Arcanis the Omnipotent-My first "good" deck when I first started playing was mono-blue control that ran Arcanis as a one of (because I only owned one), so mono blue decks have always held a special place for me. When I got into EDH, mono blue control with Arcanis as the general seemed like it could be a fun deck.
Sliver Overlord-Slivers are just so fun. This certainly isn't a competitive deck, but it's a blast to play.
Ghave, Guru of Spores-I wanted to see how many ways I could break him. Luckily, he isn't very hard to break.
Kaalia of the Vast-I didn't expect this deck to be very good, but it cost me like $20 to buy the cards for it and the lure of dropping huge fatties into play for free was too much to resist (I have Timmy tendencies I think). It's actually surprisingly powerful, too.
Honestly, the biggest problem I have with commander is the way WOTC did the previews. Their preview strategy should be in a textbook under "How not to hype your new product." At first they announced Sol Ring and Lightning Greaves, which was a great start, but the first of the new commanders they revealed during the preview week was... Tariel, the Bland. Whoopee. Then they talked about the new cards (most of which were pretty meh) before revealing the reprints, many of which were awesome and would have spurred interest from older players.
They also didn't reveal most of the primary commanders until later in the week, so some new cards that were meant to synergize with particular commanders looked worse than they otherwise would have (like Alliance of Arms with Ghave).
The statement I heard more than any other during the preview week was "Wait, we still haven't seen all the cards yet, the precons might not actually be terrible." Of course, it turned out that the precons were awesome and sold out everywhere, but when the previews for a product that awesome have everyone trying to reassure themselves that it won't suck, you know you're doing something wrong.
Still, that gripe aside, I love them, and I don't think any of the new cards are too powerful. Homeward Path is fine; it basically reads "Get your stuff back that was stolen." I like cards like Bribery, Desertion, and Control Magic & friends, but I think it's totally reasonable to have a powerful, reusable answer to them. Command Tower is an awesome design! If anything I wish they would print five more functional reprints of it to give five color decks some more affordable mana fixing.
I also like the new commanders. While some of them are underwhelming, Animar, Ghave, Riku, and Damia can all be really good, and Kaalia, Zedruu, and Ruhan are all popular with certain types of players. They also balanced out different play styles well: Riku for combo, Ghave for combo and token shenanigans, Zedruu for combo/control, Damia for goodstuff, Kaalia and Tariel for beatdown, Animar for aggro/combo, Ruhan for voltron (kind of), and Karador and The Mimeoplasm for reanimator.
TL;DR: The decks are fine, but the way WOTC did the previews was terrible and made the decks seem a lot worse than they actually were.
Belbe's Portal-Great for tribal decks with expensive creatures Bribery-Steal a creature from an opponent's library and put it into play. Classic. Kaalia of the Vast-The creature has to be an angel, demon, or dragon, so Kaalia's better used as a general. Kuldotha Forgemaster and Shape Anew are great for getting artifact creatures
There are also various ways to return creatures from a graveyard to play. In fact, some decks are specifically designed around getting their own creatures into the graveyard (such as with Buried Alive) so they can be brought back with cheap spells such as Reanimate.
If you're dead-set on running mostly non-basics, your ramp/fixing looks pretty good. I would run Expedition Map over Sakura-Tribe Elder, but that's about the only thing I would change if you want to stick to non-basics.
Alternatively, I ran into the same problem in my five-color deck, but eventually came to the counter-intuitive conclusion that it was worth it to run more basics in the deck so that I could run better ramp. Yavimaya Elder, Cultivate, Kodama's Reach, Explosive Vegetation, and Harrow are better than just about any non-basic land ramp short of Primeval Titan. You'll sacrifice consistency for speed somewhat, but if you run enough draw and green sources that shouldn't really be a problem.
Also, if you're worried about board wipes, don't forget that Darksteel Ingot is indestructible.
Depends on what you mean by "investment," really. If you mean "plays really well right out of the box," then this would be my ranking (keep in mind that I'm not evaluating the potential of the deck, I'm evaluating how it plays as is, unmodified):
1. Devour for Power-Lots of individually powerful cards and good synergy. This is also by far the most consistent deck out of the box.
2. Counterpunch-Some powerful cards, but not as consistent as Devour for Power. This deck can be absolutely insane if you draw well, but can herp and derp around not doing anything too. It is still more consistent than the other decks except for Devour for Power, however, which is why it gets 2nd.
3. Heavenly Inferno-This deck is great if you can get Kaalia out and she lives for a few turns and you have tons of fatties in your hand, but I've found that it runs out of gas a lot and can have trouble if you can't stick an early couple hits with Kaalia. Basically, it can be really good, but the strategy is a little fragile and inconsistent.
4. Mirror Mastery-Of the all the decks (except for Political Puppets, I guess), Mirror Mastery is by far the slowest. You can do some pretty insane stuff in the late game with Riku, but most of the spells in the deck are relatively expensive and Riku's ability also eats up a lot of mana, meaning you're twiddling your thumbs during the early game a lot of the time. Animar is really fun to use though and is actually a much better general, IMO, even though the deck is designed to be used with Riku.
5. Political Puppets-I'm sure there are people out there who love playing "weird" decks, and if you're that sort of person then I guess I wouldn't dissuade you from picking this one up... but every single time someone has played it in my playgroup (even when everyone was using precons) they've gotten completely destroyed. People learned to just ignore it after a while, because it wouldn't have a significant impact except for occasionally helping someone out a little bit or being mildly annoying. Even the strategy of "wait till everyone kills each other off and then finish off the last person" doesn't work because the deck just isn't powerful enough. Do NOT pick this up if you are looking for a good deck to play out of the box.
On the other hand, if you mean "good investment" as in "contains generals and cards that are fun, interesting, and potentially powerful if you spend the time to build a deck around them," then the ranking would go like this:
1. Mirror Mastery-Even though it's not very good out of the box, Mirror Mastery contains four very powerful generals (the fourth being Edric, Spymaster of Trest). Any of them can be completely busted if you build around them, and they make games interesting.
2. Counterpunch-I forget what thread it was in, but at one point there was a conversation about how it was hard to NOT make infinite combos with Ghave. A lot of times you'll be staring at a board with Ghave and something like Doubling Season in play, wondering what you should do, and then you'll be like "Oh wait, there are three separate ways I could go infinite right now." You have to build a deck to around him, obviously, but he's just so powerful that there are a million ways to break him. He gets my vote as the best commander in the precons.
I'd say the other three decks are tied for third in terms of their potential. Kaalia's probably the most straightforward out of all the generals, and the Timmy in me squeals with joy when I imagine an "optimized" Kaalia list.
Political Puppets is interesting because it has one general (Numot) that is best suited for a competitive control deck, whereas the other two generals are unusual and require some creativity to be good. That said, I'm sure a Zedruu or Ruhan deck could be good if you built it right, it would just be more challenging. All the Devour for Power generals can be good too. In other words, any of the decks can be good if you want to use the generals to build your own decks, but Mirror Mastery probably gives you the most potential in that department.
Thus: If you're looking for a good deck to play with out of the box, get Devour for Power. If you're looking for a deck with good generals to build around, get Mirror Mastery (or whichever deck appeals to you, really). If you're looking for a deck that's good out of the box AND has a ton of potential to be expanded, get Counterpunch. If you like weird decks, get Political Puppets.
Using an internet forum as a cross-section of the player base is a really bad way of measuring things. There is a strong bias in the sampling towards more serious and competitive-minded players, because those are the kinds of people who are much more likely to talk about Magic in forums on the internet. The people who are more casual about how they play have a much lower weight here than they do in real life, since many more of those players don't go to forums like this one.
I suppose you're right. I guess I'm just going with my gut here, but I'm fairly confident in saying that a significant portion of the EDH community would have appreciated slightly better cards in the Commander decks. Maybe not a majority of the community, but a significant portion. Regardless, I stand by my point that EDH, as a player-created and -maintained format, is "supposed" to be whatever the people playing it want it to be.
EDH wasn't even supposed to be for the serious crowd in the first place =p
EDH is a player-created, player-maintained format. It is "supposed" to be whatever the people playing it want it to be, and it's clear from reading this thread that enough people want it to be at least somewhat competitive* that Wizards should have realized this and designed cards accordingly. Again, I'm not saying that every card should be format-breaking (actually, none of the people who have been lamenting the lack of good cards have said they want format-breaking cards; more on that point below), it would just be nice if there was a little more of a balance between good cards with wide applications and cards that can only be used by people who want to play in the most casual* of environments.
People are looking for format breaking cards in this set and that's not what it's about.
People are looking for good cards, not broken ones. There's a difference. Command Post is exactly the sort of good card I'm talking about: a staple card that fulfills a need within EDH (good mana fixing for multicolor decks) and can be used by everyone from the most casual players to the most cutthroat. Command Post doesn't "break the format," it's just a useful card for a lot of different decks and has no downside. When people say they wish there were more "good" cards, this is what they're talking about, not ways to win on turn 2.
*EDIT: Also, note that when I say that I want EDH to be "somewhat competitive," I DO NOT mean that I want super high-powered decks that win on turn 4. All I mean is that I want there to be some skill involved in winning. Cards that involve choosing things at random (like Ruhan) remove a large part of the skill, which makes me dislike them. I don't mind that cards like that are printed, I just think there should also be cards for players that want to rely more on skill. So far, most of the cards that have been previewed that were designed with the "skill" player in mind haven't been that exciting, as better cards are already available that fulfill the same role (most of which are not very expensive and can be acquired easily). Thus, I say that most of the previewed cards will only be used in the most casual of environments because the cards either involve lots of chance or most players have access to cards that are just better. The decks were designed partly for new players, so I can understand printing a few cards that are similar to already available ones, but they were also designed to appeal to the established EDH community, and judging by the previews thus far, Wizards designed cards to appeal to only part of the established community.
The more previews I see for this set, the more disappointed I am. Some of the cards are okay, and a couple are good, but overall these decks don't look to be very exciting.
It seems like they designed a lot of these cards to create "random, hi-LAAARious, off-the-wall game scenarios" rather than good EDH cards. Just because EDH is a casual format doesn't mean we all want randomness and mediocre cards. Some people do, and designing a few cards like that is fine, but we also want plain ol' GOOD CARDS, and those seem to be in short supply. It's not that I wanted them to print a bunch more Azamis and Rofelloses, but they could design balanced, interactive generals that are a lot better and more interesting than the ones they've previewed so far. And so many of the non-general cards are overpriced/underpowered or have some downside that make them much worse.
Damia is good for card advantage, but she's expensive, small, and has no evasion. The Mimeoplasm can be good if there are good creatures in the graveyard, but there will be a lot of times where he will be virtually uncastable, and if he dies you have to choose different creatures when you cast him again, so he can't be consistent at all. Tariel is too expensive and too random to be very good. Ruhan just sucks. The vows are okay, but three mana is a lot to pay for what are, by and large, pretty average abilities. Collective Voyage and Alliance of Arms are pretty bad. If you work really hard you can create a narrow situation when they're good (which can be said of most bad cards), but they are still bad 90% of the time. Most of the other previewed cards run the gamut between "meh" and "okay."
I know that not all cards can be amazingly good and cater to my particular tastes, but I love EDH, and when they design cards specifically for EDH and I only get excited about a few of them, that's very disappointing. The only new cards that I looked at and immediately thought "Holy #$&% that's awesome!" were Animar, Command Tower, and Skullbriar. I'll still probably pick up some singles from these decks when they drop in price a little; I just wish Wizards could cater to a slightly more serious crowd as well as the people who want the "random, wacky, hilarious" cards.
Generals with variable color identities. I'm not sure how they would do it, but they could, for example, print a general that was something like this:
Card Name 1WU(G/B)
Legendary Creature - Whatever
When generals are revealed, choose either GWU or WUB to be Card Name's color identity.
In other words, you could make a Bant deck or an Esper deck with the same general. Obviously, there would have to be some tweaking of the mechanic and the rules to make that work, but I still think it would be cool if you had some choices about the color identity of your general.
Actually, there is a general like that already, sort of: Reaper King. Theoretically, you could play any color combination with Reaper King as your general, since you don't actually need colored mana to cast him. If they expanded on this idea, they could make a really cool changeling tribal general:
Card Name
{1/G}{1/R}{1/B}{1/U}{1/W}
Legendary Creature - Shapeshifter
3/3
Changeling. Whenever you cast a creature spell, you may search your library for a creature card with the same converted mana cost that shares a type with that creature and put it onto the battlefield.
Or something. The way I have it worded might be too broken, but I still think there's potential there, and a changeling general that could work with any tribal deck would be awesome.
I was playing on Cockatrice the other day and found myself in an unusual situation. Here is the board state: I have a Vigor and Thrun, the Last Troll (my general) voltroned up to 28/25. I am at 64 life. My opponent is running a Stonebrow, Krosan Hero deck, and has Stonebrow, Avenger of Zendikar, several other fatties, and a Vigor of his own in play. He also has a Rage Reflection out and 9 untapped lands. Although the opposing Vigors had resulted in a stalemate thus far, my opponent had quickly established a superior board presence and was now able to deal ~70 damage in one swing. We both think he has the game won. My last option is to sacrifice Thrun to Momentous Fall, bringing my life total up to 89, drawing 28 cards, and hoping that one of those cards is a Nevinyrral's Disk. Miraculously, that's is exactly what happened: I drew into the Disk and played it, praying that he didn't have an Acidic Slime or something. Unfortunately, he had Survival of the Fittest in play, so he got Woodfall Primus, planning to destroy Nevinyrral's Disk before I could activate it. With 8 untapped lands, he had just enough mana to play it. He forgot about my untapped Strip Mine, however, so, much to his frustration, I destroyed one of his lands, leaving him one mana short of victory. I survived his attack, reset the board, played Primeval Titan, and followed up with Kozilek the turn after that, at which point he scooped. I guess that sort of comeback is not all that unusual in EDH, but I still can't believe I won that game.
It looks like you are essentially trying to make a sliver voltron deck. You get out Fury Sliver to give Overlord double strike, and Winged Sliver, Crystalline Sliver, and Shifting Sliver to give him evasion, and then try to win through general damage. The method may be different from most voltron decks, but the goal is the same: make your general big and give him evasion so that you can kill people quickly without them being able to do anything to stop you.
With that in mind, I guess my two suggestions would be to (1) find reliable ways to make Overlord bigger so that he can kill people faster, and (2) find a way to get your slivers out more quickly (so that you can get Overlord the size and evasion he needs to start beating face more quickly).
Assuming you'll have both Shifting Sliver and Fury Sliver out before you swing with him, you really don't need to make Overlord that much bigger to kill someone in a single turn. All you need to do is raise his power by 4. As crazy as this sounds, and as worthless as they are in non-EDH decks, I would suggest putting in Spectral Sliver or Barbed Sliver, or both. Especially with Training Grounds in play, that would allow you to pump Overlord to 11 power pretty easily, allowing him to deal lethal damage in a single turn and making your deck that much faster. They also don't require targeting, meaning they'll synergize with Crystalline Sliver well, and they can be tutored for by Overlord, meaning you'll be able to get them reliably.
As for the second suggestion, try running Urza's Incubator. That would allow you to get all the slivers you're running out more quickly (except for Overlord and Crystalline Sliver), which might accelerate your win condition.
Sliver Overlord-Slivers are just so fun. This certainly isn't a competitive deck, but it's a blast to play.
Ghave, Guru of Spores-I wanted to see how many ways I could break him. Luckily, he isn't very hard to break.
Kaalia of the Vast-I didn't expect this deck to be very good, but it cost me like $20 to buy the cards for it and the lure of dropping huge fatties into play for free was too much to resist (I have Timmy tendencies I think). It's actually surprisingly powerful, too.
They also didn't reveal most of the primary commanders until later in the week, so some new cards that were meant to synergize with particular commanders looked worse than they otherwise would have (like Alliance of Arms with Ghave).
The statement I heard more than any other during the preview week was "Wait, we still haven't seen all the cards yet, the precons might not actually be terrible." Of course, it turned out that the precons were awesome and sold out everywhere, but when the previews for a product that awesome have everyone trying to reassure themselves that it won't suck, you know you're doing something wrong.
Still, that gripe aside, I love them, and I don't think any of the new cards are too powerful. Homeward Path is fine; it basically reads "Get your stuff back that was stolen." I like cards like Bribery, Desertion, and Control Magic & friends, but I think it's totally reasonable to have a powerful, reusable answer to them. Command Tower is an awesome design! If anything I wish they would print five more functional reprints of it to give five color decks some more affordable mana fixing.
I also like the new commanders. While some of them are underwhelming, Animar, Ghave, Riku, and Damia can all be really good, and Kaalia, Zedruu, and Ruhan are all popular with certain types of players. They also balanced out different play styles well: Riku for combo, Ghave for combo and token shenanigans, Zedruu for combo/control, Damia for goodstuff, Kaalia and Tariel for beatdown, Animar for aggro/combo, Ruhan for voltron (kind of), and Karador and The Mimeoplasm for reanimator.
TL;DR: The decks are fine, but the way WOTC did the previews was terrible and made the decks seem a lot worse than they actually were.
Bribery-Steal a creature from an opponent's library and put it into play. Classic.
Kaalia of the Vast-The creature has to be an angel, demon, or dragon, so Kaalia's better used as a general.
Kuldotha Forgemaster and Shape Anew are great for getting artifact creatures
There are also various ways to return creatures from a graveyard to play. In fact, some decks are specifically designed around getting their own creatures into the graveyard (such as with Buried Alive) so they can be brought back with cheap spells such as Reanimate.
Alternatively, I ran into the same problem in my five-color deck, but eventually came to the counter-intuitive conclusion that it was worth it to run more basics in the deck so that I could run better ramp. Yavimaya Elder, Cultivate, Kodama's Reach, Explosive Vegetation, and Harrow are better than just about any non-basic land ramp short of Primeval Titan. You'll sacrifice consistency for speed somewhat, but if you run enough draw and green sources that shouldn't really be a problem.
Also, if you're worried about board wipes, don't forget that Darksteel Ingot is indestructible.
2. Counterpunch-Some powerful cards, but not as consistent as Devour for Power. This deck can be absolutely insane if you draw well, but can herp and derp around not doing anything too. It is still more consistent than the other decks except for Devour for Power, however, which is why it gets 2nd.
3. Heavenly Inferno-This deck is great if you can get Kaalia out and she lives for a few turns and you have tons of fatties in your hand, but I've found that it runs out of gas a lot and can have trouble if you can't stick an early couple hits with Kaalia. Basically, it can be really good, but the strategy is a little fragile and inconsistent.
4. Mirror Mastery-Of the all the decks (except for Political Puppets, I guess), Mirror Mastery is by far the slowest. You can do some pretty insane stuff in the late game with Riku, but most of the spells in the deck are relatively expensive and Riku's ability also eats up a lot of mana, meaning you're twiddling your thumbs during the early game a lot of the time. Animar is really fun to use though and is actually a much better general, IMO, even though the deck is designed to be used with Riku.
5. Political Puppets-I'm sure there are people out there who love playing "weird" decks, and if you're that sort of person then I guess I wouldn't dissuade you from picking this one up... but every single time someone has played it in my playgroup (even when everyone was using precons) they've gotten completely destroyed. People learned to just ignore it after a while, because it wouldn't have a significant impact except for occasionally helping someone out a little bit or being mildly annoying. Even the strategy of "wait till everyone kills each other off and then finish off the last person" doesn't work because the deck just isn't powerful enough. Do NOT pick this up if you are looking for a good deck to play out of the box.
On the other hand, if you mean "good investment" as in "contains generals and cards that are fun, interesting, and potentially powerful if you spend the time to build a deck around them," then the ranking would go like this:
2. Counterpunch-I forget what thread it was in, but at one point there was a conversation about how it was hard to NOT make infinite combos with Ghave. A lot of times you'll be staring at a board with Ghave and something like Doubling Season in play, wondering what you should do, and then you'll be like "Oh wait, there are three separate ways I could go infinite right now." You have to build a deck to around him, obviously, but he's just so powerful that there are a million ways to break him. He gets my vote as the best commander in the precons.
I'd say the other three decks are tied for third in terms of their potential. Kaalia's probably the most straightforward out of all the generals, and the Timmy in me squeals with joy when I imagine an "optimized" Kaalia list.
Political Puppets is interesting because it has one general (Numot) that is best suited for a competitive control deck, whereas the other two generals are unusual and require some creativity to be good. That said, I'm sure a Zedruu or Ruhan deck could be good if you built it right, it would just be more challenging. All the Devour for Power generals can be good too. In other words, any of the decks can be good if you want to use the generals to build your own decks, but Mirror Mastery probably gives you the most potential in that department.
People are looking for good cards, not broken ones. There's a difference. Command Post is exactly the sort of good card I'm talking about: a staple card that fulfills a need within EDH (good mana fixing for multicolor decks) and can be used by everyone from the most casual players to the most cutthroat. Command Post doesn't "break the format," it's just a useful card for a lot of different decks and has no downside. When people say they wish there were more "good" cards, this is what they're talking about, not ways to win on turn 2.
*EDIT: Also, note that when I say that I want EDH to be "somewhat competitive," I DO NOT mean that I want super high-powered decks that win on turn 4. All I mean is that I want there to be some skill involved in winning. Cards that involve choosing things at random (like Ruhan) remove a large part of the skill, which makes me dislike them. I don't mind that cards like that are printed, I just think there should also be cards for players that want to rely more on skill. So far, most of the cards that have been previewed that were designed with the "skill" player in mind haven't been that exciting, as better cards are already available that fulfill the same role (most of which are not very expensive and can be acquired easily). Thus, I say that most of the previewed cards will only be used in the most casual of environments because the cards either involve lots of chance or most players have access to cards that are just better. The decks were designed partly for new players, so I can understand printing a few cards that are similar to already available ones, but they were also designed to appeal to the established EDH community, and judging by the previews thus far, Wizards designed cards to appeal to only part of the established community.
It seems like they designed a lot of these cards to create "random, hi-LAAARious, off-the-wall game scenarios" rather than good EDH cards. Just because EDH is a casual format doesn't mean we all want randomness and mediocre cards. Some people do, and designing a few cards like that is fine, but we also want plain ol' GOOD CARDS, and those seem to be in short supply. It's not that I wanted them to print a bunch more Azamis and Rofelloses, but they could design balanced, interactive generals that are a lot better and more interesting than the ones they've previewed so far. And so many of the non-general cards are overpriced/underpowered or have some downside that make them much worse.
Damia is good for card advantage, but she's expensive, small, and has no evasion. The Mimeoplasm can be good if there are good creatures in the graveyard, but there will be a lot of times where he will be virtually uncastable, and if he dies you have to choose different creatures when you cast him again, so he can't be consistent at all. Tariel is too expensive and too random to be very good. Ruhan just sucks. The vows are okay, but three mana is a lot to pay for what are, by and large, pretty average abilities. Collective Voyage and Alliance of Arms are pretty bad. If you work really hard you can create a narrow situation when they're good (which can be said of most bad cards), but they are still bad 90% of the time. Most of the other previewed cards run the gamut between "meh" and "okay."
I know that not all cards can be amazingly good and cater to my particular tastes, but I love EDH, and when they design cards specifically for EDH and I only get excited about a few of them, that's very disappointing. The only new cards that I looked at and immediately thought "Holy #$&% that's awesome!" were Animar, Command Tower, and Skullbriar. I'll still probably pick up some singles from these decks when they drop in price a little; I just wish Wizards could cater to a slightly more serious crowd as well as the people who want the "random, wacky, hilarious" cards.
In other words, you could make a Bant deck or an Esper deck with the same general. Obviously, there would have to be some tweaking of the mechanic and the rules to make that work, but I still think it would be cool if you had some choices about the color identity of your general.
Actually, there is a general like that already, sort of: Reaper King. Theoretically, you could play any color combination with Reaper King as your general, since you don't actually need colored mana to cast him. If they expanded on this idea, they could make a really cool changeling tribal general:
Or something. The way I have it worded might be too broken, but I still think there's potential there, and a changeling general that could work with any tribal deck would be awesome.
With that in mind, I guess my two suggestions would be to (1) find reliable ways to make Overlord bigger so that he can kill people faster, and (2) find a way to get your slivers out more quickly (so that you can get Overlord the size and evasion he needs to start beating face more quickly).
Assuming you'll have both Shifting Sliver and Fury Sliver out before you swing with him, you really don't need to make Overlord that much bigger to kill someone in a single turn. All you need to do is raise his power by 4. As crazy as this sounds, and as worthless as they are in non-EDH decks, I would suggest putting in Spectral Sliver or Barbed Sliver, or both. Especially with Training Grounds in play, that would allow you to pump Overlord to 11 power pretty easily, allowing him to deal lethal damage in a single turn and making your deck that much faster. They also don't require targeting, meaning they'll synergize with Crystalline Sliver well, and they can be tutored for by Overlord, meaning you'll be able to get them reliably.
As for the second suggestion, try running Urza's Incubator. That would allow you to get all the slivers you're running out more quickly (except for Overlord and Crystalline Sliver), which might accelerate your win condition.
Just my two cents.