MTG Salvation

So my current build looks like this





Need to make 9 cuts to the main. Anyone have any pointers?

at all possible costs I’d rather keep in gellcarver, doomsday, lich and wheel of fortune. They’re always cards that lead to amazingly hilarious gamestates.

You got rid of final fortune? The card that helps you fill the yard and fills you up to 7 cards? I’ve not played with the contract, but it looks good, if ‘boring’ (I don’t tend to enjoy cards that just say win without a bit of work).

tegrid looks interesting though, seems good but it’s not a demon? I guess it’s possible to alter the card to make it fit the theme of my build (heavy metal band).


I’ve also seen a guy called varragoth, seems ok since it’s a low cmc guy that nets you cards.

Anyone stil playing this? I’ve been meaning to update it since… dunno, like 2019, but that’s a lot of cards to go through.

Any shortlist of cards I should keep an eye out for? I wanna keep the existing plan of reanimate big beaters, and hellcarver/doomsday for a win through a clogged board.

all that glitters. Playable or not? Imagine its like bravado in that against a enchantment heavy deck, it can be very good. Also, since we’re giving enchantments away, it’d work its magic too, right?

So I’m thinking of building an edh deck that has some sort of weird archetype to theme to it. It’s not meant to be super competitive nor amazingly good. But synergies are welcome.


For example, I have a zedruu voltron deck. It uses 1-2cmc auras, which I then gift to my opponents, while I beat down and draw cards/gain life. It’s not ever been good, but it’s silly, and the strategy has a good amount of synergy to it (and feels like a cohesive deck).


Does anyone have an idea as to what sort of archetype/general I could use to do something else similar? I’m completely out of ideas, and nothing really jumps to me as interesting nor fun.


Otherwise, some other strange theme could be used to make a deck with too. I’ve built the ‘pointing to the left’ theme, the leaves the battlefield-tribal, and even the mono blue lord tribal (with the legend changeling; can’t recall its name)!

rakdos the defiler is my fav general. Think BR suicide black with a heavy demon tribal theme. Featuring lich, it that betrays, repay in kind, hellcarver demon!


Followed by lord of tresserhorn.. mine is a leaves play tribal and a smattering of anti etb tech (torpor orb comes to mind).


Really fun, especially rakdos. Your games are liable to take about 1/3 the normal time just cuz of the punisher properties and life-pressure you put on everyone.

I will say though, considering how some of the art sports 'real world' things (leather jackets, baseball bats), i'm not too keen on how WotC decided to go back on their attitude on keeping the aesthetic of magic congruent.

I miss the days where silly looking art and quite serious ones can all come in the same booster pack. I thought i understood wotc's approach in wanting the game to have a more cohesive look, and then they pull out these black bordered life-like, modern era images...

And for what it's worth, there was a 5-0 humans list, i believe it was, in legacy, featuring Rick and Michonne. Yes, they are definitely competitive-format playable.

That being said, there WAS a build of DnT i saw a while back that tried to run dust bowl with flagstones instead of ports.

That alongside wastelands means that they're going for a full-out wasting all lands kinda strategy; white pox, if you will. Wasn't good though, but was still worth looking at.

I believe all of the points above are good. Just cuz it acts/looks like a basic plains with upside doesn't mean that it's actually that in legacy. blood moon is still played here and there, price of progress i saw as a 4-of in a recent burn build, back to basics is a card that also sees play, and heck, even ashiok, dream render is something that i've seen 4 of in a deck's 75.

All that poo-poo-ing aside, the landfall themed white zoo build seems like it could be interesting. My assumption would be that you'd need to splash for green to make it reasonably competitive against the general legacy meta. Was thinking veil of summer vs control/discard/storm, and berserk as a gotcha-finisher.

Hello!

So if i control a liliana the last hope, and i +1; target a guy, what would happen if my opponent sacs it in response?

Does the ability fizzle 'cuz all the targets are gone? Or does it, because it says "up to one target", still resolve? Does liliana still get to +1?

Quote from Jazz_and_Coffee »

I mean, there are a lot, but worldspine wurm is pretty good here. When it's killed, you still have 15 trample power on the board and your opponents have 3 more creatures to deal with. Plus, since it shuffles back into your library, you will be able to keep "cheating it out" with similar spells.

I'll be willing to give more suggestions, but I'd like to at least know what colors you're running first. Is it just red?

Could even run a Atla Palani, Nest Tender and only a single worldspine wurm. Just constantly sacrifice it in response to an egg dying, and you’ll make a constant stream of beefy wurms!


I can imagine it feeling somewhat boring to play after a while.

So er... there IS a cost to magmatic channeler. It needs to tap (i.e. NOT do 4 damage) for you to draw. It's a trap card, i feel, though i've no real evidence to back it up aside from my hunch/hypothesis.

If you're on topdeck mode, wouldn't you just be going in for 4 damage each turn instead of drawing 1 extra? It's 3-4 damage possibly (unless you draw double lander), at the cost of a 4 damage swing.

Also, not all decks have removal for the eidolon. Also, don't we normally play pyrostatic pillar too? against xerox decks, it can be a real killer.
It feels to me that rolling vortex can be good, but it's basically good against force, daze, LED, petals. So maybe as a sideboard option against storm and RUG?

It could be worth just throwing in a mystic sanctuary and some number of blue fetchlands in there just so you can, in a bind, yuriko-trigger on the stack, crack fetch, put some big cmc instant/split spell on top of the library to kill someone, or maybe even cast it (say a dig through time)to dig for an answer that happens to be on the battlefield (if you can't kill your opponent there and then).

But htat isn't very budget friendly i guess. Unless you happen to have some nunmber of fetches lying about.

That being said, mystic sanctuary itself isn't all that expensive yet.

Colourless lands have been somewhat pulling more weight than I’d expect. Mostly off the back of eldrazi displacer and other eldrazi cards.
More often than not, I find myself out of colourless sources more than coloured sources.

Emeria, flagstones and krosan verge have been replaced by mana confluence and 2 basics. I’ve been having a hard time finding a canopy vista.


You know what though, 34 lands have not felt too bad. I still start games with 2 lands often enough, and a turn 0-1 accelerator. I might’ve forgotten to mention, but the average cmc for the deck is 2, or thereabouts.


Flooded strand, vesuva are still pulling their weight. Mostly from shuffle effects (which I don’t have many of), and vesuva is pretty flexible.

the goldfishing of the deck is what I’ve been doing for a while. The colour requirements for curving isn’t perfect yet still, but maybe it’s something I’m gonna have to just accept that isn’t solvable yet.


Exiling for chrome Mox is somewhat easy. Not every card in the deck is vital to the wincon, and not every removal spell is relevant at that moment in time. There are always easy picks.


Search for tomorrow, rampant growth and farswek makes lands etb tapped/cost 2G. It’s kinda a huge tempo sink when the deck wants to be dropping blockers or threats. The Mox amber isn’t great, but there are 2 1cmc coloured legendary creatures and the general is 2cmc, which allows me to turn 2 throw down saffi and hold up path to exile/swords/nature’s claim. Like you say, not the best, but it works well enough.

Quote from serrasin »

What is the goal of the deck? How much mana do you need before you're in stage 2 (stage 1 is being throttled by mana, stage 2 is being throttled by card/action availability)?

Why aren't you using more of the mana dorks or ramp spells?
Do you really need City of Brass in a two-color deck?
Emeria needs far more plains.
Why is Flooded Strand in the list?
Krosan Verge is a trap, imho. You've got Mox Diamond suggesting that your turns 1-3 are important, but then why have tapped lands?

I think that you need to sit back and evaluate what your goals are with your deck and then how your mana base can supplement it. With a two-color deck you don't really need a lot of mana fixing, so you can easily cut out half of your non-basic lands. Maybe just keeping lands dropping on curve is enough for your deck and you need to focus more on card draw? What about Sylvan Library and/or Land Tax?

the goal of the deck is to be able to answer opposing combo pieces while trying to use saffi as a value-generator. the deck is some sort of GW reanimator-ish grinding deck, with Jorael (the new one) as a finisher (with concordant crossroads). aside from land-fetching/tutoring, there is no tutor effects, so the wincon will have to come up naturally.
Yea, im gonna take out krosan verge. Seemed like a good idea since it fetches for plains and a forest, not necessarily basics, but the etb tapped is bad.
City of brass helps me get the colours i need. Maybe it's not as good as it seems, but the deck feels very colour-intensive. So all the colour-fixing is used.
Mana dorks are a thing that i use to help get the extra coloured pips in. The problem ive found are some of them, like the llanowar elves-like dorks tap only for G, which means that I need to lean on the first landdrop to also tap for W if at all possible. The dorks also add this weird tension, where the deck itself is white-heavy, cuz there are early threats that need answering, but wants to have G on turn 1 for the dorks. which is why the land base leans heavier on green sources.
Flooded strand (and the other off-colour fetches) finds me forests and/or plains. also, since the deck doesn't have much in the way of actual card draw, i lean a lot on sylvian library, sensei's divining top, and the green vizier (that lets you play creatures from the top of the library) so extra shuffle effects to clear the topdeck is useful.
I guess i'll have to remove emeria then. It was sort of a very very long term grind plan in case my other wincons end up being unusable for whatever reason.

And back to your first point, which ramp spells do you mean? i have nature's lore. I have some number of mana dorks in the deck already (i believe i have them all listed above). Are there some major ones im missing?

Quote from Xcric »

birds of paradise?
razorverge thicket?
sunpetal grove?
bountiful promenade?
mana confluence?

if you just need ww or wg on t2 there's also tithe

i mean, you've got a ****ton of ways to fetch for both types, are you shuffling properly? are you keeping the right hands? not sure why you'd be running into that issue with the mana base you have going

Razorverge thicket was teetering on the edge for me, but as a non-fetchable land that most likely will etb tapped, i'm not super convinced. Ill proxy one up for a test before i knock it off though.
Sunpetal grove on the other hand, should etb untapped 99% of the time. The deck does, however, want a starting hand of 2 lands, so there are (unlikely) situations where i start the game with ancient tomb/city of brass/some other non-land-type-land and grove. Ill have to also proxy a copy up to test opening hands before i can tell whether or not it'd work though.
pountiful promenade seems like a shoo-in. when it does etb tapped, it doesn't really matter too much by that point late-game.
Mana confluence as well. City of brass has the upside of it being a triggered damage, but 99% of the time, it is the same land. I'll have to find a copy somewhere. it can be said that in other mtg formats, i have seen games with the city of brass damage trigger on the stack as the combo went off in response to it. Not sure my deck can do that though.
I have considered tithe, but i'd end up with the situation where it'd be either win-more (as in it'd be mid-late game where i probably don't need the extra lands) or blowing it off early and losing tempo (at which time my opponent/s might be threatening a combo-piece or some other form of hate that needs answering). I'll probably have to actually test it before i know for sure though.
thanks for the heads up! i keep forgetting some of the land cycles like the ones you've mentioned.
And also, you're probably right that i gotta shuffle better. Maybe i gotta resleeve the whole deck, since theres a good chance the sleeves are getting a tad gunky/makes shuffling tricky.

Quote from serrasin »

Honestly, I would try gold-fishing the deck with 20 forests and 20 plains to get a benchmark, before backing that off to 15 plains and 15 forests to add some of the non-basic lands and then goldfish that again. I think the problem is that you're building a mana base that's over-complicated. One of the benefits of a two-color deck over a three to five color deck is a simplified mana base, so you really don't need to bend your back for color fixing like a 5 color deck.

Yea, i get what you mean. I started from 8 fetches (1 on-colour, 6 off-colour, prismatic vista), 10-ish basics, command tower, and some duals, then made it more complicated from there. There are some weird choices now that i looked over the list again to the last time i ran it in a 3-player pod, in that there are 2 cards in the deck that need C, and those sources of mana are actually few and far between, with little fetching/tutoring to find them. Now it's ended up here at least.
Thing is though, the 20/20 only basics manabase means that i'm not gonna be able to answer early-game threats/hate pieces that hit the board consistently enough while allowing me to ramp up/keep up the tempo. It's why it looks as complicated as it is. I don't mean to demean your comment, but normally, I would concur that a 2-colour manabase shouldn't need to be this complicated. I just mean that the evolution of the land base and the needs for the deck has led me down this path.