Cool deck, great work. I am going to throw it together just to see how it works since I have most of the cards, at least the pricy ones. Not something my group would enjoy long term, but seems like a good introduction to all-in combo. Not too complicated, somewhat disruptable.
A few questions:
- How important was the muligan rule change to the viability of this deck. We never used partial Paris anyway, but can see that it would have helped the consistency of a deck like this.
- How carefully did you optimize the number of lands vs 0 cost artifacts? I can see you absolutely always need to hit your land drops, but you should be able to do that pretty consistently with less than 60 lands, right? And the more 0 cost stuff the higher you can get your storm.
- Have you considered X cost creatures like shifting wall or endless one? Just as good as 0 for storm count, but should let you get a T1 or T2 creature if you don't have your cheap tutor. Guess you want to be ramping than anyway.
- What is the rationale behind leaving out elixir of immortality? Does the deck not generate enough mana to let you cycle your deck a few times with elixir for a higher storm count, or do you just not need it? What if you added a few more free mana sources like sol ring, Mana vault, grim monolith, chrome mox and mox opal? Claws of Gix would let you re-use vault and crypt for a modest profit. Edit: Voltaic Key is also another free colourless with mana vault.
I can see that sickening dreams is probably your plan A, and these questions relate more to the tendrils of agony wincon, which is more like your plan C. Also understand that you would need to remove skirge familiar and exsanguinate to add any mana cost to the list, and that you don't want to do this. Fair enough, but I am still curious to hear what you think of these as ways of getting the storm count up to 200 ish without losing sickening dreams option.
Personally I keep one holiday box full of blue sleeved cards sorted by color, (+some bulk elsewhere) and I build complementary decks out of that. For example I'd build a Rakdos, Lord of Riots deck while I'm running Rubinia Soul Singer, though its not always 5 colors. I still buy cards for specific decks on the occasion, but they all end up in the general pool. I like to keep things fresh and build new decks every few weeks, so this style suits me.
Pretty much exactly this. Have one box of sleeved staples and cards that have been in recent decks and another box of un-sleeved "playable" but more niche stuff I haven't used in a while. A trade binder for anything I have multiples of that I draw on from time to time but am happy to deal out.
Really enjoy the creativity of operating out of a pool of cards and long term makes a ton of money sense compared to my old routine of optimizing and keeping multiple decks around at a time. I have been pretty committed to keeping only one of each card in the pool, but might consider adding a second of some colourless cards or 5c lands that often get moved back and forth.
Bitter Revelation is probably worth mentioning. Digs, draws and fills the yard. Definitely my new favorite 4 mana one-shot. Still doesn't always make the cut, but highly playable all the same.
Edit: And don't forget Cruel Bargain if you are a bad-ass old school suicide black player.
I un-foilled the XDOE list in my sig a few months back, great decision. I was only at about 95%. I started seriously questions what I was doing once I was getting into the really pricy things, but the decision to stop was ultimately about creativity and variety like you are talking about. I did it in stages to make sure it was the right thing to do. First swapped out everything I had in non-foil, made some changes to the deck and grabbed all of the cheap non-foils for the deck I was missing. I put the foils aside for a month or two before unloading anything. There is a mid-price range where it doesn't make sense to trade in foils if you don't have the non-foil version already. Trading a $35 foil for $20 store credit when the non-foil cost $17 doesn't make any sense. So there are a handful of nice foils I kept for that reason. Less of an issue if you are more patient and can find people to trade with directly. When I did finally go trade the load in I got a huge pile of store credit that has gone towards a couple of revised duals and what I needed to complete a half a dozen other decks since. Moving towards a "one of each playable card" in a box with more frequent but less optimized deck building and really enjoying it.
You are obviously pushing the limits here for low land and high ramp count. Does it work? How often do you have access to too much/not enough mana? Maxing out the cheap ramp and cheap draw is definitely the way to go, the trick is balancing the two. I was never successful at running less than 35 lands, no matter how much ramp. Still need to make your land drops since your mana costs are probably pretty black heavy and if you are going coffers rout, you sure want your swamps. My feeling is to stick with the cheap ramp like 0-2 cc rocks and the best of the rituals and let your land base handle the big mana part of your game. Taking a turn to play a caged sun or a gauntlet of power is pretty lame when it gets blown up and can't be easily recurred, especially during the first few turns when you are trying to get set up.
Another way to look at the land count is that if you are drawing a ton, using a combination of the cheap one-offs mentioned above and skullclamp /necropotence big draw, you are pretty much never going to flood out, you are just seeing so many cards. On the other hand, if 70% of your deck is land or rocks, maybe you are at risk of... "rocking out"?
Oh god, MORE GOLD TOKENS?! I pray it's not a reprint, and a new card that produces these more often. Such a weird token, but I love it's flavor and uniqueness.
My money is on gild reprint. Even has the smashed up golden horse in the art.
+1 Treasonous Ogre
Just love this card and particularly well suited to EDH where you always have something half decent to do with the mana sitting in the command zone.
Talrand, Sky summoner: Continuing to tweak and refine Talrand is definitely an option. This would definitely be the one option that would create the one deck that is completely different from anything else I play (which is what drew me to Talrand to begin with).
This is what I am playing around with for more or less this reason, has been pretty fun so far. Depends a bit on how competitive you need it. I feel like if you tune to be as fast and consistent as possible it can get a bit boring. What I have been doing, which is definitely more casual, is trying to put in a mix of directions/win-cons to spice it up a bit. I still have the spellslinger count very high, but have a polymorph/proteus staff package with 3-4 fatties in there along with a couple of the choicest drake pumpers. Takes a bit longer to get going, but then can go either (a) drown them in card advantage and drakes, (b) polymorph into something scary or (c) pump a few drakes and beat face. Still not weak, just less consistent.
I wish the Gatherer comments were still working. That is the perfect place to discuss individual cards. Does anyone else know another play to talk about individual cards, rather than starting a thread for every card here?
Magic Origins has cards which represent the various planes we have been to before, and I am pretty sure that Priest of the Blood Rite is an Innistrad plane creature. Ghoulcaller Gisa has been my commander since December 2014 and I love using Innistrad themed cards any chance I get.
It is nice that the life loss is attached to the creature card and not the token. That means you can take advantage of it's EtB trigger with Nim Deathmantle + a sacrifice outlet to make demon tokens every turn. Not only is my commander a sacrifice outlet, but Ashnod's Alter and Phyrexian Tower are two outlets which grant mana... which help pay for Nim Deathmantle's trigger. I will happily turn Priest of the Blood Right into a 4/4 zombie and make a 5/5 Demon each turn in exchange for only two life.
Phyrexian Reclamation is a nice way to repeatably recover the 2/2 body from the graveyard after sacrificing it for profit with something else.
Because it is a Human, sacrificing it triggers Xathrid Necromancer. Yes, if you have Rotlung Reanimator out as well, you get two zombies off of one body. ha!
Because it is a human, it does not benefit from Mikaeus, the Unhallowed. However... once equipped with Nim Deathmantle, it becomes a 5/5 Zombie instead of a Human Cleric and gains undying. That means the next time you sacrifice it, it can come back for free as a 3/3 Human Cleric again, meaning you only have to pay for Nim Deathmantle every other sacrifice.
This card isn't amazing, but it is fun to think about and brew. Just about everything that I wrote about it really applies to any creature with a nice EtB/Dies trigger, which is why I like it in my Commander deck built around abusing those triggers. He's just another fun and flavorful tool in my toolbox. I love putting tokens into play. Especially since WotC started supporting tokens in 10th edition.
Neat card, not sure I would run it, but I am sucker for Legends cards so maybe in a B-team deck. I have thrown in Demonic Torment before to serve a similar purpose, but it was never very good. Imprison is probably better.
Grim Haruspex - Insanely good draw engine, and cheap. I value him over Bloodgift these days, but Bloodgift gets an HM as a solid beatstick draw engine.
Mindslicer - Best cheap easily reusable multi-discard. A bit anti-fun for EDH, but sometimes control is needed.
Sidisi, Undead Vizier - re-usable tutor, and cheap. Beats out rune scarred for me, who always seemed too expensive.
Xiahou Dun, the One-Eyed - Solid multi-option combo piece and useful recursion.
I could see taking out Bloodghast, never bothered to run him in Karador since his ability is not that special when you can recur any of your creatures. I would never cut Skullclamp from Karador. You still have a dozen good targets for it, it doubles as a sac outlet for your X/1s, it is almost always going to be card advantage at almost no opportunity cost.
A few questions:
- How important was the muligan rule change to the viability of this deck. We never used partial Paris anyway, but can see that it would have helped the consistency of a deck like this.
- How carefully did you optimize the number of lands vs 0 cost artifacts? I can see you absolutely always need to hit your land drops, but you should be able to do that pretty consistently with less than 60 lands, right? And the more 0 cost stuff the higher you can get your storm.
- Have you considered X cost creatures like shifting wall or endless one? Just as good as 0 for storm count, but should let you get a T1 or T2 creature if you don't have your cheap tutor. Guess you want to be ramping than anyway.
- What is the rationale behind leaving out elixir of immortality? Does the deck not generate enough mana to let you cycle your deck a few times with elixir for a higher storm count, or do you just not need it? What if you added a few more free mana sources like sol ring, Mana vault, grim monolith, chrome mox and mox opal? Claws of Gix would let you re-use vault and crypt for a modest profit. Edit: Voltaic Key is also another free colourless with mana vault.
I can see that sickening dreams is probably your plan A, and these questions relate more to the tendrils of agony wincon, which is more like your plan C. Also understand that you would need to remove skirge familiar and exsanguinate to add any mana cost to the list, and that you don't want to do this. Fair enough, but I am still curious to hear what you think of these as ways of getting the storm count up to 200 ish without losing sickening dreams option.
Pretty much exactly this. Have one box of sleeved staples and cards that have been in recent decks and another box of un-sleeved "playable" but more niche stuff I haven't used in a while. A trade binder for anything I have multiples of that I draw on from time to time but am happy to deal out.
Really enjoy the creativity of operating out of a pool of cards and long term makes a ton of money sense compared to my old routine of optimizing and keeping multiple decks around at a time. I have been pretty committed to keeping only one of each card in the pool, but might consider adding a second of some colourless cards or 5c lands that often get moved back and forth.
Edit: And don't forget Cruel Bargain if you are a bad-ass old school suicide black player.
Another way to look at the land count is that if you are drawing a ton, using a combination of the cheap one-offs mentioned above and skullclamp /necropotence big draw, you are pretty much never going to flood out, you are just seeing so many cards. On the other hand, if 70% of your deck is land or rocks, maybe you are at risk of... "rocking out"?
Mitotic Manipulation = top secret mono-blue ramp
My money is on gild reprint. Even has the smashed up golden horse in the art.
Exactly my first thought too. The "target" player part is nice, will stop me from killing myself in Jarad dredge.
Love the card.
I just wet myself. Not that gary needs any help...
Just love this card and particularly well suited to EDH where you always have something half decent to do with the mana sitting in the command zone.
This is what I am playing around with for more or less this reason, has been pretty fun so far. Depends a bit on how competitive you need it. I feel like if you tune to be as fast and consistent as possible it can get a bit boring. What I have been doing, which is definitely more casual, is trying to put in a mix of directions/win-cons to spice it up a bit. I still have the spellslinger count very high, but have a polymorph/proteus staff package with 3-4 fatties in there along with a couple of the choicest drake pumpers. Takes a bit longer to get going, but then can go either (a) drown them in card advantage and drakes, (b) polymorph into something scary or (c) pump a few drakes and beat face. Still not weak, just less consistent.
Sounds like a fun deck. Have a list?
Exactly this.