Thrilling Encore. Cool card, one of the Battlebond cards I believe will become a Commander staple.
Whether just playing it for value after a board wipe or enabling some really crazy stuff in sacrifice-based decks, I have been seeing this card enable a lot of strong plays of late. Which leads me to wonder what others' experiences with this card have been.
I run it and grim return in a casual rakdos deck. I've only cast encore once thus far and was able to grab a nice pile of etb triggers.
It should be comparable to grim return in that it might make a huge swingy play, but the cmc makes it something that isn't always convenient to hold up. I often times find myself resolving a nice threat, and either not having enough to protect it with grim return or something annoying happens like a mana rock I kept untapped to use it was blown up before my creature dies.
Encore probably fits better in the more controlish deck that has mana open more frequently. Hopefully the deck that sits to the right of the deck playing all the boardwipes.
I've used grim return to snag eldrazi with their reshuffle trigger on the stack, and will enjoy doing the same with encore once the opportunity comes.
It's great if you're doing a sort of Grave Pact sac for value strategy. I mean, if you're in BR, you can just sac everything to Goblin Bombardment to trigger Grave Pact and go with that.
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Card advantage is not the same thing as card draw. Something for 2B cannot be strictly worse than something for BBB or 3BB. If you're taking out Swords to Plowshares for Plummet, you're a fool. Stop doing these things!
Lyzolda, the Blood Witch clerics is my build.
4-Player game. On my field, Purphorus, God of the Forge, Altar of Dementia, Priest of Gix and Priest of Urbrask, and Dictate of Erebos. Mostly fodder on other players boards, only notable exceptions being Snapcaster Mage and Avenger of Zendikar with no tokens(don’t remember why for some reason). I was empty-handed at the time. So, the guy to my left plays Temple Bell and activated it. I draw Thrilling Encore. I was about to be stomped, had about 15-18 life with the other guys a little farther ahead. Well, at EOT of the final player to
My right, I start sac’ing my dudes and ultimately clear most of the field(AoZ and SCM Both has to be sac’ed, along with a few others from other players). I had the open mana, so I play Encore, bring back my 2 clerics plus SCM and AoZ, trigger Purph, target encore with SCM, sac it all over again, use mana from my Priests to recast Encore and I killed the table. It. Was. FANTASTIC. It’s an incredibly fun, and fair, card.
Sorry for the ramble, it was a blast though. Not one upset guy at the table, just “Wait, what?”.
Riku of Two Reflections - Copy, then copy again | Shattergang Brothers - Token Sac&Recur | Gahiji, Honored One - Multiple attack steps | Karametra, God of Harvests - Landfall, Creaturefall, Shroud | Ruhan of the Fomori - Stop hitting yourself | Zurgo Helmsmasher - Equipment&Wraths | Crosis, the Purger - Dragon Tribal Reanimator | Derevi, Empyrial Tactician - No stax, just tap and untap fun | Anafenza, the Foremost - Enduring Ideal Enchantress | Sharuum, the Hegemon - Sphinx Tribal Control | Noyan Dar - Spellslinger | The Mimeoplasm - Counterpalooza
Lists can be found here.
Still convinced the guy on Beseech the Queen is wearing a Mitra-type hat. Wake up sheeple!
It is a cool card, but it's not a staple by any means. 5 mana means that you will have to be reacting to either an opponents spell, or your deck is setup to use it (i.e. the examples of sacrifice outlets).
Staples are sort of just good in any decks and situations, where as this needs to be worked in.
Sure if your meta is always playing creature board wipes, then you could look to put it into your decks, but you must always have 5 mana available in order to make sure you always get it to work. It just takes that one time you tap low to cast a spell and then opponent casts a board wipe, and then the card is now dead in your hand for the rest of the game.
Sure if your meta is always playing creature board wipes, then you could look to put it into your decks, but you must always have 5 mana available in order to make sure you always get it to work. It just takes that one time you tap low to cast a spell and then opponent casts a board wipe, and then the card is now dead in your hand for the rest of the game.
That's kind of like saying counterspells are bad because sometimes you might have to tap out all your mana. Like everything else in a commander game, when it is and isn't worth holding back mana for a reactive spell is very much dependent on what is going on in the game. If the biggest threat of the moment is the person who is running Hapatra and has a dozen deathtouch snake tokens in play, casting Thrilling Encore in response to a well-needed boardwipe won't net you much. In the meta I play in, though, it isn't unusual for 2-3 boardwipes to happen over the course of a game, and as long as the biggest threats aren't usually token-based or superfriends decks, or where games don't tend to end with sudden "I win" combos, Thrilling Encore at some point in the game can easily net you a strong advantage. Last time I played it in response to a boardwipe - the second of the game, I think - I got a Farhaven Elf (yay ramp), a Reclamation Sage that took out an opponent's problematic enchantment, an Acidic Slime which took out another enchantment, a couple of okay midrange creatures, a Sun Titan (which got me back a Sword that had been zapped a few turns earlier) and a random dragon of some sort, plus I got back all of my own creatures, and since it was my turn next and everyone else had mostly empty boards, I was able to take out one opponent (the one who I would lose the least by their creatures leaving the game) and badly hurt the other two, which resulted in me winning a turn later.
I don't think that sort of scenario is particularly rare in a lot of Commander metagames, frankly. Boardwipes are not a rare thing, and they aren't always exile wipes. And that's why I think Thrilling Encore is going to become, if not a staple, darn close to it.
Sure if your meta is always playing creature board wipes, then you could look to put it into your decks, but you must always have 5 mana available in order to make sure you always get it to work. It just takes that one time you tap low to cast a spell and then opponent casts a board wipe, and then the card is now dead in your hand for the rest of the game.
That's kind of like saying counterspells are bad because sometimes you might have to tap out all your mana. Like everything else in a commander game, when it is and isn't worth holding back mana for a reactive spell is very much dependent on what is going on in the game. If the biggest threat of the moment is the person who is running Hapatra and has a dozen deathtouch snake tokens in play, casting Thrilling Encore in response to a well-needed boardwipe won't net you much. In the meta I play in, though, it isn't unusual for 2-3 boardwipes to happen over the course of a game, and as long as the biggest threats aren't usually token-based or superfriends decks, or where games don't tend to end with sudden "I win" combos, Thrilling Encore at some point in the game can easily net you a strong advantage. Last time I played it in response to a boardwipe - the second of the game, I think - I got a Farhaven Elf (yay ramp), a Reclamation Sage that took out an opponent's problematic enchantment, an Acidic Slime which took out another enchantment, a couple of okay midrange creatures, a Sun Titan (which got me back a Sword that had been zapped a few turns earlier) and a random dragon of some sort, plus I got back all of my own creatures, and since it was my turn next and everyone else had mostly empty boards, I was able to take out one opponent (the one who I would lose the least by their creatures leaving the game) and badly hurt the other two, which resulted in me winning a turn later.
I don't think that sort of scenario is particularly rare in a lot of Commander metagames, frankly. Boardwipes are not a rare thing, and they aren't always exile wipes. And that's why I think Thrilling Encore is going to become, if not a staple, darn close to it.
A counterspell can be used in response to any spell however. So even if you tapped out and get stung by a spell that you would have liked to counter, it's still good to go for the rest of the game. What I'm saying is that Thrilling Encore is only good against very particular spells, so if you missed the opportunity, it's unlikely that you'll get another for a long time (if at all). Because two things need to happen, first a board needs to built up again, and then another spell of the appropriate board wipe needs to be cast. Plus 5 mana counterspells are way too expensive and that's why you don't find any of those as staples either, so I wouldn't compare the two in anyway.
It is a unique card, and does have good to great value. There is nothing else like it in black to protect your creatures (I think?). White has access to Teferi's Protection, Ghostway, etc. Green has Heroic Intervention. Blue can of course counterspell. Red doesn't have any protection as far as I know? So it is a nice dynamic that black didn't have access to before.
But I was just pointing out, it's certainly not an automatic include, it requires a certain amount of patience and investment, and therefore I just don't think it will be a "staple" and so this will be reflected in the number of decks that run it. EDHREC will give us the numbers over time. It'll probably get a reasonable go at first, but I imagine it will thin out in popularity over time. Happy to be proven wrong.
Although the effect is strong, it's a 5 mana instant that requires a specific situation to be good. And that immediately starts raising flags in my mind. While the required situation isn't that uncommon in a typical EDH game, it's not one you can rely on happening every turn, so there's going to be plenty of times when you hold up this card, hoping for a board wipe, and none comes. At which point, you've basically wasted your turn. It's not like, say, a Counterspell where you only need to hold up two mana, and thus can still do some stuff on your turn, unless you're pretty late on in the game, holding up mana for Thrilling Encore is all you're going to be doing more often than not.
Of course, this can be mitigated by having other things to do at instant speed. If a chance to play this never comes up, but you can cast a Jace's Ingenuity, or activate Oona, Queen of the Fae, then you've not wasted the turn; you've still advanced your gameplan. So at this point, in order to run this card, we want to be a black deck that is looking to play a significant amount of instants, flash creatures or activated abilities. And while that does rule out a lot of decks, there are still a good number that can satisfy those criteria.
Unfortunately, many of those decks then run into another flaw of this card. Probably the most suited deck to those criteria would be UBx control, a strong and popular archetype. However, UBx control generally runs a pretty low creature count as much of its strength comes from the powerful and wide ranging instants and sorceries you have access to. And that means, when you do get to play Thrilling Encore, you're basically dependent on your opponents boards in order to get value out of the card. Sure, there's likely to be a decent amount of stuff in play, as someone's felt the need to wrath, but that doesn't mean said stuff will be useful to you. Tokens are particularly bad, but even just decks that run creatures based on synergies with their commander or non-creature spells and going to end up giving you some pretty mediocre stuff. So you want to mitigate this by having a baseline of getting a good creature or two of your own back, with having your opponents' stuff as a bonus. Which UBx control often can't rely on.
So we're actually getting pretty narrow when it comes to decks that are going to want this - we have to have black, we want to be playing at instant speed and we want to have a good number of creatures. If you meet those criteria, this is likely to be pretty strong. But that's quite an if. Of course, there are some more combo-type shenanigans you can do with this - returning all your stuff to play after saccing it, for example, so if that's something your deck wants, this could be a good card, but for the "normal" use, of "getting all the things after a wrath", if feel there's just not that many decks out there which it fits into.
So we're actually getting pretty narrow when it comes to decks that are going to want this - we have to have black, we want to be playing at instant speed and we want to have a good number of creatures. If you meet those criteria, this is likely to be pretty strong. But that's quite an if. Of course, there are some more combo-type shenanigans you can do with this - returning all your stuff to play after saccing it, for example, so if that's something your deck wants, this could be a good card, but for the "normal" use, of "getting all the things after a wrath", if feel there's just not that many decks out there which it fits into.
To come to it's defence a little bit, it is very good in decks that are running sacrifice outlets, like Viscera Seer or Phyrexian Altar and then Dictate of Erebos or Grave Pact. This way you can get the bonuses without actually needing to invest other mana into the spell. Nevinyrral's Disk is also good as it only require 1 as part of the mass removal. Essentially if you can set your deck up so that you can get mass removal without having to spend much mana.
Thrilling Encore seems strong from the few times I've seen it played. I think the most insane I've ever seen it be is when one player cast Rise of the Dark Realms returning about 15ish creatures, two of which happened to be Cataclysmic Gearhulk and Diluvian Primordial. The Primordial cast another player's Thrilling Encore after the Gearhulk had mostly cleared the board after the Rise, which allowed the Rise player to get double ETB value for every creature. That's value town.
someone boardwiped and I Thrilling encore'd for the first time yesterday, and then the next player wiped after that. Felt bad, but hopefully it will have a better payoff next time...
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someone boardwiped and I Thrilling encore'd for the first time yesterday, and then the next player wiped after that. Felt bad, but hopefully it will have a better payoff next time...
I guess it depends on what the creatures in your meta are. We have a Yisan player and a Karador value engine player in one of my primary groups, so wether it’s just profiting off a wipe, or taking advantage of Karador when he gets Gravepact going, I’ll always profit enough that a wipe won’t be too much of a feel bad. If it’s more aggressive critters then I could see how it’s a feel bad.
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Whether just playing it for value after a board wipe or enabling some really crazy stuff in sacrifice-based decks, I have been seeing this card enable a lot of strong plays of late. Which leads me to wonder what others' experiences with this card have been.
It should be comparable to grim return in that it might make a huge swingy play, but the cmc makes it something that isn't always convenient to hold up. I often times find myself resolving a nice threat, and either not having enough to protect it with grim return or something annoying happens like a mana rock I kept untapped to use it was blown up before my creature dies.
Encore probably fits better in the more controlish deck that has mana open more frequently. Hopefully the deck that sits to the right of the deck playing all the boardwipes.
I've used grim return to snag eldrazi with their reshuffle trigger on the stack, and will enjoy doing the same with encore once the opportunity comes.
Links to my most current deck lists;
Primary EDH; Rakka Mar Token Perfection, Crosis Mnemonic Betrayal, Cromat Villainous, Judith Gravestorm, Rakdos Empty Storm, Exava Artifacts, Bant Trash, & Fumiko Voltron!
EDH kept at home; Ruzzian Isset & Rakdos LoR!
EDH (nostalgic/pimp/retired) in storage;
Latulla Burns, Akroma Smash, Jeska Voltron, Rakdos Storm, Bladewing Darghans, Lyzolda Worldgorger, Xantcha Steals your Heart, Jori Storm, Wydwen Permission, Gwendlyn Paradox, Jeleva Warps, & Sigarda Brick!
Legacy Showanimator and High Tide!
On phasing:
Lyzolda, the Blood Witch clerics is my build.
4-Player game. On my field, Purphorus, God of the Forge, Altar of Dementia, Priest of Gix and Priest of Urbrask, and Dictate of Erebos. Mostly fodder on other players boards, only notable exceptions being Snapcaster Mage and Avenger of Zendikar with no tokens(don’t remember why for some reason). I was empty-handed at the time. So, the guy to my left plays Temple Bell and activated it. I draw Thrilling Encore. I was about to be stomped, had about 15-18 life with the other guys a little farther ahead. Well, at EOT of the final player to
My right, I start sac’ing my dudes and ultimately clear most of the field(AoZ and SCM Both has to be sac’ed, along with a few others from other players). I had the open mana, so I play Encore, bring back my 2 clerics plus SCM and AoZ, trigger Purph, target encore with SCM, sac it all over again, use mana from my Priests to recast Encore and I killed the table. It. Was. FANTASTIC. It’s an incredibly fun, and fair, card.
Sorry for the ramble, it was a blast though. Not one upset guy at the table, just “Wait, what?”.
Tamanoa - Welcome to the Jungle
Lists can be found here.
How do you cast a card with Toshiro more than once? He removes the card from the game after casting it right?
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Staples are sort of just good in any decks and situations, where as this needs to be worked in.
Sure if your meta is always playing creature board wipes, then you could look to put it into your decks, but you must always have 5 mana available in order to make sure you always get it to work. It just takes that one time you tap low to cast a spell and then opponent casts a board wipe, and then the card is now dead in your hand for the rest of the game.
Niv-Mizzet Reborn
Feather, the Redeemed
Estrid, the Masked
Teshar
Tymna/Ravos
Najeela, Blade-Blossom
Firesong & Sunspeaker
Zur the Enchanter
Lazav, the Multifarious
Ishai+Reyhan
Click images for decks->
-Prime Speaker Vannifar
---------------------Will & Rowan Kenrith
That's kind of like saying counterspells are bad because sometimes you might have to tap out all your mana. Like everything else in a commander game, when it is and isn't worth holding back mana for a reactive spell is very much dependent on what is going on in the game. If the biggest threat of the moment is the person who is running Hapatra and has a dozen deathtouch snake tokens in play, casting Thrilling Encore in response to a well-needed boardwipe won't net you much. In the meta I play in, though, it isn't unusual for 2-3 boardwipes to happen over the course of a game, and as long as the biggest threats aren't usually token-based or superfriends decks, or where games don't tend to end with sudden "I win" combos, Thrilling Encore at some point in the game can easily net you a strong advantage. Last time I played it in response to a boardwipe - the second of the game, I think - I got a Farhaven Elf (yay ramp), a Reclamation Sage that took out an opponent's problematic enchantment, an Acidic Slime which took out another enchantment, a couple of okay midrange creatures, a Sun Titan (which got me back a Sword that had been zapped a few turns earlier) and a random dragon of some sort, plus I got back all of my own creatures, and since it was my turn next and everyone else had mostly empty boards, I was able to take out one opponent (the one who I would lose the least by their creatures leaving the game) and badly hurt the other two, which resulted in me winning a turn later.
I don't think that sort of scenario is particularly rare in a lot of Commander metagames, frankly. Boardwipes are not a rare thing, and they aren't always exile wipes. And that's why I think Thrilling Encore is going to become, if not a staple, darn close to it.
It is a unique card, and does have good to great value. There is nothing else like it in black to protect your creatures (I think?). White has access to Teferi's Protection, Ghostway, etc. Green has Heroic Intervention. Blue can of course counterspell. Red doesn't have any protection as far as I know? So it is a nice dynamic that black didn't have access to before.
But I was just pointing out, it's certainly not an automatic include, it requires a certain amount of patience and investment, and therefore I just don't think it will be a "staple" and so this will be reflected in the number of decks that run it. EDHREC will give us the numbers over time. It'll probably get a reasonable go at first, but I imagine it will thin out in popularity over time. Happy to be proven wrong.
Niv-Mizzet Reborn
Feather, the Redeemed
Estrid, the Masked
Teshar
Tymna/Ravos
Najeela, Blade-Blossom
Firesong & Sunspeaker
Zur the Enchanter
Lazav, the Multifarious
Ishai+Reyhan
Click images for decks->
-Prime Speaker Vannifar
---------------------Will & Rowan Kenrith
Of course, this can be mitigated by having other things to do at instant speed. If a chance to play this never comes up, but you can cast a Jace's Ingenuity, or activate Oona, Queen of the Fae, then you've not wasted the turn; you've still advanced your gameplan. So at this point, in order to run this card, we want to be a black deck that is looking to play a significant amount of instants, flash creatures or activated abilities. And while that does rule out a lot of decks, there are still a good number that can satisfy those criteria.
Unfortunately, many of those decks then run into another flaw of this card. Probably the most suited deck to those criteria would be UBx control, a strong and popular archetype. However, UBx control generally runs a pretty low creature count as much of its strength comes from the powerful and wide ranging instants and sorceries you have access to. And that means, when you do get to play Thrilling Encore, you're basically dependent on your opponents boards in order to get value out of the card. Sure, there's likely to be a decent amount of stuff in play, as someone's felt the need to wrath, but that doesn't mean said stuff will be useful to you. Tokens are particularly bad, but even just decks that run creatures based on synergies with their commander or non-creature spells and going to end up giving you some pretty mediocre stuff. So you want to mitigate this by having a baseline of getting a good creature or two of your own back, with having your opponents' stuff as a bonus. Which UBx control often can't rely on.
So we're actually getting pretty narrow when it comes to decks that are going to want this - we have to have black, we want to be playing at instant speed and we want to have a good number of creatures. If you meet those criteria, this is likely to be pretty strong. But that's quite an if. Of course, there are some more combo-type shenanigans you can do with this - returning all your stuff to play after saccing it, for example, so if that's something your deck wants, this could be a good card, but for the "normal" use, of "getting all the things after a wrath", if feel there's just not that many decks out there which it fits into.
- Rabid Wombat
Nevinyrral's Disk is also good as it only require 1 as part of the mass removal. Essentially if you can set your deck up so that you can get mass removal without having to spend much mana.
Niv-Mizzet Reborn
Feather, the Redeemed
Estrid, the Masked
Teshar
Tymna/Ravos
Najeela, Blade-Blossom
Firesong & Sunspeaker
Zur the Enchanter
Lazav, the Multifarious
Ishai+Reyhan
Click images for decks->
-Prime Speaker Vannifar
---------------------Will & Rowan Kenrith
http://www.commandercast.com/category/articles/generally-speaking
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The EWit loop has been very strong in Meren the couple times I've been able to achieve it.
Steel Sabotage'ng Orbs of Mellowness since 2011.
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I guess it depends on what the creatures in your meta are. We have a Yisan player and a Karador value engine player in one of my primary groups, so wether it’s just profiting off a wipe, or taking advantage of Karador when he gets Gravepact going, I’ll always profit enough that a wipe won’t be too much of a feel bad. If it’s more aggressive critters then I could see how it’s a feel bad.