MTG Salvation

It all depends on your meta i guess, but i feel all cards you mention are too slow for this deck. The damage to mana cost ratio is just too far off. Your creature might be more resilient (saves you a card) but if your opponents get one more round to stop you that’s -3 cards. Net -2.

One you might consider is Phytotitan. Trades evasion for resiliency. I wouldn’t run it myself but i feel it’s better than the cards you mentioned and achieves the same thing.

Also, since you only need one big beatstick, not overcommitting is the best boardwipe insurance there is.

Or Approach of the Second Sun

Quick comments looking through your list:

Drownyard Temple would go nice with that Mana Vortex, especially as you can use your rocks to activate it’s ability.

Ward of Bones is another solid softlock piece with Lavinia, especially if you can ramp into it. Just don’t play your Xth land and no one can.

Since you’re already playing Knowledge Pool, why not Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir as well? It just as much a lock as Lavinia is in most cases.

Too bad Limited Resources is banned, it would be a perfect fit.

If white cannot be better at drawing cards, maybe it should become better at preserving it's cards to prevent it from getting X for 1'ed so often. Maybe more cheap ways to give your stuff indestructible or blink it out so you are less hampered by your own sweepers (white's strength). Some higher volume of niche draw cards like Mentor of the Meek or Puresteel Paladin - cards that only work with a specific strategy - can help a lot.

Also, some better recursion. Theoretically, the more recursion you have the less card draw you need to still even out on cards. A general rule of thumb could be that cards at cmc 5 or lower have a restriction to work on small permanents only (CMC or Power 3 or less) whereas more expensive cards can get any permanent. In both cases, either to hand or directly onto the battlefield.

All in all, white could be the color that "recovers naturally" moreso than other colors and that could, with adequate cards, compensate for bad card draw.

I think.

I don't think white can be fixed by adding a variant on Karakas or making more rebels. That's too narrow.

I think equalizer effects have the best shot at this. Everbody draw until everybody has an equal amount of cards in hand feels very white. If they want to prevent it ruining standard due to white being abke to dump it's hand quickly then just cost it non-competitively.

The main difficulty is finding a mechanical space that allows white to be able to be better at draw than the artifact options yet feel white.

I feel Farsight Mask would be a decent enchantment at 3 or 4 mana. I also feel Shapers' Sanctuary would be a good white card instead of green.

Additionally, a Truce variant where the life gain is high enough so the card has an actual choice could be interesting as well.

So most of us know about white's main problem for Commander: it doesn't draw enough cards, leaving it with a poor late game compared to other colors. In the recent Command Zone episode aout gameplay stats regarding win % white also came out as the worst color for EDH by far. Regardless of wether their methods are fair, it is a known problem. Red used to have it as well but ever since Khans of Tarkir block red has gotten impulse-draw technology (exile a card and play it this turn or lose it forever) that has significantly improved red's late game. Now I wonder, what could WotC realistically do to improve white's card flow? Remember, anything they do must be within color pie and must realistically be printable in standard legal sets. Mark Rosewater repeatedly stated that white must be the worst at drawing cards because it has the best universal answers; this is the niche how white gets designed so any effect we come up with should not undercut this, because then it is not realistic WotC will print it. Draw effects in white, as far as they are allowed now, are designed as narrow cards that require some deckbuilding around it in order to make it work - no goodstuff card draw.

The more I think about the harder it seems to become as everything I come up with is eiter too general or out of color pie. Dawn of Hope is a good start but trigger on life gain is not as deep as impulse draw is, and while white does lifegain more than any other color, not all white decks are about life gain so something more universally applicable would be desired. But how?

Some thoughts:

Fair sharing style card draw: white is about equalization, perhaps an enchantment with "whenever an opponent draws his or her third card in a turn, draw a card" or "at the beginning of each end step, if at least two players drew a card this turn, draw a card" allowing you to keep up with someone who does excessive drawing.

White is also good in retribution: "Whenever an effect an opponent controls destroys a permanent you control, draw a card" seems good (wrath Insurance) or something along the lines of "At the beginning of end step, if you were dealt 4 or more damage by sources your opponents control, draw a card".

It’s a very good card. People just hate it that they can’t always keep mana up for instant speed interaction. I play it in a deck together with propaganda and attack forcing effects, effectively forcing my opponents to attack each other. Koskun Falls is the only black propaganda effect I know but it sure combo’s well with the Web in a multiplayer setting.

A blink variant does not need hat much black staples. I build her as a U/W with a few good black cards in there mainly for removal, Ravenous Chupacabra and Noxious Gearhulk mostly.

Interesting package in the deck is a token package with Day of the Dragons and Divine Visitation. The token makers are Knight-Captain of Eos, Captain of the Watch, Grave Titan and one or two others I can't remember right now. The beauty of Day of the Dragons is that, using Aminatou, you can blink it to in turn blink your entire team. So you can attack and block with 5/5 flyers and still get all the ETB value every turn. Also provides some form of board wipe insurance. Add in Divine Visitation and Day of the Dragons will make an ever growing army of Angels instead.

Another way is to have a few cards that exile cards from your opponents library - Villainous Wealth and Nightmare Incursion do so in spades. You can just grind your opponents out until their deck is gone.

Additionally, maybe Bolas plans to instate himself as Guildpact and leverage the power of the Guildpact against Ugin / Azor.

Isn’t project Lightning Bug the thing Bolas is after? Ravnica being the center of the multiverse makes for a good place to track and trap walkers.

After all this is Done though, I wouldn’t be suprised if this is only about finding and trapping Ugin for Bolas. It would, from Bolas’s perspective accomplish several things:

- trap the only creature he knows of that can potentially rival Bolas himself in power.
- do to Ugin what Ugin planned to do to Bolas: the ultimate way for Bolas to show his brother that he is better than him. Poetic justice at it’s best.

The destruction of Amonkhet and Ravnican society is just collateral damage.

Just checked the price of a Watery Grave from GRN, preorder price trend starts at €8,60 ($10). So it preordering them does not seem to be worth it, going on the expectations in this thread so far.

Quote from 3drinks »

Nice try, r/MtgFinance.

Get out.

Wtf dude? My concrete problem is not having enough time to keep building new decks every week so it's important for me to have decks standing at the ready. I also don't have the money to just willy nilly buy whatever I want when I want so I'm solving this in large part by playing with proxies of cards that I already own. But I'd rather not have to, so if a little preplanning would enable me to acquire some more at a decent price MAYBE I don't need to proxy them as much.

Maybe you're so affluent that you can buy whatever you want whenever you want and you don't need to mind (future) card prices in order to build up and/or maintain a decent collection. But for many of us, the fact that Magic turned into some sort of stock market except you can play a game with your shares is an unfortunate but real fact of life we cannot ignore.

So please allow me to apologize on behalf of all the impoverished magic players that you had to read about issues that do not exist for you even though you chose to open a thread that doesn't really hide what it's about anyway.

So I'm always chronically short on decent lands due to having way too many decks and good lands costing too much money. With the shocklands up for a rerun in standard with the release of GRN, I was wondering what the best moment would be to buy some additional ones? On one hand, them being in standard greatly increases supply, which would lead to lower prices. However, demand will also skyrocket as people who play standard will want them too. The best answer is probably to wait until GRN and the 2nd Ravniva 3 set rotate out of standard, but that's too long for my tastes.

Anyway, at the moment of writing they cost about €8-€12 a piece. Do people see them go to like €5 and if so, when?

What's a commander only player to do?

When building decks, I use Decked Builder for brainstorming in off-time but every deck I want to build seriously I need to build in Excel in order to be able to check my ratio’s. Do any of you know a deckbuilding app that will allow you to add a custom tag/category to a card so it can give you the amount and average cmc per category? Decked Builder can do this on card type but when building decks I want to group cards to ramp, card draw, removal, resilience, consistency and then some free form categories to divvy up cards based on their function in the deck like say “aura synergy” if you build an aura deck etc. Is there an app that does this?