The problem with Omnath is that they want to be elemental tribal, +1/+1 counters, and landfall at the same time. I blame it on Risen Reef.
This deck wins sometimes, but usually becomes trigger hell without accomplishing very much. It also draws hate because it looks impressive while it’s not doing anything.
I’m taking this apart so I can build a pure lands deck. I chose Gretchen Titchwillow as the commander, and I’ll probably build it around land bouncing and card draw.
Here is my attempt at a Meren Modular deck. The deck uses Meren of Clan Nel Toth‘s ability to recur Modular creatures, collecting all the +1/+1 counters on fewer creatures. I haven’t had it happen yet, but the ultimate goal was to play Ashnod’s Transmogrant on Meren and drop all the counters on her in her new artifact form. Practical? Nope. Fun? Yeah, I liked it.
The deck did well with recurring ramp, but there aren’t enough Modular creatures for it to consistently function. I could probably increase my self-mill to compensate, but it’s also slow because I don’t have many ways to ramp my experience counters early on. It is fun to play, but I’d like to build a Modular deck with another commander.
We’re disassembling another deck. This Orzhov token sacrifice deck needed too many parts in play at the same time to really succeed. It was fun to play, but too slow and inconsistent to win much.
Oops! It also looks like I lost a card somewhere along the way.
The first time I played an earlier version of this deck, I won by feeding way too much mana into a Hydra Broodmaster to make 17 17/17 creatures and a 22/22 with haste on turn 4. In response I took out most of the good cards that allowed this: Concordant Crossroads, Guardian Project, Priest of Titania, Elvish Archdruid, and most of the rest of the permanent card draw other than Chulane. Now the deck just spins its wheels a lot instead of winning.
Chulane, Teller of Tales has gained a strong reputation for being super powerful, even by accident. Since I’m not interested in building a cEDH deck, I think I should limit its use to highly themed decks that need its ability to function at all, rather than trying to build around his abilities. Maybe I should’ve kept my thanksgiving deck together instead?
The point of this deck is: lots of mana ramp via dorks, and big fat X creatures. Having Haste makes this deck work much better; too much better, especially with Mobilize and Vitalize to untap all the dorks and use them again.
After taking apart my Elsha of the Infinite deck, I’ve built two versions of a Shu Yun, the Silent Tempest Voltron deck. Both aimed to suddenly deal lethal command damage to an opponent in a single attack: One-Punch Man style.
The first version tried to minimize board presence: other than land and mana rocks, the only permanent allowed was Shu Yun himself. The deck basically cast Shu Yun once you could protect him, and then built up a lethal hand. On the right turn, you cast enough buff and evasion spells so his activated double strike ability deals lethal command damage, and attack. He was vulnerable after either being attacked or attacking, so it was challenging to take on more than one opponent. The only hope the deck had was politicking itself into the final pair.
The main reason I rebuilt the deck is because it wasn’t very fun for me to play. Most of the time you did nothing other than cull your hand and try to think of new reasons people shouldn’t attack you. I prefer doing things instead of being patient.
The deck listed here is the last iteration of Shu Yun, One-Punch Man. It uses equipment and other permanents for better value, and to help with the longevity problem of the previous version. One-Punch Man With a Cane. It’s a lot more straightforward, and projects its danger through board presence a bit more obviously. It works better than the first version, and is more fun for me to play. However, we have so many Voltron-style decks that this has been pushed to the bottom of the pile. I have a very similar Okaun/Zndrsplt coin-flip deck that I’ll basically always play instead of this one, so… time to strip it for parts.
This deck is a hateful creation. For some reason it feels horrible to play against in 1v1, but isn’t as annoying in multiplayer.
Where the deck falls short is in how fun it is to play. Since most of the deck consists of pain and taxes, playing the deck well is more about pestering your opponents to remember your cards’ triggers, than making interesting gameplay decisions.
Even with all that trigger policing, if the deck wins, it’s typically a bit more Voltron: commander damage from Mogis once you have a few damage multipliers on the board.
It looks like I built two decks into one, again.
This was built long before Theros: Beyond Death came out; there may be some new enchantments that would be worth including. Many of the cards are just weird old cards I’ve never had a chance to play.
What happens when Skyship Weatherlight returns to home port after years of sailing the multiverse? This deck demonstrates by unloading artifacts all over the place until you run out of playmat to put them on.
The basic idea of the deck is to get out Jhoira and keep her alive long enough to play the rest of your deck in one turn. Every time you cast an artifact, you draw a card. Most of the artifacts are mana stones or mana discounts for other artifacts. Eventually you’re playing mana stones for less mana than they cost, and the only thing left to stop you is running out of artifacts in hand. To avoid this, the deck includes X draw spells and plenty of artifacts that draw additional cards. There are a few protection spells for Jhoira, but the biggest protection is the massive amount of mana available to recast her.
After playing Elsha of the Infinite as a spellslinger deck, I intended to build it into an artifact storm deck. When I read Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain, I decided she’d make a much better commander for this deck. The main problem I had with Elsha was getting stuck when I couldn’t play the top card. After playing this deck I can say that drawing a card after playing an artifact is more effective than just being able to play the top card of the deck.
I think I should start adding a standard evaluation section with my impressions of the deck. Something like this:
This is a pretty fast deck that’s very fun to play and has a variety of win conditions, but don’t expect your opponents to have much fun watching you play every card in your deck. There’s interaction, but it’s mostly in the form of preventing other people from interacting with you, or recovering when they do.
I like how this deck provides a place where horrible cards can have their day in the spotlight. I don’t think I’ve ever actually used a Barbed Sextant before, but once your engine is running, drawing 2 cards for 0 mana is great.
The deck originally had a primary win condition of self mill with Jace, Wielder of Mysteries, though it also won with creatures or Psychosis Crawler as well, usually more quickly. Tuning up the deck with additions like Aetherflux Reservoir mostly reduced the length of the last turn rather than decreasing the turn count before it won.
This deck was originally built with cards I had on hand, and then upgraded with 5-10 singles. As I tuned it, I noticed several things about exactly which janky artifacts and support cards work best:
Another blog, another early deck I built that it’s time to take apart.
This deck has a lot of Yarok ETB synergy, but not much focus. It’s a toolbox without a single strong path to victory. There are infinite mana combos with Peregrine Drake and Shrieking Drake or other bouncers, and bouncing Gray Merchant of Asphodel is good for lethal damage, and Phyrexian Ingester can get huge when its ETB trigger is doubled. When the deck succeeds, it’s when it happens to draw the cards required to slow the game down long enough to eventually win on its own terms.
This deck is an Elf Bomb: accelerate mana through mana elves and Karametra’s land drops, and win with large X creatures or hordes of elves.
Karametra, God of Harvests helps a lot with ramp, but she also requires a lot of tutoring and shuffling, so it can slow down the game considerably if you also want to time your plays correctly. The main reason I’m taking the deck apart is because I’m going to rebuild it around Chulane, Teller of Tales, who helps with both ramp and card draw, and avoids the delay of constant land tutoring.
This deck is reasonably good, maybe a 6/10 for power. Its fun comes from making giant creatures and/or a lot of creatures. It tends to win more when it goes wide than when it goes tall, due to lack of evasion or trample.
Now that I think about it, this deck has a problem I’ve had before in decks I build: it is basically two decks mashed together. It’s trying to do both Elf Tribal and Big Mana Stompy, but it should just choose one. I built a worse Elf deck with a poor commander, but it needs some of the cards from this deck to work well enough to bother with. I expect I’ll eventually end up with both a Chulane Big Mana deck and another Elf Tribal.
“You should make a Thanksgiving deck with a bunch of Food cards in it,” Erik said.
“Ok.” So I did.
Finding cards to fit the theme is the easy part. I also wanted the deck to have a way to win, while still allowing for a bunch of janky theme cards. This deck isn’t competitive or consistent, but it has won games. It’s fun to play only because of the theme. I’d call it a 4-5/10 on the power scale, and fun enough to play once a year.
The Thanksgiving theme covers two very different perspectives on Thanksgiving: a progressive critique of the traditional story of pilgrims arriving in the bountiful new world on three ships, and a modern progressive stuck at a stereotypical dysfunctional family Thanksgiving dinner. I built this deck as a parody specifically because I don’t like Thanksgiving and what it stands for. Nothing here should be interpreted as endorsement of the holiday or the concepts traditionally associated with it.
(Update: I have learned, and changed my mind. If this article is accurate when it says that the national holiday of Thanksgiving was created by president Lincoln to help win the war against slaveholders, then I’m all for it. I just don’t like celebrating colonialism. https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-28-2019)
The theme cards are almost all green and white, and I wanted the deck to work, so Chulane, Teller of Tales seemed like a good choice for commander. A combo win condition could be added with only a few cards, and Chulane’s card draw and ramp make it that much easier to get the combo in hand.
I settled on an easy combo I am not likely to use in decks I play more often: Palinchron and Panharmonicon, for infinite mana. I added a handful of X spells for win (or just epic game end) conditions, but if I revise the deck I’d like to remove most of them. Playtesting revealed the other now-obvious benefit Chulane provides: with infinite Palinchron castings, you can draw as much of your deck as you need to find a win card, and then Chulane bounces himself back into your hand so you avoid milling yourself to death.
I didn’t add High Tide as a backup plan because of the low Island count. I did choose green enchantment ramp and multi-mana lands, to provide an alternative to Panharmonicon: If I can get 12 mana out of 7 lands, that’s enough for Palinchron to generate infinite mana.
The theme portion of the deck is used primarily as blocking fodder and ways to trigger Chulane, but there are also several theme cards that are more useful.
As for the budget… I didn’t actually buy the expensive cards for this deck, I had them on hand. I’m not that crazy… if I were, I’d add artifact tutor cards such as Enlightened Tutor.
Come on, tell me Palinchron doesn’t look like a roasted turkey?