I have always been a fan of the shoals. I've loved Shining Shoal since I first saw it printed. It also works well with the deck with the decent number of white cards in the deck, as does the Sickening Shoal. I don't often play them for free, but the option is there when I need it and the trickery you can do with Shining Shoal is not to be underestimated.
I looked at Fist of Suns, but for the most part I think I would rather play a regular mana acceleration card in its place, like Chromatic Lantern, Commander's Sphere, Coalition Relic, or Coldsteel heart. While the idea of dropping the cost of the expensive cards to five mana is nice, it doesn't fix our mana and at times that is going to be more important. It is a close thing and I think if I made room for all five Myojins I would consider it more.
Wow, Moonlit Strider is quite cool. I like that its sacrifice ability also gives me an on-demand Soulshift ability.
I can also easily see taking out Ghost-Lit Redeemer, it is not very high impact, even if you do get lucky and you can drop it early for some life gain.
I'm not sure if locking down a creature with Dungeon Geists is better than permanently taking control of one with Keiga, the Tide Star, but it is cheaper, which is helpful in a top-heavy deck.
I do also like Kami of False Hope. With just some recursion going on, it can provide quite a bit of protection to your life total.
I thought about the Hondens, but they just have no mechanical synergy with Spirits or Arcane spells. While including them would be fun, especially when you can get two or three of them out at a time, I was trying to go for a deck that was more spirit and arcane based, and not just fun Kamigawa cards.
As it was, I had to lose most of the arcane cards to make room for the spirits I did include. I am especially sad about not making room for Horobi's Whisper, a great arcane removal spell.
While Kamigawa block is not known to have a lot of really strong cards, the spirit tribe, along with its arcane magic, has a lot of interesting potential. However, seeing that their creatures and magic was spread over all five colours, it was hard to create a good Commander deck that didn't feel like it was cutting off a lot of potential cards and the Blue / White spirit tribe from Innistrad only had Geist of Saint Traft as a potential Commander. In fact, Kamigawa block has only one legendary creature that was more than one colour, Iname as One, which pushed the deck in a combo direction and still had limited colour selection. I think a lot of the inclination to get Genju of the Realm to be considered a legendary creature is from this lack of other options for a viable spirit-tribal commander.
If it was designed and released today, I am sure there would have been more 2, 3, and 5 colour spirit legendary creatures in Kamigawa block. The block was designed during a time that felt that "starving" the environment of things before a set featuring them was released was a good idea. In this case, Ravnica was right around the corner, so they "starved" standard of gold cards right before its release. Kamigawa block and spirits had a second problem in that it was released just after the overpowered Mirrodin block, which is often a time when they tone down the power-level to provide a kind of reset to the format once the over-powered block rotates out, so most cards are not very strong individually.
Entering into this mix, we have O-Kagachi, Vengeful Kami, a 5-colour spirit legendary creature, the perfect Commander for a spirit tribal deck.
Mana Base: Playing a five colour deck is going to be hard, no matter what you do. If you have the cards, the dual lands are great, but recently WotC have been printing more lands with two land types, giving players more options here with a cycle of allied-coloured lands from Battle for Zendikar and Amonkhet. If you have the fetch lands, they are also really good, but there are alternatives that can get the job done in a pinch, like the cycle of slower fetchlands from Mirage, like Bad River and more general fetching cards like Terramorphic Expanse and Ash Barrens. It has probably never been easier to make a 5-colour mana base. I happen to have one of each of the dual lands and fetch lands, so I have them in the deck. I also put in a few five colour lands, but there are more that could be included, along with more basic lands.
I have found the Onna spirits, like Nikko-Onna and Haru-Onna, to be especially good. When you can get them along with a cost reduction artifact, like Urza's Incubator, they can provide a great source of repeatable spirit trigger and their "enter the battlefield" abilities are good for the deck. I wish I had found room for Kemuri-Onna, but I could not decide what to take out for it.
Spells: Nearly every spell in the deck is Arcane, which means they are a little slower than what you could otherwise get, but they trigger a good number of abilities on your spirits and the uses of Splice onto Arcane are real.
I feel like I am at the point where I have a deck filled with lots of interesting synergy, but I'm not sure what to take out to increase the overall power of the deck. I know the deck would be better with cards like Demonic Tutor and Rhystic Study, but trying to decide which of my other cards is simply worse than they are is difficult. Those cards are individually powerful, but offer no other synergies with the deck, while an individual spirit like Forked-Branch Garami might not look that powerful, it has the potential to trigger one or more other creatures in play and when it dies, because creatures always die, it could get me back two spirits from my graveyard, which is pretty strong.
* Soul of New Phyrexia (protection with indestructible)
* Argent Sphinx (cheap protection by exiling until end of turn if you have enough artifacts in play)
* Hateflayer (untaps and deals damage)
* Knacksaw Clique (another cheap untap ability with an interesting ability)
I have practiced with a several planeswalkers as Commanders and for the most part, they seemed fine. I even played a Sorin Markov deck. It certainly made the game faster as I could just keep setting an opponent's life down, but that is done one opponent at a time, and still needs other cards to generate a win. I had games where other players would kill the people that I brought down to 10 and then kill me.
Thr talking about Edgar's story being retconned stems from the summary of it that was given in the podcast pretty much saying that Edgar was looking for immortality for he and his family and made a pact with a demon in order ot obtain that. Completely ignoring the previouslt established part about wanting to solve a famine that threatened to kill everyone in Stensia.
Wether that is an official retcon or not we still have to see. I interpreted it as such as from the words of the woman in the podcast (can't remember the name and can't seem to find the podcast again) that was all she could come up with about Edgar Markov.
Does that count as a retcon though? It could just be an alternative way of saying the same thing. Edgar Markov wanted to find immortality as a way of saving his family from a famine.
Or maybe as a shifted goal, he wanted to find a cure to the famine, then couldn't, so he wanted to find a way to gain immortality for his family.
However, I really don't consider that podcast to be a deep dive into Edgar Markov, so her line could easily be condensed from several paragraphs that properly explains his history and how he decided to become a vampire.
I think a City of Heroes power pool system limited by archtype makes sense for a game like this. So if you can access red mana, you could choose a pool of fire powers or a pool of lightning powers and then as you level up you gain various powers from your selected pool, ie, you start with Shock and eventually get Lightning Bolt and other lightning related powers.
I also think you would be custom created planeswalkers and a starting zone on Ravnica could make sense. There is a lot of things you can do there that would get players into the game as part of a sprawling "Gatewatch" organization that saves planes from dangers.
I can easily imagine each of the colours having access to pets, since summoning creatures is a pretty big part of the lore for planeswalkers, and part of the stories as well.
I could see starting zones for different races, but I think it would just be easier for them to say that you start as a planeswalker just after your spark ignited, and you planeswalked to Ravnica because the Gatewatch did some crazy thing to attract newly igniting sparks to help introduce new planewalkers instead of just letting them roam around freely. That way you could still have a bunch of starting races and home planes, without having to do a lot of actual starting zones.
I don't know think they would do different factions. Magic has those five clearly defined colours, but the point of the Gatewatch is to bring the colours together. That said, PvP could still be done as planeswalkers fight against each other a lot for a variety of reasons and it could be open-world PvP on certain servers or limit PvP to arena's or zones designed for PvP (low WoW's battlegrounds).
I think being able to tie a player's magic into the environment in some way, as someone mentioned above, would be pretty cool and a unique thing in the game, beyond just the things that are unique for the IP. I don't know exactly how I would want it to play, but forcing players to gather mana in some way by moving around in combat could keep that part feeling dynamic. You would have to do it in a way that doesn't just crowd the screen with "mana nodes". Maybe they only appear during combat and their purpose is to unlock the most powerful abilities, but not your regular abilities, sort of like how Nissa can still summon elementals on Ahmonket, but they are not as strong as they are on Zendikar (ie. not as strong as when she can get to an green-mana node during a battle).
I think the most logical place to expand into when looking for non-typical commanders are planeswalkers. A number of them have interesting build-around themes and a number of them are dripping with flavour since there are a lot of cards named after planeswalkers.
Certainly, most of the themes available to planeswalkers can be duplicated by some legendary creature out there, but not always as well or in interesting ways. A swamp-matters mono-black deck is more interesting with Liliana of the Dark Realms compared to Korlash, Heir to Blackblade or a mountain-matters mono-red deck based around Koth of the Hammer compared to Ben-Ben, Akki Hermit.
I'm just starting to learn this deck, and I saw several pages back, that some people rejected the Thopter Foundry / Sword of the Meek combo for this deck. I've seen this combo run in as few as five slots (3 foundries and 2 swords) with some extras in the sideboard. Why isn't it a viable plan for the deck? Did people try it out and it was found lacking?
It just seems like it is a good alternative win condition when the milling isn't working out fast enough, when you need a more inevitable game plan, when you want to apply consistent pressure against certain opponents.
My post laying out how PH can win out of nowhere seems to have disappeared but trust me it can. It just needs Viscera Seer, Saffi Eriksdotter, Reveillark, Karmic Guide, and a kill condition below 6 cmc like Blood Artist or Gary.
You can currently get the same effect with Boonweaver Giant as long as Pattern of Rebirth is somewhere in your deck. Although in both cases, you do need a way to kill the creature that first time.
Prossh doesn't die to removal, because the Prossh player is comboing off with Food Chain or Phyrexian Altar. Removal can't stop this, but Hinder used to.
Derevi doesn't die to removal because her ability dodges commander tax, and the Derevi player will just run you out of removal spells. Chaos Warp used to stop this.
The move away from tuck forces players to lock out commanders using cards that have to sit on the board that the opponent can interact with. This is inherently weaker than using tuck to get rid of a Commander until the opponent draws into it or draws an appropriate tutor, but it does exist.
Sink you blue mana just before your turn to get multiple untap and mills. They could easily turn Phenax into 30+ mill a turn, and provides additional insurance.
My concern with these two cards is that you are risking card disadvantage. Right now you can have pretty "bad" creatures like Glacial Wall sitting on the table waiting for Phenax, God of Deception and opponents are reluctant to remove them because there are more dangerous creatures coming to the table than a simple 0/7 wall, but when you add an aura to that creature, it becomes a much larger threat and getting rid of it is now a 2-for-1. I like the cards, they are strong, but the chance of card disadvantage is a little too strong for me.
The only thing that sounds "stable" about this mana base is your likelihood to be unable to play anything other than the upkeep for your lands for the first 3 Turns. I can't believe they printed Rupture Spire even once, much less twice.
I looked at Fist of Suns, but for the most part I think I would rather play a regular mana acceleration card in its place, like Chromatic Lantern, Commander's Sphere, Coalition Relic, or Coldsteel heart. While the idea of dropping the cost of the expensive cards to five mana is nice, it doesn't fix our mana and at times that is going to be more important. It is a close thing and I think if I made room for all five Myojins I would consider it more.
I can also easily see taking out Ghost-Lit Redeemer, it is not very high impact, even if you do get lucky and you can drop it early for some life gain.
I'm not sure if locking down a creature with Dungeon Geists is better than permanently taking control of one with Keiga, the Tide Star, but it is cheaper, which is helpful in a top-heavy deck.
I do also like Kami of False Hope. With just some recursion going on, it can provide quite a bit of protection to your life total.
I thought about the Hondens, but they just have no mechanical synergy with Spirits or Arcane spells. While including them would be fun, especially when you can get two or three of them out at a time, I was trying to go for a deck that was more spirit and arcane based, and not just fun Kamigawa cards.
As it was, I had to lose most of the arcane cards to make room for the spirits I did include. I am especially sad about not making room for Horobi's Whisper, a great arcane removal spell.
Introduction:
While Kamigawa block is not known to have a lot of really strong cards, the spirit tribe, along with its arcane magic, has a lot of interesting potential. However, seeing that their creatures and magic was spread over all five colours, it was hard to create a good Commander deck that didn't feel like it was cutting off a lot of potential cards and the Blue / White spirit tribe from Innistrad only had Geist of Saint Traft as a potential Commander. In fact, Kamigawa block has only one legendary creature that was more than one colour, Iname as One, which pushed the deck in a combo direction and still had limited colour selection. I think a lot of the inclination to get Genju of the Realm to be considered a legendary creature is from this lack of other options for a viable spirit-tribal commander.
If it was designed and released today, I am sure there would have been more 2, 3, and 5 colour spirit legendary creatures in Kamigawa block. The block was designed during a time that felt that "starving" the environment of things before a set featuring them was released was a good idea. In this case, Ravnica was right around the corner, so they "starved" standard of gold cards right before its release. Kamigawa block and spirits had a second problem in that it was released just after the overpowered Mirrodin block, which is often a time when they tone down the power-level to provide a kind of reset to the format once the over-powered block rotates out, so most cards are not very strong individually.
Entering into this mix, we have O-Kagachi, Vengeful Kami, a 5-colour spirit legendary creature, the perfect Commander for a spirit tribal deck.
The Deck:
1 O-Kagachi, Vengeful Kami
Lands - 37 total
1 Forest
1 Island
1 Mountain
1 Plains
1 Swamp
1 Arid Mesa
1 Badlands
1 Bayou
1 Bloodstained Mire
1 Breeding Pool
1 Cascading Cataracts
1 Cavern of Souls
1 City of Brass
1 Command Tower
1 Flooded Strand
1 Godless Shrine
1 Hallowed Fountain
1 Mana Confluence
1 Marsh Flats
1 Misty Rainforest
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Path of Ancestry
1 Plateau
1 Polluted Delta
1 Savannah
1 Scalding Tarn
1 Scrubland
1 Steam Vents
1 Stomping Ground
1 Taiga
1 Tropical Island
1 Tundra
1 Underground Sea
1 Verdant Catacombs
1 Volcanic Island
1 Windswept Heath
1 Wooded Foothills
1 Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit
1 Angel of Flight Alabaster
1 Arashi, the Sky Asunder
1 Bloodghast
1 Bounteous Kirin
1 Drogskol Captain
1 Drogskol Reaver
1 Elder Pine of Jukai
1 Forked-Branch Garami
1 Geist of Saint Traft
1 Ghost-Lit Redeemer
1 Hana Kami
1 Haru-Onna
1 He Who Hungers
1 Iname, Life Aspect
1 Infernal Kirin
1 Kagemaro, First to Suffer
1 Karmic Guide
1 Keiga, the Tide Star
1 Kira, Great Glass-Spinner
1 Kiri-Onna
1 Kokusho, the Evening Star
1 Loam Dweller
1 Mausoleum Wanderer
1 Mirror Entity
1 Myojin of Cleansing Fire
1 Myojin of Night's Reach
1 Myojin of Seeing Winds
1 Nikko-Onna
1 Oyobi, Who Split the Heavens
1 Petalmane Baku
1 Primordial Sage
1 Rattlechains
1 Sire of the Storm
1 Taurean Mauler
1 Thief of Hope
1 Yuki-Onna
1 Chromatic Lantern
1 Commander's Sphere
1 Herald's Horn
1 Kodama's Reach
1 Mana Crypt
1 Sol Ring
1 Urza's Incubator
Card Draw - 2 total
1 Kindred Discovery
1 Murmurs from Beyond
Tutors - 2 total
1 Bring to Light
1 Conflux
Removal - 6 total
1 Hideous Laughter
1 Rend Flesh
1 Shining Shoal
1 Sickening Shoal
1 Swords to Plowshares
1 Wear Away
Other Spells - 8 total
1 Death Denied
1 Door of Destinies
1 Kindred Boon
1 Otherworldly Journey
1 Seasons Past
1 Sensei's Divining Top
1 Soulless Revival
1 That Which Was Taken
Deck Description:
Mana Base: Playing a five colour deck is going to be hard, no matter what you do. If you have the cards, the dual lands are great, but recently WotC have been printing more lands with two land types, giving players more options here with a cycle of allied-coloured lands from Battle for Zendikar and Amonkhet. If you have the fetch lands, they are also really good, but there are alternatives that can get the job done in a pinch, like the cycle of slower fetchlands from Mirage, like Bad River and more general fetching cards like Terramorphic Expanse and Ash Barrens. It has probably never been easier to make a 5-colour mana base. I happen to have one of each of the dual lands and fetch lands, so I have them in the deck. I also put in a few five colour lands, but there are more that could be included, along with more basic lands.
Creatures: Lots of spirits! I tried to have a good mix of spirits that trigger when you play other spirits or arcane spells, like Elder Pine of Jukai and Petalmane Baku, and spirits that are just good on their own, like Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit, Kagemaro, First to Suffer, and Taurean Mauler.
I have found the Onna spirits, like Nikko-Onna and Haru-Onna, to be especially good. When you can get them along with a cost reduction artifact, like Urza's Incubator, they can provide a great source of repeatable spirit trigger and their "enter the battlefield" abilities are good for the deck. I wish I had found room for Kemuri-Onna, but I could not decide what to take out for it.
Spells: Nearly every spell in the deck is Arcane, which means they are a little slower than what you could otherwise get, but they trigger a good number of abilities on your spirits and the uses of Splice onto Arcane are real.
Possible Includes: There are numerous spirits and spells that didn't make the cut into my first played version of this deck, from Banshee of the Dread Choir, Selfless Spirit, and Niblis of Frost to Promise of Bunrei and Patriarch's Bidding (too many other tribal decks in my local metagame).
Conclusion:
I feel like I am at the point where I have a deck filled with lots of interesting synergy, but I'm not sure what to take out to increase the overall power of the deck. I know the deck would be better with cards like Demonic Tutor and Rhystic Study, but trying to decide which of my other cards is simply worse than they are is difficult. Those cards are individually powerful, but offer no other synergies with the deck, while an individual spirit like Forked-Branch Garami might not look that powerful, it has the potential to trigger one or more other creatures in play and when it dies, because creatures always die, it could get me back two spirits from my graveyard, which is pretty strong.
Comments and thoughts are welcome.
* Shauku, Endbringer (exiles a creature)
* Soul of New Phyrexia (protection with indestructible)
* Argent Sphinx (cheap protection by exiling until end of turn if you have enough artifacts in play)
* Hateflayer (untaps and deals damage)
* Knacksaw Clique (another cheap untap ability with an interesting ability)
* Magus of the Bazaar (card draw)
* Jace's Archivist (card draw)
* Havengul Lich (let's you get creatures from a graveyard)
* The Scarab God (let's you get creatures from a graveyard)
* Sakashima the Impostor (gives you another copy of Mairsil, the Pretender)
With all of the possible tap abilities floating around, I think Thousand-Year Elixir and Minamo, School at Water's Edge should have a place as well.
Does that count as a retcon though? It could just be an alternative way of saying the same thing. Edgar Markov wanted to find immortality as a way of saving his family from a famine.
Or maybe as a shifted goal, he wanted to find a cure to the famine, then couldn't, so he wanted to find a way to gain immortality for his family.
However, I really don't consider that podcast to be a deep dive into Edgar Markov, so her line could easily be condensed from several paragraphs that properly explains his history and how he decided to become a vampire.
I also think you would be custom created planeswalkers and a starting zone on Ravnica could make sense. There is a lot of things you can do there that would get players into the game as part of a sprawling "Gatewatch" organization that saves planes from dangers.
I can easily imagine each of the colours having access to pets, since summoning creatures is a pretty big part of the lore for planeswalkers, and part of the stories as well.
I could see starting zones for different races, but I think it would just be easier for them to say that you start as a planeswalker just after your spark ignited, and you planeswalked to Ravnica because the Gatewatch did some crazy thing to attract newly igniting sparks to help introduce new planewalkers instead of just letting them roam around freely. That way you could still have a bunch of starting races and home planes, without having to do a lot of actual starting zones.
I don't know think they would do different factions. Magic has those five clearly defined colours, but the point of the Gatewatch is to bring the colours together. That said, PvP could still be done as planeswalkers fight against each other a lot for a variety of reasons and it could be open-world PvP on certain servers or limit PvP to arena's or zones designed for PvP (low WoW's battlegrounds).
I think being able to tie a player's magic into the environment in some way, as someone mentioned above, would be pretty cool and a unique thing in the game, beyond just the things that are unique for the IP. I don't know exactly how I would want it to play, but forcing players to gather mana in some way by moving around in combat could keep that part feeling dynamic. You would have to do it in a way that doesn't just crowd the screen with "mana nodes". Maybe they only appear during combat and their purpose is to unlock the most powerful abilities, but not your regular abilities, sort of like how Nissa can still summon elementals on Ahmonket, but they are not as strong as they are on Zendikar (ie. not as strong as when she can get to an green-mana node during a battle).
I also think this should happen.
Especially as the story continues as a planeswalker driven affair with the Guildpact.
Certainly, most of the themes available to planeswalkers can be duplicated by some legendary creature out there, but not always as well or in interesting ways. A swamp-matters mono-black deck is more interesting with Liliana of the Dark Realms compared to Korlash, Heir to Blackblade or a mountain-matters mono-red deck based around Koth of the Hammer compared to Ben-Ben, Akki Hermit.
It just seems like it is a good alternative win condition when the milling isn't working out fast enough, when you need a more inevitable game plan, when you want to apply consistent pressure against certain opponents.
You can currently get the same effect with Boonweaver Giant as long as Pattern of Rebirth is somewhere in your deck. Although in both cases, you do need a way to kill the creature that first time.
Doesn't Pithing Needle stop those things from happening currently? Or Faith's Fetters (and similar cards) for Commander's with on-the-board abilities. Lignify and Darksteel Mutation. Stuff like that.
The move away from tuck forces players to lock out commanders using cards that have to sit on the board that the opponent can interact with. This is inherently weaker than using tuck to get rid of a Commander until the opponent draws into it or draws an appropriate tutor, but it does exist.
My concern with these two cards is that you are risking card disadvantage. Right now you can have pretty "bad" creatures like Glacial Wall sitting on the table waiting for Phenax, God of Deception and opponents are reluctant to remove them because there are more dangerous creatures coming to the table than a simple 0/7 wall, but when you add an aura to that creature, it becomes a much larger threat and getting rid of it is now a 2-for-1. I like the cards, they are strong, but the chance of card disadvantage is a little too strong for me.
Not everything can be Command Tower.