MTG Salvation

This is a great article and explains many things about card drawing in commander that many players fail to understand. I do agree with the others that the title was a little misleading, as most of the insight was about card draw overall and not specifically clues.

The only thing I'll pinpoint is that I think Tireless tracker and Seer's Sundial are very different. Sundial is more resilient, and yet its rate is so bad that basically every deck has better card draw options. Tracker won't give you cards forever as he'll likely meet his doom faster, but it is a much better card in my opinion because it helps to build board presence and actually attack people in agressive decks, or be a beefy blocker when you need it.

I think you said many things that are true and not much helpful. The exercise of doing a deck with no fixing on lands is interesting because you show other kinds of fixers, but I also think it is misleading, because, as a casual player, I know that I should always trade for land fixers, as they are the most important parts of deckbuilding. I can skip a $10 card from the rest of the deck and it won't be that different, but if I have vivid lands, guildgate, terramorphic expanse, gainlands, and all those, I'll be able to play a deck much more consistency.

Also, I consider thinning from the land ramp spells good: in decks I can draw many cards later, drawing lots of lands isnt good, so thinning is good. In decks that lack card draw, you just raise a little bit you land count to compensate for the thinning. The advantage of the mana rocks is lower cost later, as most 2 mana rocks can add mana as they come into play, so if you play them on like turn 4 they essentially cost 1.

I think there are better options than leaving 2W open, but a lot of people sing praises to this Stonecloaker. I'm almost sure they are just being too cute.

Actually, CVM opted for shocks because of his oozes, but i still think that is wrong. The thing is that Shocklands are either tapped lands or lands that dealt 2 damage to you, and since you're playing temples already, you dont want to have a lot of shocks because you might be forced to deal 2 dmg to youself more often. In my junk build, I added 4 llanowar wastes and 1 Cave of Koilos (I run 2 mutavaults, 0 basics, 0 urborg) and found out that having the option to play untapped lands with no dmg or 1 damage only is very valuable, and better than shocking yourself most times, especially in caryatid decks. Shocks can be overall better than painlands in 2 color decks, where you have plenty of basic lands, but in 3 color standard decks, the place where you actually have to opt for one of them, you should replace some of the shocks for painlands. Observe that the "shards" can use only 1 painland, so i advise maxing it, while other combinations can play 2 different painlands, and in this case i would run less than 8 painlands, certainly.

I like your article, though I must say that what you call 8/8 is redundancy that people always refer too. The 12 creature observation seems to be more of a legacy thing, and it seems to me that it is basically the same observation as the one about disruption: you play some proactive cards, then you need the disruption, too, in most decks. Also explains the case of Death and Taxes: creatures in this deck do disruption, so you don't need to stick to 12 creatures rule cause you are already enough disruptive. About the Disruption hypothesis, I think it is almost obvious that disruption is "better" than proactive plans: since disruption cards won't work against any proactive card, but a subset of them, you need to get some value of it, be it CA (electrolyze you BoB), tempo (sword to plowshares you Knight of Reliquary) or some kind of strategic value (you depend on that Delver right now, so I abrupt decay it), or else there would be no reason to run reactive spells.

I think finding patterns applies more to limited, since the creatures are more similar to each other (the important part is the body) good removal is not easy to find, so things will end on the battlefield and that makes high creature density a must.

i love ajani's ultimate: a lot of walkers have lenghty text for the ultimate while it basically wins the game... ajani's does make a lot of work in winning for you, but with much less words.

i think godsend is a very bad card in constructed formats, but my friends complain when i say that. do you guys agree with me?

it made sense to me, since i wouldnt could first appearance as a return.

Nice decks! I second The_DragonMage in regards of cavern of souls: both decks have good mana bases and would benefit a lot from having uncounterable gods since they are so vital to the whole plan. I'd love to see some protection from tucking: high market, wordly tutor, enlightned tutor, and primal command come to mind. I have seen a list with putrefax somewhere, i know it is hard to get people but it is awesome! Also, since the xenagos deck is not flooding the board, i think starstorm, molten disaster, and arashi, sky asunder would all be fine choices. finally, i think the xenagos deck deserves wheel of fortune effects (including Dragon Mage, curiously), and i think your steal spells of choice should be Unwilling recruit, act of Agression, traitorous blood and traitorous instinct... not all of those,probably, but i think they are all better than sarkhan in this deck.