolbox addition here. Don't spam it every single time you can, even sitting idly on Feather helps out with her clock. Rip it when you explicitly need something. The deck does not run spells that are worth sinking five mana into every turn.
• The game-ending artifacts are good to keep around. A few of the protection spells (Apostle's Blessing, Faith's Shield) come with emergency clauses to act as shields for them too. You won't get them back then, but they will prevent an instance of spot removal on them. This should hopefully suffice, given sufficient game-ending girth.

1. Early Game (Turns ~1-3)

The very first thing you do in a game is acquire a hand of some sort. Feather's not that picky in this regard. You're looking for 3-4 coloured mana spread between rocks and lands, some sort of value spell (scry will do in a pinch) and ideally some level of protection, especially against inexperienced foes. If you get that, you're fine. Some sort of cast payoff or tutor wouldn't hurt either. If the draw luck is not with you and you're missing some of these, you'll probably still survive. Mana's the most important component - getting stiffed on coloured before you run out Feather is very unfortunate, and you should only consider hands with two or fewer coloured sources if they offer a bunch of early action that will keep you busy before you run Feather out. That means your Young Pyromancers, Burning Prophets, Scroll of the Masters, you get the drill. You might have noticed I haven't mentioned Sol Ring or Mana Crypt. They're good here, as you have non-Feather plays to make as well, but they're far from their usual snap keep selves as they don't explicitly help you get your commander out.

The early game should play itself automatically after that. Your main focus is ramping a bit, be it via rocks or a Depression Automaton variant, so that you are able to play Feather quickly with some mana held up for interaction. Chasing Feather out with no protection, be it bluffed or real, will often lead to her eating removal and slow you down. This is where you sequence around your rocks and other sources of ramp, and can even consider popping a Recruiter Friend on an ETB ramp option. This becomes particularly appealing if you're sitting on a flicker spell - not only will you be able to get more lands out of the Depression Automaton variant once Feather lands, you can get something else with the Recruiter later. There are also some less conventional options in Springleaf Drum or Mox Amber that do nothing before you cast Feather, but work just fine for the extra mana purpose once she's around. You can also chase out the cheap synergy pieces, if you have them. However, if given a choice between a Young Pyromancer and a rock enabling a protected Feather the next turn, you should probably go for the rock. The deck's swath of cheap instants are dead weight without her around, and only start doing their thing once you get your commander out.

There's not a lot you can do if someone explodes out of the gate. You've got Path/Swords, but those may be insufficient to stop a particularly feisty kaboomboom. There's also Duergar Hedge-Mage, who might be a reasonable emergency popper. At times like these the fetches and dual really shine, as you should be able to have at least one (usually both) of the modes online pretty quickly. Generous Gift may be held if you smell something going super crazy, but will more often be done sorcery speed after untapping in those sort of scenarios. Look, there's no beating around the bush - you're not a particularly removal-heavy deck, and your interaction is limited. And that's okay. You probably shouldn't be running Feather at a table where games end turn three anyway, if I'm to be honest

Your early game is very one-track. You get the ramp out, you get Feather out with protection mana up. This typically happens turn three, but there's nothing wrong with taking a while to play out a Depression Automaton for extra mana beforehand. Some super nut draws do it turn two sometimes, but are not common. The deck needs the commander to function. As such, we have now acquired the commander, are signalling to the world we can keep her alive (whether we actually can is a different matter entirely), and are ready to move on to the mid game.

2. Mid Game (Turns ~4-6)

It's now approximately turn four. You played Feather, the turns went around the table, you held up interaction mana, nothing came, and it's back to yours. Alternately, something came and you stopped it with much panache, impressing the rest of the board and notifying them of your protective prowess. One way or the other, things are okay. Time to get cooking with gas!

The protection aspect of the deck is vital to reliably keeping it online. Picture casting Feather only to have her die over and over again. Some good all those cantrips/scries in your hand will do. That's not the best. As such, you need to always hold, or at the very least bluff, protection for Feather. One mana will suffice. That's where Gods Willing, Sheltering Light and a few others reside. Staying in control of Feather being on the board is important, and can lead to various cat and mouse mind games with the opposition. Some of the protection spells come with added value, so you can pop a Gods Willing to get a scry with some spare mana. Now your opponents are notified that you can blank spot removal, and have to play around it. Use Ajani's Presence to minimally speed up Feather's clock? That Wrath of God won't take her out. This tends to ultimately lead to you being left alone and not interacted with outside wipes when playing against opponents experienced against the deck. "He'll have something to stop it, just don't mess with him." This is where the bluff element comes in - you can sometimes get away with not having protection at all against those foes, and as long as that token mana is waiting they'll leave you be. The only time you should feel ok using it is in main two before your turn with everyone tapped out. You can try greeding it in less inviting circumstances, but don't say I didn't warn you if someone rips a funny on you in response.

The second order of business comes in various cast synergy friends and other value pieces worth getting out. You need payoff. While you'll eventually be casting an impressive flurry of spells with frightening regularity, card advantage for card advantage's sake won't get you too far if nothing is happening as you rip it. Board gummers like Monastery Mentor help ensure you have some board presence that deters free swings into you. Being able to chump, maybe even trade with, anything coming your way will dissuade attacks reasonably well. Non-board payoff, such as Burning Prophet or Scroll of the Masters, is also pretty good to have around. The cumulative value these sort of cards bring to the table is very handy in trying to close out the game later. Thankfully, most are pretty cheap to cast.

At this point, you should still have some mana left. Probably not a dizzying amount, but a few pips of pocket change. This is where you start spamming the value spells. Cantrip a bit, scry a bit, try to find some good payoff to work into your board. Or mana, if you're short. Anything you need, really. For now this is not means unto itself, but you can invest heavier in this if you find yourself lacking payoff. Each of those one-cost cantrips you have does not actually cost one. It can secretly cost as much as you have opponents, as you can pop it in everyone else's turn (remember to do this in main two, Marchesa/Roon style, so you get it back in the following end step). As such, it's very easy to have a small value suite stretch a long way if given the opportunity to, or roll back the expenditure and devote mana to furthering your board state. Ultimately this flexibility is what allows Feather to scale well into multiplayer, so make use of it when you have the resources to. Another important thing to keep track of is what your opponents know about your hand for another cat and mouse element. Let's say you've opened Heal, and have been using that for card acquisition. A couple Heals in you find yourself an Expedite. That's objectively better as you get the card immediately! However, your opponents are not aware of you having that card, so unless you have the resources to start slinging both around keep showing them the Heal.

Everything else you do around now is a bit more variable. If you get given ways to improve your mana setup, try to work those in as mana's just a good thing to have. Sometimes you can use some ETB value, sometimes you can recycle it via flickers. If you get some Feather voltron options and folks are open, by all means spend a couple mana to rough them up a bit more. You can mooch extra value from protection spells by making your chumps impervious in combat, saving your precious hit points for a later turn. The deck does stuff. Do the stuff.

As the mid game progresses, you should have found some decent synergy pieces and slowly started moving your resources towards juggling spells around. Your token horde gets bigger, your Scroll of the Masters is starting to fill up, and your scrying priorities change a bit. Whereas previously you were probably looking for these synergy pieces, now you're trying to find something with enough kick to it to just end the game in short order.

3. Late Game (Turns ~7+)

By now your mana pool should be impressive, you should hopefully have some well-humming synergy on board, and you're trying to bring it home. Some games you won't even need to reach out to an end game play as you'll incidentally count to 20 with a Guttersnipe that came out early, or just keep ramming Fists of Flame and Psychotic Fury to two-shot a guy at a time. Incidental voltron kills are particularly common in 1v1 games. However, in a multiplayer pod, you'll often find yourself pining for a high-impact setup that will really allow you to kick things into overdrive.

The most reliable way to close out the proceedings is to acquire a way to machine gun spells. Paradox Engine is super good at that, given the rock heaviness and negligible curve of the deck. You suddenly churn through your entire instant collection for free, probably picking up some new members along the way, and can keep doing it in everybody else's turns if necessary. Some more silly Pengine interactions are Isochron Scepter, which leads to infinite casts with at least two untappable mana, and Sunforger, which is a bit greedier, and not explicitly infinite, at five. The ideal thing to slip under the Scepter is Boros Charm, as in the mid game it can act as a repeatable wrath shield while offering table shredding potential off the seldom EDH-used bolt mode when going off with Pengine. In a pinch, stick some sort of cantrip/scry on there, dig your way to a Guttersnipe/Aria of Flame/Aetherflux Reservoir and get it on the field. Even if you're about to deck yourself, you can still win this - rip a Scepter copy, resolve the untap trigger and relevant cast payoff from the game-ender, and respond to the spell by repeating the thing again. Your foes shall be dead soon enough. The Sunforger setup allows you to go dig up as many instants from your deck as you feel like and cast them. While technically not infinite, this should result in a back-breaking repeatable value explosion that should close out the proceedings in no time flat. Probably right then and there if you have Guttersnipe/Aria of Flame/Aetherflux Reservoir or a way to get then. Good ole gobbo/mini-wand/lazors, they're sure doing a lot of work in these combo'esque endgame setups, eh? Another machine gun setup involves swarm capabilities and Phyrexian Altar. While not as explosive as Pengine, and lacking either of the two grand finale finishes, it allows you to trade board development for barfing your entire hand over and over again. This should let you dig for whatever you may need to properly end the game.

Another closing time usher comes in Zada variants. Suddenly your Expedites nab you as many cards as you have bodies. Combine that with a little spare mana and you should be able to pick up most of your deck in short order, especially if there's some swarm around. There's another neat trick to maximising Zada'd cantrip returns with a swarm maker (e.g. Monastery Mentor) around - cast whatever you can spare to go as wide as you can, and then pile on your cantrips, allowing the swarm triggers to resolve but keeping the Zada copy trigger on the stack. Once you run out of cantrips, resolve them one at a time. Maybe you'll find more ways you can use to increase your swarm or draw further cards along the way? This may seem like unnecessary levels of faff, given the draw potential of just normally casting the cantrips, but the more cards you see the better. Another cool thing you can do is copy a scry spell, resolve the copies one at a time, shipping stuff to the bottom until you find something you want, and respond with a cantrip. Then draw a swath of cards with the one you want in there, and you still have some scry left over when that's done. This may seem like basic stuff, but the deck's pretty good at getting you to pay attention to every last trigger and spell on the stack to milk maximum value from everything. Another good thing the Zadas do is spread your protection board-wide, which should make you near impervious to interaction, helping your odds of closing things out in your favour. One way or another, a Zada on the board will typically deposit you in the Pengine combo realm soon enough.

Sometimes the mid game value engines will run away with stuff on their own. Go wide enough with Monastery Mentor and a few spells shredded in your turn may well translate to lethal on someone. Non-Mentor wides can use Phalanx Leader to buff up. Scroll of the Masters quite easily gets itself into two-shot range, and it's conceivable for it to hit 18 and single-handedly make Feather a one-shotter. Something will typically happen. You'll keep shredding the casts, digging your way through the deck, and assemble something. And it'll be fun. And won't feel stereotypical Boros at all.

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Kudos

• Ebline - Continued feedback throughout the deck's development, and surviving me keeping the mana-centric equipment
• Greendawg - Enduring various configurations of the deck in testing, magicking up a cool banner, and alerting me of Aurelia's Fury spiking.
• Carthage - Providing a number of spot-on card suggestions, some of which I'm still processing in my roundabout way.
• Dominicus - Reinforcing me in my choice to run copious amounts of dirt cheap protection, and hopefully coming around to the various swarm synergies.
• darrenhabib - Getting me to write up the primer swiftly to slide under his multi-primer emporium, and offering solid formatting assistance.
• Everybody not mentioned who provided their opinions/feedback at any point of the time-space continuum, or even made it down here. You rock!

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Where applicable, the deck change header is clickable to take you to the relevant discussion post in the thread.

Oh wow, this again, except under the guise of "wide-eyed casual goes out into casual terror waters, gets mauled". Every single time one of these comes up (combos are bad, stax are bad, your ad here is bad), it pretty much boils down to the fact people dislike losing, even if they claim otherwise. My Daxos the Returned is inherently relatively unpleasant, what with the Oppressions and the Rule of Laws, but my meta minds it less than my Feather, the Redeemed that avoids messing with the game. Why? One of those is much better at cleaning house quickly (even though "quickly" is around turn 8).

That said, public EDH mileage may vary. Wildly. I hit up an LGS a few weeks ago, and watched as two guys struck a deal - guy A won't punch guy B for some number of turns if guy B lets guy A's commander resolve. Guy A casts the commander, guy B plonks down Desertion immediately. This was within 10 seconds of finishing up the deal. I saw red, threw all my resources at taking guy B out, and fell over to guy A on the backswing. Given the uncertain nature of the social interaction, building to win is the most reliable way to get something out of a public game, which leads to the rise of various ugly decks that aren't quite cEDH. The best way to get joy out of the format is to cultivate a local meta, which you can then communicate with to inbreed it to whatever standard you desire.

The cEDH facsimile is a pretty good description. I recognise a group of "casual terrors", a general umbrella term for commanders that built competently will annihilate a casual pod, but have no game if actual cEDH were to show up. I'd actually include Marchesa in that category However, your build is relatively benign. Turns out you can do some interesting things with the commander, as evidenced by your take or an artifact-heavy spin (plushpenguin's list, or a severely depowered variant of it cruising around in my meta).

Lard is lardy

A quick note with regards to image sizing - there's an imgsize tag that does just that.

Hey look, it's a thing in the same general ballpark of Feather, previewed by the same guys.

The Sunforger point holds true for most sensible removal you could run in that shell. In my case, I could Isochron Scepter it for even more Fun Times TM. Plus it protects Paradox Engine. Dammit I won't let you besmirch Panic though, it may be a crap one-mana do-nothing instant with a hyper restrictive casting window, it may actively hamper the creature you cast it on, but it draws a card.

Okay, enough Feather-related hijacking, sorry about that. I'd imagine Mox Diamond will probably be fine here, once you get a nice draw engine going you should be sitting on multiple lands in hand. It is quite high variance though, so you might have just ended up on the butt end of it the first time you crossed paths with it. You acknowledge Mistmeadow Witch as super slow, but it also does horrible things to people if you score a Containment Priest, so there's that?

Yeah, Feather will have her devotees. My list's here to stay. I don't make primers lightly - the last one was in 2016, for a deck I consider my signature build. Also, seriously, just goldfish them. I was entirely convinced Mox Diamond was a devastatingly bad idea until I just sat down and pulled up hand after hand, comparing the Diamond to a two-drop tap rock. Or just skip it - it's not a night and day tier of difference, and the monetary investment is nontrivial.

Note Yawgers says "up to one". My complete layman idea of how sacrifice decks work has me wanting a copy

Chronic misanthropic contrarian yells at cloud, the thread, part 27: "knowing how to build decks ruins the game" edition.

Chainer — In the Darkness of Dreams

— Introduction —
PLUS: Deckbuilding Goals

— Decklist —

— Changelog —
MOST RECENT FIRST

— Acknowledgments —

Note: I will be adding further, primer-like sections on card selection, interactions, strategy, etc. in the future.

Quote from Drain Life »

Quote from Buffsam89 »

[Quote]When I think Aggro, I think Lightning Bolt. Mana spent to damage dealt. Burn spells scale horribly into multiplayer. Same goes with aggressive creatures. You can achieve stupidly large burst turns, but you’re still probably only eliminating one player, and leaving yourself open to be killed by the others. There isn’t enough efficiency across the available Aggro cards for it to be viable like combo is.

Allow me to introduce Edgar Markov.

Turn one cast a one drop, get a token. Turn two cast two more one drops, tap them to convoke Obelisk of Urd. You now have 18 power on the board at the end of turn 2. That can kill many players player in two swings if they have fetch lands and/or pay life to ramp/tutor.

Same set up, turn one one drop, turn two a pair of one drops, turn three Shared Animosity and swing for 36.

Turn two mana rock, turn three Door of Destinies. Cast a combination of one and two drops which add 3+ counters to the door. Next turn cast Grandpa Munster and swing for 39+

Purphoros, God of the Forge + 10 or fewer one and two drops should kill the table.
Malakir Bloodwitch can knock out one player upon resolution and swing out on another, leaving the third player to look at their top deck and sometimes concede.

ISBPathfinder's deck is really fun, and mine is not even as strong as his is. The mass card draw keeps your hand full, and unlike other traditional agro decks, you do not have to vomit your hand and over extend into a wrath to create a board presence. Just a combination of three creatures which cost one and two mana can easily result in 18+ power in play. Glory of Warfare, Dictate of Heliod, Anthem of Rakdos and Coat of Arms are all casual anthem effects which can single-handedly threaten the table.

Having played out similar situations to this many times, what actually happens:

One player dies, then the board is wiped, then the game goes on and the aggro player has no cards in hand. The player that went all in is unhappy because they have nothing to do with the empty hand, and the player who was eliminated is unhappy because the game can last for an hour after that.

Quote from Pokken »

I think something missing from the aggro v. combo discussion is that in traditional formats, Aggro decks are the prey of combo decks, not vice versa.

The traditional pillars combo beats aggro and loses to control.

In Modern that was kinda spun on its head for a while because most combo decks couldn't beat burn because of Eidolon of the great revel but that's an unnatural state of affairs (and it's arguable whether burn in modern was really an aggro deck or closer to a combo deck, but that's a realllly big tangent).

The reason all that is weird in EDH is that the only efficient control finishers are combos, and so we have combo-control decks and combo-combo decks, and midrange-combo decks, and all kinds of stuff.

If your goal is to think about it like a regular format, I guess you could say that you want aggro to beat combo-control or combo-stax. And lowering life totals is something that might actually do, but I doubt it - you'd need the life totals to be closer to 10 than 30 for that to be feasible.

Also just the nature of multiplayer makes it impossible to achieve the kind of game state control is looking for where it can reliably answer all relevant threats for the rest of the game.

A single player going off is usually enough to drain the control player of resources enough for the next player to go off immediately.

So we have aggro decks trying to deal 120 damage instead of 20
Control decks trying to control 3 players instead of 1
And combo decks that...are completely unaffected

It's pretty obvious from the outset which archetype is going to be the most successful.

I'm relatively new to EDH compared to most here, I've only been at this for 3 years where Kess (place held with Crosis for a few months) on release was my first deck. EDH was my window back into MtG after having left paper around Origins.

I learned very quickly that big money staples > thematic decks (especially with the mana base). This Kess deck was just Grixis control, using Crosis, Bolas and other relatively cheap beaters in the 99 to close games out. I still didn't have much in the way of a fleshed out mana base, since I bought precons only after a few games. From memory I think I had a Bloodstained Mire from my days playing Khans standard, a Temple of Epiphany and then guildgates with basics. Mana rocks consisted of Darksteel Ingot, a few Cluestones and a Worn Powerstone. As you'd expect from the first time running this pile sans Command Towers and Sol Rings, it did very little until one action would annoy the table (nature of control) and get me wiped out of the game in short order. But I was able to pick up on a few things that still speak to me now...

1) The guy running Uril, the Miststalker in my first game basically read: "You don't get to interact with me", which led to a very boring match being his first target. To this day I have no love for this Commander and will happily lose if it means countering every time he's cast. I play to have interactive back and forth games, not "can you answer this? Lose" which is no different to Sheldon's issues with the "feel bads" of infinite combo.

2) 2 players had Mana Crypts (1 had a Mana Vault) and fully fleshed out mana bases, but were running what I now know aren't "top tier" decks. They're just run to accelerate their game plan. one was the above mentioned Uril Voltron, the other was some Kruphix concoction I can't recall entirely, although I'm feeling "Big X Spells" came up a lot more than Eldrazi did. Kruphix was also running Oracle of Mul Daya too.

Now what was the overarching lesson for me from these 2 things? I needed to win faster. If I was going to be staring down lethal, unblockable commander damage or an overwhelming board state of enchantments Grixis has a sad time against, I needed a faster game plan. The issue was the cost some of these cards had, easy for older players long in the tooth who collected these in better times, but with a lot of the good ramp and win packages consisting of $20+ cards, this wasn't the "cheap, casual format" I was led to believe. So I took a different approach in looking at cheap, fast combos. 2 months and a few other precons experience later, I came very close to a full Kess Storm deck sans the mana base. The reaction of players at that LGS? "Get out of here with that tryharding pile". This shocked me a bit, surely these same players running one shot voltron decks or Craterhoof Behemoth wins wouldn't be that dim to not see how easily an Isochron Scepter win turn 8 achieved the same effect at the same speed? Fast forward to now and I still don't see Sheldon and others' arguments against infinite wincons as anything other than an old-guard grumbling that kids nowadays get bored of smacking plastic dinosaurs against each other for 2+ hours.

Uh, a 6? 7? It's probably my most tuned, most piloted deck as it started as a pet project that's evolved into something new. I did a brief foray into cEDH but I found it boring. The majority of my interest in EDH is being creative. It is easy to make a good deck, I am more interested in taking an unusual theme and making that good. cEDH is just a race to the most efficient which leaves little for creativity; they're the most boring decks for me to make and while playing them is rewarding it is difficult to get a good cEDH pod. The majority of players aren't building cEDH to play cEDH, they build a facsimile of cEDH just to pubstomp players who don't know any better. This behaviour is poisonous as it turns away particular players and others adapt the mentality of spending more money is the only way out, which then locks another batch of players out. Because sadly, frequently, the only way to improve a cEDH deck is to spend more money; while something that is less powerful lets you be creative with different themes or trying something new out.

I think Benthic Biomancer is a better Looter than Looter il-Kor. It's a Wizard so it benefits from Metallic Mimic and Sage of Fables, allowing you to repeatedly Sacrifice it for value. It would also ETB with a +1/+1, so that instantly draws you a card. If you don't have that, you can just swing each turn to get more Loots. It also protects itself in a pinch by Adapting in response to removal.

Magmasaur is too costly for my build to consider. My cards that cost 5+ are there to win me the game, not do cute things. That's one of the things that sucks about this particular build is that I don't have time to do silly things, I need to be efficient with my win. Since you're going more midrange, you can afford to do some more card advantage tricks. One of the best cards I saw for a Midrange Marchesa was Pilgrim's Eye; it flew in for damage and colour fixed his budget mana base but also ensured he would have a land drop each turn for his expensive Creatures.

Commander will be adopting the London Mulligan (bit.ly/314vgT7) at the same time as other formats, with the standard first-mulligan-is-free for games with more than two players (CR103.4c).

https://twitter.com/mtgcommander/status/1135695111864573952

The criticisms about the Primer Committee that have been mentioned are fair, and will be taken into strong consideration on the new site. As darrenhabib mentioned, the goal of the Primer Committee is to create a positive experience for general readers of the Primer, to encourage Primer submissions, and to approve Primer submissions.

Some changes that have already occurred since my tenure in the Primer Committee, which post-dates after 3drinks' Primer submission(s), DirkGently's submission, and Rumpy's submission(s):

• The Primer Committee has created and approved a Primer template that has a significant number of coding tags already built in, including the Table of Contents tags/coding, box tags, anchor tags, etc. This is the template that we've provided to several of our applicants and the goal of it was to relieve the applicant of learning the intricacies of BBCoding (of which I'm still not a master of myself). I believe that we'll do something similar on the new site so that an applicant has something to work off of before submitting their thread for Primer status.
Primer Template:


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Your Thread Title/Commander

Cool Supporting Card CardName,Your Commander CardName, Another Cool Supporting Card CardName

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Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Commander Analysis
• Current Decklist
• Alternate Decklists
• Deck Philosophy
• Deck Strategy
• Card Choice Discussion
• Commander Match-Ups
• Credits & Thanks
• Change Log

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Introduction


Put your Intro content here.


Back to the Top

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Commander Analysis


Put Your Commander Analysis here. I like using the List tags to sort out Pros and Cons and/or Strengths/Weaknesses.


Back to the Top

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Current Decklist


Use the Deck Tags and Deck Builder Tool to create your decklist!
I also like to sort my decklists according to function and then separately according to card type, but that’s totally up to you.


Back to the Top

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Alternate Decklists


This is the part where you can put up Tribal decklists, Budget decklists, different power level decklists, whatever.
Remember to use the Deck tags!


Back to the Top

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Deck Philosophy


Talk about what your deck is trying to do on a broader scale and your own personal philosophy to Commander and your Primer.


Back to the Top

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Deck Strategy


This is where you should talk about the nuts and bolts of how your decklist plays out. What do you do in early turns of the game? What are some good opening hands?
What about the Mid-Game and Late-Game strategies?
Do you have a specific backup plan in case your primary strategy gets foiled?
This is where you would want to talk about these kinds of things.


Back to the Top

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Card Choice Discussion


This is a section where you talk about individual card choices that are located in your decklist. I also recommend you include other popular cards that other users may have used and include a brief description as to why/why not you’re running X card.


Back to the Top

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Opposing Commander Match-Ups


I personally enjoy reading about how Primers, and their respective strategies, match up against some of the more popular Commanders you play against IN YOUR PLAYGROUP or for Commander generally.


Back to the Top

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Credit & Thanks


I’m 100% confident that you didn’t build your Commander deck in a vacuum. This section is to give credit where it’s due and help you build a solid reputation.


Back to the Top

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Change Log


Lastly, it’s fun to keep track of how your deck has changed and evolved as you have as a player. It also gives readers an idea of what cards you’ve already tried out.


Back to the Top

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[/quote]

Sure, it might encourage a homogeneity of Primers but that's a separate issue (that I personally have no problem with, btw). By providing at least a template to applicants, we are reducing a significant complaint that has been presented within this thread, that of the time commitment of learning the coding required to make a visually appealing Primer. When I first submitted my Memnarch Primer, I too had to spend hours learning the coding tags of BBCode and it was laborious. My goal once I joined the Committee was to eliminate this concern as much as possible, hence the creation of the Primer template.

• We've had internal discussions about the key components we look for in a Primer application and have compiled an internal list of requirements that we like to see. As we receive additional comments from users within the Commander forums and balance that against the feedback of the Admins, Mods, and Primer Committee members, we will perhaps be able to release a formal checklist of Primer requirements that a user can review before submitting a Primer for the official Primer tag. This should address another concern that has been legitimately brought up within this thread, that of unclear expectations of what constitutes "Primer Quality" threads. By establishing this kind of checklist alongside the Primer template, we should have a clear path forward for users to create a visually appealing Primer on their first try without having to devote hours in formatting and coding education.
• We've begun to optimize our review process internally so that it's systematized and efficient for the Committee itself. This should reduce the wait time that applicants experience when they submit a Primer for review and ensure that Primers are released to the general community in a timely manner, which will justify the time and energy spent to create a Primer in the first place.
• Finally, we've advocated strongly with the Admins and Mods to create Commander based content that will specifically feature the Primers that are approved. This will create a deterministic and real incentive for Primers to be created and to justify the QC process that the Primer Committee engages in. These articles will hopefully be approved on the new site and will be directly written by members of the Primer Committee/Primer owners themselves as a way to both showcase the work of the Primer applicant and drive traffic to the site. Consequently, there will be REAL standards that we have to measure up against since the Primers will potentially be featured on the site in formally written and approved articles that will generate traffic to the site.

I have personally done real market research on why people don't like MTGSal as a platform. I've asked users on Discord and Facebook primarily, and my sample size was probably around 100 responses all said. The main attraction that regular users have to MTGSal as a site is because of the visually distinctive Primers and coding capabilities of the site, in addition to the improved community experience that MTGSal now offers (props to cryogen and other Mods for reducing the Flaming/Trolling that this site used to have). Because these are the qualities that differentiate MTGSal (and hopefully the new site) from other Commander platforms, it's important that the Commander Primers (which drive a majority of the traffic to this site in the first place) maintain that market-leading quality.

This is at least one valid justification of why the Primer Committee can appear to be "strict" about Primer submissions; the reasoning is directly related to what drives traffic to the Commander forums and MTGSal and thus ensured its continued existence. While this may have been conveyed poorly in the past and the criticisms of previous Committee members accordingly harsh, it was (usually) with the intent to ensure that the Primer, and consequently the site overall, received more views and traffic in comparison to its competitors. In the end, MTGSal is an asset and a business and the needs of the business have to come first. And the Primer Committee indirectly played a role in ensuring that the site was able to be viable by maintaining a quality Commander Primer that attracted users from a Google search about a specific Commander.

I realize that this site is closing its doors, and I'm legitimately sad to see it go for deeply personal reasons. It was a lifeline for me when I was getting sober 8.5 years ago because this site was so engaging for me, the community was so friendly, and the threads were usually well written. I've verbally committed to being a part of the new site that Feyd is building and will carry the collective suggestions brought up here to the new site. It's a chance to start over, which is a rare opportunity, and the Primer Committee members who have committed to being a part of the new site are an excellent group of people who are genuinely trying to help our applicants create the best Primer possible, both for quality reasons and for site specific reasons.

I hope that this novel of a post helps to convey the fact that the Mods and the Primer Committee actually hear and respond to the comments and suggestions that are mentioned. In order not to derail the thread further, I encourage everyone to either PM a member of the Primer Committee or create a separate thread so that we can keep track of the suggestions more efficiently.

Kindly,

benjameenbear