It's pretty admirable that you'd hold your trump cards back until your meta can scale to meet them, I must say. It's frustrating being thumped by someone who clearly has more expendable income and a vast collection to draw from when you don't have the same resources.
It's honestly not as much fun to play like that. It's also the reason I'm a strong supporter of proxies - I want to play things like duals and Moat because I own them, but I don't want people at the table feeling like they're out of the game because they don't want to or are unable to spend that much on cardstock. That's even more true with current card prices. I would never be able to have the collection I have if I had started in the last couple years.
For me, I think that's partly because the fun is in the actual journey, not the destination (win or loss). I have a reasonable collection now, but still missed the end of reserved edition by a year or two, and bowed out of the game for a few years prior to Urza's block. Clearly, my timing is impeccable. Either way I still don't like handing a beating downwards; whatever I'm playing I try to make it an even fight where I can.
It's pretty admirable that you'd hold your trump cards back until your meta can scale to meet them, I must say. It's frustrating being thumped by someone who clearly has more expendable income and a vast collection to draw from when you don't have the same resources.
It's honestly not as much fun to play like that. It's also the reason I'm a strong supporter of proxies - I want to play things like duals and Moat because I own them, but I don't want people at the table feeling like they're out of the game because they don't want to or are unable to spend that much on cardstock. That's even more true with current card prices. I would never be able to have the collection I have if I had started in the last couple years.
For me, I think that's partly because the fun is in the actual journey, not the destination (win or loss). I have a reasonable collection now, but still missed the end of reserved edition by a year or two, and bowed out of the game for a few years prior to Urza's block. Clearly, my timing is impeccable. Either way I still don't like handing a beating downwards; whatever I'm playing I try to make it an even fight where I can.
+1 with what Weebo said. It's no fun when someone gets shut down because you threw a wallet at them. Some stuff is fine because it's not excessively powerful like Telekinesis or Argivian Archaeologist, but other stuff does not have any reasonable analogues and are gamebreaking.
It was less about disposable income and more about timing for me. I got back into Magic in 2008 and rabidly bought all the singles I ever wanted. At some point, I realized that I had better buy the reserved list cards I wanted, because they would be unavailable later; case and point, when Gray Merchant of Asphodel was spoiled, I went out and bought my one copy of Invoke Prejudice (for $35, moderately played)... since 'devotion to black' was a mechanic, I had some serious suspicion that 'devotion to blue' would also be a mechanic. No surprise later, by Born of the Gods, it was $150, and has never come back down. In hindsight, I was probably wrong about the reason for the spike ('Devotion to blue' appears on precious few cards).
It's pretty admirable that you'd hold your trump cards back until your meta can scale to meet them, I must say. It's frustrating being thumped by someone who clearly has more expendable income and a vast collection to draw from when you don't have the same resources.
I don't agree. This is an open format, and one we all started collecting in at different times. Let me play my cards just like you want to play yours. That is my privilege I earned by investing into my "shrine" to Mardu as I've called it.
I really didn't want to see this thread degenerate into a slam of people playing old, pricey cards. This is exactly the format in which those cards can be played; in fact, it was designed in part to give people a format in which those cards could be played, because things like Invoke Prejudice and All Hallows Eve and Moat are not viable Legacy/Vintage cards. They only work in a less competitive, more social setting. Heck, it was originally based around the Elder Dragons from Legends, which are some of the least cost-effective cards ever printed.
Are some of the old cards pretty over-powered? Sure. You can say the same thing about much later cards, including many Storm and Dredge cards. And let's be real here, what's really scarier, Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale or a tuned Storm deck? And are some of the old cards hard for most players to access? Sure. Heck, I only have a lot of the old stuff I have because I started playing Magic within a few months of the original printings, and even though I have more disposable income than the average player, there's no way I'm going to buy cards that cost more than my monthly mortgage payment.
Having a deeper card pool gives you more options, and sometimes more power, than is available to a player who doesn't have the same resources, but that really isn't an issue in this format unless you are playing it competitively, which is not what it was designed to be. You can play old and pricey stuff, but you don't need that stuff to play and to do fine. Many of my decks have ABU duals and old cards, and they don't have significantly better win percentages than my decks which just have more recent cards and Ravnica duals. I think my Brudiclad and Edgar Markov decks - neither of which has anything from the Reserved list - have higher win percentages than my most pricey decks (Tazri 5-color allies and Kurkesh, both of which are pricey mostly because of the mana bases, with Kurkesh including Mishra's Workshop). The beauty of this format is that through the nature of multiplayer dynamics, politics and just luck of the draw, a player who has a well-built deck consisting mostly of junk rares and staples can pull out games against players with much pricier decks.
Edited to add an example:
Recently I played in a game with a guy who is fairly new to Commander, and to Magic in general. I am pretty sure he's been playing less than a year. He had two decks. One of them was a very fast Gishath dino tribal deck. It consisted mostly of dinos, green ramp, haste enablers and cards that made him resistant to boardwipes (things like Boros Charm, Rootborn Defenses and Heroic Intervention), plus a few staple removal cards and some recent green card draw (Beast Whisperer, Lifecrafter's Bestiary, Rishkar's Expertise). His manabase was mostly basic lands and a few CIPT duals and stuff like Evolving Wilds. I was playing my Lord Windgrace deck which, while not particularly pricey, still probably cost at least about 10x what his deck cost(I don't think he ran a single card approaching $10) and someone else was playing a superfriends build, and the Gishath player was more than holding his own.
It's pretty admirable that you'd hold your trump cards back until your meta can scale to meet them, I must say. It's frustrating being thumped by someone who clearly has more expendable income and a vast collection to draw from when you don't have the same resources.
Honestly most of those cards he mentioned are luxuries, except the duals and arguably mana drain and twister. I think out of those the only ones I own are nether void and invoke prejudice, and I've played them... once?
I really didn't want to see this thread degenerate into a slam of people playing old, pricey cards. This is exactly the format in which those cards can be played; in fact, it was designed in part to give people a format in which those cards could be played, because things like Invoke Prejudice and All Hallows Eve and Moat are not viable Legacy/Vintage cards. They only work in a less competitive, more social setting. Heck, it was originally based around the Elder Dragons from Legends, which are some of the least cost-effective cards ever printed.
Are some of the old cards pretty over-powered? Sure. You can say the same thing about much later cards, including many Storm and Dredge cards. And let's be real here, what's really scarier, Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale or a tuned Storm deck? And are some of the old cards hard for most players to access? Sure. Heck, I only have a lot of the old stuff I have because I started playing Magic within a few months of the original printings, and even though I have more disposable income than the average player, there's no way I'm going to buy cards that cost more than my monthly mortgage payment.
Having a deeper card pool gives you more options, and sometimes more power, than is available to a player who doesn't have the same resources, but that really isn't an issue in this format unless you are playing it competitively, which is not what it was designed to be. You can play old and pricey stuff, but you don't need that stuff to play and to do fine. Many of my decks have ABU duals and old cards, and they don't have significantly better win percentages than my decks which just have more recent cards and Ravnica duals. I think my Brudiclad and Edgar Markov decks - neither of which has anything from the Reserved list - have higher win percentages than my most pricey decks (Tazri 5-color allies and Kurkesh, both of which are pricey mostly because of the mana bases, with Kurkesh including Mishra's Workshop). The beauty of this format is that through the nature of multiplayer dynamics, politics and just luck of the draw, a player who has a well-built deck consisting mostly of junk rares and staples can pull out games against players with much pricier decks.
Edited to add an example:
Recently I played in a game with a guy who is fairly new to Commander, and to Magic in general. I am pretty sure he's been playing less than a year. He had two decks. One of them was a very fast Gishath dino tribal deck. It consisted mostly of dinos, green ramp, haste enablers and cards that made him resistant to boardwipes (things like Boros Charm, Rootborn Defenses and Heroic Intervention), plus a few staple removal cards and some recent green card draw (Beast Whisperer, Lifecrafter's Bestiary, Rishkar's Expertise). His manabase was mostly basic lands and a few CIPT duals and stuff like Evolving Wilds. I was playing my Lord Windgrace deck which, while not particularly pricey, still probably cost at least about 10x what his deck cost(I don't think he ran a single card approaching $10) and someone else was playing a superfriends build, and the Gishath player was more than holding his own.
Allow me to respond at this point by saying that my comments were not intended to slam people with a full raft of reserved list options. If I had access to them, I'd play them; although, as I always do, I would definitely adhere to my rule of choosing a deck that scales appropriately to the rest of the table. I'm also aware that a lot of these cards are expensive but not necessarily useful everywhere. Some of them are entirely corner cases, and some are only expensive by virtue of being in an older set. The only cards I resent seeing at a casual table are original duals, especially someone cracking fetches to get them. That being said, a deck can do just fine without them. Even then, if or when this happens so long as the deck is table appropriate I'm fine; this is something that I'm realising more as time goes on. No card is a villain - a card/deck is only as broken as a player allows it to be.
My wife runs Gishath dino-tribe, and yeah, it really doesn't take a ton of encouragement to make things really tough for a table. There's also a reason we won't ever see storm or dredge come back as mechanics. They're competitive as hell. You're also right, the beauty of this format is that anything can happen and monetary value won't always win you a game. I saw a Zahid, Djinn of the Lamp voltron deck win yesterday; even the Zahid player couldn't believe it happened.
I really didn't want to see this thread degenerate into a slam of people playing old, pricey cards.
Oof. This is not what I intended. People ought to play what they want, but, I find that there is some truth to being able to dunk players by having expensive cards, and that may not be to the player's taste. That is all.
I really didn't want to see this thread degenerate into a slam of people playing old, pricey cards.
Oof. This is not what I intended. People ought to play what they want, but, I find that there is some truth to being able to dunk players by having expensive cards, and that may not be to the player's taste. That is all.
If people use their expensive cards to build competitive, killer decks, sure. That's lame, unless they are playing against other cEDH players. Are there some people who do that? Sure. We should rightly call them a-holes.
On the other hand, there are people who simply have deeper card pools, either because they've been playing for a long time and picked up a lot of stuff along the way, or because they've paid for them (or both, I guess). The question is, what do they do with those cards? Are they playing 100-card singleton Legacy, or are they playing decks built around a bunch of cards that can't complete in Vintage or Legacy or even Modern (were they in the Modern card pool)? Not everybody has original duals or good fetches, which is frankly unfortunate, but not everyone who does have them uses them to build T4 combo-wombo instawin decks, either. For example, one of my decks includes Badlands, Underground Sea, Volcanic Island, the corresponding Ravnica duals, Bloodstained Mire, Polluted Delta and Cavern of Souls. Does that give me an advantage over some player who has a bunch of CIPT duals from recent standard sets and Commander precons? Sure. But fact is, the deck in question is still a vampire tribal deck commanded by Garza Zol, Plague Queen. Yep, I might use my fetches to get an Unlimited or Revised dual land, but my T1 play (if I have one) is still gonna be something like Blade of the Bloodchief or Guul Draz Assassin. If a strongly-thematic, combat-based tribal deck headed by 7-mana beater counts as picking on the scrubs just because it has a strong mana base and a few other pricey cards (Vampiric Tutor being the most pricey outside the manabase, and chosen because it was obviously the most thematic), I dunno what to say. My other vampire deck - Edgar Markov - has no orignial duals and only one fetch, but it has a much higher win rate - and a tendency to win a lot quicker - than my decks including more pricey stuff, simply because Edgar is a vastly more powerful commander, even when (as the case with my build) the deck isn't based around all the 1-2 drop vampires and swarming the field with vamp tokens.
I’ve got got 25 EDH decks currently, and my Darien deck is easily in the top third in terms of power and fun. In fact it’s one of my 8 foiled out decks. I’ve had it for almost 8 years now, so I’ve easily got well over 100 games piloting it. For the first 5 or so of those years I didn’t have a Crypt. And, while it does now run a Mana Crypt, there’s absolutely NO way it’s essential. Granted it’s not a 0 cost rock, but there are plenty of lands that you can use to ping yourself with to create Soldiers. Nomad StadiumAncient TombCity of BrassTarnished Citadel and Grand Coliseum have provided more than enough redundancy that the deck is a consistent top performer.
I’m attaching pics of the deck to give you an idea of what it consists of. If you ignore the foiled out nature of it, and remove the Crypt and Zhang Fei, the whole deck probably costs just $300-$400. Not pictured are 16 Plains and a Smothering Tithe I’m waiting on.
ATTACHMENTS
D74F023E-423D-4B69-B900-92958C1111FF
22B96D8D-A695-432F-A389-2C6BBDC8CA76
14AA0915-175E-48AE-B5A1-134581FDD81C
13D36310-AF65-4E2A-8805-1D93FD6B1789
204F963E-9D06-4907-9737-6F8B1E1588CD
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Truthfully, Seedborne Muse but the main reason I don't have it now is it would be too op in my derevi deck... Not to say I didbt play prophet back in the day.
Otherwise I'd say dual lands bc I need more targets.
I really didn't want to see this thread degenerate into a slam of people playing old, pricey cards.
Oof. This is not what I intended. People ought to play what they want, but, I find that there is some truth to being able to dunk players by having expensive cards, and that may not be to the player's taste. That is all.
If people use their expensive cards to build competitive, killer decks, sure. That's lame, unless they are playing against other cEDH players. Are there some people who do that? Sure. We should rightly call them a-holes.
On the other hand, there are people who simply have deeper card pools, either because they've been playing for a long time and picked up a lot of stuff along the way, or because they've paid for them (or both, I guess). The question is, what do they do with those cards? Are they playing 100-card singleton Legacy, or are they playing decks built around a bunch of cards that can't complete in Vintage or Legacy or even Modern (were they in the Modern card pool)? Not everybody has original duals or good fetches, which is frankly unfortunate, but not everyone who does have them uses them to build T4 combo-wombo instawin decks, either. For example, one of my decks includes Badlands, Underground Sea, Volcanic Island, the corresponding Ravnica duals, Bloodstained Mire, Polluted Delta and Cavern of Souls. Does that give me an advantage over some player who has a bunch of CIPT duals from recent standard sets and Commander precons? Sure. But fact is, the deck in question is still a vampire tribal deck commanded by Garza Zol, Plague Queen. Yep, I might use my fetches to get an Unlimited or Revised dual land, but my T1 play (if I have one) is still gonna be something like Blade of the Bloodchief or Guul Draz Assassin. If a strongly-thematic, combat-based tribal deck headed by 7-mana beater counts as picking on the scrubs just because it has a strong mana base and a few other pricey cards (Vampiric Tutor being the most pricey outside the manabase, and chosen because it was obviously the most thematic), I dunno what to say. My other vampire deck - Edgar Markov - has no orignial duals and only one fetch, but it has a much higher win rate - and a tendency to win a lot quicker - than my decks including more pricey stuff, simply because Edgar is a vastly more powerful commander, even when (as the case with my build) the deck isn't based around all the 1-2 drop vampires and swarming the field with vamp tokens.
To be fair, the people in that first scenario are the sort that would dunk people regardless of the card pool they're drawing from. And yes, there's no way I begrudge the second scenario. I'm jealous, but as long as I'm not being trolled, I'm more curious to see a unique, original list that's as complete as the history of magic allow.
...some day i'll have them, some day. the island i can easily get, but since its just a dual and its expensive i can't justify it since the cost to get one also enables me to get staples for like 5 other decks that are half complete
...some day i'll have them, some day. the island i can easily get, but since its just a dual and its expensive i can't justify it since the cost to get one also enables me to get staples for like 5 other decks that are half complete
I think that's half of the weird part about expensive cards; like JWK was saying, many of them are luxuries. Speaking from experience, ABUR duals are not *that* much better unless you're playing 4 or 5 colour. 3 colour decks often do just fine without them.
The Mishra's Workshop doesn't really have duplicated functionality, though, Ancient Tomb does a good job of mimicking it...
Speaking from experience, ABUR duals are not *that* much better unless you're playing 4 or 5 colour. 3 colour decks often do just fine without them.
Functionally, they're no better than the checklands if you don't have fetchlands. But once you do? There's so much power, SO MUCH in being able to command your manabase such that you can flip between WW to BBB in the time between t2 and t3.
Chains of Mephistopheles. Used to own a copy. I almost never used it and ended up throwing into decks that couldn't properly make use of it just to actually use it. Sold it early last year to get ~80% of the cost of my new gaming pc. I wouldn't really miss it as much if it weren't for the huge dredge kick I've been on lately.
Speaking from experience, ABUR duals are not *that* much better unless you're playing 4 or 5 colour. 3 colour decks often do just fine without them.
Functionally, they're no better than the checklands if you don't have fetchlands. But once you do? There's so much power, SO MUCH in being able to command your manabase such that you can flip between WW to BBB in the time between t2 and t3.
Certainly you can do that, but I often don't feel like you *need* to, unless you're playing a very greedy deck in terms of mana costs. I suppose I don't, but, there are folks who play punishing cards in my groups; Price of Progress, Primal Order, etc.
Speaking from experience, ABUR duals are not *that* much better unless you're playing 4 or 5 colour. 3 colour decks often do just fine without them.
Functionally, they're no better than the checklands if you don't have fetchlands. But once you do? There's so much power, SO MUCH in being able to command your manabase such that you can flip between WW to BBB in the time between t2 and t3.
Certainly you can do that, but I often don't feel like you *need* to, unless you're playing a very greedy deck in terms of mana costs. I suppose I don't, but, there are folks who play punishing cards in my groups; Price of Progress, Primal Order, etc.
The Grand Abolisher to Necropotence line of play is what I was going for, there. Sometimes you DO need to, to land that. Even when nonbasic hate is aplenty, I get it, you just have to play around it or play faster than it. Or, like, this is the format with a hundred tutours, just burn one to nuke the offending hate piece.
For me, I think that's partly because the fun is in the actual journey, not the destination (win or loss). I have a reasonable collection now, but still missed the end of reserved edition by a year or two, and bowed out of the game for a few years prior to Urza's block. Clearly, my timing is impeccable. Either way I still don't like handing a beating downwards; whatever I'm playing I try to make it an even fight where I can.
It was less about disposable income and more about timing for me. I got back into Magic in 2008 and rabidly bought all the singles I ever wanted. At some point, I realized that I had better buy the reserved list cards I wanted, because they would be unavailable later; case and point, when Gray Merchant of Asphodel was spoiled, I went out and bought my one copy of Invoke Prejudice (for $35, moderately played)... since 'devotion to black' was a mechanic, I had some serious suspicion that 'devotion to blue' would also be a mechanic. No surprise later, by Born of the Gods, it was $150, and has never come back down. In hindsight, I was probably wrong about the reason for the spike ('Devotion to blue' appears on precious few cards).
http://www.commandercast.com/category/articles/generally-speaking
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I don't agree. This is an open format, and one we all started collecting in at different times. Let me play my cards just like you want to play yours. That is my privilege I earned by investing into my "shrine" to Mardu as I've called it.
Steel Sabotage'ng Orbs of Mellowness since 2011.
Are some of the old cards pretty over-powered? Sure. You can say the same thing about much later cards, including many Storm and Dredge cards. And let's be real here, what's really scarier, Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale or a tuned Storm deck? And are some of the old cards hard for most players to access? Sure. Heck, I only have a lot of the old stuff I have because I started playing Magic within a few months of the original printings, and even though I have more disposable income than the average player, there's no way I'm going to buy cards that cost more than my monthly mortgage payment.
Having a deeper card pool gives you more options, and sometimes more power, than is available to a player who doesn't have the same resources, but that really isn't an issue in this format unless you are playing it competitively, which is not what it was designed to be. You can play old and pricey stuff, but you don't need that stuff to play and to do fine. Many of my decks have ABU duals and old cards, and they don't have significantly better win percentages than my decks which just have more recent cards and Ravnica duals. I think my Brudiclad and Edgar Markov decks - neither of which has anything from the Reserved list - have higher win percentages than my most pricey decks (Tazri 5-color allies and Kurkesh, both of which are pricey mostly because of the mana bases, with Kurkesh including Mishra's Workshop). The beauty of this format is that through the nature of multiplayer dynamics, politics and just luck of the draw, a player who has a well-built deck consisting mostly of junk rares and staples can pull out games against players with much pricier decks.
Edited to add an example:
Recently I played in a game with a guy who is fairly new to Commander, and to Magic in general. I am pretty sure he's been playing less than a year. He had two decks. One of them was a very fast Gishath dino tribal deck. It consisted mostly of dinos, green ramp, haste enablers and cards that made him resistant to boardwipes (things like Boros Charm, Rootborn Defenses and Heroic Intervention), plus a few staple removal cards and some recent green card draw (Beast Whisperer, Lifecrafter's Bestiary, Rishkar's Expertise). His manabase was mostly basic lands and a few CIPT duals and stuff like Evolving Wilds. I was playing my Lord Windgrace deck which, while not particularly pricey, still probably cost at least about 10x what his deck cost(I don't think he ran a single card approaching $10) and someone else was playing a superfriends build, and the Gishath player was more than holding his own.
Honestly most of those cards he mentioned are luxuries, except the duals and arguably mana drain and twister. I think out of those the only ones I own are nether void and invoke prejudice, and I've played them... once?
Misc. EDH Stuff: Commander Cube | Zombies (Horde)
Resources:Commander Rulings FAQ | Commander Deckbuilding Guide
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Allow me to respond at this point by saying that my comments were not intended to slam people with a full raft of reserved list options. If I had access to them, I'd play them; although, as I always do, I would definitely adhere to my rule of choosing a deck that scales appropriately to the rest of the table. I'm also aware that a lot of these cards are expensive but not necessarily useful everywhere. Some of them are entirely corner cases, and some are only expensive by virtue of being in an older set. The only cards I resent seeing at a casual table are original duals, especially someone cracking fetches to get them. That being said, a deck can do just fine without them. Even then, if or when this happens so long as the deck is table appropriate I'm fine; this is something that I'm realising more as time goes on. No card is a villain - a card/deck is only as broken as a player allows it to be.
My wife runs Gishath dino-tribe, and yeah, it really doesn't take a ton of encouragement to make things really tough for a table. There's also a reason we won't ever see storm or dredge come back as mechanics. They're competitive as hell. You're also right, the beauty of this format is that anything can happen and monetary value won't always win you a game. I saw a Zahid, Djinn of the Lamp voltron deck win yesterday; even the Zahid player couldn't believe it happened.
http://www.commandercast.com/category/articles/generally-speaking
Follow me on Twitter: @generalspeak
If people use their expensive cards to build competitive, killer decks, sure. That's lame, unless they are playing against other cEDH players. Are there some people who do that? Sure. We should rightly call them a-holes.
On the other hand, there are people who simply have deeper card pools, either because they've been playing for a long time and picked up a lot of stuff along the way, or because they've paid for them (or both, I guess). The question is, what do they do with those cards? Are they playing 100-card singleton Legacy, or are they playing decks built around a bunch of cards that can't complete in Vintage or Legacy or even Modern (were they in the Modern card pool)? Not everybody has original duals or good fetches, which is frankly unfortunate, but not everyone who does have them uses them to build T4 combo-wombo instawin decks, either. For example, one of my decks includes Badlands, Underground Sea, Volcanic Island, the corresponding Ravnica duals, Bloodstained Mire, Polluted Delta and Cavern of Souls. Does that give me an advantage over some player who has a bunch of CIPT duals from recent standard sets and Commander precons? Sure. But fact is, the deck in question is still a vampire tribal deck commanded by Garza Zol, Plague Queen. Yep, I might use my fetches to get an Unlimited or Revised dual land, but my T1 play (if I have one) is still gonna be something like Blade of the Bloodchief or Guul Draz Assassin. If a strongly-thematic, combat-based tribal deck headed by 7-mana beater counts as picking on the scrubs just because it has a strong mana base and a few other pricey cards (Vampiric Tutor being the most pricey outside the manabase, and chosen because it was obviously the most thematic), I dunno what to say. My other vampire deck - Edgar Markov - has no orignial duals and only one fetch, but it has a much higher win rate - and a tendency to win a lot quicker - than my decks including more pricey stuff, simply because Edgar is a vastly more powerful commander, even when (as the case with my build) the deck isn't based around all the 1-2 drop vampires and swarming the field with vamp tokens.
No single card is a "must" (but yeah Mana Crypt is pretty good in it).
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Resources:Commander Rulings FAQ | Commander Deckbuilding Guide
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I’ve got got 25 EDH decks currently, and my Darien deck is easily in the top third in terms of power and fun. In fact it’s one of my 8 foiled out decks. I’ve had it for almost 8 years now, so I’ve easily got well over 100 games piloting it. For the first 5 or so of those years I didn’t have a Crypt. And, while it does now run a Mana Crypt, there’s absolutely NO way it’s essential. Granted it’s not a 0 cost rock, but there are plenty of lands that you can use to ping yourself with to create Soldiers. Nomad Stadium Ancient Tomb City of Brass Tarnished Citadel and Grand Coliseum have provided more than enough redundancy that the deck is a consistent top performer.
I’m attaching pics of the deck to give you an idea of what it consists of. If you ignore the foiled out nature of it, and remove the Crypt and Zhang Fei, the whole deck probably costs just $300-$400. Not pictured are 16 Plains and a Smothering Tithe I’m waiting on.
Otherwise I'd say dual lands bc I need more targets.
Mox Diamond Mox Opal (was secretly hoping this is what took the modern ban hit so it would slash the price), and Lion's Eye Diamond
Mana Crypt is probably a distant fourth having missed the boat on that last reprint.
Hoping for the reprints of the two that it is possible for but wondering where those would slot in now with no Masters on the horizon.
BGGRock
Modern
BRGJund
BBGRock
To be fair, the people in that first scenario are the sort that would dunk people regardless of the card pool they're drawing from. And yes, there's no way I begrudge the second scenario. I'm jealous, but as long as I'm not being trolled, I'm more curious to see a unique, original list that's as complete as the history of magic allow.
Bruse Tarl & Kraum, Ludevic's Opus
Mayael the Anima
mishra's workshop
volcanic island
in that order
for jhoira, weatherlight captain
...some day i'll have them, some day. the island i can easily get, but since its just a dual and its expensive i can't justify it since the cost to get one also enables me to get staples for like 5 other decks that are half complete
The Mishra's Workshop doesn't really have duplicated functionality, though, Ancient Tomb does a good job of mimicking it...
http://www.commandercast.com/category/articles/generally-speaking
Follow me on Twitter: @generalspeak
Functionally, they're no better than the checklands if you don't have fetchlands. But once you do? There's so much power, SO MUCH in being able to command your manabase such that you can flip between WW to BBB in the time between t2 and t3.
Steel Sabotage'ng Orbs of Mellowness since 2011.
WBG Karador, Ghost Chieftain
B Toshiro Umezawa
BG Pharika, God of Affliction - Necromancy and Politics
WWW The Church of Heliod
WBR Zurgo, Helmsmasher
RG Wort, the Raidmother
UBR Jeleva, Nephalia's Scourge
UG Vorel of the Hull Clade
http://www.commandercast.com/category/articles/generally-speaking
Follow me on Twitter: @generalspeak
The Grand Abolisher to Necropotence line of play is what I was going for, there. Sometimes you DO need to, to land that. Even when nonbasic hate is aplenty, I get it, you just have to play around it or play faster than it. Or, like, this is the format with a hundred tutours, just burn one to nuke the offending hate piece.
Steel Sabotage'ng Orbs of Mellowness since 2011.