MTG Salvation

Lol you could build an entire deck around that theme and just troll people. I once heard of a deck that did that and was actually kind of competitive. It was called the most fun deck to lose to. I'll have to look it up again sometime. I think it was a Tariel deck that was just there for the colors or something.

Quote from Elminster »

Personally I dislike metagaming in EDH. You just get dead draws that end up being a liability in the hopes of ensuring some protection versus a nitch probability. It's the 10th man syndrome, prepare for an alleged disaster. I don't expect disaster, so the 10th man ideology is useless to me. This is, of course for me specifically, I am not calling out anyone else to follow (unless they want to).

I always play the same deck honestly. If someone feels like mainboarding red elemental blast, choke and boil, go for it. I find that more often players I know that did this very thing before just end up taking these cards out anyway, because they find the dead weight isn't worth it overall. I can understand perhaps a piece of GY removal because that is exceptionally common in EDH, but specific hate cards mainboard is a stretch.

The only dilemma to me has ever been power level. If some of a playgroup are playing hyper cuthroat lists that win consistently as early as turn 3-4, then the decks have to change to either become top end to match, or the power level lowered. I don't think any player will hate another player out as long as the power level is similar in the group.

I find your points interesting because I agree but at the same time I can't build a deck that doesn't have an answer to everything lol. At least 1 answer anyway. I'll ~7 removal spells (often more if they are on bodies that I already want anyway) and while 4-5 of those are dedicated for creatures I will make sure to have 2-4 for enchantments and artifacts too. Obviously I'll prioritize versatile removal like Utter End but Into the Core and Wear // Tear are completely reasonable to answer any craziness that might arise.

Is this the kind of thing you are talking about or do you mean things like Choke, Boil, etc. which are ridiculously narrow hate cards? Because I would never run those cards. That's a waste of valuable deck building space.

Quote from illakunsaa »

Séance

Y/N?

Originally when I saw this card I dismissed it because it exiled your stuff, tokens not getting haste and costed a ton of mana. After seeing SaffronOlive play seance it made me think "man seance looks awesome". Do you think seance is playable in edh? How does it compare to other options? What kind of deck is best for seance if any?

I freaking love that card. I bought 4-copies back when it was released lol. I think the card is good and its a lot of fun but you have to build with it in mind. One of the biggest advantages is that you don't pay any man to activate its ability and it triggers on EVERY upkeep, including opponents. It basically guarantees you can trigger Ephara, God of the Polis, for example, as long as you have creatures in the 'yard. I looked it up on EDHREC to see what other people were playing with it and discovered that its popular in decks that run a lot of ways to copy creatures or tokens so basically Bant colors (for things like Populate and Rite of Replication). I think that's as good an idea as any. Red has plenty of ways to give things haste if that was a real draw back but honestly, having haste only matters some of the time because haste on your opponent's turn doesn't do you any good.

I think it is best in decks that still want value from creatures that have died but aren't necessarily running a ton of ways to get them back. In EDH, if you want Seance you might also want Back from the Brink. You're probably going to want to grab some kind of super high impact etb creature like Luminate Primordial, Cataclysmic Gearhulk, Duplicant/Phyrexian Ingestor, etc. but are also good blockers and then just sequence your plays in such a way that you can use it to protect yourself on your opponent's turns.

In short, yes. I love it but its best in ETB effect decks that don't usually have a lot of ways to get creatures back from the Graveyard (like in UW).

Ugh, now I'm going to have to build an Ephara deck. The bug got planted and now I need to scratch that itch!

Whip of Erebos, Séance, and Back from the Brink are the only ones I know of but they have obvious downsides.

Otherwise there is Palace Siege and Phyrexian Reclamation.

I played Olivia, Mobilized for War. I think it has some real potential if built well. I'll be honest I'm not sure how to build it well though lol. I felt like using the Madness mechanic really helped me build a stronger army than it would appear at first. Olivia 2.0 can be a REAL beating with things like Hero's Blade and Blade of the Bloodchief. I think the deck needs to go deep on both the +1/+1 counter and discard mechanics and heavily synergize to really get out of it what you want. That's just me though.

Quote from DunstilBrejik »

Quote from herenorthere »

I don't like Ravenous Rats. I'd prefer Specter without Witches especially if you are playing Gary. Otherwise Wicked Akuba can do a LOT of damage.

Ravenous Rats I mostly include just to have something on the lower end of the curve that has an upside, do you think Duress might just be better?

Witches I haven't had too much luck with in the last few games, but it has had games where it has been amazing, and especially against Kuldotha I think it has some value, and 2 devotion for 2 mana isn't that bad.

In general I've been trying to switch away from a creature focused build and transition into CA almost entirely. I'm now running 6 to 7 read the bones effects with a much greater discard package than before and I've been having good luck with it, even against blue based control decks which used to be a terrible matchup. Anyone doing similar?

Actually this is why I like Midnight Scavengers + Graf Rats over Gurmag Angler + Ravenous Rats/Cuombajj Witches. 1) It gives you a lower cmc play which helps you pressure slower opponents and slow down faster opponents and 2) Scavengers gives you card advantage in the late game which Angler can't do. Scavengers can get back any < 3cmc drop you want such as Rats for a big beater to finish off the opponent, Rager to draw more cards (because you get ANOTHER body + card off of Scavengers at that point. REALLY good play), Liliana's Specter/Chittering Rats which is still CA.

Quick dissertation on Rats + Scavengers: I've used their recursion ability to set up bigger Gary's after several trades with the opponent to thin their board. You drop a Scavengers to grab something else, play it, and then next turn drop a Gary for 4-5 where you would have only gotten 2 before. Oh, and that's a drain for 4-5 plus you have creatures on board to attack with...Plus if you can get Chittering Host to flip, its one of the single best creatures available in Pauper (5/6 Menace Haste with ETB +1/+0 and Meance to your team). While I think its typically the wrong play to try and push for the flip, in the situations where it happens organically (you have both creatures in hand and the opponent as no cards in hand, etc.) you pretty much just win. Having Haste is a REALLY BIG DEAL. Its not unusual to hit large land counts in MBC and being able to turn 7 mana into a bare minimum 5 damage that turn is a BIG deal. That's a better return than both Gary AND Angler. AND if your opponent happens to have the two blockers necessary to stop your Menacing threat, then its big enough to chew through most opposition and live. I dunno, its not to be underestimated but you also have to know how to play it and just trying to ram it out there and force the flip is probably the wrong play like 80% of the time. Its best to play it patient and use it to gain card advantage and work the game state in your favor before playing for the flip. Remember, you are the control deck.

While Angler matches up better against opposing Anglers and Fangren Marauders (for Tron), I think the overall power level of Scavengers in other match ups really make it worth it. It pumps any other creature you have on the board as well which can represent as much damage as a Gary sometimes.

There are a lot of great "reanimator" cards for low cmc creatures that can help your go wide plan. You can run cards like Austere Command, Return to the Ranks, Driver of the Dead, Order of Whiteclay, Swift Warkite, Crypt Champion, Orzhov Charm and a few key reanimator spells like Immortal Servitude, Return to the Ranks, Dread Return and Unburial Rites with some hastey things like Mogis' Maurader, Lightning Mauler, Fervor, and Hammer of Purphoros to get in some huge swings with little dudes. I have a Tymaret deck like this (obviously eschewing the options in White) and it works shockingly well. It can really surprise and opponent and it has a lot of accidental and easily repeatable recursion with tons of board wipes to just reset the board, bring back a few doods, hit for ~10 on whatever opponents are open for as long as I can get through and once I'm outclassed, dump the board, and do it again.

I've often considered switching to Alesha because there are so many good cards in white for the strategy I just haven't done it.

I run her in a Mono-U Artifact deck helmed by Padeem. I use Thopter Spy Network, Efficient Construction, and all of the Junk Diver-esque cards. She could easily be the Commander because you can easily get back anything you sac and produces tons of tokens too so its a lot of fun. I think that is maybe another good take on Jalira if you want to still do that thing but have back up plans as well.

Quote from Hunding Gjornersen »

I run Night's Whisper and Read the Bones in virtually every black deck I have. Sign in Blood always makes the cut in mono-B decks, too. These cards are waaaaaay under-rated in this format, often even by people who support them. Consider Armillary Sphere. Especially in budget and/or non-green decks, this dinky little artifact is in extremely wide use as a way to fix colors and hit land drops early in the game. It's very very good at that task, making most 2-land opening hands that include it perfectly keepable. I was really high on this card for a long time, running it in every deck I had. Things were great, at first. I was hitting land drops, had the right colors to cast my spells, and enjoyed the benefits of going up a card. But then I started drawing Armillary Sphere on turns 10-12, where it's essentially a paper-weight. That's when it occurred to me that Night's Whisper, Sign in Blood and Read the Bones also let you keep a lot of land-light hands while not stinking up the place when drawn later in the game. These cards add consistency to your early game and card advantage (and in the case of Read the Bones, substantial card selection) to your mid and late games.

I think this best explains why these cards are good. It also explains why Ponder/Preordain/Serum Visions/Brainstorm are good. Any kind of early game draw is awesome for purposes of keeping your early game on track. If you don't need it then you cash it in for gas once you get down to 2 or 3 cards in hand. You don't get that kind of versatility out of cards like Phyrexian Arena (which offers other advantages) and I think that is personally why I like them so much. When Read the Bones was released I bought a copy for every single Commander deck I have with black in it and to date, they all still have their copy intact. The ability to scry before draw, as someone else has mentioned, is the real key to the cards power. Its basically a Black Preordain that nets you an extra card for 2 more mana.

I think your comparison to Boggles is very interesting. I mean, its kind of like that but the deck is really more built around maximizing the output from Nightsky Mimic and less about the enchantments themselves. Its about finding as many multi-colored spells as possible to trigger the activated ability of Mimic. The reason why Gift of Orzvhova and Edge of the Divinity are so good is because they trigger Mimic but also have lasting effect on the board. I could see an argument for adding Heliod's Piglrim though to grab the two enchantments. While I think that Ethereal Armor is a powerful card, things like Castigate, Unmake, and Pillory of the Sleepless are more what the deck wants to be doing because they are powerful AND trigger Mimic. Mimic is a 3-swing kill w/ Edge of the Divinity if you can consistently trigger it. Gift of Orzhova is a nice addition because Mimic is kind of weak if you can't consistently trigger it but Gift is on curve and being able to hit for 5 Lifelink in the air can really swing the tempo in your favor. Leaving behind a 3/2 Lifelink Flier isn't the worst either if you never manage to trigger Mimic again. That's really what this deck is trying to do. Suiting up your other creatures to turn them into more viable threats definitely helps push Gift of Orzhova in terms of value in this deck, not so much because of the Boggle plan but because if your Mimic dies the other threats kind of suck on their own. Giving them Flying & +1/+1 or +3/+3 helps make them into more legitmate threats.

There used to be a thread for this but I can't find it now. I decided to just make a new one.

Since Gift of Orzhova was recently rarity shifted to Common I thought it might be a good time to re-look at this deck. This is a list I pulled off of MTGGoldish. Seems like a good enough starting point.



The list is pretty tight. Not sure what you would want to change up but I have a few ideas.

1. Remove Blind Hunter. I hate saying that because its such a good creature I think. Alone it can represent upwards of 6 damage and 4 life gain all for doing things that just naturally happen over the course of a game. The problem I think is that it is the top of the curve and removing it means we can also cut a couple lands which let's us add a couple slots. I'm thinking -2 Blind Hunter, -1 Land (57 Cards)
2. Removing Blind Hunter reduces our creature count. We could consider adding additional copies of Mourning Thrull. Only thing is that Thrull doesn't get much benefit out of Gift of Orzhova. +2 Mourning Thrull (59 Cards)
3. We have a lot of removal, 8 copies in the main is probably overkill. I would maybe go down the Doom Blades because Mono-B is still a thing. -2 Doom Blades (57 Cards)
4. We have 3 slots we could add for Gift of Orzhova at this point. Fill 'er up I guess. +3 Gift of Orzhova (60 Cards)

Quote from mordekai47 »

In a physical game, I can draw my card and look at it before putting it into my hand. I will check out the videos. I have never played with the Miracle mechanic before, so I'm curious when is that window of opportunity to reveal the card and play it.

When you draw a Miracle card it pops up in one of those "Trigger" boxes and stays there until you play it or pass the trigger. You just click the trigger to put it on the stack if you want to use it.

You could run Rite of Consumption. It would work somewhat like Fling in Affinity.

Complete list (for convenience) + list of possible homes:

• Augur of Bolas: Potentially a U/R Spell, Counter-Burn, or Mystic Teachings
• Burning-Tree Emissary: Stompy, Gruul Aggro
• Call of the Conclave: Selesnya Good-stuff?
• Cower in Fear: MBC
• Dinrova Horror: No idea
• Falkenrath Noble: Tortured Existence? New brew most likely
• Gift of Orzhova: B/W Mimic Aggro
• Gnawing Zombie: Same as Noble
• Graceful Reprieve: New brew most likely
• Grasp of Phantoms: Probably too expensive to show up anywhere outside of Tron
• Grixis Slavedriver: Interesting card, probably too slow
• Ground Assault: Gruul aggro to remove blockers
• Magma Jet: Burn, Counter-Burn, Kuldotha Jeskai/Boros/Mardu
• Mortician Beetle: Same as Noble
• Pitfall Trap: White Weenie?
• Revive: Possibly same as Noble? G/B Delve?
• Scorched Rusalka: Not sure there's a home yet
• Scourge Devil: Probably not sure this is good enough but RDW/Boros White Weenie
• Slime Molding: Tron?
• Spike Jester: Rakdos Aggro?
• Tandem Lookout: Counter-Burn, Mono-U Delver replacing Ninja
• Thunderous Wrath: Burn, Counter-Burn

My thoughts:
Burn might be too good now. 4 Magma Jet helps set up a solid 1-3 of Thunderous Wrath. Beyond that I can't imagine a world where 4x Magma Jet isn't just the default. Hell, that was what Modern and Legacy used to run before the printing of other options! Burns biggest downfall was always inconsistency (hate cards not withstanding). Magma Jet goes a long way to fixing that.

On the other hand, Thunderous Wrath makes a serious Counter-Burn deck look much more likely. We have access to Ponder, Preordain, and Brainstorm (which more and more makes Pauper look like budget Legacy). Before you needed to do whatever you could to make Galvanic Blast work which made the decklist really tight. Now you can rock Thunderous Wrath, maybe even as a 4-of, and Magma Jet with Lightning Bolt as your burn package. Then you could run Thermo-Alchemist + Tandem Lookout to turn all of your spells into cantrips. Tap Alchemist, draw 1, Cast Magma Jet, untap, Scry 2, put Wrath on top, on your opponent's turn tap Alchemsit, miracle draw Wrath and slam it for another 5. That's 9 damage and 2 cards for 3 mana with a little set up. You can do similar things with any scry ability.

Beetle and Noble make a sac deck look good. Mind you, Beetle triggers on ANY players sacrifice so Chainer's Edict....Gnawing Zombie helps add to that strategy. You could make it a G/B deck and run a few Eldrazi token makers like Nest Invader to get extra bodies but also easily saccable tokens.

BTE makes stompy way better but I could also see it enabling a serious Gruul deck using Jund Hackblade as others have mentioned. Heck, even Goblin Bushwacker is good. Turn 1 Foundry Street Denizen into BTE into Bushwacker? 9 dmg on turn 2.... Denizen -> BTE -> Hackblade is still 6 dmg. Hackblade is way worse without BTE unless you can find a way to play some other multi-colored creatures.

I think Spike Jester is a super interesting option because it could help enable a decent Rakdos Aggro deck as well since they already have Jund Hackblade and Rakdos Shred-Freak, which does make enough hybrid color creatures to make Hackblade reasonable. That's a lot of Hastey 2-drops. Could be something, could be nothing. The mana cost may just be too dang awkward for an aggro deck like this to really work fast enough to be worth it. Hackblade is a strictly worse Shred-Freak without another multi-color creature but their low toughness means any reasonable blocker decimates your board.

We have a few archetypes that win with this set. Namely G/X Aggro/Mid-Range wins big with this set. Conclave is a super efficient body and already has a lot of other interesting pieces like Centaur Healer. They could go Gruul for BTE or Scourge Devil. They could go Black with Angler, etc. Thunderous Wrath is a big win for Izzet IMO because blue offers so much in terms of Scry and Instant speed draw. This might push B/W Mimic into the next tier as well.

We might also see the start of some new archetypes such as a B/X Sacrifice. I really hope this takes off because its a very interactive strategy. I would also love to see Dinrova Horror take off but I have no idea where that would go. It seems like it could be decent value attached to a reasonable body. Izzet Counter-Burn might actually have what it takes to become an actual thing now too. I like Grixis Slavedriver too. I mean, its a lot of mana but it provides so many bodies for the cost that...I just feel like its got to be worth something.

Revive might be the sleeper hit of this set. G/B Delve is a pretty good deck and Revive is a super clutch addition because it puts the creature right back in hand. It might not be good enough though because using Reclaim to grab removal and similar things is a really big deal. Not to mention some of the most important creatures in the deck are black.