MTG Salvation

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Feather definitely wants ancient tomb. Turn 1 ancient tomb, turn 2 signet + land = turn 2 feather. One of the very few ways to do it actually (mostly sol ring/mana crypt related).

Arguing in favour of a land that makes colourless in a deck as drastically colour-intensive as Feather because opening a hand with a two-drop rock lets you play it turn one doesn't really check out, sorry. Note that the literal actual signet is the only one that nets you more than one coloured from this elaborate operation. I run Reliquary Tower as the only non-coloured land in my mana base.

That said, the sort of decks that want Reliquary Tower are indeed quite few and far in between. They're the ones that count on sheer card quantity to get the job done, or draw scarcely and massively. The opportunity cost of running it may be low, but that doesn't make it worth an automatic shoe-in.

Agreed. Plus, it makes stuff far more efficient to alter. I ported mine to text files recently after about three years of them just living online, and it's so much easier to do large-scale editing/rewriting. Here's to hoping the differences are not particularly jarring - there is promise of all the bbcode elements moving over, so it should hopefully be similar enough.

The easiest way to carry this out would be to add the primer tag to any MTGS primers that migrate over

It's not just you, sorry for singling your Sol Ring example out. That's the general vibe I'm getting from the thread.

Yeah, Feather will have her devotees. My list's here to stay. I don't make primers lightly - the last one was in 2016, for a deck I consider my signature build. Also, seriously, just goldfish them. I was entirely convinced Mox Diamond was a devastatingly bad idea until I just sat down and pulled up hand after hand, comparing the Diamond to a two-drop tap rock. Or just skip it - it's not a night and day tier of difference, and the monetary investment is nontrivial.

This thread reads a lot like what people were saying about London mull in Modern before the event happened. Combo will reign supreme, people will dig out specific cards, your ad here. And then it worked fine, as per the general player consensus and now an official WOTC decree. Ya'll may have ran numbers on trying to dig up a Sol Ring, but those numbers don't account for the fact that Partial Paris is just inherently better than London at sculpting your hand. And guess what? EDH was still pretty playable with Partial Paris around. Tone down the needless alarmism a bit and take it out for a spin. It's seriously going to be fine.

Thanks, means a lot. Kind of funny that I achieve primerdom literally as Feather slips from the week's top commander spot on EDHREC There's no pretending this hype would last forever. The commanders that endure are typically somewhat open-ended value engines, whereas Feather is ultimately very commander-dependent, and considerably more narrow. A typical flash in the pan, once the novelty of slinging Heal wore off people started migrating to the new hot thing. This appears to be Lord Windgrace, thanks to MH1's RG draft archetype.

Speed for speed's sake is not the most crucial when getting Feather out. You've got stuff to play, spells to recycle, shuffling a treasure token into your deck is really not where you want to be. However, I never got in proper testing of the zero-drop rocks I don't run. As such, I repeatedly fished up six-card hands (pretending to hold a Mox Diamond), and evaluated the Diamond against Coldsteel Heart, i.e. the only CIPT two-drop rock left in the list. The hand had three turns to get out Feather with protection mana up, as the current rock does that. Four outcomes were tallied: a turn two Feather, a turn three Feather with the Diamond mana accelerating a pre-Feather play that would not have otherwise happened, a plain turn three Feather (equivalent to the Heart), and failure to produce a Feather (at this point the Heart would be superior). Sol Ring starts did not actually change that much here, as the Heart reality would still have insufficient coloured to Feather turn two. One hundred hands later:

• Turn two Feather: 27
• Turn three Feather plus goodies: 30
• Turn three Feather (no goodies): 12
• Failure to produce Feather: 31

There's no denying that the Diamond is higher variance than the Heart - 30% of the hands felt the fact that the Diamond just sneaks in an extra land drop and wilted in the face of lack of other ramp, but over half benefited from the presence of other cheap rocks and low-curve plays, getting out value that the Heart would not be able to achieve. Add to that the fact the Diamond is a far preferable topdeck and we have a swap on our hands. Timely, too - each of my other primers got some high-end goodie around the time the thread got approved



However, I maintain that the other cheap-as-hell rocks I'm not running are not worth the space here. Of the 100 hands tested, a whopping seven would have supported an early Mox Opal.

We've been Londoning in my group since the original announcement, and it works fine. We're not super high on the power level though.

There we go, now we're getting somewhere.

Coincidentally, I just had a slightly different mode of interaction with the committee - a comment of mine made it perfectly clear I'm extremely bbcode-green, to what the response I received featured small excerpts of my primer reworked into a style that was to the reviewer's liking. This was nothing short of fantastic. The reviewer got to solidify their concept of how the rework should appear, while simultaneously providing tag guidance for village idiots like yours truly. I feel this sort of assistance should be explicitly advertised when offering feedback, and it would help things along considerably.

So yeah, if the review process were to focus on content, and formatting reworks came with the explicit possibility of guidance, the process would probably be significantly closer to painless.

Read the room, man.

Without even looking at the 99, the legend design is essentially a brutal pasting of two things. One is a faux-Psychic Corrosion that you wouldn't even realistically need (if you're drawing enough cards to dent people's decks with this, you probably found a way to win), and then you decided that isn't enough and slapped on a pillowfort defensive mode to get people off your back. I probably wouldn't humour you. However, I'm kind of wary of all sorts of non-standard setups since prolonged exposure to a fellow with zero respect for the ban list a few years back. Sorry if this sounds rough, but the design just doesn't speak to me on any level.

You could just look into Phenax, you know. There's a fantastic primer about him on the boards.

I'm not a huge fan of the formatting side of primers either. I got off easy with Patron of the Orochi, in retrospect I think the committee knew that nobody would care about the thread and just slapped on the primer tag to get me to stop bumping the application. My Daxos the Returned was a bit thornier, but ultimately I ended up with a primer template that I was happy with to the point of back-porting my Patron list to the same style. I figured it was worth to put in the elbow grease that one time to figure out something that worked, if I decided to make any future primers.

Eventually, I got smitten enough by Feather, the Redeemed to go for it. I mirrored my Daxos primer in layout, wrote everything up carefully while keeping in mind the content feedback I got last time around. It came back with stylistic change requests.

I'm aware of some builds that are primer-worthy and well maintained, but the authors are just unwilling to put up with this process. I can't blame them. I'm picking up some similarities to peer review in academia, where reviewers tend to suggest stuff for the sake of suggesting stuff. If we're going to be this picky about layout, create a gold standard template that people can copy-paste and fill out to get around the stylistic requirements.

Note Yawgers says "up to one". My complete layman idea of how sacrifice decks work has me wanting a copy

Nice to see you back around these parts Yeah, that works, but it's not enough for me to run the Conscriptor. Meteor Golem is better.

I need to add Gamble to the primer, yes. I also need to add a note about Gemstone Caverns. There's a finite amount of cards one can recall while typing this stuff up, thanks for the catch.

Meteor Golem is better than Mangara of Corondor in most situations. Mangara fits my rattlesnake'y play style more, whereas I'd often keep the Golem back for various reasons. I don't feel particularly comfortable chainsawing removal with this build - I'm already pretty untouchable given the protection options and constant draw (just had a game where I was archenemy'd by two of my meta's stronger decks, eating tons of removal to various pieces and all the combat swings, and I barely noticed and won the game through all the disruption), if I start crapping on everybody else's stuff too reliably everybody's going to escalate from grumpy to mad.

Seriously, just try Chrome Mox. It's perfectly fine. The other Moxen that are not in here, not so much.

Aria of Flame is solid, it takes less spells than Guttersnipe to maul a four-man pod. I have been bumping my win cons a bit, as the whole draw/scry apparatus is efficient and this way I spend less time stalling in dig mode, trying to find something. Also I'm less boned if someone interacts the wincon out.

Reckless Rage is a very good include, I'm straying from it for the whole "don't maul people while being unmaulable yourself" reasons. I've quite liked Psychotic Fury, but I can see your reasoning. Can't spread it to the team with Zadas, for one.

The new Mox is not of relevance here, yes.

One of the recent Command Zone episodes linked to a "competitive" Feather primer. It was quite cool to look at it - the guy runs the same Paradox Engine + Isochron Scepter gib, gets to back off the protection in a number of categories because of how cEDH tends to operate, shaves most cast payoff as he doesn't need it and adds various meta cards/hate pieces in their place. Not bad then, my list takes a similar base idea but tunes it to your stereotypical EDH slog rather than cEDH.

But yeah, it's MH1 time. Never before in my five year EDH career has a fresh set deposited so many new cards into a single deck. In fairness, you can tell a lot of this was made with Feather in mind, and a few are fleshed out cycles from way back when that Boros happily absorbs. The ease with which all these swaps came together leads me to believe that there's still room in the list to tune it up.



All of these are essentially 1:1 swaps, so let's present them as such.

• Aria of Flame is like WOTC listened to me complaining about Sphinx-Bone Wand costing an arm and a leg. The life gain actually doesn't even matter that much, Aria needs you to count to 17 to take out a four-man pod from full health while the Wand charges you a surplus of 4 to accomplish the same feat in 15 spells. Sure, this doesn't hit creatures, but I don't tend to do that anyway. Taking out Tenth District Legionnaire. This is a card I really wanted to like, but ultimately she's quite low on the target priority list and often ends up ignored or stuffing a Chrome Mox. The fact Burning Prophet doesn't hog targeting ends up making a surprising amount of difference.
• Ephemerate is a Cloudshift with rebound. In it goes as a replacement. I don't think I want more insta-flicker in the list, my other 1 cmc protection options are a pretty good spread of potential value and emergency non-creature shielding.
• Fists of Flame may cost two, but also scales quite nicely with cards drawn. Adds yet another redundant layer of game winning to Zada setups, and if you force a Rift with this in your combat then you can chase out any potential combos sitting in your 80 card hand in main 2 with marginally less disruption. In a vacuum, paying 2 for +2/+0 and a card is probably a bit better than paying one for +3/+1 and a scry. Titan's Strength out.
• Generous Gift is a white Beast Within and an obvious include. Mangara of Corondor has been working somewhat ok in his threat of activation state, so for now taking out Chaos Warp. I might swap the Warp back in for Mangara at some point.
• Sunbaked Canyon is just a City of Brass variant in here. Don't think we'll be cashing this in too often. Still, we run all the other City of Brass variants, so in this goes. The nonbasics are pretty tight, so a Mountain gets the kick.
• Talisman of Conviction immediately becomes the best two-drop rock in the list, and ousts the worst two-drop rock in Star Compass. Coldsteel Heart survives on early game flexibility. Some irresponsible part of me wants to swap it out for Thought Vessel.

Apart from some potential swap musings upstream, I'm considering decreasing the volume of the protection suite a bit more. The fact I was just gifted a second Cloudshift and chose to only run one leads me to believe I could consider trimming it down a bit. We'll see.