MTG Salvation

This is my first deck that really focuses on discard. There's a lot of ways I could have gone with it, but in this case I'm mostly just focusing on making everyone discard everything, all the time. The only other major theme here is bounce as my only removal, partly for lulz, and partly because it's a good way to make sure my discard continues to be relevant even late into the game.

I ran a similar list a while back, but ran into the issue of how to kill once everyone is out of a hand. Liliana's Caress and its ilk are too slow for multiplayer.

What is your way to end it once you've stripped the hand, and how do you deal with people ganging up on you?

Quote from Teysa_Karlov »

I ran a similar list a while back, but ran into the issue of how to kill once everyone is out of a hand. Liliana's Caress and its ilk are too slow for multiplayer.

What is your way to end it once you've stripped the hand, and how do you deal with people ganging up on you?

Yeah I'm not impressed with cards like liliana's caress/megrim/etc. quest for the nihil stone is a bit better, but I still don't like having cards that ONLY do damage in my deck. Even if hippy only does 2 damage to one player per turn, at least it also forwards my game plan.

Main way to win is just beating down with specters and such. With repeatable bounce and discard I can hopefully keep the board clean-ish. Akroma's memorial, filth + urborg, etc can make my little beaters pretty annoying. Could bounce + steal stuff with oni to win, that'd be hilarious.

To be totally honest, I think there's a high probability I'm going to get ganged up on and lose playing this deck, but I haven't played a discard-focused deck before and I'm just curious to experiment with it. I suspect that people are really going to hate playing against it and will treat me as a much greater threat than I actually am. I mean, I know I hate playing without a hand too so I guess I can't blame them. Anyway it's mostly just an experiment to try focusing around this particular synergy to see if going all-in on discard and bounce is enough, or if I'll need to have other ways to control the board, or what. Or if it's just too hate-drawing to be worth playing at all.

It's also an excuse to play one of my sweet old legends legends. Haven't helmed one of those since angus mackenzie, and that was so long ago I don't think I even have a decklist for it. Which, considering how far back my decklists go, is really saying something.

As expected it worked pretty not great. The specters were too ineffective in a multiplayer game, and it drew a lot of hate despite not doing a whole hell of a lot most games.

First game was a 5-player game where I kind of focused on one guy because he had a pretty strong deck and I found him to be an obnoxious person, but then got blindsided by a copied expropriate by another player with a fairly mediocre-powered deck, but was nevertheless strong enough to win with 2 extra turns and everyone's best permanents. Then did a couple 3-player games, first one I ended up 1v1 vs omnath 1.0 with me at 1 life, and couldn't quite manage to get a lock with bounce + discard because I was having mana problems - too few blue to bounce stuff repeatedly (something I'll try to fix with the deck, utility lands are definitely too high). Second one I pulled off the sick cyclonic rift into sire of insanity, but then one player topdecked the 13 zombies card and killed the rest of us (we were at lowish life).

Overall I don't think it ended up being super fun to play. The only times discard really went off was when, surprise surprise, it was all at once, a la sire of insanity. The fact that any random black deck could throw in myojin and a few tutors and ramp, and end up being BETTER at discard than a dedicated discard deck is pretty discouraging. I could see gwendlyn as a sort of soft lock with bounce AFTER the myojin hits, and she's probably pretty good 1v1 on turn 4, but in multiplayer the effect is pretty minimal without something to rip hands off in the first place.

Your decks are always a fascinating read since you approach EDH differently, but yeah this seems to confirm that if you want to do Discard EDH, you need to be wheeling and exploiting the power of Wheels alongside stuff like Waste Not, Nath of the Gilt Leaf, or Nekusar, the Mind Razer. Trying to pick apart hands one or two cards at a time is likely to draw a ton of aggro while not achieving enough to win.