MTG Salvation

Hello hive-mind!

Im a tad bored of my decks now, and am looking to find a new deck to build. Thus far, my favourite (and fan favourite to play against) is my rakdos the defiler suicide BR. Causes tonnes of chaos, massive demons for beatdown, can lich-repay in kind combo, and can even doomsday for a win.

Then my other decks, a mono-white combo with teshar, ancestor's apostle, and a 5c child of alara lands deck.

What i really want now is a really fun to play, fun to play against, multi-faceted deck that is possibly quite unusual. Any ideas?

How about Izzet coin flips for the battlebond partners?

Possibility Storm is a card that most people enjoy playing against. You can go with Ruric Thar, the unbowed to deal 12 damage per spell.
You can go with a theme of top deck manipulation.

Experiment Kraj seems like a fun deck too, as long as you are animating non-creatures.

My Zedruu deck uses Kiki-Jiki, mirror breaker to clone things like Palisade Giant, then donate the clones so they can't be sacrificed. Think of some cards you want everyone to have and you can make some weird games.

I second Dunharrow's suggestion of Ruric Thar + Possibility Storm. Build it with a few ways to give Thar lifelink (Basilisk Collar, Loxodon Warhammer, etc.) to help you get around Thar's damage dealing + lots of creatures. What makes this particularly nice is that RG doesn't really allow you to tutor for PStorm, so you have to draw into it, which makes the game less predictable, but once the pieces are in play, you have presumably built it so that your other pieces are more or less interchangeable. Sure, you occasionally spend a bunch of mana to cast a big fatty and instead get Wood Elves, but the other possibility (Casting Wood Elves and getting Terrastodon) is worth it, and it is hilarious when your opponents are trying to cast tutors and instead are hitting counterspells when there's nothing to counter, or when they try to counter something and instead end up casting something else entirely, for good or ill, while killing themselves. One of my funnest decks, easily.

I also like his suggestion of Kraj. I have never not enjoyed playing against a Kraj deck, and people who have built them tell me they are infinitely fun to play. I have sometimes let the Kraj player live when I probably should have killed him or her, just because I wanted to see what shenanigans they would pull next. If that isn't a social gaming experience, I don't know what is.

Quote from Dunharrow »

Experiment Kraj seems like a fun deck too, as long as you are animating non-creatures.

animating non-creatures? what did you have in mind for that? sounds intriguing (and possibly expensive)!

I'll repeat myself and throw Gonti, Lord of Luxury in the ring.
Always ends up doing some weird stuff, plus it comes with a mono-B shell, which is always great fun - at least for you.

I love playing against Yeva, Nature's Herald, because you never know what you're getting yourself into. From Temur Sabertooth etb shenanigans to pseudo hasty stompies.

Ruric Thar, the Unbowed and Possibility Storm are NOT what people think of being fun to play against, unless your idea of a good time is going to the dentist to get your teeth drilled.

I’ve seen some great Gonti lists that are fun to play against. I’d add that I have a Vial Smasher/Thrasios deck that my opponents tell me is really fun to play against. In case you’re interested, you can see the list under my decks.

off-kilter tribal is pretty fun for me. I love my colors-tribal Ur-Dragon deck, which runs effects like Civic Saber, Might of the Nephilim, and Knight of New Alara alongside as many 5c and 4c creatures as possible. Nobody can really be mad about getting beat down by a buffed-up K&T.

Bird-Tribal Derevi is also fun. It's just generally interesting when you take a commander with an obvious build direction (dragon tribal, stax) and then go somewhere completely different with them. Again, when you hit with 8 bird tokens to untap/tap and charge up your Otherworld Atlas, then next turn deck everyone by making them draw 81 cards, it's not an efficient strategy but it is a memorable one.

Quote from Anachronity »

off-kilter tribal is pretty fun for me. I love my colors-tribal Ur-Dragon deck, which runs effects like Civic Saber, Might of the Nephilim, and Knight of New Alara alongside as many 5c and 4c creatures as possible. Nobody can really be mad about getting beat down by a buffed-up K&T.

Bird-Tribal Derevi is also fun. It's just generally interesting when you take a commander with an obvious build direction (dragon tribal, stax) and then go somewhere completely different with them. Again, when you hit with 8 bird tokens to untap/tap and charge up your Otherworld Atlas, then next turn deck everyone by making them draw 81 cards, it's not an efficient strategy but it is a memorable one.

but you decky yourself too. How are you suppose to win? (And don't say that is not the poi t. I know that is it the point. But if you play MTG just to end every match in a draw. Why bother playing at all? I don't mind uncomve tional Derevi decks. But I rather not playbagainstbdecks with no win con and instead just game ending.

Quote from Gashnaw »

but you decky yourself too. How are you suppose to win?

Well, you can use Elixir of Immortality (or have used it at some point earlier) and just stop activating the Atlas once you're the last one standing. Or just put more counters on it instead and then activate it on the end of their turn to have a huge hand of cards on your next turn. Drawing the game with Otherworld Atlas isn't the entire goal of the deck, it's something incidental that resulted. In that particular game I was out of mana and didn't have anything to survive to next turn, and it was a friendly enough game that people generally found it funny for it to end that way.

You can also get a bunch of Myr tokens with Myr Turbine in the same way, or cast as many cards as you have mana for off of their deck with Chaos Wand. Hopefully one of those should let you win.

If you are looking for a new main-stay with a bunch of replayability, or just a whacky different idea?

If you want a solid main-stay then I'd suggest nekusar, the mindrazer. "Helping" your opponents draw more cards is often a dangerous gambit, and tends to make for some very interesting games. It's not always an instant win combo style of deck, but with lucky draws and ramp it can end games very quickly. There is also the lack of time-consuming interactions, you just have to display the math of your damage. Some other combo decks make for grumpy opponents when they have to wait for multiple spells and whatnot to resolve for the damage to be added up. Nekusar doesn't do that

Past that I would consider finding a fun combo you like that isn't commonly seen in your group, and trying to make it work.

If you're very quick at shuffling you can make a solid goblin charbelcher deck. I ran one a while ago and I always had the dream of having 5x charbelchers online at once (clon'ing it with sculpting steel/copy artifact/clever impersonator/phyrexian metamorph). I sadly only ever got up to 3x online at once. People seem to love holding a gun to an opponents head with aetherflux reservoir, but doing so with a charbelcher is far more pleasing. The issue with that deck is that you have to extract all of your lands (mana severance effects) and thus shuffling between games is a headache.

If you like a specific combo but you think it's been done too much, you can also try a self-restriction on said combo. This is usually done by limiting the win-con (changing to a weaker or less optimized win-con), or limiting your colors (less tutors/draw/etc). I love hermit druid combos but people tend to complain when they see the commonly expected & repeated combos, so I made a green/white druid deck just to enjoy.

The problem with janky weakened combos although is the deck may not have much longivity.

This might be prefaced by saying that I don’t normally play U/G and find it a fun, fun variation to normal control. I really enjoy using a shell of mutants to keep Simic Combine theme, but then pack in spells that make an absolute mess of battlecruiser decks in combat. The suite of hijinks is very fun and my friends seem to really enjoy it, too. I personally use Prime Speaker Zegana to keep steam going all game, but Kraj is good, along with Vorel of the Hull Clade for a laid back theme still with as many teeth as you want.

Quote from NoNeedToBragoBoutIt »

I'll repeat myself and throw Gonti, Lord of Luxury in the ring.
Always ends up doing some weird stuff...

Not to hijack the OP, but what is it about Gonti that’s so fun in edh? I run 4 Gonti in a Kaladesh 60-card deck, but I’ve found he’s rather hit or miss and it’s a good thing I rely on gearhulks for end game steam. Sometimes it’s a janky spell, but I did steal someone’s Kalitas, Bloodchief of Ghet to close out a game recently, so I do enjoy Gonti, but might play Yahenni vampires over Gonti in MB edh. Is it the sheer variance of spells in edh that makes him worth being a commander?

I'm actually a bit afraid of playing Gonti in my own group, for the same reason I don't take Jeleva, Nephalia's Scourge out for much play any more.

With my Jeleva deck, people would get tired of me exiling 4,6,8,10+ cards off their decks at a time. Players really don't like seeing chunks of their deck go missing and on an opponents side of the table. After a while they stop responding to the trigger and just expect you to handle their deck for them, or they get salty when you start reaching for their deck because they are taking too long after you ask for the top x cards of their deck. Granted my Jeleva list was tuned around spam-casting her multiple times in a game with the idea of exile-milling everyone.

For Gonti, I'm pretty sure by me exiling the top few cards of a target players decks it will bring up some bad memories and partial heated comments from Jeleva's past, so I'm just not going to play him.


But I do love playing against Gonti. It's fun because the card he takes is hidden and a mystery. It could be a critical combo part that went missing, an essential answer, or just a complete wiff and a secret-do-nothing.

I can attest that the coin flip partners are not fun to play against. They're generally short, underwhelming games. I get that its nifty, but it just ends up being coin flip combo.dec every game. It's pretty repetitive.

My Nissa list is a lot of fun. It can be rough if you get a strong starting hand, but it scales well and has a lot of answers. It'll never be super competitive, but it encourages thinking outside of the box and has a lot of ways to win without having to look for the same cards every time. I get quite a few comments that it's an interesting build, and probably the best thing going for it is that short of MLD it can take a really heavy pounding and still be relevant.

Otherwise, Thraximundar is a lot of fun, too. Grixis is great colours for barnstorming, board changing effects, and Thrax is a fun general.

I prefer not to recommend decks I haven't got experience with, and these are what I'm playing most at the moment.

cheers peeps!

It feels to me that i should probably be a bit more specific with my request; I'm looking for a non-novelty deck that is a challenge and is fun to play with and against. In other words, decks like gonti, nekusar, ruric that/possibility storm can be fun, sure, but it's only really fun once and the novelty's gone. I'm not completely convinced that a 5c 'multicolour matters' theme would entertain me for more than just 1 game either.

My few decks i have remaining have all the components required to be a very effective deck, but has multiple avenues to winning. not including forbidden orchard beatdowns, but genuinely epic wins from weird angles. And at least with my rakdos deck, i STILL am finding new interactions within the deck that gives me a win (or a spectacular miss).

I've recently looked at the 'new' elder dragons, and chromium looks ultra interesting. I have an old-school chromium deck with rampage being the theme (it doesn't really work). has anyone here got a new-school chromium deck that does something interesting with the discard ability?