blinkmoth urn is looking like it might get cut but there’s been a few cards recently that have been spun around and switch3d in and out.
I’ve been idling about with vedalken orrery and mycosynth lattice a bit but blinkmoth urn has managed to stay in the 99.
mox diamond is absent for that exact reason. The only time I see Mox diamond as viable is if I had a crucible of worlds in hand to get that land back. Bear in mind we play with a toolbox of lands as well.
I rarely end up with lands to spare and I’d rather be hitting my land drops and casting artifacts that either tap for more than one, or tap for one and do something else as well.
Also worth mentioning, your running the great distortion. How often will Mox diamond counter a spell on discard?
mind’s eye is a strange one for me. I can’t deny it’s a strong card but it’s one of those that will sit in my hand all game because the other options in my hand are so much better. Through no fault of its own it just became redundant. I’ll typically cast kozilek 3-7 times per game before I find my combo just because my opponents don’t want me to go to combat phase. Casting kozilek alone keeps me well stocked.
ring of three wishes isn’t combo only. It will get you some answers when you need them. Tutoring is by no means a ‘combo move’ and you can happily run it to go and get ugin, the spirit dragon, lightning greaves or any other non combo card to develop your board.
I always go for rings of brighthearth, then go again while copying it for the rest of the combo pieces. Often if can resolve the ring of three wishes and keep it on the board, the game ends the turn after.
Personally i’m Not a fan of equipment. I like lightning greaves because they grant haste, can be shuffled from creature to creature and have no equip cost. If you think loxodon warhammer could work for you then dig in. akroma’s memorial is more where I’d be looking.
Flying, vigilance, trample haste with protection and evasion. Yes please!
As I said above, I’ve been playing around with vedalken orrery and mycosynth lattice.
Vedalken orrery because you can pay 4 mana and pass turn, then you can evaluate the board until the end step of the player on your right. When he goes to pass the turn you start casting. It gives you much more insight into what player are doing and gives you time to react. You can keep your cards safe in hand to avoid sorcery speed wrath effects without leaving yourself at a disadvantage.
the
Mycosynth lattice because my current meta is saturated with so much artifact hate: energy flux, hammer mage and even foblin tinkerer. When I play a mycosynth lattice it turns every ‘destroy artifact’ into ‘destroy permanent’. It makes them wider their field of vision to the whole table and can take something that was going to spoil my day and turns it into someone else’s nightmare. If has been effectively watering down the removal focused on me. I would never tell them that that what it’s for, but that is the real reason I’m running it currently.
Also, darksteel forge and nevinyrrals disk means bye bye opponents.
It nonbo’s with ugin but it’s a risk I’m happy with.
I would consider tabernacle of penrell vale if you have access to one or are allowed to proxy (she be pricey)
That card is gold. Solid gold in our deck. Lay that beautiful land and watch you opponent’s start to panic.
You can pay for kozi to stay or not, it always goes in your favor!
Run every man land you can that have the ability to pay 1 mana to animate.
They’ll save you from sheoldred, whispering one long enough to deal with the player who has it.
I often throw mine under the warren instigator bus.
One of the best ones is mishra’s factory. It turns into a 2/2, asign it to block!tap it to turn it into a 3/3 and kill the attacking creature with it. Did I mention I get targeted by warren instigator a lot?
kuldotha forgemaster is fine in a non combo environment.
It can go and get much needed artifacts when you need them. For instance I’d much rather tutor up a mindslaver by sacking 3 of my artifacts than die to the token player who’s about to squash everyone at the table. Use his tokens to kill my opponents, then drive kozilek straight into his tapped field!
I’m not playing hall of the bandit lord simply because I run the bare minimum of lands and I can’t afford any to come in tapped.
I really need to post an updated version on my list because I can’t even remember the last time I posted my build.
ISBPathfinder is on the money with the swiftfoot boots.
Often I’m bang on with my mana count to drop kozilek and maybe a few rocks that went before him; that 1 extra often isn’t there for me to equip.
I agree that the other dudes in the deck would love me to run it but I have quite a tight balance.
The removal cards you listed are all in my sideboard. I switch them in and out depending on the decks I’m playing. ratchet bomb and powder keg for token decks and so on.
I’ve not got the space for bazaar of Baghdad, it’s a land drop that I need to tap for mana to rock and ramp, the draw is cool. The discard less cool. I’ve just not got space for it
doubling cube is literally there to generate a ton of mana. Not exclusively to combo with but just to hit those high numbers needed to maybe drop kozilek for a fourth time plus maybe an Ulamog or two
Going infinite can end with having Staff of Domination + Scultping Steel on Staff + Clock of Omens + Staff of Nin to ping everyone to death. Untapping with Kuldotha Forgemaster and a bunch of artifacts accomplishes that in a series of searches (nice puzzle). But usually casting a few dumb Eldrazi is enough to seal the deal.
If you’re doing that all on the forgemaster does it not male more sense to search out rings of brighthearth, then on the second activation, copy the ability and search up basalt monolith and staff of domination and then just pick up your deck and ping away
Yours means sacrificing 12 artifacts over 4 turns when you need only sac 6 over 2.
I ran salvaging station but often found it a dead card. The only time I remember it shining was when I used it with a welding jar to keep my metalworker in full working order.
If it’s working well for you then crack on!
The deck can definitely be played relatively competitively without the infinite combos.
I regularly win game by shutting people down with annihilator triggers which then closes them out of the game.
I only ever combo off with infinite mana around 20% of the time.
Obviously a token deck will just swallow the annihilator and laugh it off so you need backup plans for those.
If you’re look8ng to take out the infinite combos I would lose staff of domination and erratic portal. As they are just asking to make you pick up your deck and drop your library on the table.
paradox engine is one of those weird ones where it can be used to generate an enormous amount of mana but not actually hit infinite.
What causes paradox engine to go infinite is pure draw power.
Unfortunately with the nature of kozilek’s cast ability it’s easy to go infinite by accident with it if you have a sac outlet.
So what do you do? Do you cut the paradox engine or cut the sac outlets? The engine can net you a ton of mana and chain into a massive board presence but the sac outlets allow you to both protect your commander and draw you cards. The ball is in your court with that one!
blinkmoth urn is a great card that requires timing. Lay it too early and it gets blown up, too late and it generates more mana than you know what to do with on top of all the rocks you’ll have.
It’s pushing towards getting cut from my deck as my opponents read it, panic, then do everything they have to shut me down.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great card but I feel like the exact time to play the card requires too much patience and often I’d rather have something else at my disposal.
I’ve not tested averice totem, I can see why it would be strong but if I find myself with 10 mana open with nothing better to do than steal something, something has gone wrong somewhere because that 10 mana should go toward developing my board state and keeping up the pressure. Maybe in a more control/stax build it could be strong but I play less stax, more speed/combo.
winter orb is a crippler for my opponents, the only person at the table who doesn’t feel the pain of it is the dude tapping his creatures for mana. He’s the first to take the annihilator so he can also feel what the other players are feeling.
mirage mirror can go both ways, sometimes it’s dead on the boards but it’s one of those cards I like to keep handy.
If it’s on the board it actas as a preventative. Until it’s been removed I’ve found my opponents will hold back their strong cards becausse I can copy and use. My favourite targets for it are things like necropotence, a very heavily played card in competitive metas. I’ll copy it up, pay 10 life for 10 cards but still be able to draw after the mirror switches back.
Less important for you but worth mentioning, it works as a good sac outlet for kozilek. Copy him, legend rule and sac your commander, cast, draw 4, legend rule, sac commander, cast, draw 4... over and over.
I used to run storm cauldron but 5 mana seemed high when I’m not running a heavy stax package and I often found it sat in my hand and being passed over for better cards that could speed up my game plan, rather than slow everyone else’s. It’s a good card, I just don’t favor it.
I run cloud key and I don’t run semblance anvil.
Whenever I play a semblance anvil it gets taken out which takes out two of my cards.
I’d rather run the key which has less impact than the anvil and it be a target.
I used to run foundry inspector but he’s a bit fragile being a creature as well, but ironically, works really well with semblance anvil.
I’m liking geode golem though so will have to test him for a while.
isolated watchtower is great if you’re running a wastes deck but as I only run 3 Wastes, that a 1 in 33 chance that its ability pans out for me
Tbh it looks like you're running a pretty tight build but you just need to remember to hold something back to feed the Paradox engine. It's an amazing card for us but by no means infinite on its own. If you run out of steam if ends up dead on the board. If you play it too early you'll get hated out too fast
OK, so you're running th strong combos.
Rings + basalt
Metalworker + staff of domination
Spine + ironworks
Darksteel forge + nev's disk
Buried ruin + Crucible of worlds + mindslaver
And the synergies
Unwinding clock + Planar bridge/ring of three wishes
Among many others lol
I sit on Paradox engine in my hand until the timing is right,
You need low cost cards in hand, rocks on the field and maybe a sac outlet.
Tap everything, drop the engine, then drop a 0,1,or 2 mana card, tap out, cast small, tap out, cast kozilek.
90% of the time you can pull it off quite efficiently but if you've not got enough cards in hand you'll drop the engine and fall short.
I run a few more 0 and 1 drops for things like Paradox angine and krarks clan ironworks.
Also if you draw into erratic portal its game over.
And having a fully foiled deck full of inventions, expeditions and judge foils comes the need for your opponents to grab at your cards with greasy fingers.
If I could shuffle it I'd put my entire deck in toploaders! Lol
Didn't really consider that aspect. There's a ton of control changing in my meta already so this guy was just one more in that regard. I double sleeve all my decks already so I'm not really bothered handing them over. Once someone did even spill a drink on a few and the double sleeves fully protected it so I generally feel pretty confident with my level of protection there.
Although I realize it is a bit of an unfair comparison. I have zero interest in foiling out my decks, I go for the cheapest versions of cards almost every time. Once in a while I'll "splurge" with a promo copy if its only like $1 more and I like how the promo looks. Or if the oracle text has changed so much between the old and new version that playing with the old copy is borderline impractical at this point and its worth an extra $1 or $2 to save people from doing lots of gatherer lookups during the game. But that's a rare exception. Not to say I don't get nervous about some (there is no such thing as a cheap copy of an original dual land for instance lol). But still, its clearly different since most of my cards are cheap. I just want to play the game, I don't care how my deck looks.
I've actually been debating whether to just sub out all my expensive cards with proxies to further reduce this risk. My group is super cheap so we let anyone play with proxies freely as long as they take the effort to actually print out the card (so its nice and readable) and sleeve it up with their deck so it looks like any other card from the back. Hand-written post-it proxies stuck to a token or playing card with just the name aren't really acceptable. But as long as we can play normally without looking stuff up all the time as if you really did have the card we don't care.
I personally try to make sure I acquire at least one copy of every card in all my decks so if I ever went to a store event or something I could make one or two of my decks legal. But that still means there's really no reason to carry around the real copies most of the time when we're playing around food/drinks, in bars/restaurants, or just risk my backpack being stolen in transit.
There's still comparison but i got stung once and it made me not trust other players I didn't know with touching my cards.
I had someone drop a sylvan primordial back when it was legal and he went around the table jamming his fingernail saying 'pop' to everything he was destroying. Made a very noticeable and permanent dent in my doubling season. I was fuming.
I've had too many theft players roll for damage on a mana crypt across my cards with heavy dice so now whenever a card gets taken, it goes in plastic solely because I don't want to have to have the 'you're paying for the damage to my card' talk with them.
I don't mind theft as a strategy, I think it's great but I just hate my cards being controlled by someone who's not got respect the cards they've taken.
It's a shame that the kind of ramp we play our cards are more appealing to steal than most others on the board!
What i don't like about Treasure nabber is that people will take and grab my cards. Some people are filthy when they're playing, chips and chocolate etc.
I run azor's gateway I really like it. I don't use it to try and flip it into a mega land, I use it to filter lands out of my hand after kozilek casts. Its saved me a few times when launching into the metalworker/staff of domination combo as you need 3 artifacts in hand.
Totally agree with the 'dirty players' comment. I carry 20 top loaders with me when I play and when another player steals a card I stick it in solid plastic and pass it over. Then say something like "I'd hate for something to happen to the card that might mean you have to buy me a new one" in a jokey way. Except I'm serious. Deadly serious.
My Kozi deck is 97% foil lol
I’ve been idling about with vedalken orrery and mycosynth lattice a bit but blinkmoth urn has managed to stay in the 99.
mox diamond is absent for that exact reason. The only time I see Mox diamond as viable is if I had a crucible of worlds in hand to get that land back. Bear in mind we play with a toolbox of lands as well.
I rarely end up with lands to spare and I’d rather be hitting my land drops and casting artifacts that either tap for more than one, or tap for one and do something else as well.
Also worth mentioning, your running the great distortion. How often will Mox diamond counter a spell on discard?
mind’s eye is a strange one for me. I can’t deny it’s a strong card but it’s one of those that will sit in my hand all game because the other options in my hand are so much better. Through no fault of its own it just became redundant. I’ll typically cast kozilek 3-7 times per game before I find my combo just because my opponents don’t want me to go to combat phase. Casting kozilek alone keeps me well stocked.
ring of three wishes isn’t combo only. It will get you some answers when you need them. Tutoring is by no means a ‘combo move’ and you can happily run it to go and get ugin, the spirit dragon, lightning greaves or any other non combo card to develop your board.
I always go for rings of brighthearth, then go again while copying it for the rest of the combo pieces. Often if can resolve the ring of three wishes and keep it on the board, the game ends the turn after.
Personally i’m Not a fan of equipment. I like lightning greaves because they grant haste, can be shuffled from creature to creature and have no equip cost. If you think loxodon warhammer could work for you then dig in. akroma’s memorial is more where I’d be looking.
Flying, vigilance, trample haste with protection and evasion. Yes please!
As I said above, I’ve been playing around with vedalken orrery and mycosynth lattice.
Vedalken orrery because you can pay 4 mana and pass turn, then you can evaluate the board until the end step of the player on your right. When he goes to pass the turn you start casting. It gives you much more insight into what player are doing and gives you time to react. You can keep your cards safe in hand to avoid sorcery speed wrath effects without leaving yourself at a disadvantage.
the
Mycosynth lattice because my current meta is saturated with so much artifact hate: energy flux, hammer mage and even foblin tinkerer. When I play a mycosynth lattice it turns every ‘destroy artifact’ into ‘destroy permanent’. It makes them wider their field of vision to the whole table and can take something that was going to spoil my day and turns it into someone else’s nightmare. If has been effectively watering down the removal focused on me. I would never tell them that that what it’s for, but that is the real reason I’m running it currently.
Also, darksteel forge and nevinyrrals disk means bye bye opponents.
It nonbo’s with ugin but it’s a risk I’m happy with.
I would consider tabernacle of penrell vale if you have access to one or are allowed to proxy (she be pricey)
That card is gold. Solid gold in our deck. Lay that beautiful land and watch you opponent’s start to panic.
You can pay for kozi to stay or not, it always goes in your favor!
Run every man land you can that have the ability to pay 1 mana to animate.
They’ll save you from sheoldred, whispering one long enough to deal with the player who has it.
I often throw mine under the warren instigator bus.
One of the best ones is mishra’s factory. It turns into a 2/2, asign it to block!tap it to turn it into a 3/3 and kill the attacking creature with it. Did I mention I get targeted by warren instigator a lot?
It can go and get much needed artifacts when you need them. For instance I’d much rather tutor up a mindslaver by sacking 3 of my artifacts than die to the token player who’s about to squash everyone at the table. Use his tokens to kill my opponents, then drive kozilek straight into his tapped field!
ashnod’s altar is an all star along with high market and miren, the moaning well. Don’t just use these cards in your turn to sac kozilek for a recast.
They’re amazing to sac kozilek after he’s targeted by song of the dryads, darksteel mutation, imprisoned in the moon and anything that can steal him.
Having your butcher on the other side of the table is a bad situation to be in.
I’m not playing hall of the bandit lord simply because I run the bare minimum of lands and I can’t afford any to come in tapped.
I really need to post an updated version on my list because I can’t even remember the last time I posted my build.
ISBPathfinder is on the money with the swiftfoot boots.
Often I’m bang on with my mana count to drop kozilek and maybe a few rocks that went before him; that 1 extra often isn’t there for me to equip.
I agree that the other dudes in the deck would love me to run it but I have quite a tight balance.
The removal cards you listed are all in my sideboard. I switch them in and out depending on the decks I’m playing. ratchet bomb and powder keg for token decks and so on.
I’ve not got the space for bazaar of Baghdad, it’s a land drop that I need to tap for mana to rock and ramp, the draw is cool. The discard less cool. I’ve just not got space for it
doubling cube is literally there to generate a ton of mana. Not exclusively to combo with but just to hit those high numbers needed to maybe drop kozilek for a fourth time plus maybe an Ulamog or two
If you’re doing that all on the forgemaster does it not male more sense to search out rings of brighthearth, then on the second activation, copy the ability and search up basalt monolith and staff of domination and then just pick up your deck and ping away
Yours means sacrificing 12 artifacts over 4 turns when you need only sac 6 over 2.
I ran salvaging station but often found it a dead card. The only time I remember it shining was when I used it with a welding jar to keep my metalworker in full working order.
If it’s working well for you then crack on!
Yeah, I nearly lost mine to the Twitch trap!
I regularly win game by shutting people down with annihilator triggers which then closes them out of the game.
I only ever combo off with infinite mana around 20% of the time.
Obviously a token deck will just swallow the annihilator and laugh it off so you need backup plans for those.
If you’re look8ng to take out the infinite combos I would lose staff of domination and erratic portal. As they are just asking to make you pick up your deck and drop your library on the table.
paradox engine is one of those weird ones where it can be used to generate an enormous amount of mana but not actually hit infinite.
What causes paradox engine to go infinite is pure draw power.
Unfortunately with the nature of kozilek’s cast ability it’s easy to go infinite by accident with it if you have a sac outlet.
So what do you do? Do you cut the paradox engine or cut the sac outlets? The engine can net you a ton of mana and chain into a massive board presence but the sac outlets allow you to both protect your commander and draw you cards. The ball is in your court with that one!
blinkmoth urn is a great card that requires timing. Lay it too early and it gets blown up, too late and it generates more mana than you know what to do with on top of all the rocks you’ll have.
It’s pushing towards getting cut from my deck as my opponents read it, panic, then do everything they have to shut me down.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great card but I feel like the exact time to play the card requires too much patience and often I’d rather have something else at my disposal.
I’ve not tested averice totem, I can see why it would be strong but if I find myself with 10 mana open with nothing better to do than steal something, something has gone wrong somewhere because that 10 mana should go toward developing my board state and keeping up the pressure. Maybe in a more control/stax build it could be strong but I play less stax, more speed/combo.
winter orb is a crippler for my opponents, the only person at the table who doesn’t feel the pain of it is the dude tapping his creatures for mana. He’s the first to take the annihilator so he can also feel what the other players are feeling.
mirage mirror can go both ways, sometimes it’s dead on the boards but it’s one of those cards I like to keep handy.
If it’s on the board it actas as a preventative. Until it’s been removed I’ve found my opponents will hold back their strong cards becausse I can copy and use. My favourite targets for it are things like necropotence, a very heavily played card in competitive metas. I’ll copy it up, pay 10 life for 10 cards but still be able to draw after the mirror switches back.
Less important for you but worth mentioning, it works as a good sac outlet for kozilek. Copy him, legend rule and sac your commander, cast, draw 4, legend rule, sac commander, cast, draw 4... over and over.
I used to run storm cauldron but 5 mana seemed high when I’m not running a heavy stax package and I often found it sat in my hand and being passed over for better cards that could speed up my game plan, rather than slow everyone else’s. It’s a good card, I just don’t favor it.
I can see batterskull's synergy with paradox engine but are you quiping those and swinging with them?
Whenever I play a semblance anvil it gets taken out which takes out two of my cards.
I’d rather run the key which has less impact than the anvil and it be a target.
I used to run foundry inspector but he’s a bit fragile being a creature as well, but ironically, works really well with semblance anvil.
I’m liking geode golem though so will have to test him for a while.
isolated watchtower is great if you’re running a wastes deck but as I only run 3 Wastes, that a 1 in 33 chance that its ability pans out for me
Tbh it looks like you're running a pretty tight build but you just need to remember to hold something back to feed the Paradox engine. It's an amazing card for us but by no means infinite on its own. If you run out of steam if ends up dead on the board. If you play it too early you'll get hated out too fast
Rings + basalt
Metalworker + staff of domination
Spine + ironworks
Darksteel forge + nev's disk
Buried ruin + Crucible of worlds + mindslaver
And the synergies
Unwinding clock + Planar bridge/ring of three wishes
Among many others lol
I sit on Paradox engine in my hand until the timing is right,
You need low cost cards in hand, rocks on the field and maybe a sac outlet.
Tap everything, drop the engine, then drop a 0,1,or 2 mana card, tap out, cast small, tap out, cast kozilek.
90% of the time you can pull it off quite efficiently but if you've not got enough cards in hand you'll drop the engine and fall short.
I run a few more 0 and 1 drops for things like Paradox angine and krarks clan ironworks.
Also if you draw into erratic portal its game over.
I'd then go and get krarks clan ironworks and spine of ish sah and force a scoop.
Aside from comboing out its a dead card in my opinion
If I could shuffle it I'd put my entire deck in toploaders! Lol
There's still comparison but i got stung once and it made me not trust other players I didn't know with touching my cards.
I had someone drop a sylvan primordial back when it was legal and he went around the table jamming his fingernail saying 'pop' to everything he was destroying. Made a very noticeable and permanent dent in my doubling season. I was fuming.
I've had too many theft players roll for damage on a mana crypt across my cards with heavy dice so now whenever a card gets taken, it goes in plastic solely because I don't want to have to have the 'you're paying for the damage to my card' talk with them.
I don't mind theft as a strategy, I think it's great but I just hate my cards being controlled by someone who's not got respect the cards they've taken.
It's a shame that the kind of ramp we play our cards are more appealing to steal than most others on the board!
I run azor's gateway I really like it. I don't use it to try and flip it into a mega land, I use it to filter lands out of my hand after kozilek casts. Its saved me a few times when launching into the metalworker/staff of domination combo as you need 3 artifacts in hand.
Totally agree with the 'dirty players' comment. I carry 20 top loaders with me when I play and when another player steals a card I stick it in solid plastic and pass it over. Then say something like "I'd hate for something to happen to the card that might mean you have to buy me a new one" in a jokey way. Except I'm serious. Deadly serious.
My Kozi deck is 97% foil lol
Nice knowing you guys!
I'm in two minds.
Yes, that card is amazing BUT it won't be foiled so I'm completely torn!
I will most likely run it as its an easy peasy T2 drop