MTG Salvation

Sliver Queen Omniscience. All the duals are Alpha/Beta as well as any other relevatn cards (Mana Vault, Sol Ring) and the rest all foil. Basically just get Omni into play as quickly as possible and durdle a bit until I just win.

Hey hey! I had a Krenko deck that was a holy terror in 1 v 1.

Star players were Goblin Lackey, Goblin Matron, Goblin Recruiter, Goblin Warchief, Goblin Chieftain, Siege-gang Commander, Pyroblast, Red Elemental Blast, Skirk Fire Marshal and an assortment of disruption like Blood Moon, Price of Progress, Winter Orb and so on. The Kinship discard and draw four on upkeep was also an all-star, Sensation Gorger I think his name is.

Oh yeah, the last post reminded me: Mass Hysteria. It doesn't matter if your opponent's guys have haste if you're making 20+ tokens with Krenko. Skirk Prospector and Umbral Mantle are also amazing. Oh and Burn at the Stake was surprisingly lolzy and good once I had a bunch of goblins out. Tap 7 of them, take 21? Tap 10, take 30?

Quote from Hammer »

1 in 3 people want Prophet of Kruphix gone. Was hoping for higher.

I think I voted for it but it's really disappeared from our meta of late, as has Consecrated Sphinx as fast combo decks have come to the forefront, and some prison/slowdown to combat these. Basically a ton more spot removal and control and whatnot pushed it out for a while. You still see her in the odd Riku or Momir Vig deck for sure, and I would not complain if it were banned, but the problem solved itself over here.

It's a completely legitimate card and strategy. If you know your opponent has it you can hold lands or perhaps even use tricks like Cyclonic Rift in response (which would be super hilarious) or whatnot. I used it in my Thalia and Doran builds, cos games need to end.

Quote from cryogen »

But that is one group, which happens to be that particular LGS. If the owner of the store has made it clear that he or she is fine with the store being known as a place to play cutthroat Commander without the responsibility of adapting the list to compensate, then you do what any player who is unhappy with their group does: leave and find a new one.

This works...in theory. In Ottawa what we have is a bunch of former Vintage/Legacy players that want a little "oomph" and built EDH decks, then optimized the crap out them. For example my friend Ken's Grand Arbiter Augustin IV deck is likely in the thousands of dollars at the moment, thanks to stuff like Moat and The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale and it does quite well, but it's lost to my Thrun deck a few times. And my land d focused "Diluting" Thrun will lose to Karador occasionally cos Iona. But we're in a weird EDH meta that has multiple tournaments, 1 v 1 or multi or 2HG, so we can get super cutthroat. Since we use he original banned list, we keep an eye on each set release. The LGS owners know that we're all hyper-abusive munchkins so they just let us play in our sandbox.

That isn't to say we can't our don't chill with our proliferate theme decks or silly "infi-durdle Glacial Chasm/Life from the Loam/Zuran Orb/Land Tax/Oath of Druids/Eternal Witness/Aetherling/Constant Mists" decks, but we do build a lot more competitively than would be envisaged by the RC. But it works for us and we have 25-50 people playing EDH every week, and enjoying the way we play it.

Late edit: I'll also disagree with AzureShadow that competitive events are inherently antiosocial. We all have a great time at our events and they've been won by everything from Purphoros to Ad Nauseam to Marath Combo to...and after the events are over we go to McDonald's or Gabriel's Pizza and play some more EDH and have more fun. We have a social contract of our own, I guess, it just means if someone wants to join one of the events we help them tune their decks or we lend them a deck of ours so they can compete, and after that we play beer & pretzel Magic. It's not that hard to do both.

Horobi, Death's Wail. Was the first Commander I built, deck all foily and such. Had tons of silly interactions like Masticore + Horobi, Phyrexian Splicer + Horobi, Cuombajj Witches + Horobi + Begging not to kill Horobi...was fun stuff.

I can only think of silly things like Iona. Was considering Kedrekt Leviathan (the bounce all but lands guy) but not sure if he affects your stuff as well. You could always Cyclonic Rift their board then use a 'twister effect to give them a new hand. Really depends how much of a griefer you are.

Thanks for the explanation on Vicious Shadows and I will respectfully disagree on LR. Our group plays with a ton of Nature's Claim effects (very low mana answers like the latter, Mental Misstep, Force Spike, Force of Will, Duress and so on) so that's why I'm not overly concerned about it. I've seen it played occasionally in our groups by someone that wants to "see what it does" and our general response is: "Well, at least he didn't Land Tax or Serra Ascendant or Crucible Strip early" and we deal with it. But we're really a corner case group across most of Ottawa. For some reason out meta is fairly cutthroat and we gravitate around 75% 1 v 1 (which explains my nonchalance) and even the multi games can get pretty vicious unless we get a request to tone down stuff, in which case we pull out something durdly and slow.

The funniest was the event (yeah we run a lot of Commander events, both 1 v 1 and multi) that had 3 Ad Nauseam decks at the table and me on Thalia, they all killed Thalia/Duress SPhere of Resistance) and race to AN so we could get ice cream before next round.

I agree with Cryogen, with the caveat that it dpeends what else is in there. If the Teferi deck has P3K time warp variants (highly unlikely) then it will be more expensive. As usual over here in Ottawa Algonquin College (trades college with a local game store/computer store all-in-one) will sell these at MRP and sell briskly, my favoured store will mark them at $59.99 and wonder why they haven't sold any of them (they STILL have a Derevi box, DAMAGED, selling for $59.99 but they'll give you $10 in store credit and no one has even given it a second look...) and most other stores will sell at maybe $10 over MSRP.

FWIW voted for all the fast tutors, fast mana, "end game now" stuff like Ad Nauseam, Enter the Infinite, Omniscience and the SBL (standard banned list) stuff with the exception of Limited Resources (too slow), Coalition Victory (too slow) and with apologies to Cryogen, I did not really understand why Vicious Shadows was on there at all? I did not vote for any of the mass land destruction cards as those are "fair play" cards, they end the game but not in an unfair manner; I place Limited Resources and Coalition Victory under this banner as well.

Quote from 9spheres »

Slightly off topic but did anyone else notice that Invoke Prejudice is multiverseid 1488? I'm wondering if that was an unfortunate accident... weird.

It isn't, look on Facebook and google about the artist, one of those "shove it under the rug" choices for sure.

Af fot IP itself, we've had one traded among our playgroup for the longest time and it's never seen play. The Memnarch player just goes off too fast to cast it, the Grand Arbiter Augustin IV player can lock things down without it, it's too clunky for Sygg and too U-intensive for Oloro. I'm sure eventually a Thassa deck will show up and wreck with it though.

So outside of the Planeswalker spec it looks like we are getting Portal reprints now in these products. Seeing that, I'm going to go into super wish-fulfilment mode and hope for either Temporal Mastery or Capture of Jingzhou or (even more unlikely) one of the P3K tutors, or even small junk like some zodiac animals or so on.

That aside, I'd love to see some of the following come back:

Sensei's Divining Top;
Any of the "swords" (Fire/Ice, Feast/Famine);
Some nice bomby stuff like Avenger of Zendikar, Cratehoof Behemoth, Reveillark, Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker;
SMallish stuff like Basalt Monolith, Worn Powerstone, Ancient Tomb, Endless Ranks of the Dead, Avacyn, Angel of Hope or the Mirage fetches.

Don't really mind this as long as Green's lets you do something equally game-breaking (playing lands as instants might be TOO much, maybe just equipment plays and activations) and every colour has a broken commander/planeswalker.

Alex is super cool and responsive on the forums, I've found. Well, the RC is pretty much always responsive but Ban-Ki Moon is great for having in-depth conversations about problematic cards. They're all great though.

So far only using Reclamation Sage, Nissa and Soul of New Phyrexia. I'm sure other stuff will find its way into my decks but I'm generally pretty lazy about this sort of stuff unless the new cards are really eye-catching like Primeval Titan was in the day.