MTG Salvation

I wonder if anyone might humor me on what is likely a very easily answered question. What would happen if Upheaval and Worldfire got unbanned? Not advocating it, just wanting to have a little thought experiment that I think suits this thread.

I'm curious to know what would happen in your typical game of EDH if a deck was designed to potentially use them to try to win. What exactly does the setup have to be to win after playing one of these two similar cards? How much would they warp the format if they were allowed, just hypothetically? How would you prepare a deck to react to such cards resolving in regards to answers in each color?

Upheaval at least doesn't seem much more oppressive than Cataclysm can be to me, but I suppose if you could phase out/flicker your board state after playing it or have some kind of combo ready it would be pretty powerful, but even still it just seems to me like a 6 mana board-clearing finisher that only wins you the game if you have everything else set up along with it to do so.

Worldfire however is a bit more oppressive with the exiling literally everything and the life total change to 1 - and again I don't see this guaranteeing a win by itself so much as make the turns after it a race as each deck tries to rebuild fast enough to deal 1 damage to everyone else in the aftermath, unless if again you flicker your board after casting it somehow which requires setup again. It's also harder to cast than upheaval at 7 mana instead of 6 so the two cards are about in the same league I think.

Are those assessments missing any nuances to what effects these cards would have on the format? That's part of why I'm asking about them anyway, to see if I'm perceiving their effects on a hypothetical game with them incorrectly.

Again, not advocating unbanning them, just wondering how EDH would try to adapt as a format if, as I want to consider for the sake of it, these two cards were for some reason legal in commander.

I dunno about you guys but Iroas, God of Victory kind of fulfilled the thread's title some time ago if you ask me.

Mana Vault + Selesnya Signet can give you a turn 1 Selvala if you want to be really speedy.

Edit: I can't math. It's one mana short. Requires sol ring/mana crypt/ancient tomb alongside those two cards.

As someone with numerous binders full of format staples, 'hidden gems', niche cards, and otherwise having collected copies of everything I could possibly conceive of seeing myself ever running in a future commander deck that isn't prohibitively expensive, I hope it doesn't make me a bad person if I buy singles of the select new cards I think are good enough to play from my LGS's and from online instead of spending MSRP (5x35 plus tax... yeah no) for each of the decks full of mostly cards I don't need any additional copies of at this point. I'll probably spend less than 100$ grabbing what I expect, based on commander 2014, will be two dozen or so new playable cards out of the total 65 new cards that we'll see here. At this point when I see a new card as an EDH player, I go and think to myself "in what situations or types of decks might I play this card, and if I did, is there a superior option I have that fulfills the potential functions of this card better already?". If it passes that evaluation I'll get it, if not I won't.

Additionally, this severe lack of spoilers is starting to annoy me. I want to know what's coming already to I can plan accordingly! Oh well. Can't say I'm excited about the experience counters thing, just seems bad. (interesting mechanic yes, but strategically mediocre) Hopefully two or three of the new non-experience counter generals (if there are any) will be playable, but I don't expect much of the 5 experience counter-themed ones.

Selvala can make a very solid enchantress-style deck. I've seen what it can do when you have cards like Starfield of Nyx, Opalescence, Privileged Position, Serra's Sanctum, and lots of permissions enchantments and enchantment recursion to expeditiously rebuild from the disruption that will be thrown at you. It can ramp ahead of the board quite quickly and shut out opponents late game with things like Rule of Law and City of Solitude, further buffing its own enchantments (which you turn into creatures with the first two mentioned cards) with cards like Collective Blessing so you can beat face with it.

Hokori, Dust Drinker as a control/permissions (or stax) deck could be fun. Linvala, Keeper of Silence as an alternative is pretty solid too, shuts a lot of stuff down and suits a permissions deck well. Yosei, the Morning Star is also pretty neat and actually has a few powerful combos you can do with it.

However, at the moment I'd say Nahiri is one of the strongest mono-white generals available because it lends itself well to equipment and tokens, and the synergy with Skullclamp allows it to literally fix white's biggest weakness in EDH. Not to mention it survive your own boardwipes and helps you rebuild.

Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir, Knowledge Pool

I've always been a combo player. Aggro decks never really appealed to me despite trying them numerous times. Control is something I've always taken a light approach to with emphasis on combo. I always made decks that were decent at comboing out in multiplayer settings but performed poorly in 1v1 where games were essentially a race. They would lose more multiplayer games than win because they lacked adequate control to answer problem decks like Kruphix Morph or Karador Reanimator. (Two decks that dominated my meta for awhile recently as examples)

I've been trying to decide on a new deck to play, and blue especially appeals to me. I want a versatile, strong deck that can effectively counteract any strategy and come out on top in multiplayer. I took all my decks apart and looked through my collection of cards and commanders, and Teferi stuck out as something particularly capable of making for a strong control deck. I had heard in passing mention before that Teferi decks were regarded as quite hated variants of the well-known EDH counterspell.dec archetype and never tried it because of how high profile such a commander could be. But I always picked high-profile commanders like Purphoros and Riku anyway and got used to having a lot of disruption aimed at me, learned how to play around it. Now I'm thinking... why not? I always play high-profile commanders/combo decks so its not like anyone's going to believe my bluffs anymore when I try to play politics. Then I went to research Teferi and learned of the Knowledge Pool lock. Incredible. I want to play that and I want to get more acclimated to playing dedicated control decks since combo (Every deck I've made previously was basically 8-20 infinite combos.dec) is getting boring. Other than about 5 or 6 necessary cards for a good list like Transmute Artifact and Grim Monolith (which I plan to acquire for it), I pretty much have everything I could want to choose from to build the deck. I can effectively just throw together 95/100 cards right now that would be worth somewhere between 500-1000$, as a metric for what quality of cards I have available to put in it. Lots of old but good cards and niche effects available, stuff like Sunder and Hurkyl's Recall, etc. Anything you advise that isn't a card over 100$, I probably have available.

But mainly I would like advice for how to play it and how to build it. A couple of minor issues: I am lacking a few particularly expensive cards that I think contribute heavily to the deck's strength such as Mana Drain, Force of Will, Mana Crypt, and Snow-Covered Islands for Extraplanar Lens ramp. I'm concerned that without those the deck will have significantly large weaknesses against faster aggro decks. Mana Crypt especially seems like something helpful for dropping a surprise knowledge pool. Can I get away with not running those cards? How can I compensate for the loss of strength they carry? I suppose I'm not particularly inclined to win fast but I do want to be able to surprise people with that lock later in the game when they don't think I have the acceleration to do it.

Following that, there are questions of what would be some alternative win conditions to put in the deck, what is the ideal number of counterspells, how much draw, filtering, and tutoring should the deck have? I know there's a lot of new anti-counterspell tech out there for EDH but I'm not worried about that considering how many boardwipes I have available to put in a blue deck (IE: all of them). I've also noticed that blue is a bit lacking in tools to get things back from the graveyard - how can I compensate for that or should I just focus on more draw spells? I'm also worried about having to deal with things like Nevermore or Jester's Cap effects that would seek to stop my attempts at assembling my lock. Does blue have any ways to get back exiled cards if someone happens to 'permanently' exile my Knowledge Pool? I know there is a card or two in other colors that can get back exiled cards, but not sure if blue has anything like that. I want to be aware of every card that can get around the Knowledge Pool lock so I can compensate those weaknesses.

The commander tuck rule change is pretty significant as a problem for the Knowledge Pool lock but I'm not too worried about that one, it's easy enough to deal with and Hinder effects losing a bit of strength isn't that big of a deal when blue still has so much going for it in terms of strength and versatility. The decklists and discussion I've read on Teferi is getting dated now and there are many new additions to the card pool now so I need to know what new problems exist for Teferi other than the old ones that existed 2-3 years ago, and what new blue/artifact tech has come out in the last few years that can make a new Teferi list even better.

Ultimately, I want to make the deck interesting and unique in its own way alongside the basic control structure that is assisted by the deck's primary lock. As such I'm inclined to put a number of high CMC beefy creatures in it for beatdown after locking down the board but I'm not sure if that's a good way to build the deck. Might make it less mana efficient so I'm on the fence about that. I would like to assemble it in such a way as that I could be valuable to keep alive at the table as I keep the dominant decks in my metagame under control and perhaps give the other decks a chance to win for once since despite all I've said, winning isn't everything to me. (I just want to decisively win more than once every 10 games because losing that often is demoralizing) How would you play it in terms of politics? Where would you direct your wall of counterspells and boardwipes? I'm planning to run a very large control suite for this deck because I like long, drawn out games where big crazy plays happen frequently and balance of power shifts a dozen times in a game without anyone getting killed off early. I think a Teferi deck can contribute to creating such a game, though I am concerned it will be hated a bit too much if I don't now how to use the control suite conservatively enough, so advice on that as a person who isn't used to playing dedicated control would be great.

Advice on these questions is appreciated, thanks!

Omaha, Nebraska - Legend Comics, Krypton Comics, Dragon's Lair, Underground Gaming. There's a lot of overlap of the metas at each one where lots of the same people frequent all of them.

Personally, I rarely play at those places and instead have EDH nights at friends' houses most of the time because work scheduling prevents me from going. Lots of other people in my city frequently play at these places, however.

There's a lot of magic players where I live and I'm surprised Nebraska's magic scene isn't on this list.

I haven't had much luck with my decks for over a year (lots of losses and getting killed off early) until I made a Riku of Two Reflections deck a few months ago. Now it's about 50/50. I made mine half spellslinger, half creatures, though it is a little creature centric since it effectively relies on explosive token combos to win. Consequentially I am a target of a lot of control when I play it, but I really enjoy it because potentially I can pull off some crazy plays like making infinite mana, tokens, etc. A lot of people would probably frown at the fact that it's capable of the braindead tooth & nail into purphoros + avenger combo among other similar things but I just shrug and figure 'it works, its synergistic, it suits my idea of a fun deck'. It wins me games about half of the time and even with all the control holding me back I still have good chances of succeeding in my experiences with it.

When it comes to tri-color combinations picking a strategy I consider what each color offers in terms of actual available cards, how those colors compliment each other, which 'guilds' are represented and what do those 3 guilds have to offer in the card pool, and finally, what weaknesses are present since 2 other colors and 7 other guilds are not present. My analysis is thus: White offers permissive control effects and boardwipes primarily, blue offers card advantage and kind of just does everything from counters to boardwipes to extra turns and anything you could want from any other colors with almost no downsides, black offers the strongest card advantage, has good boardwipes and suits reanimator strategies well, green offers ramp, big creatures, tokens and has lots of good niche cards that suit lots of roles making it second best after blue as a color, and red lends itself to combo extremely well as a quick damage enabler. I've tried every tri-color combination at this point and temur just seems to work best at the moment for me.

I figured this might be a fun little topic to have. Discuss how you store your cards, what your preferred types of card binders are, or otherwise how you keep your cards stored. Are they all sleeved? Do you use a system other than binders to keep track of your bulk rares and valuable non-rares? How do you have the cards you have stored up organized?

Since I've just recently filled up my 5th binder full of rares/various staples across formats only 3 1/2 years after getting into Magic, I was curious how many other Magic players keep or how else you might happen to store and organize the multitudes of cards you've collected over the years.

Whoa, those Enchantress cards are a great idea! Having some source of card draw, as well as it being the synergetic kind with all the game-controlling enchantments I want to run could really make this deck viable! I didn't even know most of those existed!

As far as what I'm fearing in what I might run into: Mass removal and targeted enchantment removal is one, and there's also the very likely scenario that someone will have theft cards and will steal my general to swing at me with the tokens I give them while my general is under their control. Given the kind of people I play with and expecting that the new playgroup I'm going to check out soon will probably have a few extra smart players, I know that making a deck designed to manipulate people can easily backfire if I don't do it perfectly right and play it very carefully. It's a dilemma of making a deck that can get things out there that heavily influence and control the game and trying to do it in a way where the smartest opponent won't get annoyed at my trying to take their place of 'top manipulator' and target me with more hate cards than I can handle. Politics is a really tricky thing and with all my previous experience, playing combo decks always gave me this unique position where I could threaten without bluffing my ability to do things that could make me win very easily and choose not to do them immediately, which in this weird way would score me political points because I didn't play super aggressively even though I played the most threatening combination of cards. Because with those decks I never was the central player manipulating the game but rather an instigator of a lategame race, the more experienced players were happy to look at me as 'the guy we can deal with if he becomes a problem later, because he's not interfering with my own manipulation of the balance of power'. With a deck like Gahiji it's a whole different story - optimally I want to be the chief manipulator of the game with enchantments like City of Solitude and Rule of Law like you suggested with this kind of deck, but because these colors aren't exceptionally strong that is very likely to step on the toes of the other player that fancies themselves to be that person and they're likely to have the kind of deck that can turn all the subversive strategy my deck is trying to do on itself by convincing the 'middle ground' players at the table that I'm a bigger threat than I actually am, after which such a player will neuter my deck with some well-timed disruption and combo off themselves.

Essentially, aggro decks will be easy to handle - this deck will be nice to them and I'll be able to make tentative alliances with those players easily. I'm not playing combo/typical control so I'm not a threat to them because I'm helping them by buffing their creatures and giving them more creatures to go after the control/combo players with. Combo/control players who are very good at EDH strategy however will still be a problem if I can't design this deck just right to play around them. I need to construct it in such a way that it doesn't step on their toes as the top manipulators of the game whilst subtly allowing me to manipulate the game to my advantage more than they do without them realizing it. Because Naya doesn't really lend itself to combo as far as I can determine, I don't really have the option to 'explode' if the other 'chief manipulator' at the table calls my bluffs or sees through my plan, I have to somehow have a non-threatening but effective path to winning the game that won't be ruined by someone wiping the board or attempting to combo off when I don't have the proper response available. As far as design goes I get the idea that this deck will be the kind that doesn't do a lot of responding but rather a lot of soft rule-altering control/influencing actions against people other than me - might even cut the instants to a minimum because in an odd way, it might be ideal to be the player no one's too worried about nuking their permanents all of a sudden because I'm just doing my own thing only on my own turn and passing to the next player without drawing much attention, and because Price of Glory will be much more ideal if it doesn't effect me whatsoever. An ideal manner of playing might be to drop a creature and/or an enchantment each turn and tap out so no one's paying much attention to what I'm up to.

Still brewing, definitely adding Forbidden Orchard to my list. This is actually kind of hard considering that as I'm building this I'm trying to consider how it would actually play out and how different strategies could give it trouble. I've cut over a dozen cards and added a few more, and it's definitely turning out... different than any Gahiji decklist I've seen online. What makes this particularly difficult is that I'm trying to find ways to make a deck without black or blue somehow be able to contend with combo and control decks, which are already the most common kinds of decks in the game. The problem is that creature based strategies are extremely vulnerable to too many gameplans, so I'm not sure if this is even viable. Entreat the Angels and Storm Herd seem like good additions, but considering that my instant/sorcery count is about 25 and might even become a third of the deck I'm going to have to add Boseiju, Who Shelters All to this too just to make sure spells like those resolve. But without access to blue or black it just feels really weak. How is a deck in these colors going to hold up in a semi-competitive scenario? Boardwipes will set me back really far (maybe too far since card draw options are already limited at best in these colors) but they're kind of vital to contend with everything a deck might have to deal with, and it would be really nice if I had more strong early game options available - powerful cards I can get out turn 1 or 2 that can grow me a token army and draw me a lot of cards... But most of those such cards are only available in blue and black.

Maybe I should just go 5-color so I can run anything I want in it... Hmm.

It's been awhile since I last frequented this forum due to life getting in the way of things and I haven't played EDH for awhile either, but now I'm back and looking for suggestions on a new deck I'm brewing up that is meant to take my playstyle outside of my comfort zone and play a lot more politically. This is a deck that is going to be seeing play in multiple metagames so I figure it sort of needs to have a 'jack of all trades' sort of flexibility to it. Gahiji, Honored One seemed like a good low-profile but capable general to build around so that's the pick. I'm also trying to figure out how to make effective, capable decks without the crutch of running blue. I quite like the token/politics angle the general lends itself to so I'm pretty much set on it as the choice for my newest commander deck. Also of note, I've disassembled all of my previous EDH decks in favor of just having one highly optimized deck to play at a given time, so this will likely be for the next couple of months the only deck I have and it thereby needs to be as ready for anything as I can make it. Winning before turn 5-6 is not what I'm looking to do, however. I want it to drag out the game a bit like a control deck and create a lot of fun and interesting interactions without putting a target on my head. Ideally this would turn out as a high synergy but not combo deck that manipulates board state politics and grinds up incremental advantage.

My list so far:

Gahiji EDH Work in Progress List

So far I've got a pretty mixed up list of cards here and its really not refined at all. I want this to be highly interactive with lots of rattlesnake/monkeywrench cards that contribute to interesting and different games, and an enchantment subtheme seems fun too because that way I can run some pillowfort cards like ghostly prison and sphere of safety. But it's rather tricky because the general lends itself to a very direct aggro strategy typically and I would like for it to be a lot more multi-directional with tons of synergies and different paths to victory. So what I'm looking for is advice of cuts to the list, cards I absolutely need to have, and how to plan around the possible strategies that could give a deck in these colors trouble. I don't necessarily want the deck entirely focused around the general , because that would probably end up making me get bored of it really quickly. Right now I see a few issues: It doesn't have enough good creatures, I don't really have a game plan yet, card draw is an issue without blue and black, my ramp and mana-fixing package is currently incomplete, and I need to make sure this deck doesn't fall over flat on its face to control and combo decks. It needs good tutoring and recursion options too, but not too many. I'm not opposed to taking it in a semi-oppressive lite stax direction either which is why I put cards like Price of Progress in the WIP list here. I just want it to have a really flexible gameplan that can succeed in the long game. How can I refine this into something well equipped for what I expect will be a highly diverse number of matchups?

Library of Leng and Anvil of Bogardan seem to go into a lot of my decks for some reason.

Well if you're curious what he's running off the top of my head because you want to terrorize your own playgroup go right ahead (I don't have a full list, I'm sure I'm missing a lot of important stuff):

Win Con: Brine Elemental, Prophet of Kruphix, locking everyone else out and swinging with a wall of Morphs.
Combo: I think it has Skyscribing to just draw everyone out. Never seen it used though.
Draw: Rhystic Study, Sylvan Library, Aphetto Runecaster, Secret Plans, Fact or Fiction, and more
Ramp: Harrow, Exploration, Rootbound Siege, Trail of Mystery, Rite of Flourishing, and more
Tutor: Primal Command (Seriously he doesn't even have any other tutors, he just draws half his deck and it just works.) It shuffles his grave back most times for into-library recursion followed by draw and tutor. Also seen it used to slightly nullify the pain of drawing two off of sylvan library with the 7 lifegain.
Tech Land: Zoetic Cavern. Seriously, its almost entirely basic lands. It has almost no mana fixing at all and still works as though it did.
Answers: Voidmage Prodigy, Chromeshell Crab, Evacuation (wipes board, replays all morphs with mana stockpile for insane value off his enchantments), Reality Shift, Ixidron, Kheru Spellsnatcher, Mischievous Quanar, Plasm Capture, Nantuko Vigilante, Rewind, Voidmage Apprentice, Echo Tracer, Icefeather Aven, Equilibrium, Cyclonic Rift, Beast Within, and more I don't remember.
Other: Ixidor, Reality Sculptor, Master of the Veil, Weaver of Lies, Unblinking Bleb, Vesuvan Shapeshifter, Muraganda Petroglyphs, Weaver of Lies

All things considered you'd normally consider a deck like this kind of janky and overcosted for mana. It's actually a budget deck, even. Besides cards he already had I doubt he spent more than 50$ to get it together. But with Kruphix in the lead and an extremely good player piloting it's surprisingly fearsome.

Again, he said this will become Animar... Which might be more managable actually. If you ask me the original general, Kruphix itself really powered a lot of control of the board by giving the deck lots of extra mana for morphs and such in the first place and giving unlimited handsize. In Animar I'm sure Kruphix will be in the 99 but not assured to get every game. Might work less reliably.