I've seen it happen in EDH courtesy of Opalescence.
what you meant to say is spawnsire of ulamog, and a binder with about 200 ulamog, the infinite gyre (so when all the ulamogs comes into play, they all get shuffled back into the deck via legendary rule), then win with battle of wits.
in my zedruu group hug build, much like hydrophobicfish, it has many aspects of it. But by far my favourite is it's policing aspect. in my opinion, if you just straight up say that you're running a group hug, everyone becomes suspicious, and the best players generally try to take you out first. But if you say that you have a part hug-part chaos or whatever, people are more inclined to leave you alone.
That being said, zedruu lends herself to do some pretty crazy stuff:
Once, i built up to like 50 or 60 eyeball counters on jar of eyeballs, donated it to the strongest player on the table, then mindslaver-ed him, activating the jar of eyeballs, reordered his entire deck so he had about 30 turns or so worth of lands to topdeck for the rest of the game.
a lot of what zedruu does is along the lines of donating something a little innocuous, then mindslaver them and make them do something rather silly. Good fun though.
im not a huge fan of tutors, just 'cuz it feels like I'd be spoiling the best part of a singleton format. But i think in this debate, you'd best pick and choose dependant on your deck construction.
For example, how much of a toolkit build do you have? do you run a lot of redundancy? how specific are your needs when approaching a given situation? is it a aggro or combo or something else? how delicate is the deck's engine? and so on and so forth.
Basically, what i'd say is this: if your deck runs a lot of redundant effects or effects that do similar things that can be easily interchangeable, or that your deck doesn't require reactive effects, or has a pretty resilient engine, card-draw is probably a better option.
On the flip side, if your combo-engine is rather janky, needing many specific pieces to power up, or you don't run many redundant effects, or if you find yourself needing very specific cards all the time given a certain situation within your meta, then tutor.
Hope that wasn't too much of a "do this, then this then this" and more of a general guide. I'd hate to be thought of as a 50's dad or whatever.
edit: in terms of jayemdae tome vs planar portal, i'd go with the tome. I ran it in standard tournaments and top 8'd quite a few times. but mind you this was when 5th edition was standard (or type 2)
Does anyone here find that white bordered when playing with black bordered (or silver possibly?) kinda makes it easier to cheat?
i have a pre 1997 nicol bolas and since i don't own a lot of cards, i know exactly which cards are from which sets (in other words which ones are black and white bordered), meaning theres a possibility for me to cheat when shuffling (not that i do).
thoughts?
ps - i have a bfm in my Karador reanimator. only found in silver bordered version though.
acidic sliver! c'mon, dude! our rules are that if a sliver dies, it auto-saccs via acidic sliver targeting the creature that killed it or the player that controlled the spell/ability.
also, frenetic sliver. If a sliver would die, and the acidic sliver isn't around, it tries to phase itself out this way. But then if its a mass board wipe, we'd generally just randomly keep half of them on the board.
i actually have a sliver horde that i'm too lazy to post here. but i run it so per survivor, the horde flips over 2 non-token cards. And there are i think like 10 muscle sliver, 10 sinew sliver and 10 predatory sliver. A couple of lymph slivers also makes dealing with slivers freaking hard.
All in all though, i think its a pretty cool list... I'm a bit unsure about the oak street innkeeper just for flavour sake, but i see what u mean by shroud just being too much of a pain. but how about opaline sliver instead?
this brings me back to the days when i was playing type2 5-c sliver tempo-control. it was glorious.
i think unlike some of the other offenders on the list, SP can completely wreck and warp a game. But I think the most important thing here is the word 'CAN'. I've seen it completely warp games via rites of replication et al. Im not sure if it really is worthy of the ban-hammer, but in our meta, we look down on players pulling the 'multiple populate triggers aiming at the SP token made by the kicked rites of replication' type of move. In that way, we kinda 'balance ourselves out'.
I have no idea how other players id meet in a LGS would react though to shenanigans like that, and i wouldn't test them either.
Funnily enough, as much as I don't like omniscience, i don't think its anywhere near ban-worthy. Is it something that warps the game? i don't really think so. Does it lead to frustrating board states? it sure can, but not anything more frustrating than a well-ramped player. In and by itself, it doesn't end the game. It enables it, sure. But it probably needs card-draw, an actual finisher and/or engine to seal the deal. I DO think it ends the game in the least fun way for the guy who pulls it out though (i did it once, and i thought it felt like i pulled an infinite mana combo-cheaty finish).
can anyone here describe why recurring nightmare is banned? i still have it in some of my decks actually, but we don't have it on our ban-list. I've yet to find a really abusive way of using it, and since its effect is at sorcery speed, its really easy to get rid of.
ah its a tough situation... no matter how you decide to cut the cake, its already gone, so probably it'd just be best to move on from it? Did u talk to the offending party about this? at least when my playgroup has games, we chat about big/critical plays after... stuff like this id imagine would come up.
in the end though, i think it was a bit of a jerky play, but not 'time walk on a [CARD]stick[/CARD=Isochron Scepter]' level jerkiness.
You should also shove in some wrath of god and other mass-wipes that have some justice reference.
On the same token though, as is with my zombie horde, i shoved in a bunch of random 'weak' zombies just to increase the randomness of it all. It shouldn't all just be one massive wave after another, there should be some variance.
have u been able to beat it though actually? I think it'd completely whoop our decks we play with here hands down without help...
maybe to make it a little bit more doctor who like you can put in a jhoira of the ghitu (the only one i can think of that is remotely timey-wimey like) and have protecting her as your objective against the horde? So she'd act like a planeswalker, so the horde opts to attack her randomly, but the players can use her suspend ability.
i struggle a bit to come up with anything better, really... your deck is pretty tight!
have you thought about removing say 5 zombie giants and 5 zombie tokens for like 10 ghoultrees (and count them as tokens)? i mean it seems that this is one mean zombie-machine, so u might as well up the zombie token-power, right?
it sounds like u guys've already started wrapping the ideas up for this one, but i thought i'd chime in a bit too...
since its an illusion deck, maybe its possible to add something with phasing in there somewhere? i love bringing up old school stuff, and phasing in commander is freaking epic when done right. its annoying that it doesn't trigger CIP abilities, but whatever.
and things like mist dragon, rainbow efreet and frenetic efreet could possibly be twisted in kinda 'theme-wise', i think. if you wanna make things kinda tough to deal with, teferi's veil can definitely make it happen (nerfs all sorcery-speed removal!).
i think that looks pretty good.. i don't really get how you deal with sedris... is it that it can unearth one creature per turn? or do you unearth all of them the first pre-combat main phase from the graveyard? cuz if its the latter, thats a pretty hectic situation if you mill or do any damage to the triad!
When i get sick of losing, i pull out Kaalia of the vast. my build has hand disruption, mass LD, cataclysm, balance-effects and so on. its like a aggro-tempo that does surprisingly well in multiplayer but is an absolute beast in 1v1.
what you meant to say is spawnsire of ulamog, and a binder with about 200 ulamog, the infinite gyre (so when all the ulamogs comes into play, they all get shuffled back into the deck via legendary rule), then win with battle of wits.
a strategy i've actually applied and won (albeit only once) is 'skip your turn infinitely' strategy. its one of the only times I've had a time stretch aimed at me instead of at the controlling player. wins via having havoc festival, spiteful visions, storm world and sulfuric vortex, commander using karona, false god with all the vows attached and prophet of kruphix, seedborn muse and vedalken orrery to cast stuff on other player's turn. obviously stuff like chronatog totem and sundial of the infinite helps skip turns.
but its now possible to win games without taking more than 3-4 turns when everyone else is on turn 20!
That being said, zedruu lends herself to do some pretty crazy stuff:
Once, i built up to like 50 or 60 eyeball counters on jar of eyeballs, donated it to the strongest player on the table, then mindslaver-ed him, activating the jar of eyeballs, reordered his entire deck so he had about 30 turns or so worth of lands to topdeck for the rest of the game.
a lot of what zedruu does is along the lines of donating something a little innocuous, then mindslaver them and make them do something rather silly. Good fun though.
For example, how much of a toolkit build do you have? do you run a lot of redundancy? how specific are your needs when approaching a given situation? is it a aggro or combo or something else? how delicate is the deck's engine? and so on and so forth.
Basically, what i'd say is this: if your deck runs a lot of redundant effects or effects that do similar things that can be easily interchangeable, or that your deck doesn't require reactive effects, or has a pretty resilient engine, card-draw is probably a better option.
On the flip side, if your combo-engine is rather janky, needing many specific pieces to power up, or you don't run many redundant effects, or if you find yourself needing very specific cards all the time given a certain situation within your meta, then tutor.
Hope that wasn't too much of a "do this, then this then this" and more of a general guide. I'd hate to be thought of as a 50's dad or whatever.
edit: in terms of jayemdae tome vs planar portal, i'd go with the tome. I ran it in standard tournaments and top 8'd quite a few times. but mind you this was when 5th edition was standard (or type 2)
hahahaha... hilarious.
Does anyone here find that white bordered when playing with black bordered (or silver possibly?) kinda makes it easier to cheat?
i have a pre 1997 nicol bolas and since i don't own a lot of cards, i know exactly which cards are from which sets (in other words which ones are black and white bordered), meaning theres a possibility for me to cheat when shuffling (not that i do).
thoughts?
ps - i have a bfm in my Karador reanimator. only found in silver bordered version though.
also, frenetic sliver. If a sliver would die, and the acidic sliver isn't around, it tries to phase itself out this way. But then if its a mass board wipe, we'd generally just randomly keep half of them on the board.
i actually have a sliver horde that i'm too lazy to post here. but i run it so per survivor, the horde flips over 2 non-token cards. And there are i think like 10 muscle sliver, 10 sinew sliver and 10 predatory sliver. A couple of lymph slivers also makes dealing with slivers freaking hard.
All in all though, i think its a pretty cool list... I'm a bit unsure about the oak street innkeeper just for flavour sake, but i see what u mean by shroud just being too much of a pain. but how about opaline sliver instead?
this brings me back to the days when i was playing type2 5-c sliver tempo-control. it was glorious.
I have no idea how other players id meet in a LGS would react though to shenanigans like that, and i wouldn't test them either.
Funnily enough, as much as I don't like omniscience, i don't think its anywhere near ban-worthy. Is it something that warps the game? i don't really think so. Does it lead to frustrating board states? it sure can, but not anything more frustrating than a well-ramped player. In and by itself, it doesn't end the game. It enables it, sure. But it probably needs card-draw, an actual finisher and/or engine to seal the deal. I DO think it ends the game in the least fun way for the guy who pulls it out though (i did it once, and i thought it felt like i pulled an infinite mana combo-cheaty finish).
can anyone here describe why recurring nightmare is banned? i still have it in some of my decks actually, but we don't have it on our ban-list. I've yet to find a really abusive way of using it, and since its effect is at sorcery speed, its really easy to get rid of.
in the end though, i think it was a bit of a jerky play, but not 'time walk on a [CARD]stick[/CARD=Isochron Scepter]' level jerkiness.
On the same token though, as is with my zombie horde, i shoved in a bunch of random 'weak' zombies just to increase the randomness of it all. It shouldn't all just be one massive wave after another, there should be some variance.
assemble the legion i think would be a necessary addition, in multiples.
have u been able to beat it though actually? I think it'd completely whoop our decks we play with here hands down without help...
maybe to make it a little bit more doctor who like you can put in a jhoira of the ghitu (the only one i can think of that is remotely timey-wimey like) and have protecting her as your objective against the horde? So she'd act like a planeswalker, so the horde opts to attack her randomly, but the players can use her suspend ability.
i struggle a bit to come up with anything better, really... your deck is pretty tight!
since its an illusion deck, maybe its possible to add something with phasing in there somewhere? i love bringing up old school stuff, and phasing in commander is freaking epic when done right. its annoying that it doesn't trigger CIP abilities, but whatever.
and things like mist dragon, rainbow efreet and frenetic efreet could possibly be twisted in kinda 'theme-wise', i think. if you wanna make things kinda tough to deal with, teferi's veil can definitely make it happen (nerfs all sorcery-speed removal!).
mr prossh and friends can one-shot an opponent pretty easily if it ever comes down to it.
mycosynth lattice + your planeswalker of choice.
Not many decks can survive an early mind twist or hymn to tourach.