We all have that deck that just survives even though it isn’t the best. For me that’s [[Torgaar, Famine Incarnate]]. It’s not the best mono black commander in any way but its particular combination of effects to me is emblematic of mono black. It’s a bit of a swiss army knife and so I find myself hard pressed to really change anything about the core of the deck.
What’s your pet deck?
[[Isperia the Inscrutable]]
This is the only commander deck I’ve consistently kept around over the years. I don’t remember how I discovered this card, but I think it’s a neat ability and the commander itself feels flavourful and badass. I started playing during Return to Ravnica, which perhaps added a bonus feeling of “wow, it’s the original Isperia!”.
My deck isn’t terribly good since I don’t play Commander very competetively. I’ve tried to have sphinxes and stuff that feel badass and fitting for the deck instead of busted combos or whatever. [[Medomai the Ageless]] is a typical target to search for.
The only “combo” I can think of off the top of my head (been a while since I’ve played the deck) is [[Bruna, the Fading Light]] and [[Gisela, the Broken Blade]]. I think that combo is hilarious due to the name of the melded card: Brisela. We ship Brisela.
- Isperia the Inscrutable - (G) (SF) (txt)
- Medomai the Ageless - (G) (SF) (txt)
- Bruna, the Fading Light - (G) (SF) (txt)
- Gisela, the Broken Blade - (G) (SF) (txt)
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[[Brisela, Voice of Nightmares]]
[[Selvala, Explorer Returned]] group hug. It’s all about just speeding the game up and giving everybody a bunch of stuff. Nobody ever wants to kill Selvala because everyone gets to draw cards. It’s so much fun as long as you don’t care about winning.
For me it’s anything with [[Stitcher’s Supplier]] in it. Right now I really love trying to make Dredge work in Historic and soon Pioneer.
Love that card. I don’t have it in any decks but it’s worth at least half an [[Ancestral Recall]] in decks that want it.
I like [[Kenrith, the Returned King]] conceptually as a political commander but it irks me that aside from the red ability it’s basically not worth it at all to activate the other abilities targeting anyone but yourself. I love the black reanimate ability, though!
There’s [[Generous Patron]] and [[Willbreaker]], which are great payoffs for targetting your opponents creatures with the green ability. The blue ability is also used as an infinite mana sink to mill your opponents out.
Those are exceptions that prove the rule, I think. That you aren’t just going to randomly hand out counters, cards, and reanimates because without that infinite mana you won’t be able to defend yourself against the gifts you gave out.
I’m just saying it’s lame that it’s not worth targeting other people without having those specific synergy pieces in play.
I mean, that’s kind of expected of abilities that would only benefit their target by themselves, without politicking or other synergies you can’t get benefits from them. What would you want them to do, give you a benefit if you targeted your opponent/opponent’s permanents/cards with them? The only problem with that is that Kenrith has too many abilities to fully write this effects down. I guess it could only do that part where you benefit an opponent for a benefit to you too, but that would be a significantly different design.
There was a lot of hype when Kenrith was spoiled that “he’s perfect for politics”. I’m just saying that hype was misplaced when you’re probably going to only target sometime else with his activations on average twice per game if you’re not comboing out.
Stitcher’s Supplier is also such a great card in commander. I’ve had tons of golgari or BGx graveyard decks using it and its buddy [[Satyr Wayfinder]].
I built a [[Multani, Yavimaya’s Avatar]] $50 budget deck a number of years back that is just a mono green spell slinger build. It is pretty simple to play for new people and resilient enough to play with my normal group.
Being a budget deck I even run it unsleeved and get that nostalgia of playing kitchen table magic as a kid.
That sounds great. I care about the new player experience as well and it’s cool to see such a “what you see is what you get” commander get some love. I need to pick one up, actually.
[[Captain Ripley Vance]] it goes hard and fast, and by far it’s my best deck for coming in third. I’ve had to pull back its explosiveness, because it’s no good to take someone out on the third turn only to be stuck out of gas as archenemy. It can still wreck face out of nowhere, though, and most of my pod gives the deck a healthy dose of respect. I love it so much I got a custom alter of the commander and now I joke I own the most expensive copy of the card in the world, which may not be too far off from the truth.
That does seem like a go hard or go home deck. You’re going flat out to commit to casting three spells on as many turns as possible. It’s like the opposite of a [[Birgi]] deck where you have the payoff in the command zone instead of the enabler. I like it! I’m also a sucker for any commander that actually wants you to buff your creatures. It’s something I think is less prevalent than I would like in my experience.
One of the things that it’s really good for, too, is that it forces you to pay attention to your sequencing. Because the effect is on cast, it puts the trigger on the stack before the spell you’re casting resolves. So if you do something like arcane Signet>Seething Song> Infuriate, the trigger goes off before you can pump yourself with Infuriate. So you need to play games with the stack and hold priority to get things to land where you need them to.
Atla Palani for me. It’s actually not a bad deck, in fact I would probably say it’s at about a 6 or 7/10. It was what I turned my Captain Sisay deck into after paradox engine got banned. I love that deck. I even have an Atla artist proof signed by the artist in Cyrillic since she lives in Russia.
That’s awesome! I love the “spin the wheel” aspect of Atla Palani. You can cheese it by stacking the deck with whatever you want but ultimately it’s still random what you get each time.
Have you heard of modular decks? The idea that some part of the deck is randomized each time. For example with Atla Palani you would have a stack of cards kept separate from the deck and before each game randomly deal a number of them into your deck before you shuffle.
I actually have! I’ve thought about doing that, or building a couple of other Atla variations that I can bust out when I’m feeling like playing a little differently, and the only thing I’d have to interchange between the variations is the core mana base because that’s way too expensive to have multiple of.
[[Rakdos, Lord of Riots]] It’s a great icebreaker to get a pod moving and not be worried about attacking or “who’s the bad guy?” ‘Cause it’s me.
It’s always good to be able to choose to be the bad guy. I like the honesty that kind of deck lets you have.
Yep, takes the pressure of going first out of the game and it’s damn good fun. Honest christian Magic… with demons.
I love my Akiri Line-Slinger + Silas-Ren deck. It’s not the best in terms of win rate but it’s always fun to play as both the commanders are so cheap to cast.
My oldest deck is [[Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait]] which has turned into a bit of a monster since I added a few cards that happen to create a bunch of ways to make infinite Landfall combos. It could probably be even stronger if I took out some of the high-cost sea monsters to focus just on Landfall, but I like big sea monsters.
After that my [[Gishath, Sun’s Avatar]] deck is pretty new, I just made it this year, but I already love it. Big dinos!
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[[Jodah, Archmage Eternal]] would have to be my favorite edh deck. This has been the case from when I initially made it. As a timmy/spike hybrid, I love playing splashy spells, and Jodah let’s me cast them without having to wait too late in the game. Where I play, people run a lot of infinite combos and semi-competitive decks, so you get punished for playing strategies I prefer (“battlecruiser edh”).
Jodah seems very fair to me especially compared to the new Jodah. “[[Fist of Suns]] on legs” seems like a fun and fair proposition. Like, it’s just ramp. You have to commit to having Big Expensive Commander Cards in your deck to make the juice worth the squeeze. I’d rater get smacked in the face with a splashy 10 mana spell from deep in Magic’s history than see [[The Great Henge]] go off again.
Jodah also seems like it’s fun because you can kind of put whatever you want in it, more or less, as long as the cards are splashy enough.
I have always wanted to build a Jodah deck but with a Wheel of Time theme and Jodah as Rand Al’thor. I’m a huge wheel of time fan and that’s the one deck I would probably “bling” out with alters and foils.
[[Trostani, Selesnya’s Voice]] and [[Queen Marchesa]] Long may she reign! These were two of the first decks I built by myself and countless decks have been built and taken apart since them and they’re still here and still get played.
Long may she reign! I can see the enduring appeal of those commanders. They both get everyone in on the action.
I hate when people durdle…I recently built a [[Kami of the Crescent Moon]] deck to force people to draw all their cards so we all have options and answers. I love sitting across from 3 people and we all have a grip of 20 cards, let’s make this game pop off!
That is why I like to run [[Forced Fruition]] in blue. By the time that normally hits it is like calling for turns when a round is lasting too long.
Ah but you see now instead of tanking on three cards in hand they’re all tanking on 30 cards in hand. The monkey’s paw curls!
That’s it! I’m getting my Mogis Group Slug deck…
Test: [[Torgaar]]
Grand arbiter Stax with winter orb :)
I’ve almost always had some sort of durdly artifact deck built. Started with Kurkesh “Tinker Toys” where it was just a bunch of things that could fit together into whacky Rube-Goldberg machine combos. Eventually moved it to Breya when she released and the deck became much more powerful and streamlined. Later on, I put together Osgir + Zirda and also Urza, Lord High Artificer, featuring mostly old-bordered artifacts and pre-BRO cards that reference him as a character. I joke that the deck is about a 4 and 3.5 of that is Urza himself. Nowadays, I’ve achieved my final form and I’m playing 5C Legendary Artificer tribal with Ramos, trying to recapture some of that weirdness of Kurkesh. Has been a fun time!
[[Vorinclex, Monstrous Raider]] and his friend [[Triumph of the Hordes]]
You can randomly come out of nowhere and kill everyone in a single combat and it’s amazingly glorious (and salt-generating) when it goes off.
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