MTG Salvation

King Candy WUBR
Legendary Creature - Confectioner King
Hexproof
:Create a Candy token with "Sacrifice this token: Gain 4 life."
, sacrifice 3 Candy tokens: Each opponent loses 6 life.
If an opponent controls a Glitch or you control 5 or more Candy tokens, transform King Candy
3/4
/////////////flip\\\\\\\\\\\\\
Turbo
Legendary Creature - Racer
First Strike, Hexproof
Whenever you gain life, put a +1/+1 counter on Turbo.
3/4

Next - A commander that wants to be damaged and/or killed.

Then Along Came Sally 1WG
Sorcery
Retrace (You may cast this card from your graveyard by discarding a land card in addition to paying its other costs.)
Create a Legendary 3/3 green and white Human Soldier token named Sally with Vigilance and " :Put target land in your graveyard onto the battlefield."

Next - Infinite Deal of Nothing

This is a tough question to answer, so I've kinda avoided answering it for a while. But I think that I finally have a way to answer this question; which commanders do I play that do the most fun stuff, that lends itself to a deck that isn't completely reliant on the Commander, but when the commander hits and sticks is enables some total shenanigans. There are three commanders that fits that bill for me; Ghave, Guru of Spores, Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder, and Wort, the Raidmother, but I think that Wort, the Raidmother leads to some of the funnest overall plays and game experiences with the sheer amount of shenanigans it enables so she would be my favorite. It also fuels what is essentially an aggro-combo deck, which is pretty unique archetype-wise among my various decks.

Roar of the Skydragon UBRG
Enchantment
Creatures you control get +X/+X where X is the number of cards you have in hand less than four.
Creatures your opponents control get -X/-X where X is the number of cards in their controllers hand less than four.

Next - Let Slip the Dogs of War

Everything From Nothing WUBG
Enchantment
Spells cost less for each card in its controller’s hand less than four.

Next - What’s Past is Prologue

I think the best way to answer this is that there is enough of a difference between the two that puts Gifts Ungiven over the line where Intuition is safely on the other side. Members of the RC who have spoken on the subject have said as much:

From a Q&A article earlier this year on SCG (here)

From a recent Q&A article on SCG (here)

It is interesting to note that the original reasons for banning Gifts Ungiven back in June 2009 (announcement here) are in line with the idea that being one-card game-enders is what is getting it banned.
Being a one-card game-ender isn't necessarily a direct reason to be banned per the current format philosophy (here), but it does specifically fall under the category of 'Creates Undesirable Game States'.

In essence, Gifts Ungiven can definitely win the game out of nowhere in many many decks, whereas Intuition can really only do so in 2 or 3 (Storm, Bruna, Light of Alabaster, etc.) and takes a significantly more narrow approach to go out of your way to make it a game-ender in my opinion.

Quote from Guizee666 »

Nekusar is slow, how would you burn out everyone fast enough?

Focusing solely on "hand cycling" as much as possible, maximizing Nekusar, draw-triggers, and discard triggers. You have most of these pieces in your current decklist already, but these decks eschew milling cards like Mind Grind, Psychic Spiral, Psychic Corrosion, or Mindcrank in favor of running things like Teferi's Puzzle Box, Wheel of Fortune, Winds of Change, or Memory Jar. I think you would find that you would speed up your clock if you removed the milling cards and got away from the Laboratory Maniac plan and just focused on the damage plan. In the end, yes this is a relatively slow way of winning still, but right now you are in-between the "burn them out" route and the Control+Laboratory Maniac route.

As for the mana base, I think the biggest issue is the number of lands that enter the battlefield tapped. You have 9 lands that will always enter play tapped, and another 5 that will likely enter play tapped because you don't have enough lands with the appropriate basic land types to support them (only 8). This especially makes the Ravnica Bouncelands even worse as they will often have to bounce a land that will itself have to enter the battlefield tapped. I think that you are better off running more basics and finding some ways to run more low-cost cantrip spells like Brainstorm, Ponder, Preordain, Night's Whisper, Chart a Course, etc. to help you draw into the appropriate lands and smooth out your draws in the early game. I think that will help out your mana and the speed of the deck more than the rituals.

The results so far are somewhat interesting. After 76 people casting their votes, this is the list of all the cards that are at 30% or higher.

1) Black Lotus - 85.5%
2) Mox Sapphire - 82.9%
2) Mox Jet - 82.9%
2) Mox Ruby - 82.9%
2) Mox Emerald - 82.9%
6) Mox Pearl - 81.6%
6) Time Vault - 81.6%
6) Time Walk - 81.6%
9) Fastbond - 80.3%
10)Channel - 78.9%
11)Ancestral Recall - 77.6%
11)Tinker - 77.6%
13)Karakas - 75%
14)Leovold, Emissary of Trest - 73.7%
15)Yawgmoth's Bargain - 72.4%
16)Griselbrand - 71.1%
16)Sway of the Stars - 71.1%
16)Worldfire - 71.1%
19)Prophet of Kruphix - 69.7%
19)Tolarian Academy - 69.7%
19)Trade Secrets - 69.7%
22)Emrakul, the Aeons Torn - 68.4%
22)Sundering Titan - 68.4%
22)Sylvan Primordial - 68.4%
22)Upheaval - 68.4%
26)Limited Resources - 67.1%
27)Balance - 65.8%
28)Library of Alexandria - 61.8%
28)Primeval Titan - 61.8%
30)Biorhythm - 60.5%
31)Erayo, Soratami Ascendant - 57.9%
32)Coalition Victory - 56.6%
33)Panoptic Mirror - 53.9%
34)Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary - 51.3%
35)Iona, Shield of Emeria - 48.7% **
36)Recurring Nightmare - 47.4%
37)Braids, Cabal Minion - 43.4%
38)Painter's Servant - 35.5%
39)Gifts Ungiven - 31.6%

- All of the current cards that are banned are at 30% or higher.
- Only 1 currently unbanned card made it onto the +30% list; Iona, Shield of Emeria at 48.7%
- Cyclonic Rift, Mana Crypt, and Sol Ring were next in line all at 28.9%
- Surprisingly, Palinchron was next at 26.3%
- The only other cards to even crack the 20% threshold are Gaea's Cradle (22.4%) and The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale (21.1%)

So if there is anything to be taken way from this poll (as limited as it may be), it would be to ban Iona, Shield of Emeria and unban Gifts Ungiven and Painter's Servant.

Quote from Onering »

Agreed on all these points. It's not a card you can just throw into any deck and expect to be good as a value engine. It's only good when you stick it in a deck that really wants the effect because it has ways to abuse it or generate value beyond the land it gets you, and usually these decks will be throwing lands into the yard even without crucible, so it exists solely as a way to extract value from something you are already doing.

The one place where I have personally liked having Crucible of Worlds in my deck is my Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind deck that pretty much exemplifies this premise. I'm running 3 Fetchlands, 7 Cycling lands, Cephalid Coliseum, Blighted Cataract, Dust Bowl, and 11 other spells that discard cards. For a deck that wants to hit land drops every turn Crucible of Worlds is great, and it goes a long way towards letting me keep more spells in hand and play lands out of the graveyard. There are very few decks out there that can say that they have 24 ways to interact with Crucible, and in those cases I totally agree that Crucible is overrated and probably better served as something else.

Quote from Onering »

Since this is a good topic that has gotten too focused on a specific card, I want to give a few more examples for discussion to get back to Talerans original post:

Lurking Predators: how many creatures does your deck need to run to make this worthwhile (this one is purely a numbers game, as the more you have the more likely it is to fire and the more times it fires)

Lurking Predators is one of those cards that I would rarely just run "in the dark" without some sort of manipulation of the top of the deck. It was one of the best cards in my old "top of the deck matters" deck because I had Sensei's Divining Top, Scroll Rack, Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Sylvan Library, etc. to manipulate the odds in my favor, plus multiple other ways to take advantage of controlling that top card of the deck. There is also something to be said about the value it generates when it misses; having the option of moving the card to the bottom helps you dig to better cards and helps with late game card selection. These are harder things to measure, but it helps to take these things into consideration. Overall, green has gotten more and more ways to generate card advantage over the last few years so a card like Lurking Predators is probably less ideal than a lot of other options (especially at 6 mana), but if you run enough high-CMC payoffs and even a few ways to manipulate the top of your deck then it might be worthwhile.

Isochron Scepter: how many instants? Let's leave aside combos for a moment. How many 2cmc instants would you need in your deck before you consider including scepter just as a value card. Not planning on getting a specific instant, but being willing to put whatever you have available under it for value.

I tried it in my Gisela Burn deck with 10 potential Imprint targets and it was not worth it. I think that if I had 14+ potential cards to Imprint, then I might consider it. The fact that it allows you to cast the copy makes it synergistic with Spellslinger cards like Young Pyromancer, Guttersnipe, Monastery Menor, etc., so I would think you would really want some additional synergy that way before considering Scepter. I would think that otherwise, you would have to have some really important spells you want to copy where quality counts over quality.

From random card of the day, Secret Plans: how many morphs? This one is probably pretty irrelevant, as I just don't see people running a moderate number of morphs. Usually people either run a handful of particularly useful morphs, say 1-5, that would be below any reasonable threshold for a parasitic card like secret plans, or they are committed to a morph strategy and running around 30+. The wrinkle here is that you don't need to just play morphs for secret plans, you need to turn them face up to draw a card. That means the X isn't necessarily how many you are running, but how many of those you expect to turn over in the course of a game. Or maybe that's better thought of as another variable.

Yeah, I would think that the number is likely in the 30+ range. I think that the issue is more likely trying to find enough Morph, Megamorph, Manifest, and Illusionary Mask combos to make it worth while (although there are some other face down synergy cards like Ixidor, Reality Sculptor, Temur War Shaman, Salt Road Ambushers, Mastery of the Unseen, Aphetto Runecaster, and Trail of Mystery that might at least make the deck interesting).

So I have a few others for people:
Doubling Season
Mishra's Self-Replicator
Alhammarret's Archive
Paradox Engine

I would take advantage of the fact that Planeswalkers are now Legendary, creating all sorts of cool options for PW-based shenanigans.

I think the way to go so that you win with Norin the Wary is to create infinite Purphoros, God of the Forge copies. That way, when Norin comes back at end of turn, it will trigger all the Purph copies and kill everyone. Of course, it would just be easier to include Purphoros and 98 other Legendary creatures, but we are not going for easy here.

So to go for the more convoluted 'Rube Goldberg' approach, I think the best way to go is to have Mirror Gallery in play, and use Saheeli Rai to copy Purphoros. The issue then becomes needing to activate Saheeli multiple times, so we include The Chain Veil in the equation as well. We need to then be able to repeatedly activate The Chain Veil and have enough mana to activate it, so we include Garruk Wildspeaker and Nissa, Genesis Mage to untap 4 lands and a Ral Zarek to untap the Veil.

So the idea would be to -2 Saheeli, then +1 Saheeli over and over including Pir, Imaginative Rascal to speed up the process. This will also help out with the next problem of not wanting to kill them with Saheeli activations. I figure we can give our opponent a Urza's Armor, by including some sacrificial legendary artifacts that generate some mana like Mox Opal, Mox Amber, and Pyromancer's Goggles, then use the -2 on Daretti, Scrap Savant to weld in the Urza's Armor, then use the mana and Zedruu the Greathearted to donate it to the opponent.

Of course, we need to give all of your opponents an Urza's Armor, so we'll need to use the first few iterations of the Saheeli cycle to create plenty of copies of it, then we'll need to make sure we have enough mana to activate Zedruu multiple times to give them all away. So we could use Daretti similar to Shaeeli in a -2 then +2 (discarding nothing and drawing nothing) so that we can continue to weld stuff in and out (preferably things we can tap for colored mana each time like Gilded Lotus), or perhaps we just weld in Caged Sun to double up on our mana production through lands.



1) Cast Primeval's Glorious Rebirth, exiling Norin the Wary and putting Purphoros, God of the Forge, Saheeli Rai, The Chain Veil, Garruk Wildspeaker, Nissa, Genesis Mage, Ral Zarek, Pir, Imaginiative Rascal, Mox Opal, Mox Amber, Pyromancer's Goggles, Daretti, Scrap Savant, and Zedruu the Greathearted onto the battlefield. All the PW's would ETB with an additional Loyalty counter thanks to Pir and each opponent would take 2 damage thanks to Pir triggering Purph.

2) Use Daretti to weld out the Goggles to get Mirror Gallery into play. Garruk and Nissa to untap 4 lands, use the mana to activate Veil, then + Ral Zarek to untap Veil. We can +2 Saheeli while we're at it (damaging each opponent). We also start netting an additional 4 mana each loop.

3) Use the +2 (now +3 thanks to Pir) on Daretti to discard zero and draw zero. Garruk and Nissa to untap 4 lands, use the mana to activate Veil, then + Ral Zarek to untap Veil.

4) Use Daretti to weld out a Mox to get Caged Sun into play. Garruk and Nissa to untap 4 lands, use the mana to activate Veil, then + Ral Zarek to untap Veil.

5) Use Daretti again to weld out another Mox to get Urza's Armor into play, use Saheeli -2 to copy the Urza's Armor, use Garruk and Nissa to untap 4 lands, use the mana to activate Veil and Donate the copy via Zedruu to an opponent.

6) Use Garruk, Nissa, Ral Zarek, Veil loop to + Saheeli

7) Once every opponent has an Urza's Amor and we know that plussing Saheeli won't kill them, we start using the loop to make copies of Purphoros.

8) Once enough Purph copies are in play, we move to our end of turn step. Make sure that the Norin the Wary trigger goes on the stack last so that it resolves first, entering the battlefield to trigger all the Purphoros copies before they go away. GG.

Obviously, you pass up a ton of easier ways to kill the opponent along the way, but this is the way I would do it if I were trying to do something silly.

I once fancied that I would have a deck of each color combination, but I have since realized that there are just some color combinations that I don't like playing the deck that I have created (Bant and Jund mostly) or none of the commander options appeal to me (Mono-W and Mardu) so I've stopped expanding the number of decks I have to try and fill out every color combination. But even then, I have a hard time trying to maintain (and play) all 28 deck I currently have put together to the point where I'm basically ignoring 4 of them and really focusing on 24 decks. And I'm not playing Standard, Modern, Legacy, or Vintage very much anymore so I don't have that additional time/resource commitment to other formats right now.

So I get the addiction; creating a deck concept, finding a home for a certain subset of cards, being able to play cards in combination with each that you could in no other format, looking for hidden gems, finding creative synergies or combos, and playing and fine-tuning a new deck can all be a very rewarding experience. I'm just no longer willing to do that for every color combination "just because" anymore as it feels like I'm trying too hard and deck building shouldn't feel like you have to force it. In the future, it will be more about finding themes that I want to hit and whatever color combination it ends up in is where I will go.

Sphinx’s Revelation, Pristine Talisman, and Fumigate are some of the better “life gain tacked onto something that you want to do anyway” in your colors.

If you want to get more serious about gaining life, running some repetitive sources of life gain that also get you more “stuff” that you need like Twilight Prophet, or perhaps some beefy Lifelinkers like Divinity of Pride.

These are some good questions to take a hard look at:

Quote from Taleran »

How many enchantments to run an Argothian Enchantress or Eidolon of Blossoms

For something like this, you have to be selling out on enchantments in order to make these worth the slots, otherwise they are too inefficient as draw spells as compared to running a plain old Harmonize. I would think that the bare minimum would be around 36, which is also where I draw the bare minimum of lands for most of my decks. You need a large commitment to enchantments as a theme in order to make this work. In my own Enchantress deck, I run 41 Enchantments and it seems to work well enough.

How many 0 or 1 CMC artifacts before Trinket Mage gets a slot

I think the importance and quality of the artifacts in question is more important than just the number. If your deck already wants 4-5 0CMC-1CMC artifacts, and these are important enough as answers in the various matchups you expect to face, then I would think that Trinket Mage makes plenty of sense. I've seen people run a small package with Engineered Explosives, Expedition Map, Pithing Needle, Relic of Progenitus, Sol Ring, and a Seat of Synod to make it a flex removal/ramp card, but I've also seen people run it in a UR Minotaurs Deck to fetch up Didgeridoo. In general, I would think that you would want at least 5 targets for it.

How many 4 or less R/W instants before Sunforger finds a home

Same thing as for Trinket Mage, about 5. The nice thing about Sunforger (and Trinket Mage for that matter) is that you really don't have to go too far out of your way to run things that make it good (as opposed to something like Isochron Scepter which is much more restrictive).

How many lands entering the graveyard or effects that do the same before Crucible of Worlds comes out.

This one is harder because there are other ways that lands end up in the graveyard (through looting or Wheel effects for example). Based strictly on lands, I would think that you only want it if it fits your commanders theme (The Gitrog Monster, Borborygmos 2.0, Titania, Omnath 2.0, etc. I run it in only teo decks, both of which get value through cycling lands, fetchlands, the fact that it is an artifact, to recur artifact lands, or because of the number of looting effects in the deck (specifically Bosh and Ni-Mizzet). This is hard to put a number on; I think this is more of a feel thing than anything.

This is probably even more personal and subjective than I think it is but in general do you have any guidelines or formulas you follow for this kind of thing?

The only other rule I have is for "pure synergy" cards that do nothing unless I have the another card in play to combo with. Cards like Rings of Brighthearth, Strionic Resonator, Thousand-Year Elixir, etc. need at least 14 other cards in the deck to be useful with (in a major way, not minor) before I will consider keeping them in the deck. Obviously, that number goes down if they have major synergy with the commander, but 14 is generally where I draw the line.

Goo thread and good discussion!

Thanks!

From Guilds of Ravnica, I made a couple of changes.

Beast Whisperer - This is one of the best cards to come out for Ezuri over the last dozen sets or so. This card is amazing and needs to be in pretty much every Elf deck ever.
Pelt Collector - I’ve resisted putting in cards like this into the deck (creatures that can only attack and block without any other added utility), but I have been wanting to add in something low cost and high impact for a while and this card fits the bill nicely.

To fit these in, I pulled Spine of Ish Sah (not a bad way to remove creatures in mono-green and the synergy with Nullmage Shepherd is nice, but ultimately it was just the worst card in the deck) and Nissa's Pilgrimage (better than Cultivate and Reach, but you just don’t need land ramp in this deck).

Runke Jar
Artifact
Sacrifice Runke Jar: Target opponent loses 1 life.

Next (randomly generated by my auto fill)
The current version
We can do the same thing
I just wanted to let you know