The list in the OP is obviously not exactly what I was running, but it's pretty similar. I'll probably retool it into something a little more proactive by removing the cute high CMC stuff and going a little harder on a reanimation plan. I got my ridiculous high CMC bomb game, now those are just going to annoy me when they get stuck in hand. The game last night worked out because one player was also doing something fairly durdle-y and controlling while the third player kind of got stuck between two decks that were just trying to draw into removal, which is not going to be the norm. That's even more true once my group gets tired of playing around with the new walkers and goes back to more aggressive decks. I was really happy with Bolas's discard ETB, especially because the table has an incentive to remove it when you're sitting on enough to transform. The fact that it's also an evasive beater was more helpful than I was expecting, because it forced removal to protect walkers/life totals over time and I didn't get caught paying 7 to have it removed in response. It honestly played a lot better than I was expecting it to.
Looks really nice. I appreciate that there are a bunch of shared cards between our lists where we've gone for very different pimp options (which also reminds me that I should update those pictures because there have been a bunch of changes since I posted mine). How do you like God-Pharaoh's Statue so far?
As for what's next, appreciate not spending money/time/effort on the project for a while? There are bound to be new cards sooner or later, so it's not like it's ever really done. If you really want to keep working on it, you could always try and pick up some of the stuff that you bring in and out. I've got a pretty good stash of foil mono-R staples at this point. You get to keep a close eye on reprint sets and judge foils too - there are a couple commander set cards that are bound to show up in those eventually. The other thing I did was to pimp out a second list (aside from BB duals) and get a generally shiny collection, which isn't really a fiscally responsible choice.
I admit that sometimes I buy a card just because I can't find a copy of random Mirrodin uncommon despite being pretty sure there's several floating around somewhere...
I do this more than I will admit to. I justify it by picking up foil copies, which I'm much less likely to have just kicking around.
You've mentioned having problems with enchantments a couple times. I'd consider Blast Zone over one of your lower performing utility lands. It's not fast and it's telegraphed but the possibility of destroying multiple permanents is huge upside.
Are you intentionally omitting planeswalkers? You have enough creature hate here that you could feasibly protect them for a few turns and some of the black ones are right in line with your game plan.
It's great, but i think it suffers from the overplayed syndrome. It seems like every deck that has green plays it regardless of what the deck actually wants to do. I've even seen someone play it in a torpor orb deck.
This. It's a great card in a lot of decks. That doesn't mean it needs to be in every green deck. Sometimes you're better off with one of the spell versions, sometimes you don't need the recursion at all (admittedly a less common case).
Aside from the dozen or so decks that I keep together at all times, I also have 2,000 matching sleeves with a modular collection of cards that I use to build/rebuild decks for a few weeks before tearing them down to build/rebuild other decks.
I also do this, but I only have one truly permanent deck and about 3k unique cards (closer to 5k with duplicates, primarily for other formats) in matching sleeves. It's rare that any of my non-Jaya decks last more than a month or two at the outside.
well, I had to disappear due to need a break from the world due to a panic attack that I couldn't get over with out an inpatient stay, but I am back and doing much better.
Good to hear you're taking care of yourself. Glad to have you back.
Got Ugin, the Ineffable down last night and it was solid, in large part due to the number of walker heavy decks at the table. There weren't enough creatures to effectively pressure walkers and there were a lot of walkers splitting attention, which is more or less ideal circumstances for getting sustained value out of walkers. It stuck around for ~5 turns generating tokens, including a turn where I also had Rings of Brighthearth, and discounted 4 artifacts/All is Dust in that time, so overall paid for and replaced itself many times over. I'm guessing it's rarely going to do quite that well, but I'm more than happy to keep on running it for the time being and would recommend trying it out for anyone who's been on the fence.
I'm rooting for cryo. I would durdle so hard if Nightmare was unbanned.
Got to play Bolas's Citadel last night in a deck with basically no deckbuilding concessions made for it, so no Aetherflux Reservoir, kids, or excessive lifegain. Got wheeled into it with nothing on board but lands and 8 vampire tokens with 30ish life (two superfriends lists in a 5 player game, so no one was getting hit). Proceeded to go through the remaining 60ish cards in deck thanks to that, ramp spells to shuffle away lands, Underrealm Lich, and Fecundity. Drained everyone for 20 with Citadel and Zulaport Cutthroat and was in a position to win on my upkeep with enough life to protect Lich as well as mana to cast Heroic Intervention. Someone else ended it with a wrath before I got there just to speed things up, but the end result was the same. Card's good.
Testing those changes is complicated a little by not wanting to just keep running this deck back and playing about once a week, especially with all of the fun stuff in other colors in this set.
I've picked up a few things for legacy/modern and a first pass at EDH goodies so far. I'm a magpie when it comes to EDH, so I'm realistically better off waiting for a few weeks to grab anything else that I'm after. I grabbed the stuff I'm planning on including in Jaya and some of the stuff I want to play in other archetypes that I play a lot.
WAR is really promising for eternal/non-rotating formats in general. Legacy has people trying out Teferi, Narset, Saheeli, Karn, and Ugin in decks that are looking really good so far as well as some smaller stuff like Liliana's Triumph. Modern has a new boogeyman combo deck thanks to Neoform and people building around a bunch of the same walkers as legacy plus Ashiok. I think vintage is even picking up a few cards (I've seen Narset and Karn so far), though I'm not nearly as familiar with that format. The power level here is high.
Woop. Apologies for missing your more-recently-active thread for Dralnu! Figured I could post/continue our discussion over here for War of the Spark since you're actively updating, still!
I could probably do that too. I'm not regularly playing Dralnu right now. I'm never that far from some flavor of controlling UBx list. Here's my comments from the other thread:
Blast Zone is far and away my favorite EDH control card from this set, especially in Grixis subsets. Permanent answers to resolved enchantments are already in short supply, so having one that slots into the manabase is great. It's expensive, but you're already likely to be holding mana up with Dralnu and can charge it over a couple turns.
Finale of Eternity seems like it has some good synergy with Dralnu. You can cast it early while you're still stabilizing to remove a few smaller creatures, then flash it back for a game winning play late. It's a respectable enough 3-for-1 removal spell even without the overcost effect, even if it probably wouldn't make the cut as just removal.
I'm not big on Bolas's Citadel or Liliana, Dreadhorde General here. If you're on more of a combo Dralnu plan, Citadel gets a lot better. If you're playing control into a reanimation finish the life cost feels heavy unless you're supporting with a fair amount of lifegain. I typically stabilize at a fairly low life total when playing Dralnu-esque decks and it feels like it would be a dead draw. Lili just wants more creatures to take advantage of the static ability. The token production isn't worth 6 mana and I wouldn't be thrilled playing Barter in Blood at half again as much mana.
All the others are solid. The walkers in particular come down early, have an immediate effect, and then draw an attack or two away from your face. I wouldn't expect to protect them often unless they're very late game topdecks, and that's not really a problem. God-Eternal Kefnet seems like straight value as long as you're playing enough spot removal/card draw/reanimation/etc to take full advantage of the copying. It's another in the string of good control win cons we've seen over the last few years, following The Scarab God and Nezahal, Primal Tide.
Blast Zone is far and away my favorite EDH control card from this set, especially in Grixis subsets. Permanent answers to resolved enchantments are already in short supply, so having one that slots into the manabase is great. It's expensive, but you're already likely to be holding mana up with Dralnu and can charge it over a couple turns.
Finale of Eternity seems like it has some good synergy with Dralnu. You can cast it early while you're still stabilizing to remove a few smaller creatures, then flash it back for a game winning play late. It's a respectable enough 3-for-1 removal spell even without the overcost effect, even if it probably wouldn't make the cut as just removal.
I'm not big on Bolas's Citadel or Liliana, Dreadhorde General here. If you're on more of a combo Dralnu plan, Citadel gets a lot better. If you're playing control into a reanimation finish the life cost feels heavy unless you're supporting with a fair amount of lifegain. I typically stabilize at a fairly low life total when playing Dralnu-esque decks and it feels like it would be a dead draw. Lili just wants more creatures to take advantage of the static ability. The token production isn't worth 6 mana and I wouldn't be thrilled playing Barter in Blood at half again as much mana.
All the others are solid. The walkers in particular come down early, have an immediate effect, and then draw an attack or two away from your face. I wouldn't expect to protect them often unless they're very late game topdecks, and that's not really a problem. God-Eternal Kefnet seems like straight value as long as you're playing enough spot removal/card draw/reanimation/etc to take full advantage of the copying. It's another in the string of good control win cons we've seen over the last few years, following The Scarab God and Nezahal, Primal Tide.
The list in the OP is obviously not exactly what I was running, but it's pretty similar. I'll probably retool it into something a little more proactive by removing the cute high CMC stuff and going a little harder on a reanimation plan. I got my ridiculous high CMC bomb game, now those are just going to annoy me when they get stuck in hand. The game last night worked out because one player was also doing something fairly durdle-y and controlling while the third player kind of got stuck between two decks that were just trying to draw into removal, which is not going to be the norm. That's even more true once my group gets tired of playing around with the new walkers and goes back to more aggressive decks. I was really happy with Bolas's discard ETB, especially because the table has an incentive to remove it when you're sitting on enough to transform. The fact that it's also an evasive beater was more helpful than I was expecting, because it forced removal to protect walkers/life totals over time and I didn't get caught paying 7 to have it removed in response. It honestly played a lot better than I was expecting it to.
As for what's next, appreciate not spending money/time/effort on the project for a while? There are bound to be new cards sooner or later, so it's not like it's ever really done. If you really want to keep working on it, you could always try and pick up some of the stuff that you bring in and out. I've got a pretty good stash of foil mono-R staples at this point. You get to keep a close eye on reprint sets and judge foils too - there are a couple commander set cards that are bound to show up in those eventually. The other thing I did was to pimp out a second list (aside from BB duals) and get a generally shiny collection, which isn't really a fiscally responsible choice.
Are you intentionally omitting planeswalkers? You have enough creature hate here that you could feasibly protect them for a few turns and some of the black ones are right in line with your game plan.
For the art, I'm all about the original.
At last count I had built about 130 different generals over the course of my EDH career and some of those have been built many times. Pulling apart and rebuilding is a more or less constant process for me. Some of the repeat favorites are Jaya Ballard, Task Mage, Estrid, the Masked, Tajic, Blade of the Legion, Dralnu, Lich Lord, and Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter.
Got to play Bolas's Citadel last night in a deck with basically no deckbuilding concessions made for it, so no Aetherflux Reservoir, kids, or excessive lifegain. Got wheeled into it with nothing on board but lands and 8 vampire tokens with 30ish life (two superfriends lists in a 5 player game, so no one was getting hit). Proceeded to go through the remaining 60ish cards in deck thanks to that, ramp spells to shuffle away lands, Underrealm Lich, and Fecundity. Drained everyone for 20 with Citadel and Zulaport Cutthroat and was in a position to win on my upkeep with enough life to protect Lich as well as mana to cast Heroic Intervention. Someone else ended it with a wrath before I got there just to speed things up, but the end result was the same. Card's good.
Testing those changes is complicated a little by not wanting to just keep running this deck back and playing about once a week, especially with all of the fun stuff in other colors in this set.
Weezer on a classic rock station still made me feel old.
WAR is really promising for eternal/non-rotating formats in general. Legacy has people trying out Teferi, Narset, Saheeli, Karn, and Ugin in decks that are looking really good so far as well as some smaller stuff like Liliana's Triumph. Modern has a new boogeyman combo deck thanks to Neoform and people building around a bunch of the same walkers as legacy plus Ashiok. I think vintage is even picking up a few cards (I've seen Narset and Karn so far), though I'm not nearly as familiar with that format. The power level here is high.
Finale of Eternity seems like it has some good synergy with Dralnu. You can cast it early while you're still stabilizing to remove a few smaller creatures, then flash it back for a game winning play late. It's a respectable enough 3-for-1 removal spell even without the overcost effect, even if it probably wouldn't make the cut as just removal.
I'm not big on Bolas's Citadel or Liliana, Dreadhorde General here. If you're on more of a combo Dralnu plan, Citadel gets a lot better. If you're playing control into a reanimation finish the life cost feels heavy unless you're supporting with a fair amount of lifegain. I typically stabilize at a fairly low life total when playing Dralnu-esque decks and it feels like it would be a dead draw. Lili just wants more creatures to take advantage of the static ability. The token production isn't worth 6 mana and I wouldn't be thrilled playing Barter in Blood at half again as much mana.
All the others are solid. The walkers in particular come down early, have an immediate effect, and then draw an attack or two away from your face. I wouldn't expect to protect them often unless they're very late game topdecks, and that's not really a problem. God-Eternal Kefnet seems like straight value as long as you're playing enough spot removal/card draw/reanimation/etc to take full advantage of the copying. It's another in the string of good control win cons we've seen over the last few years, following The Scarab God and Nezahal, Primal Tide.