This might help, a poll was done a little while back getting people to vote on what they considered the best cards of all the expansions for commander;
I went through the lists and filled in some blanks for the core sets, and the configuration that I personally think is the best considering everything needs to be under $10, is actually reanimation shell in Sultai.
The issue with mana fixing is that, with these rules, I don't have access to shocks/tango lands/dual cycle lands, which weakens a lot of the usual ways that green decks can color fix in commander (i.e. that searching for a forest can only get me a green mana producing source as opposed to in normal commander when it could get a hybrid mana source). That being said, I have the option of Harrow, Kodama's Reach, Explosive Vegetation, Rampant Growth and Sakura Tribe Elder. The sultai deck would also allow me to play the bringer cycle from Fifth Dawn and the avatars from prophecy, some of which are very strong. On the other hand, a Vhati deck could be very interesting as well.
If you want nostalgia, look at my white border Kaalia. It's power level (of threats) is on the decline versus modern design but it's non-creatures are a reminder of just how savage the game used to be. Plus, resolving old school bombs like Serra Angel, Shivan Dragon, Fork, Soul Burn, Drain Life, Nev Disk....you get the idea. It'ss incredibly nostalgic of Magicpast.
If Kaalia isn't your thing, I did a similar project with Alesha too. Trike is still old school, but you get Tetravus, a mini-goblin package, Grave Pact, Worship and some very reasonable sac outlets (including Ashnod's Altar).
Both decks have an incredible tutour suite, and reasonable midrange draw (draw3 for 4).
I guess I could try something like this in either 5 color or esper (which gives me larger blue creatures and Iridescent Angel, as I don't have access to a mardu commander...
Jodah lived through most of that, so maybe you have him lead it and go back through his memories and lore?
That sounds like a cool idea, but Jodah's card isn't from that time period (and is frankly more powerful than a creature from back then (compare it to Lightning Angel which wasn't a bad card back then)). Plus for 5 color, I do have three options too.
I am looking to build a weaker commander deck than my usual spikier decks, and after looking at some of the theme decks (these were decks usually based around flavor and when looking at some ideas, I knew I would get bored relatively easily and probably take them apart), I decided on a more of a nostalgia type of deck. By this, I mean that I originally played from Weatherlight through Saviors of Kamigawa, and remember playing with a lot of the older cards, which are not typically found in current decks, especially creatures. So, my goal is to put together a coherent commander deck in which the card had to have been printed at least once during that time (5th, 6th, 7th or 8th edition and Weatherlight, Rath Block, Urza's Block, Masques Block, Invasion Block, Odyssey Block, Onslaught Block, Mirrodin Block and Kamigawa block), with the following rules:
1. I must include at least 1 unique card (that is not a basic land) from each of those sets in the deck, so every set (29 sets total) is represented.
2. No card can exceed $10 at the time of putting it into the deck in its cheapest tournament legal printing. This is to limit the cost of the deck as well as to somewhat depress the power level.
3. As Captain Sisay is my competitive commander, she cannot helm this deck (I really don't want two decks with the same commander).
The first issue that I saw is that the colors I can use for my commander are very limited.
Mono-Color: Kamigawa block is alive and well so I have plenty of mono-color generals to choose from, plus there are a bunch from the older sets.
Golgari: Vhati il-dal grants me access to this color combination.
Rakdos: Tsabo Tavoc and Bladewing the Risen give me access to this color combination.
Azorius: Hanna, Ship's Navigator gives me access to this color combination.
Orzhov: Selenia, Dark Angel gives me access to this color combination.
Shards: The invasion dragon cycle give me access to each shard. Ertai, the Corrupted also gives me access to esper.
5 color: Atogatog, Karona, False God and Cromat are my options here.
Given this, I have had a hard time finding a good idea for a deck that could be coherent and fun to play.
Trinisphere
So what are people's thoughts on Trinisphere in EDH? Specifically regarding its use outside of stax/LD strategies as its merits in those strategies is fairly obvious..
I just added one to my Rakdos, the Showstopper deck since the deck has a hefty curve and players at my local store love their 1 and 2 CMC value spells.
I've only gotten it out in one game so far, and not early in the game, but it still put in work mostly by being forgotten until it could hose a few 3+ spell turns. Notably, the Muldrotha player wasn't able to recur their Spore Frog, which allowed me to swing in for a lethal attack on my next turn.
So, thoughts? Opinions? Do y'all run it anywhere?
I run it in my competitive deck (which has a sizable stax package), but its value really depends on your metagame and how competitive the decks as a whole are, as competitive decks usually have a lower mana curve. There have been games where it has crippled the table and others where the best thing it did was enable metal craft from a Mox Opal.
I agree that the best commanders should be vital to a deck (i.e. not there for the colors or barely relevant to what the deck is trying to do), but at the same time be able to be built around versatilely. The other thing, as a corollary, to the versatility is that if I see a commander, I dont want to be able to guess more than a few non-EDH staples that would be in a deck. With many commanders, if you see it, you can usually guess what else is in the deck. Finally, does the commander emphasize linear or nonlinear gameplay.
The Scarab God. You can go Tribal Zombies, Agressive Combo or Permission Control. Its decent at all of them. All with a pseudo tax evading ability. Its jam packed with value.
I have also seen The Scarab God as a mill deck (either self mill or group mill) and I run it with a heavy discard package.
Vedalken Orrery is extremely strong in this deck as it can screw up combat math with the tokens and disincentives people from attacking (all people had to see was me with an Orrery and grip of cards and they either didn't attack or attacked elsewhere, and in addition to its normal ability functioned as another pillow fort card for that reason.
The reanimation spells are cheap, trigger Daxos and can create a very powerful creature out of nowhere.
The bond is best used when the tokens get wiped as it is either an enchantment or a creature wipe and because the tokens are both, they can wipe the opponents of their enchantments/creatures.
The Nether Void functions as a third Rule of Law effect, while majorly taxing plays.
The Orrery is give us the ability to better react to opponents plays.
The connections for additional card draw and the ascension is an alternate token generator should Daxos become too expensive to play.
A lot of the biggest offenders have been listed here (e.g. Bloom Tender and Vedalken Orrery), but the main thing that they should be doing is improving the mana bases. Some examples include:
Most of these are relatively inexpensive (prior to reprinting and will certainly be post reprinting, are not in standard) and serve as reasonable mana bases in decks (i.e. the first major step a deck would take when upgrading from the precon mana bases).
There's no arguing that Ethersworn Canonist is worse than Rule of Law/Dude of Law in the shell, but its actual mileage is quite meta dependent. If you have no mono brown cruising around, or anything crutching too heavily on rocks, the Canonist is going to be okay. In my meta, it would be noticeably worse as one guy somehow built all his decks in a manner that would render him near impervious to the effect (Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer, Marchesa, the Black Rose modular tribal, Mayael the Anima which for whatever reason runs tons of rocks and some other artifacts). The fact that this always slugs us to some degree while potentially leaving a gate open for others to get around it is not super desirable if trying to keep the deck operational in a metagame vacuum.
Nether Void seems like a high risk medium reward sort of card. Imagine this - you drop Daxos on curve, follow up with the Void next turn, and someone kills Daxos. Ruh roh, now you need to spend eight mana to get him back, and are staring down the Void tax on anything you try to do in the meantime. True, it also stiffs everybody else, but the manner in which it can backfire if dropped on an inadequately mana-rich board makes it rather narrow in when it can be cast profitably. The wording on The Abyss means you have to have your sacrificial lamb ready before it's your turn again, which also makes sequencing awkward to dangerous. I never really considered either, as they cost an arm and a leg, but they seem too risky to merit a slot. Go forth and try them out, probably with proxies if you don't own them already, and see how they do.
I don't put Thaumatic Compass in my Ramp suite, I put it in my Draw suite. It's a decent mana sink in the early game when you need to ensure your land drops but it is just a draw engine. Afterwards, it turns into a Maze of Ith that provides mana. That alone gives power, as no one wants to attack me because 'they'll get mazed anyway', so I end up using that colourless on an end step to produce a Daxosman.
If you don't mind pseudo-group hug, Oath of Lieges helps ramp you up. It's a nice rubber-band effect on those who try to explode out lands, like most Green Ramp decks. The best piece is that while everyone might have the same amount of lands because of Oath, your quality is much higher once you bust out Cabal Coffers with Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth. Another way to exploit a more Basic-centric land build would be Terrain Generator.
Thanks for the feedback. I gave Oath of Lieges a shot, and the results were disastrous. Everybody rubber-banded off each other heavily, everybody else started doing crazy stuff super fast. I played a few games with it against different configurations of opposing decks and was consistently left in the dust. Once again, may just be meta differences. I need to retry Thaumatic Compass, see if the lack of evasion hurts Dowsing Dagger (I'm pretty sure it will), get some more mileage on Conqueror's Galleon. Sadly, they'll all probably just succumb to Thran Dynamo. My Smothering Tithe has been in the mail for two weeks, so I played a game with the old configuration of the list against some friends, and the Dynamo did perfectly okay. No frills, no nonsense, here's three extra mana.
Thanks. I just bought the precon and will probably play it out of the box before adding in some of the cards I have lying around, before I go online and buy the main pieces.
I have Oath of Lieges in a different deck and what usually happens is that because each person can get a second land in per turn, instead of rubber banding, it tends to create a vicious cycle which is usually only broken when decks start running out of basics.
95% seems like a vast overestimation to me. Even the best cards in their colors, I figure *might* make it into 50% of decks in their colors, if that. Now, if all cards costed a penny each to get, maybe we'd really see how cards are preferenced, but otherwise I tend to see people build decks more often along the lines of a certain thing they're trying to do and with much less concern of 'having this particular piece of goodstuff' unless if it explicitly helps them in what they're trying to do.
There are very few decks that don't run Sol Ring as it is included in all of the precons so there is a large supply of them. Also, just about every multicolor deck would run Command Tower for similar reasons.
The issue with mana fixing is that, with these rules, I don't have access to shocks/tango lands/dual cycle lands, which weakens a lot of the usual ways that green decks can color fix in commander (i.e. that searching for a forest can only get me a green mana producing source as opposed to in normal commander when it could get a hybrid mana source). That being said, I have the option of Harrow, Kodama's Reach, Explosive Vegetation, Rampant Growth and Sakura Tribe Elder. The sultai deck would also allow me to play the bringer cycle from Fifth Dawn and the avatars from prophecy, some of which are very strong. On the other hand, a Vhati deck could be very interesting as well.
I guess I could try something like this in either 5 color or esper (which gives me larger blue creatures and Iridescent Angel, as I don't have access to a mardu commander...
This is for multiplayer.
That sounds like a cool idea, but Jodah's card isn't from that time period (and is frankly more powerful than a creature from back then (compare it to Lightning Angel which wasn't a bad card back then)). Plus for 5 color, I do have three options too.
1. I must include at least 1 unique card (that is not a basic land) from each of those sets in the deck, so every set (29 sets total) is represented.
2. No card can exceed $10 at the time of putting it into the deck in its cheapest tournament legal printing. This is to limit the cost of the deck as well as to somewhat depress the power level.
3. As Captain Sisay is my competitive commander, she cannot helm this deck (I really don't want two decks with the same commander).
The first issue that I saw is that the colors I can use for my commander are very limited.
Mono-Color: Kamigawa block is alive and well so I have plenty of mono-color generals to choose from, plus there are a bunch from the older sets.
Golgari: Vhati il-dal grants me access to this color combination.
Rakdos: Tsabo Tavoc and Bladewing the Risen give me access to this color combination.
Azorius: Hanna, Ship's Navigator gives me access to this color combination.
Orzhov: Selenia, Dark Angel gives me access to this color combination.
Shards: The invasion dragon cycle give me access to each shard. Ertai, the Corrupted also gives me access to esper.
5 color: Atogatog, Karona, False God and Cromat are my options here.
Given this, I have had a hard time finding a good idea for a deck that could be coherent and fun to play.
Or Ancestral Statue. Or Cloudstone Curio shenanigans. Or the Urza's Saga block free creatures.
I run it in my competitive deck (which has a sizable stax package), but its value really depends on your metagame and how competitive the decks as a whole are, as competitive decks usually have a lower mana curve. There have been games where it has crippled the table and others where the best thing it did was enable metal craft from a Mox Opal.
I agree that the best commanders should be vital to a deck (i.e. not there for the colors or barely relevant to what the deck is trying to do), but at the same time be able to be built around versatilely. The other thing, as a corollary, to the versatility is that if I see a commander, I dont want to be able to guess more than a few non-EDH staples that would be in a deck. With many commanders, if you see it, you can usually guess what else is in the deck. Finally, does the commander emphasize linear or nonlinear gameplay.
I have also seen The Scarab God as a mill deck (either self mill or group mill) and I run it with a heavy discard package.
1. Animate Dead
2. Martyr's Bond
3. Nether Void
4. Necromancy
5. Luminarch Ascension
6. Underworld Connections
7. Vedalken Orrery
The reanimation spells are cheap, trigger Daxos and can create a very powerful creature out of nowhere.
The bond is best used when the tokens get wiped as it is either an enchantment or a creature wipe and because the tokens are both, they can wipe the opponents of their enchantments/creatures.
The Nether Void functions as a third Rule of Law effect, while majorly taxing plays.
The Orrery is give us the ability to better react to opponents plays.
The connections for additional card draw and the ascension is an alternate token generator should Daxos become too expensive to play.
Most of these are relatively inexpensive (prior to reprinting and will certainly be post reprinting, are not in standard) and serve as reasonable mana bases in decks (i.e. the first major step a deck would take when upgrading from the precon mana bases).
Thanks. I just bought the precon and will probably play it out of the box before adding in some of the cards I have lying around, before I go online and buy the main pieces.
I have Oath of Lieges in a different deck and what usually happens is that because each person can get a second land in per turn, instead of rubber banding, it tends to create a vicious cycle which is usually only broken when decks start running out of basics.
There are very few decks that don't run Sol Ring as it is included in all of the precons so there is a large supply of them. Also, just about every multicolor deck would run Command Tower for similar reasons.