I got around Kadena's self-build problem by turning her into a stealth colorless tribal deck -- where I plan on never actually flipping the morphs face up and leaving them as colorless creatures along with colorless support cards. But I just lied. Kadena is sneaky and the not-actually-a-morph-but-a-colorless deck is a facade for my real plan of manifesting Phage the Untouchable as a facedown creature, getting her in unblocked, then flipping her face-up before combat damage. The deck has replay value because if you get the sneaky Phage kill on someone they will never forget the psychological damage. So, in future games they will always suffer from the crippling delusion that all my face-down creatures are Phage.
This is endlessly funny and now I’m kind of tempted to do it. Does it work, though? She’s not ETB’ing from you casting her from your hand, but from you flipping her for her morph cost
@@gemmafire8628 It works because she's not entering the battlefield when you flip her face up -- as she was already on the battlefield. You can use it to cheat all kinds of creatures with negative EtB effects onto the battlefield. I also run Phyrexian Dreadnaught who is a 1 colorless 12/12 to manifest and Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath.
I've retired a fair share at this point, but the main theme I've noticed in the decks I've had to retire for being too strong for my playgroup is resiliency. If the game plan has too much protection, whether it be counterspell support, a resilient commander, absurd redundacy, or some combination of the three, then the win rate tends to spike up to the point where the deck needs to be retired. The decks I still play today take a turn or two to recover from removal, and broadcast what needs to be removed more consistently, which makes the game feel a lot less like solitaire and a lot more fun for the whole table. The only exception to power level retires was Dragon's Ascent Solphim, Mayhem Dominus. It wasn't too strong, a decent enough lifegain engine or fast enough Voltron engine could take it out no sweat, but it was too repetitive. A real shocker I know, but it turns out 30 odd of the same card makes the game a bit same-y.
An Idea i had for Delina was Landfall via making copies of animated lands, and triggering cards like Impact Tremors, Witty Roastmaster, Tunneling Geopede, etc. This strategy also works with other copy token-creating commanders like Rionya Fire Dancer or Orthion Hero of Lavabrink. I am currently considering making this deck with Satya Aetherflux Genius, as the tokens he creates are permanent, because they don't cost us any energy to keep around, which leaves all the energy he creates to be spent on something else. An alternative choice, if you like playing less colors, would be Urza Prince of Kroog, but it'd work a little differently with him, as he wants to create creature copies of artifact lands, not copy already animated lands.
I've never touched any MTG stuff, but love the content! Fun and easy to understand (with a bit of reading). Excited for future videos! :> Yummy token decks...
I just LOVE your little Elk doodle and your video topics. Your deck techs are quick and to the point and give a great idea of what the deck's about, and I like this video idea a lot. Lord knows I could do a similar discussion about decks I've piloted in the past. I'm also VERY glad you brought up Starlight Spectacular, oh my god. That card is BONKERS in token decks. I had it in my disassembled Marneus Calgar token deck and it won me a game cause nobody saw it coming. I swung in for over 100 damage on a suboptimal board. Card goes crazy.
Really cool to see people talking about their discontinued decks! I have a whole folder of them in case I ever want to give one another shot. I usually stop playing a deck if it feels too much like another deck I already play - which is hard because I pretty much only enjoy creature beat down. Recent deck I'm enjoying is Dina, Soul Steeper with the condition that every nonbasic card must have the ability to gain me life in some way.
Some of my retired decks: - ezuri G (faced too many boardwipes and struggle to maintain agression). - hapatra (draws too much attention when you're shrinking other creatures, so you're a target). - muldrotha (it was good, but started to enjoy less since it relied too much on stalling the game). - rocco and teshar (2 budget competitive decks that didn't see much play and pattern became boring).
NEW 3/3 ELK VIDEO, YEEEAAAH BABYYYYYY! Love the topic covered. I've taken apart a large number of decks, almost all because their play patterns were just too consistent. Feather came and went probably faster than any deck I've ever built and Skullbriar didn't last much longer. Though I gave both decks to friends, so even if they bore me to play, it makes me happy to see them still get use.
that was a good video! i've never seen Maw of Obzedat before, what a cool card. My most notable retired deck was Lord Windgrace "Xenagos Shuffle". The combo was really sweet, but everyone saw Windgrace and assumed i was playing MLD so I always got hated out of the game.
@@MentallyLatent If you run Xenagos the Reveler as the only planeswalker in your deck, you can use Reality Scramble to essentially replay him and use a loyalty ability again. With 7+ creatures in play, one of which being a Groundskeeper, you can retrace the Reality Scramble to generate infinite mana and 2/2 Satyrs with haste. With Lord Windgrace or Minsc and Boo in the command zone, it becomes a 2 card combo!
I've fully retired 3 decks and soft retired 2 others, I still have them but I realistically don't play them anymore. Kynaios & Tiro of Meletis, it was a group hug deck focused on ramping everyone that either wanted to eventually burn everyone, win with approach of the second sun, or create enough mana to draw out its library and play a lab maniac. It was a fun deck, but I overall just fell out of live with group hug as a playstyle, and eventually took it apart to build xyris, which i thought was a little more active in how it impacts the board. Lazav dimir mastermind was a mill deck focused around theft that admittedly i might have taken apart too quickly. The main problem was i built him when a lot of my playgroup was moving away from creature based strategies, so there was very little to actually steal. Definitely more of a playgroup reason, but it made the deck just feel like it didn't do anything, plus it was my second edh deck, so I just ended up scrapping it. Imoti celebrant of bounty on the other hand ended up WAY too strong for my playgroup. The thing with the deck is it doesn't specify spells from your hand for its cascade ability. So sometimes it would end up with things like play an 8 drop, cascade to a 7, cascade to a 6 that also has cascade, and just end up playing solitaire for a while. I ended up taking it apart and building miirym sentinel wyrm instead (which might also get retired soon funnily enough. Too big of a target for what the deck actually does) Soft retired I have neheb the eternal, which was a burn deck that wanted to use nehebs ability to eventually snowball into a big X spell to kill the table. The deck was very fun, but it was built and hasn't been updated since before red got all of its treasure synergies (the last update it got was theros), so it is very slow. Add that to it being a 5 mana must protect commander and it becomes kind of annoying to play. I still have it, but it will likely be taken apart soon. I also have a similar win with a big splashy spell deck now in Anhelo, which basically fixes all my problems with neheb. Gishath Suns Avatar was my first deck and I just can't bring myself to formally retire it even though i haven't played it in so long and it hasn't been properly updated since war of the spark. I've tried multiple times to edit it and can't really find the motivation. My deckbuilding philosophy and interests just moved in a different direction, and I value synergies and interactions a lot more than playing a big thing now. Maybe one day it'll get a redo. Current decks are: Miirym sentinel wyrm dragon tribal, Anhelo the painter control/value, Anikthea hand of erebos enchantress, The necrobloom landfall, Xyris the writhing storm wheels, And I don't have it yet but the howling abomination cantrip storm will be added to that in about a week lol.
I have a lands deck too but its in a different direction than Necrobloom. You might like my Kura video! as for your retired decks Imoti was a card I considered for awhile because I wanted a deck with delve cards but it turns out that delve isn't a mechanic you should have too much of because they all compete for the graveyard. And yeah miirym is one of those commanders that everyone knows about and will not let you untap with.
This is a fantastic video idea, and a great way to look back at the journey that got you to where you are now as a commander player. Thanks for sharing this ❤
If people are looking for something similar but more consistent that Delina, you could try Rionya, Fire Dancer! Tokens equal to 1 plus the number of instants/sorceries you've cast, and they gain haste! In terms of decks I've taken apart, my main one was my boros Avacyn list. The big idea of it was to be a voltron deck with creatures that could sacrifice themselves, and ways of giving Avacyn lifelink and/or deathtouch. You could easily gain 60+ life from flipping her, and then also have a huge beater on board to quickly close out the game. I found it was often simply too oppressive - if it did it's thing, it wrathed the board and took out someone extremely quickly, and left the other players struggling to play. The pieces have mostly ended up in my Emry list, where they're helping to make Syr Ginger a monster!!
I literally have that exact avacyn deck sitting next to me and it's even more toxic. It does all that but also I jam packed it full of rule of laws and flash cards/instants to break the parity. Hahaha
@@33elk If anyone wants to make an Avacyn deck without making an Avacyn deck, I'd recommend Celestial Kirin. Does the board wipe thing but requires some actual thought since it can hit your stuff too. For reference: Celestial Kirin 2WW: Flying Whenever you cast a Spirit or Arcane spell, destroy all permanents with that spell's converted mana cost. 3/3
Thank you for sharing this with us, fam. I've had a bunch of decks in the bin. Notably the Gitrog Monster and Xyris. In the frog's case, it's because I felt like I couldn't really improve it anymore and I got bored. Same with Xyris; I got tired of messing with three colors and shuffling all the time. I dropped the red and now it's a Show and Tell political deck
I have 2 retired commanders myself, and these were from very early on when commander was a new format. MY first commander was Rafiq of the Many, and it was just a new players exalted deck, almost half the deck was Alara block, and I couldn't buy cards online as I didn't have a credit card since I was in high school. Whenever I played with a new group, I was instantly targeted down and spent the rest of the game watching. Took it apart because I got too frustrated with people killing me first so often. Second deck was Isperia the Inscrutable. I played the deck too much as the commander being the center point, and use her ability to try and find answers using a toolbox. I have been thinking about trying to remake the deck, as being a more experienced player, I think I could make a much more fun and interesting build with this. I am very much considering dismantling Fynn, the fangbearer, as this deck usually doesn't have the reach to win a 4 person game, so it leaves it to just crawling around as the last player or 2 players beat me down after I failed to aggro out effectively. It kind of frustrates my playgroup so I will likely dismantle it or maybe turn it in to a different deck. Maybe the new BG legendary that cares about death touch creatures from the Assassin's Creed set.
I'm bad about disassembling precons that haven't been used in a while. I also took apart 2 of my own decks: Eriette of the Charmed Apple, a pillowfort auras deck, and my first attempt at Voltron with Wilson, Refined Grizzly using the Flaming Fist background. Both decks were slow and inconsistent.
In the rather limited time I've played MTG, Commander most especially, outside of just slapping a list together on Cockatrice for a day, most of the dead decks that I had became victims of redundancy. I love graveyard decks and I love aristocrats decks, so I've made quite a few lists for them. Some worked out, some didn't and over time, I started to learn how I liked putting them together, which meant the failure wound up as collateral damage of the learning experience. Sidisi, Brood Tyrant, which eventually got swapped for Muldrotha was the first recursion-based deck I played properly. That deck was just glacially slow and kind of uninteresting to play without a solid plan, so it was pretty immediately on the chopping list. Second was Gisa and Geralf, which relied on a very narrow strategy of assembling a graveyard recycling combo with Phyrexian Altar and Gravecrawler to gain infinite death-triggers for both value and the eventual kill off Plague Belcher. That one was just way too sacky, relying on a narrow, minimum-3-card combo to do anything more proactive than cycling through the deck looking for said combo pieces, which the deck wasn't opitmized for down to the commander. When I eventually settled on Meren of Clan Nel Toth as my grindey recursion strategy of choice, I ended up actually mashing quite a few of those two aformentioned builds to make it, with all of their leftovers being consolidated, ironically enough, back into a revised Sidisi list based on going wide with zombies that proved pretty fun to pilot, making for both the birth of a new deck and the comeback of another. The last proper deck I have scrapped ended up being Hapatra, which was another sac-value engine, albeit with a more aggressive bent, what with all the tokens for overrun-strategies, -1/-1s for Yawgmoth and deathtouch for Fynn. Compared to the Gisa and Geralf list for example, it was a helluva lot more well-rounded for tactics and wincons and even had a much stronger game to spin when not specifically executing the game-winning move. It was honestly a solid and fun deck that received quite a bit more love from me than alot of other decks, as it was an homage to the original Amonkhet -1/-1 deck, that got me into Magic to begin with. The unfortunate reality was that, with my aformentioned and evident redundancy in strategies and colours, there's only so much love I can spread around. That Meren deck became not only a very hungry baby, but also one that was bringing in way more results. When push came to shove and my best death-triggers were split between the two, the numbers spoke louder than my affection and Hapatra had to give up many of it's engine-cards to Meren, because it was the deck I was bringing to locals 9 times out of 10. Hapatra isn't what I'd necessarily call "dead" as much as "on sabbatical", though between a Dargo and Vial Smasher build and a Lonis build that are both in-line for being assembled, Hapatra may end up withering away to entropy, eventually gutted card by card while it's in it's unfinished state.
Love this, see alot of players fall into "it just works," mentality and are just miserable from it/ get bored extremely fast in the game. Finding new things are refreshing.
Also for your wild mage deck i also suggest rionya fire dancer, similar game plan with making multiple token copies of a creature but instead revolves around a spell slinger theme as well since she makes X+1 where x is the amount of instants and sorceries. Note she does make at 1 token and its at the start of combat so it happens the turn she comes down. The most fun ive had with the deck outside of making a bunch of witty roast masters and exploding everyone is making 5 solemn simulacrums and getting to ramp like the green player, bonus points if you have a sac outlet then you get to draw all those cards since rionya exiles them at endstep.
Lovely video! It makes me a little bit sad that Kadena is so limited by what Wizards prints. It was my first ever commander deck and I'm still trying to make her playable, although I fear I'll have to retire her, too!
Grismold is my BABY! Easily one of my most powerful and fun decks ever! Definitely recommend to anyone looking for a flexible Voltron deck. If I had to give some advice for a Grismold deck, stay away from the Anthem effects like "Night of Souls Betrayal" and "Illness in the Ranks" (unless these were the cards you were wanting to play with in the first place). They might seem like obvious includes, but they put a target on your back AND they prevent you from using your own tokens for value, such as with "Skullclamp" or "Village Rites". Rather, one shot effects like "Gaze of Granite" (X = 0), "Bile Blight", "Bloodline Culling", and "Culling Ritual" do the job all the same while allowing Grismold to fly under the radar until you're ready to start deleting people.
I think its fun to look back at some retired decks to see how your deckbuilding ability has changed over time. Most of the decks i've taken apart are unfortunately because I wasn't able to make them work and they ended up too weak. I think Mistform Ultimus, Hakim Loreweaver and Brigid, Hero of Kinsbaile are some interesting and unique commanders but they all majorly under performed. I hope some day I can revisit them and give them the decks they deserve.
I don't really have many officially retired decks yet because I've been a bit of a sucker for keeping them around but my two officially retired decks are Naru Meha and Minthara. Naru Meha was a funny £10 combo deck where the entire deck is just blue creatures with ETBs and interaction to try to land a combo with Naru Meha and a blink spell. It was one of those budget decks where it just isn't very fun after you know it can work since it's so linear. Minthara was an Orzhov blink deck with some LTB stuff that tried to pump Minthara then make tokens and swing. It was a cool deck although it seems like most people choose to take it more in the direction of full token synergy with lots of sacrifice effects. One of the nice cards I found that people don't seem to use with Minthara is Dragon Throne of Tarkir. Giving your creatures twice as much power from her ability is pretty good as it turns out! I took it apart because it was a bit too slow for my playgroup; Minthara being 4 and then taking even more turns to power up leaves your board a bit too weak for too long, especially if you don't manage to find a way to have something leave the turn you play her. I think after seeing how many retired decks you have I'm going to retire a few more of mine. Look out, shrines...
Minthara was my favorite BG3 companion and im so peeved they have the old playtest version of her as the art instead of the older more grizzled one in the game. That being said, absolutely destroy that shrines deck! Leave no unfun deck assembled...
I retired two: I retired The Ur-Dragon because I felt like her eminence ability simply gave me an unfair advantage against everyone.The other is my Sisay, Weatherlight Captain deck. It's specifically a deck that combo'd off with uncanny consistency, and it was more of a "look at this massive power level" and less of a deck I actually had fun playing, let alone felt good about.
I don't think there's been a 5 color commander that has really interested me. Most of my decks are actually only one color. I like the restriction. Good for recognizing what you don't enjoy and acting on it, a lot of people (me included) sit on an unfun deck they don't play instead of just pulling the plug.
Here are some I've taken apart: - Marchesa, The Black Rose: This was my pirates/treasures deck and was my best deck for a while. Unfortunately other players and myself got better at deckbuilding and this deck did not keep up. It was dependent on too many mechsnincs to work reliably (needed +1/+1 counters, pirates, and treasures) making it not fun to play, and Wizards kept printing great cards for all 3 themes which made it really intimidating to actually decide on what to change. Eventually I just threw in the towel. - Eloise, Nephalia Sleuth: Thenatically, a deck that allowed me to play a bunch of cosmic horror themed cards (and janky combos) by obsessively investigating deaths sounded awesome. Unfortunately, the build I made for her was very reliant on self-mill and recurrance, and I just don't have the brain of a graveyard player. It just didn't feel right doing what the deck wanted to do, so it didn't work. - Krark the Thumbless/Ludevic: Built this to cantrip and make tokens on casting, but similarly to the last deck discovered that I don't have the brain/patience for a spellslinger deck. This sounded mechanically fun, but in practice in one game I spent like 10 minutes on one turn trying to cast one spell, and gave up. - Others I took apart either because they weren't good or i got bored, Haktos (other Boros were better and more fun), Arcum Dagsson (boring), Karona (just bad, wizards printed like 3+ better versions of the card), Alela Artful Provocateur (too many possible directions).
The new MH3 Satya energy command is cool. But I am already starting to see the limit with it regarding an energy theme. There are just so few and I don't want to use the universes beyond cards, like how you felt with the face-down strategy. I have had a handful of decks I have taken apart for the single reason that I suck at brewing, and I never get to the stage where I play the decks enough to fix them. After I started having an interest in cEDH I have gotten so narrow in what I consider a good card. I have to force myself to put a card into a deck and play with it even if it is a perfect fit or if it just matches whatever power level we decide to play at that evening.
My very first commander deck made around 2012-ish was a Gahiji, Honored One deck built with the idea of creating tokens for my opponents with cards like Hunted Troll and Akroan Hoarse, then hide behind pillowforts and controling combat with Master Warcraft and forced combat effects. I ended up stripping this deck for parts because it not once scucceeded at doing what I wanted it to do; it turns out, if you're handing out weapons to all your opponents, they just kill you with them instead of eachother. It wasn't until the Goad mechanic became a thing when I returned to the deck concept and swapped out commanders for Marisi, Breaker of the Coil, and focused the deck more around evasive attackers. I also cut most of the bad cards that mainly gave my opponents creatures; it turns out that players usually make enough creatures themselves without my help. After that... It was still bad; It was too easy for my opponents to counter the strat with removal, either by spot removing Marisi, and even incedental 1 damage pings were usually enough to shut down the evasive creatures. Still, I felt like the deck was a step up from its initial flawed gameplan, it just needed some better card quality. That was when New Cappena and its new precon face commander, Kitt Kanto, came out. I switched out commanders once again, and with her, and a whole lot more support for the Goad mechanic in the past few years, the deck finally works. Its a dedicated goad deck with a token subtheme now, which makes it feel a lot more proactive and interactive, while still holding true to its original roots (Gahiji and Marisi are still in the 99)... And it actually wins now sometimes.
When I first started playing Commander, I had built a White soldier deck, which I found wasn't getting the mana I wanted. So I added a bit of green and looked for an interesting commander to go with it. That's when the deck turned into... Gaddock Teeg. Things spiralled from there until I decided to take it apart 😅
This is a little community still, but I absolutely want a discord for it. The brewing here is an absolute GOLD MINE. Currently trying to build orzhov food with the New Sorin, and it’s about as jank as I think I can get.
I honestly expected Rionya for the Delina replacement, lol. While she has the same issue of “must protect” as Delina, her MO of using rituals tends to allow her to be recast ahead of curve when removed, and thanks to the now-prolific nature of impulse draw red has little issue with card advantage, same goes for treasures! Overall I loved this breakdown of your old decks! My retired decks are many but I’ll mention a few: Korvold was built as a landfall strategy but I kept having to shove in other sacrificing synergies for other card types to do anything (and frankly having Korvold saccing lands isn’t fun) and overall the deck was rather directionless. I plan to rebuild him as either aristocrats (fat chance since I have an Elas il-kor deck in the works) or as treasure/token sac. That one has legs and even survives my other attempts at similar decks thanks to the commander’s colors. I plan on doing a WURG Friends Forever deck (using the RG/WU friends) as a 2-spell-2-draw deck with a flash subtheme (too many permanents that triggered off of second spells and second cards and the point was to have a deck for as many as possible) with the clues being mainly for draw. I also plan on a WURB Friends deck (WB/UR combo) as a blink+sac deck (with Breya as a swappable commander that also likes the blink and sac synergies). I have a Temur Food+Clue deck thanks to Jenny and Madame partners; it focuses on using food and clues as engine fuel and also has a sub-theme of fight and sucker punch cards (how I dub the green direct damage spells that still use creatures but don’t have them fight). Lastly I plan to have a purely food-centric deck. Part of me wants to make that Korvold, actually, since it got a lot of support in GB with LotR and would be a cap on power level. Alternatively I make it with Gyome, or with one of the hobbit commanders or partner pair. I don’t mind having similar decks when they play at different power levels or have wildly different card selection and strategy! For example, I just finished my Kess Wheel and Deal deck that uses wheels to fill graveyards so I can reanimate from anyone’s discards, but I also plan for an Obeka, Brute Chronologist sneak attack deck that focuses on the titular card. As Obeka is prone to eating removal (in both versions lol) the deck has a suitable reanimation package planned in case any of my creatures hit the dust prematurely thanks to Obeka eating a swords or resculpt. Pair that with reanimation spells, even those that sacrifice or exile at the end step, AND Feldon and you can get rather robust deck that doesn’t rely on the commander as hard (though Kess wins on that front thanks to wheels refilling my hand and giving me access to more reanimation post-binning). Or my plans for Miirym decks. One will focus on using tons of Sakashima effects to clone Miirym and focus on combos like parallel lives + astral dragon, while the other will be a more mid-level dragon tribal (or outright be folded into the Ur-Dragon a friend gifted me on my birthday 🥳) Or my merfolk decks! I started on a Kumena deck that languished for 2 years before I got the new precon. Then I smashed them together and found I had TOO MANY MERFOLK! So I stripped out the deeproot pilgrimage combo and went all-in on explore and counters. Now Kumena will be his own deck (in addition to being in the 99 of Hakbal) that focuses on tokens, tapping, untapping, intruder alarm, and the pilgrimage combo! With light counter synergies thanks to Kumena also giving those out lol. But tokens help Kumena way more than Hakbal needs them, so deeproot pilgrimage ends up being useful outside the combo too! Same with intruder to a lesser extent as it helps draw cards before casting creatures or making tokens! Well that went on too much of a tangent on NEW decks that happen to have a lot in common with each other and why I feel they’re worth pursuing simultaneously enough. As for an actual retired deck: Prismari. Nothing agains the deck. Frankly the only issue was how parasitic it could feel. Trying to balance artifact tokens with instant and sorceries can be tough if you don’t balance type ratios or card selection correctly. Ultimately it’s retirement was simply one of bookkeeping: I wanted to have the same cards from it in multiple different decks, many of which are variant Urzas and I always forget about cards in my collection. I’ve come around to building online more often now so hopefully Prismari can be brought back soon with new cards that were printed since I last played him. Another retired deck of mention is my Isshin deck. That one was BAD because wizards CANNOT SEEM TO PRINT GOOD SAMURAI TRIBAL EFFECTS! “WHENEVER ONE OR MORE” WIZARDS! IT WAS RIGHT THERE! A WAY TO BALANCE THE SAMURAI ATTACK TRIGGERS WITHOUT NEUTERING THE ATTACKING POWER OF THE WHOLE TRIBE AND FORCING THIS PSEUDO VOLTRON STYLE!!! And we also get NOTHING to help support the old ones?! Not even a cultural sensitivity errata foe Bushido so it can be opened up to everyone AND justify printing it and synergy for it on a commander?!?! And not to mention the exclusion of tribal precons! (Let alone that the vehicles precon should have been Jeskai; just have the pilot be red and partner with the UW mech; and on that note “piloting [X]” should have been a keyword and could have expanded to help with saddling post OTJ). But nope, first 3 color Samurai legend ever and he makes for a terrible Samurai commander deck thanks to their boneheaded design decisions for the tribe AGAIN! But noooooo, ninjas get a ton of new commanders! And with commander decks being tied to sets now it’s very unlikely any of the samurai issues will ever be addressed or fixed, whether by erratta, fixed mechanics, or just new design space… I’m rambling, Isshin will just become my aggro attack deck with light anti-attack/pillowfort tech. My last, or rather my first, retired deck was Arcum Daggson, my original attempt at a cEDH deck! I started it since the friends that introduced me to the game played cEDH and mono-color was easier and cheaper to build for. But thanks to the Paradox Engine banning the deck died before I got most any of the cEDH staples! AND that caused me to miss out on $80 mox diamonds! Or $70 grim monoliths! It was a travesty I tells ya! Aaaand that’s another rambling tangent. I hope you have a wonderful day and even more success with your channel!
ESSAY WRITER, DAMN!! Rionya has a little too much build around to be a good delina replacement. Calamity is just the right amount of braindead big red that i and many other people like. as for samurai i was a big fan of Raiyuu even though he is pretty voltron-y. Mostly just because I am a big fan of exalted and I like that its in red and the theme for samurais now.
Thalisse was my first commander deck after buying the Korvold Brawl deck. I was always drawn to it but something always felt off about it. Almost like it was too generic. I ended up taking it apart and fitting her into a couple very different treasure decks-- one with the party mechanic and another with legendaries--that she feels right at home in and it makes me happy I still get to play one of my favorite cards. Korvold I took apart because it was too easy to be really strong haha
I have a Kelsien deck that does sort of the same thing, though I also paired with Obosh and just put a bunch of bad 3-drop pingers in the deck. It's fun, and it can pop off if I have drumbellower or white plume in play, but I try not to run too much protection in the deck so others can interact and shut it down if need be haha
I have been wanting to make a boros avacyn deck ever since I started playing magic... Pleassee make a deck tech or do you maybe have a deck list to link? I would love to see it. In general loving this channel and can't wait to see more content 💜💜
It is a very very mean deck that is like a ton of rule of laws and instant/flash creatures to abuse them so i get to play 4 cards a turn and my opponents only get 1, LOL
@@jakabrezavscek969 haha there’s definitely a way to build it nicer I’m just a mean guy who hates when people take a turn thats more than a couple minutes 😈😈
It's funny, I took apart my Kelsien deck for the same reason you took apart Lynde & Kadena; I built them around -1/-1 counters and proliferate to eventually set people's creatures to 1 toughness as well as getting extra experience counters even if Kelsien wasn't in play/didn't have a valid target but boy do they not make many minus-counter cards.
2 landfall decks, retired. 2 dragon decks, retired. 2 treasure decks, retired. I think the most painful deck I had to retire was my Jared Carthalion, True Heir deck. It was... really unfocused, while simultaneously being too focused on Jared. It didn't run well, and I didn't understand deck building very well back then. However, I've also fell out of love with the premise of the deck, and I really prefer my Tamanoa secret commander deck for the whole "naya burn" plan
The one deck I retired and keep thinking about sometimes is The watcher in the water. The idea was of course draw a lot of cards in my opponent's turns, make a lot of 1/1 tentacles and use them for attacking or costs/synergies (convoke, sacrificing them for stuff like Ashnod's) and if things went well untapping my commander and hitting for letal in one swing (combining stuff like wizard class and wonder on the gy). A card I found neat at first but that later made me think it was too easy was Sage of the Falls, that gives a loot on non-human etb effect (it's only on like 80 decks in contrast to it being in the top 10 for a similar commander like The locust god). Ultimately having a costly commander and a deck so reliant on it meant without it on play I wouldn't be doing anything relevant other than one or two counters maybe. It was fun when it popped of tho :3
I also used to have a kelsien deck. Mine was built with obosh as a companion. however, I found out I liked the group slug cards more than the other stuff that deck was doing, so I cut white and went all in on rakdos group slug.
My biggest gripe was an attempt at Tormod, the Desecrator & Ghost of Ramirez dePietro based on discarding cards that come back to hand from graveyard like Gutterbones, Lochmere Serpent, Ovalchase Dragster etc. The idea sounded so cool to me but in practice every little ability to pay for added up to so much mana it was never worth it. The idea is there, so maybe someone could build it better. In the end I splitted the original commanders up, pairing dePietro with Bruse Tarl for cycling deck and Tormod with Sidar Kondo for various leave graveyard stuff deck but without discard theme
I played that exact pairing. The way I found to close out the game with ramirez and tormod was to use tortured existence to juggle some creatures in my graveyard and with enough zombies i could attack with them and cycle gempalm polluter to melt opponents (the polluter could then be brought back with the tortured existence to be cycled repeatedly over and over). since all this is instant speed i could hold up counters all the way. It was fun but ultiamtely it has a similar niche to pharika so i didn't make the deck in paper
My first deck was Brago built starting from the Ranar precon back when it came out, it was your typical blink value deck that won via infinite combos. It wasn't all that fun for the table so i switched to Ranar and put more foretell cards (I could've just removed the infinite combos in favor of more token makers to finish games, but I like that Ranar has that built in plus foretell is fun). The second retired deck was a Krav & Regna token aristocrats, this one became Teysa Karlov because I've fallen in love with the secret lair artwork. I ditched most of the token makers because most of the triggers I want to double say "nontoken". Third one started of with a custom card i saw online (Gwynevere, Bountiful Sun. 2GW for a 2/5 with lifelink that says "Whenever an Aura enters the battlefield under your control, if it’s not a token, create a token that’s a copy of that Aura."). I liked that it played with auras in an interesting way, but eventually I wanted a real magic card so I swapped her with Mazzy. The current version run Calix, Guided by Faith since he's the closest to the original idea of the deck. Last one was a Jhoira, Ageless Innovator deck that aimed to untap her a bunch of times and cheat huge artifacts into play. It had many many problems balancing the number of protection, card draw and untappers. I haven't replaced this deck yet, but Chiss-Goria is looking really good.
The only deck I've taken apart was an Atraxa deck. It was complicated, people didn't like playing against it, and I didn't like playing it. One of the few fun things it did was cast an Elesh Norn at instant speed for free on someone else's turn. I've since taken those cards and put them in other, more fun decks.
Might I suggest Agrus Kos as a replacement for Delina? Forget the dice-rolling and go all in on copy shenanigans. Coincidentally Delina is a GREAT include in the deck (along with Rionya, Jaxis, and Orthion). Target Agrus Kos with ANY of these and copy your ENTIRE board. Target Agrus Kos with MULTIPLE of these and it gets REALLY nutty.^^
If you want to go into boros like that I'd actually suggest duke ulder ravenguard. It becomes bad once you're 1v1 but its better than calamity until then.
I totally hear you with the Kelsien issue. I have a Zagras deck that's just as binary. I still dont know how to make it fun to interact with or what direction to take it that would make it unique.
I want more rakdos party support. My judith deck has so much party in it without me even trying. Imagine a card that's like 'Sacrifice a party: do something'
Mishra, Artificer Prodigy. It's really cool to have a gameplan that revolves around using a normally unusable ability. The problem is most of the effects it relies on are symmetrical, making the game almost unplayable for certain opponents (Possibility Storm, Nether Void, Planar Chaos, Nullstone Gargoyle, Chalice of the Void). Add on that the gameplan is also often hard stax with an eggs finish, and I don't particularly feel like it fits in a casual setting. I enjoy these things in normal games, but I'm not here to eat everyone else's time by shutting them down, I'm here to interact with everyone. Derevi, Empyrial Tactician. This is for a similar reason as above, but kind of the inverse. I'd like to play the game, not be shut down for the sins of my commander's potential. Anybody that knows how good Derevi is with Stasis effects will immediately put their focus on me, despite not including them in my deck. Yarok, the Descrated (really sad since I have a foil copy from M20). One of the couple decks I fully own, and technically not dismantled (I still have all the cards in their own sleeves), though I haven't played with it in forever. It's so generic and I can easily take over the game if I'm not aggresively stopped. I'm able to get so much value from any permanent I play, from extra ramp, to single-target removal, to boardwipes, to recursion, to anthems. And while I'm not playing cards like Peregrine Drake or Deadeye Navigator that have ways to blatantly go infinite, I still somehow managed to include ways to go infinite, such as Cryptolith Rite (included to make use of 1/1 etb creatures), Great Oak Guardian (included as a budget Craterhoof), and a repeatable way to reuse the Guardian. I'm playing draft level cards, and getting them to really punch above their weight class if I'm left alone for just a little bit. Dinrova Horror is messed up with double triggers. Decoction Module lets me reuse permanents and generates tons of energy for stuff like Demon of Dark Schemes. Deadwood Treefolk gives so many cards back.
Yarok heralded the beginning of when you do x do x again era of commanders. I've always heard about mishra but it always sounded like it had that problem so i didn't build it.
The only decks I've done this for were my Bant Aura and Heroic deck and a Selesnya Landfall Token deck. The aura deck was built off the back of the Forgotten Realms precon with some heroic cards thrown in. Ultimately, i took it apart because it didnt feel good to play, was just too much of "play aura, get +1/+1, pass". The token deck i didnt dismantle but gave to a friend who enjoyed piloting it. Personally, as much love as i poured into it, i just wasnt a fan of how slow it actually was. The deck wasnt bad, i just didnt enjoy piloting it because i couldn'tbe as aggressive as i wanted. I now have decks that replace them. I took a Virtue and Valor precon, removed some cards and added Danitha, New Benalia's Light as the commander. Not only is it the snowbally and out of control voltron i wanted, but there are plenty of creatures in the deck that take advantage of that strategy in different ways (shout out to Timber Paladin!). As for tokens, I have a Kasla deck thats much more aggressive and can cast big spells through convoke. Its never a dull moment with that deck.
Goreclaw: was my first edh deck was a budget build from 2018 might revisit it again sometime Talrand: ended up selling it as I'm not a huge fan of its play style of either countering everything scary or cantriping constantly for land drops/ drakes Tolsimir friend to wolves: this one just never paned our there's not enough good wolves that even a really tuned version of the deck would die to precons a lot of the pieces turned into voja jaws of the conclave eventually Lord wind grace: sold it bc of financial struggles during COVID, would love to revisit the landfall strat again sometime Then my most recent deck that's getting close to retirement is wyleth simply bc I feel I build it wrong as a equipment deck without really taking into account it should be a cheap low CMC equipment and aura deck. But it's low enough power where I pull it out of my other tuned decks like light paws, voja, emiel turbo blink control, or Mirko are too much for the table since it's a bit jank
Damn its always sad to hear about people selling decks. I hope you get windgrace back together someday! (sorry i ribbed him a bit in my Kura deck tech video haha) I have a good friend who plays windgrace, its part of what made me build my Kura lands deck, though that anecdote was a bit too personal to have in the video. I got that friend a signed eternal witness for his deck from Kyle Hill since he likes him a lot. Goreclaw got a couple new toys from OTJ as well. Outcaster Trailblazer and Smuggler's Surprise.
Recently my commander deck graveyard has had a spike in grave robbing's and some of my newer commander decks are starting to look like Frankenstein's monster, but hey thats just called efficient recycling
I had an Esix, the Fractal Bloom deck for a little bit that I took apart simply because there was too much going on. How I would run it was by getting ETB creatures that make tokens (avenger of zendikar) and making those tokens copies of creatures with effects or of other token generators, then copying things like Coiling Oracle to go for the win. Ended up with long turns that were easy to shut down, so all it did was make the game take longer. Could be improved with the new Nadu, but that would just make the situation worse lol
Gosh I could see how that could lead to a monster of a turn that takes like 10 minutes to resolve. Friend at my LGS had a Volo clone deck that got the axe for the exact reason you had of value overload
I haven't taken apart many decks, but Krenko is one of them. I like to have lots of efficient answers for different things, mono red just couldn't do it for me. It was also very linear, similar play patterns every game. It was SO fun and explosive three times... but exactly three times....
So far, my retired decks are: Progenitus Kyler, Sigardian Emissary Belbe, Corrupted Observer Anowon, the Ruin Thief And soon to be retired: Jodah, the Unifier Tovolar, Dire Overlord Progentius was a 5 color Gates deck that I initially built to be a lower powered deck, but because of the self-imposed taboo of people not destroying Lands, once the Gate plan got online, it was hard to stop. I either won because Gates or got focused on because I was in danger of winning frequently with a basically non-interactive wincon. Kyler was a functional deck, but I played it a handful of times and it just never jelled with me. It had its moments, but I just found myself reaching for it less and less and once I started scavenging some cards out of it for other decks, I retired it. Belbe was a deck I was looking forward to building ever since I saw Kyle Hill play it on I hate Your Deck. I finally got around to building it and.... it just didn't hit. Sure there were times where I got to do "the thing" but a lot of times I sat there with plenty of ways to ping my opponents for 1 but nothing in my hand to make use of the 6 mana Belbe gave me. A friend of mine actually liked the deck a lot and wanted to build it, so I said goodbye to her and took her apart. Anowon was one of my first precons that I upgraded and... quite frankly the deck was overhated by my tablemates because of the mill. The minute I started milling everyone, even though I said that's not my plan and I just wanted the card draw, the deck would get focused down. Very fun deck, but people started groaning whenever I wanted to play it, and eventually I said enough is enough and retired him. Jodah is currently built and was initially just a pile of Legendary creatures and Lands I had in my binders. I didn't follow any lists, I just threw a bunch of cards together. Yeh, it was immediately too strong. I tinkered with it a bit to try and focus it, but it's just strong strong strong and immediately paints a target on him whenever I play it. I've built a Tom Bombadil deck which is a more fair 5 color deck and I want to have decks I can actually play with my friends that aren't overwhelmingly powerful, so I'm taking Jodah apart soon to build a Korona Goad deck. Tovolar... is just a pain in the ass. Constantly tracking the Day/Night cycle in addition to worrying about the older werewolves who don't have Daybound/Nighbound just takes up a lot of mental bandwidth. I love the guy and I love werewolves, but I very rarely play it anymore. I held a retirement night but never retired it. I think I just need to take it apart.
I absolutely need to make a video about the weird opinions people have about mill but i don't think theres anything i can say to make them see reason. Day/night was a mistake and I understand your pain with belbe. I played her for a couple games and its like "wow this commander looks cool but really just doesn't do much of anything"
I excitedly built a Tovolar deck when he was announced. I gravitate towards kindred decks, and it seemed like a unique mechanic. Then I started to think about the bandwidth required to operate the deck vs the payoff for doing so. It filled me with pure dread. The deck was disassembled before it was ever played. Edit to add: the worst part was that day/night and old werewolves almost work together, but not quite, so there is a lot more tracking than initially apparent.
Retired decks, Originally, I had an Edgar markov deck, but I noticed I kept putting in more board whipes, control, removal and funny lands, and way to few vampires, so I disassembled it and build a deck that I thought would be a better fit. My Oloro deck is being retired, it was originally meant as the go to control deck, the idea was that if I did not play a single creature, I could add all the cards that say no to creatures, and not be hit myself. It lacked win conditions and occasions where it was appropriate to play it, thus, it is no more. Besides that, I still have a lot of decks that I mostly tested, then chose to abandon instead of refine to a state where I am happy with them, However I don't really consider them to have "died", since I have not fully completed them. For example, I once made an emrakul, the promised end deck because it is my favorite card. Realized I had too few colorless cards lying around and when I tried it, it didn't really work. What I like most about every deck I remember taking apart is the things I learned from said deck, either playstyle wise or deck construction wise.
I'm currently working on an Oloro deck... chiefly revolving around Parallax Nexus/Tide/Wave and proliferate effects. If I'm going to be arch-villain, I might as well go full SUPER villain.^^ Also has Light of Day and Darkest Hour for the accidental Green Lantern reference (I don't care if I can't attack). I AM PARALLAX.^^
@@zackkelley2940 Sounds great, my favorite from back in the day was Spreading Plague, to really get those debates started on whose creature needs to live the most. (Its effect is, whenever a creature comes into play, destroy all creatures that share a color with it)
I spend a really long time thinking about a deck before I ever build it because I don't like the idea of buying a lot of cards only to realize I don't like the deck. I've been mulling over a token deck for what feels like years, I've been working myself around to the idea of making a dinosaur deck since original Ixalan bc "Gishath Ramp+Stompy" was too similar to my less-restrictive Mayael the Anima "Ramp +Stompy" deck, but worse. I think the only time I built a deck and played it only to dismantle it was Feldon of the Third Path, around Kaladesh timeframe I think. At the time WotC didn't print anywhere near the number of Wheel of Fortune or discard effects we now have, so it felt like a challenge to enable Feldon. Even then I ended up not really going back to Feldon because it would end up in a boring play pattern of just reanimating the biggest thing in my graveyard every turn. What I primarily have these days are ideas for decks that peter out at the decklist phase or after getting a few cards. Ideas I've sat with long enough to fall out of the puppy-love phase with, basically. Only then, if I still feel that pull do I get the cards ordered.
I was excited for the new Voja, because I like Naya and I like wuffies. I built a deck (proxied) with budget cards. It stomped too much. I don't like elfball, and this was just elfball with wolfball card draw. So I took it apart after only two game days.
Question: how do I come up with a unique and interesting deck idea, preferably without resorting to using an extremely obscure commander? I own three precons: Inalla, Mishra, and Mirko, but I want to build my first actual deck. The only problem is that I can't find a commander/card/engine/idea that seems strong, interesting, and unique. I don't want to play anything in EDHREC's Top 100, and even though there are a lot of mid-tier commanders that seem interesting, everything seems more or less "solved" (i.e. common strategies already established). I've found a few interesting commanders, but I don't want to just scroll through EDHREC and play the same stuff as everyone else. You seem like you have a lot of experience with deckbuilding, especially niche decks, so I was hoping you might be able to help me out of my predicament.
I had an idea for the new Mjolnir card coming out in the Assassin’s Creed set, pair it up with Thalia, heretic cathar where everyone’s stuff comes in tapped already and on top of that just add equipment tutor and tap down stuff. I was really excited until I started playing the deck and everyone hated it. It also was kinda the same gameplay every game too so there was that. 🤷
my disappointing deck was my Myra attraction I did not want to put extra turns and also I did the mistake of putting all my attraction on their 4, 5, 6 versions which means if I roll good I get the full value otherwise I am screwed. and I was screwed too many times 😢
I ran into the Delina issue a little bit with some cards that are more cute than anything in my Ob Nixilis, Captive Kingpin budget list. Mana Clash seems like a fantastic card in the deck, and has hilarious implications. I could "draw" 7 cards. I could just delete someone from the table. I could delete myself. I could delete us both! I could eat 6 damage for no gain. All for just a single R. But man, in practice the card is just a headache to keep track of and is so time consuming to resolve that it's just been unfun for everyone, myself included.
My favorite deck I used to have was an Iroas, god of Victory combat deck. It was pretty powerful, but I decided to add a color and switch to Vial-Smasher and Ravos. the deck lost it's identity and i stopped playing it. I keep wanting to rebuild the deck but never get around to it.
@@33elk yeah! Power creep has definitely been kind to the cards I could run in it, it's just not a very exciting thing to build. Any decent creature with vigilance becomes a real threat really quickly
i find this so interesting, because i have a Delina deck i love deeply myself and obviously it runs Wyll, but somehow the thought of "go for Wyll everytime" just didn't come up very often, despite owning the deck for a while. i rarely seem to draw him and when i do he just ends up being a value piece to more reliably copy something else lol now the thought is in my head tho, so let's see if it negatively impacts future games.
I HAD considered building Oketra like that (it's probably the most efficient way to build it, but it's also really dull) but it occurred to me that there is something Oketra does that is VERY unique... She's a mono-white creature that makes BLACK creatures. So I'm making mono-white Happily Ever After.^^ Yes, that's actually possible. I'm also throwing in Binding Mummy since it's a cheap white creature and Oketra IS a zombie that MAKES zombies.
Oh, I have a lot of retired decks, mostly from when I built very mean decks: Atraxa stax: honestly this one I'd like to put back together, such a fantastic stax commander and I feel like it's not as oppressive as it once was, loads of cool interactions with stax pieces and proliferate, and all the right colors to boot, also Atraxa under stax is a very strong beatstick. The Gitrog Monster: I really like frogs and at the time this felt like the best choice, I now have a janky frog tribal deck and I'm much happier, Gitrog was the only frog in the deck and it was more of a value engine for a lands matter deck, very standard build. Lord Windgrace MLD/Superfriends: it was a pretty decent brew tbh, just not very fun to play, I feel like Guff is a much better superfriends commander, I still play it rarely because superfriends decks tend to take very long turns. Aryxmethes Sea Monsters Tribal: this one was not particularly mean, had a couple of infinite combos but it was more of a novelty, also I barely play combo decks anymore. Sydri, Galvanic Genius: this was my best deck for a long while, maybe one day I'll revisit it with more recent cards, I just got burned out of playing the deck, and now it's too slow to even try and compete in my playgroup, still love the commander tho. Prossh Food Chain: back in the day this was one of the best decks, I feel like it would probably be a very strong deck but combo is not really my jam anymore, a good candidate to be turned into a cool Kobold Tribal deck tho.
Jeez a lot of your decks are like the face of "Command zone boogyman" from 2016-2018 hahaha. Its funny to look at them now just being ok cards with stuff like nadu and friends going around.
@@33elk Yeah, that was kind of the point in time where I was fixated on high power level decks, then I built Phelddagrif and fell in love instantly, at the time it was kind of a group hug deck, but over time it evolved into the political draw go that it is now, probably still my favorite deck I have today tbh.
I recently retired my adapted precon of ranar ever watchful because I’ve always wanted to build an angel life gain deck and I wanted a lot of the pieces from it and I found I was leaving it in the bag any time I took it to a game night
I think Delina is a workable commander as a filthy Delina gambler myself, the main stickler is that you have to run other enablers, like flameshadow conjuring, mirror march, Calamity, Panharmonicon, Jaxis the troublemaker, etc. Additionally, while expensive, running Gamble and Imperial Recruiter as tutors for Wyll makes the deck run a lot more consistently. I just love gambling too much to switch the deck's commander to Calamity haha.
I'm an old player that is returning to magic and commander. I stopped with the third kamigawa set back then and returned to ... LCI I think. So yeah. I found a playgroup, build plenty of decks and prepared a lot. I think of my decks as Pre-Group and Post-Group right now. The ones I build before and the ones I build while in the group. Unsurprisingly 2 of those 3 prebuild decks... kinda got dismantled or are in process of being so... I kept Faldorn, although she does not win a lot, she's fun to play with and against. Stuff I am dismantling though is Brimaz, simply because of the inherit limitations of the actual trope he'd want to build. White / Black Phyrexians has a lot of good stuff but all of them is like extremely costly (both cmc wise and $, yeah looking at you sheoldred) while at the same time getting it out is not that easy... End of story is that the deck ended up being a very removal heavy with integral cards coming up only lategame. That's not really enjoyable and most of the time I just spend there, ramping a little, passing turns and throwing the occasional removal without actually doing somethig. When I do something... it easily gets shut down as phyrexian wincons kinda tend to be slow... so yeah... unfortunate as I really like the trope of Phyrexia. second deck being dismantled is my, on paper, Power level 9 Mazirek... Generally a deck with a sacrifice subtheme build to be relatively passive and only making people sacrifice lots of their stuff before going infinite or wide... ended up NEVER even once having all the necessary pieces for a combo which lead to me learning to better organize my combos. Never even once won with it, only had the chance to go infinite with one of my combos but that was foiled by an epic counterspell duel involving 5 counterspells.... long story short.getting rearranged for a meren-deck and heavily updated... at least I learned to not be hiding comboes behind comboes and only use direct combos now.. sheesh
@@33elk Same boat. Loving Mazirek, still loving him although the deck is practically dead. I can see why he performs well as part of the 99 in Meren, Ghave or Korvold but as a leading act? Too much attention I guess.. My experiences with him are that, no matter if people know the deck or not, he instantly draws too much attention... people with good threat assessment see how he can escalate easily while people with lesser threat assessment see him and are scared of the gameplan he suggests ("he will let me sacrifice everything and then run me over") while in reality he feels more like a parasite benefiting from other strategies and adding to them like adding salt for flavoring instead of having strategies around him involved as he's more of a "Link" of mechanics, rather than being a "Part" of them... surely not something for a Novice / intermediate builder to work with as he needs too many factor to keep staying on board and do stuff. Sadge :( thx for the reply
Kadena! I love morph and when I first saw Kadena years ago it was an easy fit for a new build... But she ended up being to simple and easy, basically piloting herself and vomiting cards onto the board. So I took her apart and looked around for someone else to fill the niche, and set my eyes on Sidar Kondo. He makes creatures with power 2 or less evasive so my morphs can connect more easily, and has partner so i can squeeze in blue. To this day it's the only Bant deck I have and the mind games of morph are simultaneously easier to pull off and more fun with someone who forces enemies to hem and haw over their own interaction rather than a static value engine.
When i started playing commander, I got the March of the Marchine Back-up deck with Bright Palm, but thought that Shalai and Hallar was the cooler card to build around. It turned into basically whatever 'enters the battlefield with some counters' cards and ping ppl with the commander When I did that, I realized that the red in the deck was mostly just for the commander and like blasphemous act. And the gameplay got a little too samey of playing the commander and pray it doesnt get removed after drawing aggro from shooting your opps. So, I took out the red, took a lot of the cards from the precon, and made it into a hamza counters and x-spells deck
LOL in my analytics I had like 1 view from a search for "Hamza EDH" was that you? I was curious about that. Hamza is a fucking beast though I playtested that guy a ton but ultimately decided against it. I don't think I have the list anymore sadly.
Outside of my other comment. Decks that I have taken apart recently: - Goldbug: Azorious Humans is fun, but the soldier support made for a better deck and he ended up being replaced before I eventually just fully took the deck apart. - Nylea, God of the Hunt: Actually a deck I mained and built over 7 years. I took it apart because I got tired of Craterhoofing people. It was such a resilient and hard to slow down deck as long as I got to 5 mana. I still love Nylea, but I’ll likely never put the deck back together. Still waiting to find a mono-green commander besides her that I genuinely love, but nothing yet.
I've built and taken apart Gyome 2 or 3 times now. On paper it does a lot of things I enjoy in a deck but in execution it just doesn't deliver it seems.
the amount of self restraint i need not impulse by gyome every passing set is getting to a level of causing me pain when we got bargain in WOE i had to take a second to stop myself from dropping a stupid amount of money on another commander deck i didn't need
I've lost track of the number of decks I took apart, but I do remember a few. Feather, The Redeemed........ moving on Colorless Eldrazi: I had this deck back in 2019. I found out the hard way that Eldrazi tribal and Big Eldrazi are two separate archetypes that don't mesh well together. Or they didn't at the time. Marchesa, The Black Rose: this deck never even made it to my LGS. It was infuriating enough just goldfishing it that I shelved it instantly. Mayael of the Anima: she's just not good enough anymore, even by the time I built her ~2021. She's too slow, requires too much mana, and too inconsistent without forking out for top of deck tutors. Taniwha one sided MLD. Deck had trouble getting online, and even if it could do its thing, my life total was usually too low to stabilize
One of my retired decks is also still one of my favorites, I just stopped enjoying playing it. The concept was forced draw with Gluntch, the Bestower. It had two different win cons, but both involved Helm of the Host, which made the deck have a rather large reanimating package for artifacts. It was fun, but felt bad to play because if your opponents didn’t remove Gluntch fast enough you just won the game out right.
I had a combo satuoro umezawa deck which felt too samey and slow I'd just try and make infnite mana and blink some big etb creture for the win I then made araumi the dead tide and I pulled it apart for being the same just straight cars draw and stuff until I combo and now that deck is going too become a estior the warding wind and Francisco deck with gyruda as a companion
Right now I have 3 decks that I have retired. Wilhelt Aristocrats: Wilhelt is good. In fact, Wilhelt is great. I generally lost interest in the deck because of 2 reasons: a) the turns take FOREVER because you're double-dipping all of your dies triggers, this is a problem especially when you cannot immediately end the game and b) in order to not take 60 work days turns you have to lean into some pretty boring combos. Tried going combat route instead of sacrifice and honestly? Zombies are pretty lethargic when it comes to combat. Greven, the Predator Captain: This was my signature deck for a long while, it is absurd the things you get to do with it. I love Voltron but I'm not a fan of artifacts and I don't really like the fragility of auras so Greven's suicide charges were incredibly fun and the deck is terrifying when it gets to do its thing. I still love this deck to death and would definitely reassemble it one day, but I took the pieces apart for a Rowan, Scion of War deck that I'm also having a lot of fun with. Firesong and Sunspeaker: If you're interested in building an F&S deck, do not bother. Sure, getting 6 damage and 9 life out a Lightning Helix is fun and all, and it's actually a boardwipe tribal masquerading as a spellslinger deck, but the 6 mana on a Boros commander that barely does anything on its own and makes the deck fall apart once it is removed is a big ask that wont work in any way, shape or form.
@@33elk Judith kind of is yeah lol, the thing with FS&SS is that it was among the first standard legal box toppers in the game ever, so they wanted avoid having a box topper that could hurt the meta but they were quite heavy handed with its mana cost. A Rakdos lifegain focused spellslinger deck would have sounded rad a long while ago, before I made multiple Rakdos decks so I don't think I will lol
![[EDH] Commander on a Budget](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/DpeoCJYxVY0/mqdefault.jpg)
![[EDH] Commander on a Budget](/img/tr.png)
![[EDH] What you NEED to make a Commander deck](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/prg6qNDgjsk/mqdefault.jpg)
idk if anyone's told you but your little self-doodle elk is EXTREMELY adorable. It's such a simple drawing but it's so cute.
Tysm! It honestly took me like 5 minutes in ms paint, I’m glad people like it, haha.
I ABSOLUTELY CONCUR, I wanna see how he plays magic with only hooves :3
@@33elk Oh yeah no it feels like the elk gives you a robust sense of identity. Lovely fellow.
@@33elk Its so cute i love them!
Not sure why but... getting some cute Undertale vibes.^^
I got around Kadena's self-build problem by turning her into a stealth colorless tribal deck -- where I plan on never actually flipping the morphs face up and leaving them as colorless creatures along with colorless support cards. But I just lied. Kadena is sneaky and the not-actually-a-morph-but-a-colorless deck is a facade for my real plan of manifesting Phage the Untouchable as a facedown creature, getting her in unblocked, then flipping her face-up before combat damage.
The deck has replay value because if you get the sneaky Phage kill on someone they will never forget the psychological damage. So, in future games they will always suffer from the crippling delusion that all my face-down creatures are Phage.
that is evil you are evil
My guy is out here giving mtg players literal ptsd
This is endlessly funny and now I’m kind of tempted to do it. Does it work, though? She’s not ETB’ing from you casting her from your hand, but from you flipping her for her morph cost
@@gemmafire8628 It works because she's not entering the battlefield when you flip her face up -- as she was already on the battlefield. You can use it to cheat all kinds of creatures with negative EtB effects onto the battlefield. I also run Phyrexian Dreadnaught who is a 1 colorless 12/12 to manifest and Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath.
best use of Kadena I've heard yet
I've retired a fair share at this point, but the main theme I've noticed in the decks I've had to retire for being too strong for my playgroup is resiliency. If the game plan has too much protection, whether it be counterspell support, a resilient commander, absurd redundacy, or some combination of the three, then the win rate tends to spike up to the point where the deck needs to be retired. The decks I still play today take a turn or two to recover from removal, and broadcast what needs to be removed more consistently, which makes the game feel a lot less like solitaire and a lot more fun for the whole table.
The only exception to power level retires was Dragon's Ascent Solphim, Mayhem Dominus. It wasn't too strong, a decent enough lifegain engine or fast enough Voltron engine could take it out no sweat, but it was too repetitive. A real shocker I know, but it turns out 30 odd of the same card makes the game a bit same-y.
I cannot understand dragon approach gamers. Like no shade on their fun but I don't think I could survive playing that strat. Difference in build ig.
@33elk I proxied a Slime against humanity deck and got bored of it in approximately 5 games lmao
An Idea i had for Delina was Landfall via making copies of animated lands, and triggering cards like Impact Tremors, Witty Roastmaster, Tunneling Geopede, etc. This strategy also works with other copy token-creating commanders like Rionya Fire Dancer or Orthion Hero of Lavabrink.
I am currently considering making this deck with Satya Aetherflux Genius, as the tokens he creates are permanent, because they don't cost us any energy to keep around, which leaves all the energy he creates to be spent on something else. An alternative choice, if you like playing less colors, would be Urza Prince of Kroog, but it'd work a little differently with him, as he wants to create creature copies of artifact lands, not copy already animated lands.
I've never touched any MTG stuff, but love the content! Fun and easy to understand (with a bit of reading). Excited for future videos! :> Yummy token decks...
haha wild that youtube recommended you my video even though you don't play. Maybe someday!
I just LOVE your little Elk doodle and your video topics. Your deck techs are quick and to the point and give a great idea of what the deck's about, and I like this video idea a lot. Lord knows I could do a similar discussion about decks I've piloted in the past.
I'm also VERY glad you brought up Starlight Spectacular, oh my god. That card is BONKERS in token decks. I had it in my disassembled Marneus Calgar token deck and it won me a game cause nobody saw it coming. I swung in for over 100 damage on a suboptimal board. Card goes crazy.
Really cool to see people talking about their discontinued decks! I have a whole folder of them in case I ever want to give one another shot.
I usually stop playing a deck if it feels too much like another deck I already play - which is hard because I pretty much only enjoy creature beat down. Recent deck I'm enjoying is Dina, Soul Steeper with the condition that every nonbasic card must have the ability to gain me life in some way.
I am in the exact same situation as you where I really enjoy mono white aggro strategies so i had to take apart a lot of decks for being too similar
Some of my retired decks:
- ezuri G (faced too many boardwipes and struggle to maintain agression).
- hapatra (draws too much attention when you're shrinking other creatures, so you're a target).
- muldrotha (it was good, but started to enjoy less since it relied too much on stalling the game).
- rocco and teshar (2 budget competitive decks that didn't see much play and pattern became boring).
Your elk is adorable! Goes wonderfully with your chill narration. I adore your videos!
NEW 3/3 ELK VIDEO, YEEEAAAH BABYYYYYY!
Love the topic covered.
I've taken apart a large number of decks, almost all because their play patterns were just too consistent. Feather came and went probably faster than any deck I've ever built and Skullbriar didn't last much longer. Though I gave both decks to friends, so even if they bore me to play, it makes me happy to see them still get use.
Both of those decks are brews that i picked up and dropped just as fast as well
that was a good video! i've never seen Maw of Obzedat before, what a cool card.
My most notable retired deck was Lord Windgrace "Xenagos Shuffle". The combo was really sweet, but everyone saw Windgrace and assumed i was playing MLD so I always got hated out of the game.
What's rhe xenagos shuffle combo?
@@MentallyLatent If you run Xenagos the Reveler as the only planeswalker in your deck, you can use Reality Scramble to essentially replay him and use a loyalty ability again. With 7+ creatures in play, one of which being a Groundskeeper, you can retrace the Reality Scramble to generate infinite mana and 2/2 Satyrs with haste. With Lord Windgrace or Minsc and Boo in the command zone, it becomes a 2 card combo!
@@jarvvoitlus9458 that sounds like a sick combo
I've fully retired 3 decks and soft retired 2 others, I still have them but I realistically don't play them anymore.
Kynaios & Tiro of Meletis, it was a group hug deck focused on ramping everyone that either wanted to eventually burn everyone, win with approach of the second sun, or create enough mana to draw out its library and play a lab maniac. It was a fun deck, but I overall just fell out of live with group hug as a playstyle, and eventually took it apart to build xyris, which i thought was a little more active in how it impacts the board.
Lazav dimir mastermind was a mill deck focused around theft that admittedly i might have taken apart too quickly. The main problem was i built him when a lot of my playgroup was moving away from creature based strategies, so there was very little to actually steal. Definitely more of a playgroup reason, but it made the deck just feel like it didn't do anything, plus it was my second edh deck, so I just ended up scrapping it.
Imoti celebrant of bounty on the other hand ended up WAY too strong for my playgroup. The thing with the deck is it doesn't specify spells from your hand for its cascade ability. So sometimes it would end up with things like play an 8 drop, cascade to a 7, cascade to a 6 that also has cascade, and just end up playing solitaire for a while. I ended up taking it apart and building miirym sentinel wyrm instead (which might also get retired soon funnily enough. Too big of a target for what the deck actually does)
Soft retired I have neheb the eternal, which was a burn deck that wanted to use nehebs ability to eventually snowball into a big X spell to kill the table. The deck was very fun, but it was built and hasn't been updated since before red got all of its treasure synergies (the last update it got was theros), so it is very slow. Add that to it being a 5 mana must protect commander and it becomes kind of annoying to play. I still have it, but it will likely be taken apart soon. I also have a similar win with a big splashy spell deck now in Anhelo, which basically fixes all my problems with neheb.
Gishath Suns Avatar was my first deck and I just can't bring myself to formally retire it even though i haven't played it in so long and it hasn't been properly updated since war of the spark. I've tried multiple times to edit it and can't really find the motivation. My deckbuilding philosophy and interests just moved in a different direction, and I value synergies and interactions a lot more than playing a big thing now. Maybe one day it'll get a redo.
Current decks are:
Miirym sentinel wyrm dragon tribal,
Anhelo the painter control/value,
Anikthea hand of erebos enchantress,
The necrobloom landfall,
Xyris the writhing storm wheels,
And I don't have it yet but the howling abomination cantrip storm will be added to that in about a week lol.
I have a lands deck too but its in a different direction than Necrobloom. You might like my Kura video!
as for your retired decks Imoti was a card I considered for awhile because I wanted a deck with delve cards but it turns out that delve isn't a mechanic you should have too much of because they all compete for the graveyard. And yeah miirym is one of those commanders that everyone knows about and will not let you untap with.
This is a fantastic video idea, and a great way to look back at the journey that got you to where you are now as a commander player. Thanks for sharing this ❤
I have been playing commander forever it feels and I'm still learning deck building strats. Thank you
If people are looking for something similar but more consistent that Delina, you could try Rionya, Fire Dancer! Tokens equal to 1 plus the number of instants/sorceries you've cast, and they gain haste!
In terms of decks I've taken apart, my main one was my boros Avacyn list. The big idea of it was to be a voltron deck with creatures that could sacrifice themselves, and ways of giving Avacyn lifelink and/or deathtouch. You could easily gain 60+ life from flipping her, and then also have a huge beater on board to quickly close out the game. I found it was often simply too oppressive - if it did it's thing, it wrathed the board and took out someone extremely quickly, and left the other players struggling to play. The pieces have mostly ended up in my Emry list, where they're helping to make Syr Ginger a monster!!
I literally have that exact avacyn deck sitting next to me and it's even more toxic. It does all that but also I jam packed it full of rule of laws and flash cards/instants to break the parity. Hahaha
@@33elk If anyone wants to make an Avacyn deck without making an Avacyn deck, I'd recommend Celestial Kirin. Does the board wipe thing but requires some actual thought since it can hit your stuff too.
For reference:
Celestial Kirin 2WW:
Flying
Whenever you cast a Spirit or Arcane spell, destroy all permanents with that spell's converted mana cost.
3/3
Thank you for sharing this with us, fam.
I've had a bunch of decks in the bin. Notably the Gitrog Monster and Xyris. In the frog's case, it's because I felt like I couldn't really improve it anymore and I got bored. Same with Xyris; I got tired of messing with three colors and shuffling all the time. I dropped the red and now it's a Show and Tell political deck
I have 2 retired commanders myself, and these were from very early on when commander was a new format. MY first commander was Rafiq of the Many, and it was just a new players exalted deck, almost half the deck was Alara block, and I couldn't buy cards online as I didn't have a credit card since I was in high school. Whenever I played with a new group, I was instantly targeted down and spent the rest of the game watching. Took it apart because I got too frustrated with people killing me first so often. Second deck was Isperia the Inscrutable. I played the deck too much as the commander being the center point, and use her ability to try and find answers using a toolbox. I have been thinking about trying to remake the deck, as being a more experienced player, I think I could make a much more fun and interesting build with this.
I am very much considering dismantling Fynn, the fangbearer, as this deck usually doesn't have the reach to win a 4 person game, so it leaves it to just crawling around as the last player or 2 players beat me down after I failed to aggro out effectively. It kind of frustrates my playgroup so I will likely dismantle it or maybe turn it in to a different deck. Maybe the new BG legendary that cares about death touch creatures from the Assassin's Creed set.
Oketra seems like a really fun one - ive never built mono-white in commander before...
I'm bad about disassembling precons that haven't been used in a while. I also took apart 2 of my own decks: Eriette of the Charmed Apple, a pillowfort auras deck, and my first attempt at Voltron with Wilson, Refined Grizzly using the Flaming Fist background. Both decks were slow and inconsistent.
In the rather limited time I've played MTG, Commander most especially, outside of just slapping a list together on Cockatrice for a day, most of the dead decks that I had became victims of redundancy. I love graveyard decks and I love aristocrats decks, so I've made quite a few lists for them. Some worked out, some didn't and over time, I started to learn how I liked putting them together, which meant the failure wound up as collateral damage of the learning experience. Sidisi, Brood Tyrant, which eventually got swapped for Muldrotha was the first recursion-based deck I played properly. That deck was just glacially slow and kind of uninteresting to play without a solid plan, so it was pretty immediately on the chopping list. Second was Gisa and Geralf, which relied on a very narrow strategy of assembling a graveyard recycling combo with Phyrexian Altar and Gravecrawler to gain infinite death-triggers for both value and the eventual kill off Plague Belcher. That one was just way too sacky, relying on a narrow, minimum-3-card combo to do anything more proactive than cycling through the deck looking for said combo pieces, which the deck wasn't opitmized for down to the commander. When I eventually settled on Meren of Clan Nel Toth as my grindey recursion strategy of choice, I ended up actually mashing quite a few of those two aformentioned builds to make it, with all of their leftovers being consolidated, ironically enough, back into a revised Sidisi list based on going wide with zombies that proved pretty fun to pilot, making for both the birth of a new deck and the comeback of another.
The last proper deck I have scrapped ended up being Hapatra, which was another sac-value engine, albeit with a more aggressive bent, what with all the tokens for overrun-strategies, -1/-1s for Yawgmoth and deathtouch for Fynn. Compared to the Gisa and Geralf list for example, it was a helluva lot more well-rounded for tactics and wincons and even had a much stronger game to spin when not specifically executing the game-winning move. It was honestly a solid and fun deck that received quite a bit more love from me than alot of other decks, as it was an homage to the original Amonkhet -1/-1 deck, that got me into Magic to begin with. The unfortunate reality was that, with my aformentioned and evident redundancy in strategies and colours, there's only so much love I can spread around. That Meren deck became not only a very hungry baby, but also one that was bringing in way more results. When push came to shove and my best death-triggers were split between the two, the numbers spoke louder than my affection and Hapatra had to give up many of it's engine-cards to Meren, because it was the deck I was bringing to locals 9 times out of 10. Hapatra isn't what I'd necessarily call "dead" as much as "on sabbatical", though between a Dargo and Vial Smasher build and a Lonis build that are both in-line for being assembled, Hapatra may end up withering away to entropy, eventually gutted card by card while it's in it's unfinished state.
Great stuff, Elk!! This is the perfect content for edh players in the year of our lord 2024 :)
Love this, see alot of players fall into "it just works," mentality and are just miserable from it/ get bored extremely fast in the game. Finding new things are refreshing.
Also for your wild mage deck i also suggest rionya fire dancer, similar game plan with making multiple token copies of a creature but instead revolves around a spell slinger theme as well since she makes X+1 where x is the amount of instants and sorceries. Note she does make at 1 token and its at the start of combat so it happens the turn she comes down. The most fun ive had with the deck outside of making a bunch of witty roast masters and exploding everyone is making 5 solemn simulacrums and getting to ramp like the green player, bonus points if you have a sac outlet then you get to draw all those cards since rionya exiles them at endstep.
Lovely video!
It makes me a little bit sad that Kadena is so limited by what Wizards prints. It was my first ever commander deck and I'm still trying to make her playable, although I fear I'll have to retire her, too!
Yeah sadly she’s just very very linear.
Grismold is my BABY! Easily one of my most powerful and fun decks ever! Definitely recommend to anyone looking for a flexible Voltron deck.
If I had to give some advice for a Grismold deck, stay away from the Anthem effects like "Night of Souls Betrayal" and "Illness in the Ranks" (unless these were the cards you were wanting to play with in the first place). They might seem like obvious includes, but they put a target on your back AND they prevent you from using your own tokens for value, such as with "Skullclamp" or "Village Rites".
Rather, one shot effects like "Gaze of Granite" (X = 0), "Bile Blight", "Bloodline Culling", and "Culling Ritual" do the job all the same while allowing Grismold to fly under the radar until you're ready to start deleting people.
I think its fun to look back at some retired decks to see how your deckbuilding ability has changed over time.
Most of the decks i've taken apart are unfortunately because I wasn't able to make them work and they ended up too weak. I think Mistform Ultimus, Hakim Loreweaver and Brigid, Hero of Kinsbaile are some interesting and unique commanders but they all majorly under performed. I hope some day I can revisit them and give them the decks they deserve.
Absolutely, looking at old decks i had 0 understanding of how magic worked LOL
I don't really have many officially retired decks yet because I've been a bit of a sucker for keeping them around but my two officially retired decks are Naru Meha and Minthara.
Naru Meha was a funny £10 combo deck where the entire deck is just blue creatures with ETBs and interaction to try to land a combo with Naru Meha and a blink spell. It was one of those budget decks where it just isn't very fun after you know it can work since it's so linear.
Minthara was an Orzhov blink deck with some LTB stuff that tried to pump Minthara then make tokens and swing. It was a cool deck although it seems like most people choose to take it more in the direction of full token synergy with lots of sacrifice effects. One of the nice cards I found that people don't seem to use with Minthara is Dragon Throne of Tarkir. Giving your creatures twice as much power from her ability is pretty good as it turns out! I took it apart because it was a bit too slow for my playgroup; Minthara being 4 and then taking even more turns to power up leaves your board a bit too weak for too long, especially if you don't manage to find a way to have something leave the turn you play her.
I think after seeing how many retired decks you have I'm going to retire a few more of mine. Look out, shrines...
Minthara was my favorite BG3 companion and im so peeved they have the old playtest version of her as the art instead of the older more grizzled one in the game.
That being said, absolutely destroy that shrines deck! Leave no unfun deck assembled...
I can’t tell you how disappointed I was after watching this video and all your others to realize you’ve only uploaded 4 total videos 😭
@@ImKhione more soon! The bell’s there for a reason too :)
I retired two: I retired The Ur-Dragon because I felt like her eminence ability simply gave me an unfair advantage against everyone.The other is my Sisay, Weatherlight Captain deck. It's specifically a deck that combo'd off with uncanny consistency, and it was more of a "look at this massive power level" and less of a deck I actually had fun playing, let alone felt good about.
I don't think there's been a 5 color commander that has really interested me. Most of my decks are actually only one color. I like the restriction. Good for recognizing what you don't enjoy and acting on it, a lot of people (me included) sit on an unfun deck they don't play instead of just pulling the plug.
I also like not using every single color. I typically play 2 color. Maybe I should challenge myself with more 1 colors?
Here are some I've taken apart:
- Marchesa, The Black Rose: This was my pirates/treasures deck and was my best deck for a while. Unfortunately other players and myself got better at deckbuilding and this deck did not keep up. It was dependent on too many mechsnincs to work reliably (needed +1/+1 counters, pirates, and treasures) making it not fun to play, and Wizards kept printing great cards for all 3 themes which made it really intimidating to actually decide on what to change. Eventually I just threw in the towel.
- Eloise, Nephalia Sleuth: Thenatically, a deck that allowed me to play a bunch of cosmic horror themed cards (and janky combos) by obsessively investigating deaths sounded awesome. Unfortunately, the build I made for her was very reliant on self-mill and recurrance, and I just don't have the brain of a graveyard player. It just didn't feel right doing what the deck wanted to do, so it didn't work.
- Krark the Thumbless/Ludevic: Built this to cantrip and make tokens on casting, but similarly to the last deck discovered that I don't have the brain/patience for a spellslinger deck. This sounded mechanically fun, but in practice in one game I spent like 10 minutes on one turn trying to cast one spell, and gave up.
- Others I took apart either because they weren't good or i got bored, Haktos (other Boros were better and more fun), Arcum Dagsson (boring), Karona (just bad, wizards printed like 3+ better versions of the card), Alela Artful Provocateur (too many possible directions).
You seem very knowledgeable while being fun and easy to listen to! Thank you algorithm!
The new MH3 Satya energy command is cool. But I am already starting to see the limit with it regarding an energy theme. There are just so few and I don't want to use the universes beyond cards, like how you felt with the face-down strategy.
I have had a handful of decks I have taken apart for the single reason that I suck at brewing, and I never get to the stage where I play the decks enough to fix them. After I started having an interest in cEDH I have gotten so narrow in what I consider a good card. I have to force myself to put a card into a deck and play with it even if it is a perfect fit or if it just matches whatever power level we decide to play at that evening.
Thank you for your clarifications ô wise 3/3 elk
Your videos are so fun, I love finding a new commander TH-cam with genuine charm and delightful cadence.
But you did not have faith in the Morph
My very first commander deck made around 2012-ish was a Gahiji, Honored One deck built with the idea of creating tokens for my opponents with cards like Hunted Troll and Akroan Hoarse, then hide behind pillowforts and controling combat with Master Warcraft and forced combat effects. I ended up stripping this deck for parts because it not once scucceeded at doing what I wanted it to do; it turns out, if you're handing out weapons to all your opponents, they just kill you with them instead of eachother.
It wasn't until the Goad mechanic became a thing when I returned to the deck concept and swapped out commanders for Marisi, Breaker of the Coil, and focused the deck more around evasive attackers. I also cut most of the bad cards that mainly gave my opponents creatures; it turns out that players usually make enough creatures themselves without my help. After that... It was still bad; It was too easy for my opponents to counter the strat with removal, either by spot removing Marisi, and even incedental 1 damage pings were usually enough to shut down the evasive creatures. Still, I felt like the deck was a step up from its initial flawed gameplan, it just needed some better card quality.
That was when New Cappena and its new precon face commander, Kitt Kanto, came out. I switched out commanders once again, and with her, and a whole lot more support for the Goad mechanic in the past few years, the deck finally works. Its a dedicated goad deck with a token subtheme now, which makes it feel a lot more proactive and interactive, while still holding true to its original roots (Gahiji and Marisi are still in the 99)... And it actually wins now sometimes.
awesome videos you make they’re actually sick also i love the 3/3 elk you drew now make 30 hours of content for me to watch thank
so many itzusumi profile pictures, you're the second one. Where are my kabru subscribers grahh!!
@@33elk kabru is such a goated character but izu is so :3
When I first started playing Commander, I had built a White soldier deck, which I found wasn't getting the mana I wanted. So I added a bit of green and looked for an interesting commander to go with it. That's when the deck turned into... Gaddock Teeg. Things spiralled from there until I decided to take it apart 😅
This is a little community still, but I absolutely want a discord for it. The brewing here is an absolute GOLD MINE. Currently trying to build orzhov food with the New Sorin, and it’s about as jank as I think I can get.
I gotta ask, jank in a good/intentional or bad/unintentional way?
@@Zevox144 its bad very bad
I honestly expected Rionya for the Delina replacement, lol. While she has the same issue of “must protect” as Delina, her MO of using rituals tends to allow her to be recast ahead of curve when removed, and thanks to the now-prolific nature of impulse draw red has little issue with card advantage, same goes for treasures!
Overall I loved this breakdown of your old decks! My retired decks are many but I’ll mention a few:
Korvold was built as a landfall strategy but I kept having to shove in other sacrificing synergies for other card types to do anything (and frankly having Korvold saccing lands isn’t fun) and overall the deck was rather directionless. I plan to rebuild him as either aristocrats (fat chance since I have an Elas il-kor deck in the works) or as treasure/token sac. That one has legs and even survives my other attempts at similar decks thanks to the commander’s colors. I plan on doing a WURG Friends Forever deck (using the RG/WU friends) as a 2-spell-2-draw deck with a flash subtheme (too many permanents that triggered off of second spells and second cards and the point was to have a deck for as many as possible) with the clues being mainly for draw. I also plan on a WURB Friends deck (WB/UR combo) as a blink+sac deck (with Breya as a swappable commander that also likes the blink and sac synergies). I have a Temur Food+Clue deck thanks to Jenny and Madame partners; it focuses on using food and clues as engine fuel and also has a sub-theme of fight and sucker punch cards (how I dub the green direct damage spells that still use creatures but don’t have them fight). Lastly I plan to have a purely food-centric deck. Part of me wants to make that Korvold, actually, since it got a lot of support in GB with LotR and would be a cap on power level. Alternatively I make it with Gyome, or with one of the hobbit commanders or partner pair. I don’t mind having similar decks when they play at different power levels or have wildly different card selection and strategy!
For example, I just finished my Kess Wheel and Deal deck that uses wheels to fill graveyards so I can reanimate from anyone’s discards, but I also plan for an Obeka, Brute Chronologist sneak attack deck that focuses on the titular card. As Obeka is prone to eating removal (in both versions lol) the deck has a suitable reanimation package planned in case any of my creatures hit the dust prematurely thanks to Obeka eating a swords or resculpt. Pair that with reanimation spells, even those that sacrifice or exile at the end step, AND Feldon and you can get rather robust deck that doesn’t rely on the commander as hard (though Kess wins on that front thanks to wheels refilling my hand and giving me access to more reanimation post-binning).
Or my plans for Miirym decks. One will focus on using tons of Sakashima effects to clone Miirym and focus on combos like parallel lives + astral dragon, while the other will be a more mid-level dragon tribal (or outright be folded into the Ur-Dragon a friend gifted me on my birthday 🥳)
Or my merfolk decks! I started on a Kumena deck that languished for 2 years before I got the new precon. Then I smashed them together and found I had TOO MANY MERFOLK! So I stripped out the deeproot pilgrimage combo and went all-in on explore and counters. Now Kumena will be his own deck (in addition to being in the 99 of Hakbal) that focuses on tokens, tapping, untapping, intruder alarm, and the pilgrimage combo! With light counter synergies thanks to Kumena also giving those out lol. But tokens help Kumena way more than Hakbal needs them, so deeproot pilgrimage ends up being useful outside the combo too! Same with intruder to a lesser extent as it helps draw cards before casting creatures or making tokens!
Well that went on too much of a tangent on NEW decks that happen to have a lot in common with each other and why I feel they’re worth pursuing simultaneously enough.
As for an actual retired deck: Prismari. Nothing agains the deck. Frankly the only issue was how parasitic it could feel. Trying to balance artifact tokens with instant and sorceries can be tough if you don’t balance type ratios or card selection correctly. Ultimately it’s retirement was simply one of bookkeeping: I wanted to have the same cards from it in multiple different decks, many of which are variant Urzas and I always forget about cards in my collection. I’ve come around to building online more often now so hopefully Prismari can be brought back soon with new cards that were printed since I last played him.
Another retired deck of mention is my Isshin deck. That one was BAD because wizards CANNOT SEEM TO PRINT GOOD SAMURAI TRIBAL EFFECTS! “WHENEVER ONE OR MORE” WIZARDS! IT WAS RIGHT THERE! A WAY TO BALANCE THE SAMURAI ATTACK TRIGGERS WITHOUT NEUTERING THE ATTACKING POWER OF THE WHOLE TRIBE AND FORCING THIS PSEUDO VOLTRON STYLE!!! And we also get NOTHING to help support the old ones?! Not even a cultural sensitivity errata foe Bushido so it can be opened up to everyone AND justify printing it and synergy for it on a commander?!?! And not to mention the exclusion of tribal precons! (Let alone that the vehicles precon should have been Jeskai; just have the pilot be red and partner with the UW mech; and on that note “piloting [X]” should have been a keyword and could have expanded to help with saddling post OTJ). But nope, first 3 color Samurai legend ever and he makes for a terrible Samurai commander deck thanks to their boneheaded design decisions for the tribe AGAIN! But noooooo, ninjas get a ton of new commanders! And with commander decks being tied to sets now it’s very unlikely any of the samurai issues will ever be addressed or fixed, whether by erratta, fixed mechanics, or just new design space…
I’m rambling, Isshin will just become my aggro attack deck with light anti-attack/pillowfort tech.
My last, or rather my first, retired deck was Arcum Daggson, my original attempt at a cEDH deck! I started it since the friends that introduced me to the game played cEDH and mono-color was easier and cheaper to build for. But thanks to the Paradox Engine banning the deck died before I got most any of the cEDH staples! AND that caused me to miss out on $80 mox diamonds! Or $70 grim monoliths! It was a travesty I tells ya!
Aaaand that’s another rambling tangent. I hope you have a wonderful day and even more success with your channel!
ESSAY WRITER, DAMN!! Rionya has a little too much build around to be a good delina replacement. Calamity is just the right amount of braindead big red that i and many other people like.
as for samurai i was a big fan of Raiyuu even though he is pretty voltron-y. Mostly just because I am a big fan of exalted and I like that its in red and the theme for samurais now.
Actually laughed out loud at the concept of Shorikai being a partner commander. What the fuck
@@franslair2199 it was a good one yeah haha
Thalisse was my first commander deck after buying the Korvold Brawl deck.
I was always drawn to it but something always felt off about it. Almost like it was too generic. I ended up taking it apart and fitting her into a couple very different treasure decks-- one with the party mechanic and another with legendaries--that she feels right at home in and it makes me happy I still get to play one of my favorite cards.
Korvold I took apart because it was too easy to be really strong haha
Great video! I need a follow up video to know which power level you play! Is it somewhere between lasagna tier and cEDH?
I have a Kelsien deck that does sort of the same thing, though I also paired with Obosh and just put a bunch of bad 3-drop pingers in the deck. It's fun, and it can pop off if I have drumbellower or white plume in play, but I try not to run too much protection in the deck so others can interact and shut it down if need be haha
I have been wanting to make a boros avacyn deck ever since I started playing magic... Pleassee make a deck tech or do you maybe have a deck list to link? I would love to see it. In general loving this channel and can't wait to see more content 💜💜
It is a very very mean deck that is like a ton of rule of laws and instant/flash creatures to abuse them so i get to play 4 cards a turn and my opponents only get 1, LOL
@@33elk Aaa dubious then😅 thank youu
@@jakabrezavscek969 haha there’s definitely a way to build it nicer I’m just a mean guy who hates when people take a turn thats more than a couple minutes 😈😈
It's funny, I took apart my Kelsien deck for the same reason you took apart Lynde & Kadena; I built them around -1/-1 counters and proliferate to eventually set people's creatures to 1 toughness as well as getting extra experience counters even if Kelsien wasn't in play/didn't have a valid target but boy do they not make many minus-counter cards.
its whats kept me from having scorpion god. I need more -1/-1 counters...
2 landfall decks, retired. 2 dragon decks, retired. 2 treasure decks, retired.
I think the most painful deck I had to retire was my Jared Carthalion, True Heir deck. It was... really unfocused, while simultaneously being too focused on Jared. It didn't run well, and I didn't understand deck building very well back then. However, I've also fell out of love with the premise of the deck, and I really prefer my Tamanoa secret commander deck for the whole "naya burn" plan
The one deck I retired and keep thinking about sometimes is The watcher in the water. The idea was of course draw a lot of cards in my opponent's turns, make a lot of 1/1 tentacles and use them for attacking or costs/synergies (convoke, sacrificing them for stuff like Ashnod's) and if things went well untapping my commander and hitting for letal in one swing (combining stuff like wizard class and wonder on the gy). A card I found neat at first but that later made me think it was too easy was Sage of the Falls, that gives a loot on non-human etb effect (it's only on like 80 decks in contrast to it being in the top 10 for a similar commander like The locust god). Ultimately having a costly commander and a deck so reliant on it meant without it on play I wouldn't be doing anything relevant other than one or two counters maybe. It was fun when it popped of tho :3
The Watcher in the Water is a great include in The Council of Four.^^
I also used to have a kelsien deck. Mine was built with obosh as a companion. however, I found out I liked the group slug cards more than the other stuff that deck was doing, so I cut white and went all in on rakdos group slug.
Haha you also went from a kelsien deck to a rakdos deck that's great what are the odds
My biggest gripe was an attempt at Tormod, the Desecrator & Ghost of Ramirez dePietro based on discarding cards that come back to hand from graveyard like Gutterbones, Lochmere Serpent, Ovalchase Dragster etc. The idea sounded so cool to me but in practice every little ability to pay for added up to so much mana it was never worth it. The idea is there, so maybe someone could build it better.
In the end I splitted the original commanders up, pairing dePietro with Bruse Tarl for cycling deck and Tormod with Sidar Kondo for various leave graveyard stuff deck but without discard theme
I played that exact pairing. The way I found to close out the game with ramirez and tormod was to use tortured existence to juggle some creatures in my graveyard and with enough zombies i could attack with them and cycle gempalm polluter to melt opponents (the polluter could then be brought back with the tortured existence to be cycled repeatedly over and over).
since all this is instant speed i could hold up counters all the way. It was fun but ultiamtely it has a similar niche to pharika so i didn't make the deck in paper
My first deck was Brago built starting from the Ranar precon back when it came out, it was your typical blink value deck that won via infinite combos. It wasn't all that fun for the table so i switched to Ranar and put more foretell cards (I could've just removed the infinite combos in favor of more token makers to finish games, but I like that Ranar has that built in plus foretell is fun).
The second retired deck was a Krav & Regna token aristocrats, this one became Teysa Karlov because I've fallen in love with the secret lair artwork. I ditched most of the token makers because most of the triggers I want to double say "nontoken".
Third one started of with a custom card i saw online (Gwynevere, Bountiful Sun. 2GW for a 2/5 with lifelink that says "Whenever an Aura enters the battlefield under your control, if it’s not a token, create a token that’s a copy of that Aura."). I liked that it played with auras in an interesting way, but eventually I wanted a real magic card so I swapped her with Mazzy. The current version run Calix, Guided by Faith since he's the closest to the original idea of the deck.
Last one was a Jhoira, Ageless Innovator deck that aimed to untap her a bunch of times and cheat huge artifacts into play. It had many many problems balancing the number of protection, card draw and untappers. I haven't replaced this deck yet, but Chiss-Goria is looking really good.
I am still so mad they errata'd ranar.
@33elk I don't mind, I like to keep that deck "fair" (I mean no infinite combos, it's WU blink it can't be too fair by design)
The only deck I've taken apart was an Atraxa deck. It was complicated, people didn't like playing against it, and I didn't like playing it.
One of the few fun things it did was cast an Elesh Norn at instant speed for free on someone else's turn.
I've since taken those cards and put them in other, more fun decks.
Might I suggest Agrus Kos as a replacement for Delina?
Forget the dice-rolling and go all in on copy shenanigans.
Coincidentally Delina is a GREAT include in the deck (along with Rionya, Jaxis, and Orthion). Target Agrus Kos with ANY of these and copy your ENTIRE board. Target Agrus Kos with MULTIPLE of these and it gets REALLY nutty.^^
If you want to go into boros like that I'd actually suggest duke ulder ravenguard. It becomes bad once you're 1v1 but its better than calamity until then.
@@33elk Hmmmm.....
Idea.^^
Duke Ulder Ravengard.... targeting Agrus Kos.^^
ALL your creatures now have haste and myriad.
I totally hear you with the Kelsien issue. I have a Zagras deck that's just as binary. I still dont know how to make it fun to interact with or what direction to take it that would make it unique.
I want more rakdos party support. My judith deck has so much party in it without me even trying. Imagine a card that's like 'Sacrifice a party: do something'
Mishra, Artificer Prodigy. It's really cool to have a gameplan that revolves around using a normally unusable ability. The problem is most of the effects it relies on are symmetrical, making the game almost unplayable for certain opponents (Possibility Storm, Nether Void, Planar Chaos, Nullstone Gargoyle, Chalice of the Void). Add on that the gameplan is also often hard stax with an eggs finish, and I don't particularly feel like it fits in a casual setting. I enjoy these things in normal games, but I'm not here to eat everyone else's time by shutting them down, I'm here to interact with everyone.
Derevi, Empyrial Tactician. This is for a similar reason as above, but kind of the inverse. I'd like to play the game, not be shut down for the sins of my commander's potential. Anybody that knows how good Derevi is with Stasis effects will immediately put their focus on me, despite not including them in my deck.
Yarok, the Descrated (really sad since I have a foil copy from M20). One of the couple decks I fully own, and technically not dismantled (I still have all the cards in their own sleeves), though I haven't played with it in forever. It's so generic and I can easily take over the game if I'm not aggresively stopped. I'm able to get so much value from any permanent I play, from extra ramp, to single-target removal, to boardwipes, to recursion, to anthems. And while I'm not playing cards like Peregrine Drake or Deadeye Navigator that have ways to blatantly go infinite, I still somehow managed to include ways to go infinite, such as Cryptolith Rite (included to make use of 1/1 etb creatures), Great Oak Guardian (included as a budget Craterhoof), and a repeatable way to reuse the Guardian. I'm playing draft level cards, and getting them to really punch above their weight class if I'm left alone for just a little bit. Dinrova Horror is messed up with double triggers. Decoction Module lets me reuse permanents and generates tons of energy for stuff like Demon of Dark Schemes. Deadwood Treefolk gives so many cards back.
Yarok heralded the beginning of when you do x do x again era of commanders. I've always heard about mishra but it always sounded like it had that problem so i didn't build it.
The only decks I've done this for were my Bant Aura and Heroic deck and a Selesnya Landfall Token deck.
The aura deck was built off the back of the Forgotten Realms precon with some heroic cards thrown in. Ultimately, i took it apart because it didnt feel good to play, was just too much of "play aura, get +1/+1, pass". The token deck i didnt dismantle but gave to a friend who enjoyed piloting it. Personally, as much love as i poured into it, i just wasnt a fan of how slow it actually was. The deck wasnt bad, i just didnt enjoy piloting it because i couldn'tbe as aggressive as i wanted.
I now have decks that replace them. I took a Virtue and Valor precon, removed some cards and added Danitha, New Benalia's Light as the commander. Not only is it the snowbally and out of control voltron i wanted, but there are plenty of creatures in the deck that take advantage of that strategy in different ways (shout out to Timber Paladin!). As for tokens, I have a Kasla deck thats much more aggressive and can cast big spells through convoke. Its never a dull moment with that deck.
i still need a deck that has auras so i can finally run dreampod druid
@@33elk Dreampod Druid and Verdant Embrace would be awesome! Lol
Goreclaw: was my first edh deck was a budget build from 2018 might revisit it again sometime
Talrand: ended up selling it as I'm not a huge fan of its play style of either countering everything scary or cantriping constantly for land drops/ drakes
Tolsimir friend to wolves: this one just never paned our there's not enough good wolves that even a really tuned version of the deck would die to precons a lot of the pieces turned into voja jaws of the conclave eventually
Lord wind grace: sold it bc of financial struggles during COVID, would love to revisit the landfall strat again sometime
Then my most recent deck that's getting close to retirement is wyleth simply bc I feel I build it wrong as a equipment deck without really taking into account it should be a cheap low CMC equipment and aura deck. But it's low enough power where I pull it out of my other tuned decks like light paws, voja, emiel turbo blink control, or Mirko are too much for the table since it's a bit jank
Damn its always sad to hear about people selling decks. I hope you get windgrace back together someday! (sorry i ribbed him a bit in my Kura deck tech video haha)
I have a good friend who plays windgrace, its part of what made me build my Kura lands deck, though that anecdote was a bit too personal to have in the video. I got that friend a signed eternal witness for his deck from Kyle Hill since he likes him a lot.
Goreclaw got a couple new toys from OTJ as well. Outcaster Trailblazer and Smuggler's Surprise.
im in the process of a similar transition from your grismold to pharika deck but mine is yargle and mulatani to the gitrog ravenous ride lol
Recently my commander deck graveyard has had a spike in grave robbing's and some of my newer commander decks are starting to look like Frankenstein's monster, but hey thats just called efficient recycling
I'm here early! Can't wait to watch the episode
I had an Esix, the Fractal Bloom deck for a little bit that I took apart simply because there was too much going on. How I would run it was by getting ETB creatures that make tokens (avenger of zendikar) and making those tokens copies of creatures with effects or of other token generators, then copying things like Coiling Oracle to go for the win. Ended up with long turns that were easy to shut down, so all it did was make the game take longer. Could be improved with the new Nadu, but that would just make the situation worse lol
Gosh I could see how that could lead to a monster of a turn that takes like 10 minutes to resolve. Friend at my LGS had a Volo clone deck that got the axe for the exact reason you had of value overload
I haven't taken apart many decks, but Krenko is one of them. I like to have lots of efficient answers for different things, mono red just couldn't do it for me. It was also very linear, similar play patterns every game. It was SO fun and explosive three times... but exactly three times....
So far, my retired decks are:
Progenitus
Kyler, Sigardian Emissary
Belbe, Corrupted Observer
Anowon, the Ruin Thief
And soon to be retired:
Jodah, the Unifier
Tovolar, Dire Overlord
Progentius was a 5 color Gates deck that I initially built to be a lower powered deck, but because of the self-imposed taboo of people not destroying Lands, once the Gate plan got online, it was hard to stop. I either won because Gates or got focused on because I was in danger of winning frequently with a basically non-interactive wincon.
Kyler was a functional deck, but I played it a handful of times and it just never jelled with me. It had its moments, but I just found myself reaching for it less and less and once I started scavenging some cards out of it for other decks, I retired it.
Belbe was a deck I was looking forward to building ever since I saw Kyle Hill play it on I hate Your Deck. I finally got around to building it and.... it just didn't hit. Sure there were times where I got to do "the thing" but a lot of times I sat there with plenty of ways to ping my opponents for 1 but nothing in my hand to make use of the 6 mana Belbe gave me. A friend of mine actually liked the deck a lot and wanted to build it, so I said goodbye to her and took her apart.
Anowon was one of my first precons that I upgraded and... quite frankly the deck was overhated by my tablemates because of the mill. The minute I started milling everyone, even though I said that's not my plan and I just wanted the card draw, the deck would get focused down. Very fun deck, but people started groaning whenever I wanted to play it, and eventually I said enough is enough and retired him.
Jodah is currently built and was initially just a pile of Legendary creatures and Lands I had in my binders. I didn't follow any lists, I just threw a bunch of cards together. Yeh, it was immediately too strong. I tinkered with it a bit to try and focus it, but it's just strong strong strong and immediately paints a target on him whenever I play it. I've built a Tom Bombadil deck which is a more fair 5 color deck and I want to have decks I can actually play with my friends that aren't overwhelmingly powerful, so I'm taking Jodah apart soon to build a Korona Goad deck.
Tovolar... is just a pain in the ass. Constantly tracking the Day/Night cycle in addition to worrying about the older werewolves who don't have Daybound/Nighbound just takes up a lot of mental bandwidth. I love the guy and I love werewolves, but I very rarely play it anymore. I held a retirement night but never retired it. I think I just need to take it apart.
I absolutely need to make a video about the weird opinions people have about mill but i don't think theres anything i can say to make them see reason.
Day/night was a mistake
and I understand your pain with belbe. I played her for a couple games and its like "wow this commander looks cool but really just doesn't do much of anything"
I excitedly built a Tovolar deck when he was announced. I gravitate towards kindred decks, and it seemed like a unique mechanic. Then I started to think about the bandwidth required to operate the deck vs the payoff for doing so. It filled me with pure dread. The deck was disassembled before it was ever played.
Edit to add: the worst part was that day/night and old werewolves almost work together, but not quite, so there is a lot more tracking than initially apparent.
Retired decks,
Originally, I had an Edgar markov deck, but I noticed I kept putting in more board whipes, control, removal and funny lands, and way to few vampires, so I disassembled it and build a deck that I thought would be a better fit.
My Oloro deck is being retired, it was originally meant as the go to control deck, the idea was that if I did not play a single creature, I could add all the cards that say no to creatures, and not be hit myself. It lacked win conditions and occasions where it was appropriate to play it, thus, it is no more.
Besides that, I still have a lot of decks that I mostly tested, then chose to abandon instead of refine to a state where I am happy with them, However I don't really consider them to have "died", since I have not fully completed them. For example, I once made an emrakul, the promised end deck because it is my favorite card. Realized I had too few colorless cards lying around and when I tried it, it didn't really work.
What I like most about every deck I remember taking apart is the things I learned from said deck, either playstyle wise or deck construction wise.
I'm currently working on an Oloro deck... chiefly revolving around Parallax Nexus/Tide/Wave and proliferate effects.
If I'm going to be arch-villain, I might as well go full SUPER villain.^^
Also has Light of Day and Darkest Hour for the accidental Green Lantern reference (I don't care if I can't attack).
I AM PARALLAX.^^
@@zackkelley2940 Sounds great, my favorite from back in the day was Spreading Plague, to really get those debates started on whose creature needs to live the most. (Its effect is, whenever a creature comes into play, destroy all creatures that share a color with it)
You are my favourite mtg youtuber wow you are so creative and interesting
For only 4 videos, I’d say you’re doing pretty well for yourself.
I spend a really long time thinking about a deck before I ever build it because I don't like the idea of buying a lot of cards only to realize I don't like the deck. I've been mulling over a token deck for what feels like years, I've been working myself around to the idea of making a dinosaur deck since original Ixalan bc "Gishath Ramp+Stompy" was too similar to my less-restrictive Mayael the Anima "Ramp +Stompy" deck, but worse.
I think the only time I built a deck and played it only to dismantle it was Feldon of the Third Path, around Kaladesh timeframe I think. At the time WotC didn't print anywhere near the number of Wheel of Fortune or discard effects we now have, so it felt like a challenge to enable Feldon. Even then I ended up not really going back to Feldon because it would end up in a boring play pattern of just reanimating the biggest thing in my graveyard every turn.
What I primarily have these days are ideas for decks that peter out at the decklist phase or after getting a few cards. Ideas I've sat with long enough to fall out of the puppy-love phase with, basically. Only then, if I still feel that pull do I get the cards ordered.
I would've thought Judith would be extremely oppressive. It turns any of the many end the festivities effects into one sided board wipes.
Wrong Judith. I am referring to her first card Judith, the Scourge Diva.
@@33elk ohh, my bad.
Your old Grismold deck sounds a lot like my Laurine and Kamber deck that loves giving out tokens just to kill them for value.
Hey Elk! Great vid. I'm back at it again. Please build a deck based on Shameless Charlatan.
These videos are great!
I was excited for the new Voja, because I like Naya and I like wuffies. I built a deck (proxied) with budget cards. It stomped too much. I don't like elfball, and this was just elfball with wolfball card draw. So I took it apart after only two game days.
Huh well now I know Starlight Spectacular is a card! Time to add that in some of my decks :)
@@pk_cupcakes it’s a great one!
like the vibe here
glad to hear c:
Question: how do I come up with a unique and interesting deck idea, preferably without resorting to using an extremely obscure commander?
I own three precons: Inalla, Mishra, and Mirko, but I want to build my first actual deck. The only problem is that I can't find a commander/card/engine/idea that seems strong, interesting, and unique. I don't want to play anything in EDHREC's Top 100, and even though there are a lot of mid-tier commanders that seem interesting, everything seems more or less "solved" (i.e. common strategies already established). I've found a few interesting commanders, but I don't want to just scroll through EDHREC and play the same stuff as everyone else.
You seem like you have a lot of experience with deckbuilding, especially niche decks, so I was hoping you might be able to help me out of my predicament.
This is the topic of next week's video! Hit the bell, and next tuesday you can learn everything there is to know about how to build a deck!!
@@33elk yay i'll stay tuned
I had an idea for the new Mjolnir card coming out in the Assassin’s Creed set, pair it up with Thalia, heretic cathar where everyone’s stuff comes in tapped already and on top of that just add equipment tutor and tap down stuff.
I was really excited until I started playing the deck and everyone hated it. It also was kinda the same gameplay every game too so there was that. 🤷
my disappointing deck was my Myra attraction I did not want to put extra turns and also I did the mistake of putting all my attraction on their 4, 5, 6 versions which means if I roll good I get the full value otherwise I am screwed. and I was screwed too many times 😢
I ran into the Delina issue a little bit with some cards that are more cute than anything in my Ob Nixilis, Captive Kingpin budget list. Mana Clash seems like a fantastic card in the deck, and has hilarious implications. I could "draw" 7 cards. I could just delete someone from the table. I could delete myself. I could delete us both! I could eat 6 damage for no gain. All for just a single R. But man, in practice the card is just a headache to keep track of and is so time consuming to resolve that it's just been unfun for everyone, myself included.
My favorite deck I used to have was an Iroas, god of Victory combat deck. It was pretty powerful, but I decided to add a color and switch to Vial-Smasher and Ravos. the deck lost it's identity and i stopped playing it. I keep wanting to rebuild the deck but never get around to it.
Iroas is a very cool card. Just constant fearless attacking.
@@33elk yeah! Power creep has definitely been kind to the cards I could run in it, it's just not a very exciting thing to build. Any decent creature with vigilance becomes a real threat really quickly
i find this so interesting, because i have a Delina deck i love deeply myself and obviously it runs Wyll, but somehow the thought of "go for Wyll everytime" just didn't come up very often, despite owning the deck for a while. i rarely seem to draw him and when i do he just ends up being a value piece to more reliably copy something else lol
now the thought is in my head tho, so let's see if it negatively impacts future games.
wish you well! especially since there's some cool delina cards in new set (fear of burning alive)
@@33elk damn, that one's crazy.
i think new Norin has some potential as well to serve as a second Dolmen Gate that lets me reuse etb triggers.
I HAD considered building Oketra like that (it's probably the most efficient way to build it, but it's also really dull) but it occurred to me that there is something Oketra does that is VERY unique...
She's a mono-white creature that makes BLACK creatures.
So I'm making mono-white Happily Ever After.^^
Yes, that's actually possible.
I'm also throwing in Binding Mummy since it's a cheap white creature and Oketra IS a zombie that MAKES zombies.
Damn i didn't think about binding mummy, and this is coming from someone that likes Court Street Denizen in decks like Adeline.
@@33elk To be fair, there's a whopping 8 mono white zombies and most of them don't do much.
It's a shame Wayward Servant is Orzhov.
Oh, I have a lot of retired decks, mostly from when I built very mean decks:
Atraxa stax: honestly this one I'd like to put back together, such a fantastic stax commander and I feel like it's not as oppressive as it once was, loads of cool interactions with stax pieces and proliferate, and all the right colors to boot, also Atraxa under stax is a very strong beatstick.
The Gitrog Monster: I really like frogs and at the time this felt like the best choice, I now have a janky frog tribal deck and I'm much happier, Gitrog was the only frog in the deck and it was more of a value engine for a lands matter deck, very standard build.
Lord Windgrace MLD/Superfriends: it was a pretty decent brew tbh, just not very fun to play, I feel like Guff is a much better superfriends commander, I still play it rarely because superfriends decks tend to take very long turns.
Aryxmethes Sea Monsters Tribal: this one was not particularly mean, had a couple of infinite combos but it was more of a novelty, also I barely play combo decks anymore.
Sydri, Galvanic Genius: this was my best deck for a long while, maybe one day I'll revisit it with more recent cards, I just got burned out of playing the deck, and now it's too slow to even try and compete in my playgroup, still love the commander tho.
Prossh Food Chain: back in the day this was one of the best decks, I feel like it would probably be a very strong deck but combo is not really my jam anymore, a good candidate to be turned into a cool Kobold Tribal deck tho.
I have many more but these were the first that came to mind.
Jeez a lot of your decks are like the face of "Command zone boogyman" from 2016-2018 hahaha. Its funny to look at them now just being ok cards with stuff like nadu and friends going around.
@@33elk Yeah, that was kind of the point in time where I was fixated on high power level decks, then I built Phelddagrif and fell in love instantly, at the time it was kind of a group hug deck, but over time it evolved into the political draw go that it is now, probably still my favorite deck I have today tbh.
I recently retired my adapted precon of ranar ever watchful because I’ve always wanted to build an angel life gain deck and I wanted a lot of the pieces from it and I found I was leaving it in the bag any time I took it to a game night
I think Delina is a workable commander as a filthy Delina gambler myself, the main stickler is that you have to run other enablers, like flameshadow conjuring, mirror march, Calamity, Panharmonicon, Jaxis the troublemaker, etc. Additionally, while expensive, running Gamble and Imperial Recruiter as tutors for Wyll makes the deck run a lot more consistently.
I just love gambling too much to switch the deck's commander to Calamity haha.
@@Meme_Deluxe i ran imperial recruiter and it getting the wyll combo also contributed to my burnout with the deck haha
@@33elk Fair enough, I just enjoyed hearing that someone else had at least played this silly little gambling deck :)
I'm an old player that is returning to magic and commander. I stopped with the third kamigawa set back then and returned to ... LCI I think. So yeah. I found a playgroup, build plenty of decks and prepared a lot. I think of my decks as Pre-Group and Post-Group right now. The ones I build before and the ones I build while in the group.
Unsurprisingly 2 of those 3 prebuild decks... kinda got dismantled or are in process of being so... I kept Faldorn, although she does not win a lot, she's fun to play with and against. Stuff I am dismantling though is Brimaz, simply because of the inherit limitations of the actual trope he'd want to build. White / Black Phyrexians has a lot of good stuff but all of them is like extremely costly (both cmc wise and $, yeah looking at you sheoldred) while at the same time getting it out is not that easy... End of story is that the deck ended up being a very removal heavy with integral cards coming up only lategame. That's not really enjoyable and most of the time I just spend there, ramping a little, passing turns and throwing the occasional removal without actually doing somethig. When I do something... it easily gets shut down as phyrexian wincons kinda tend to be slow... so yeah... unfortunate as I really like the trope of Phyrexia.
second deck being dismantled is my, on paper, Power level 9 Mazirek... Generally a deck with a sacrifice subtheme build to be relatively passive and only making people sacrifice lots of their stuff before going infinite or wide... ended up NEVER even once having all the necessary pieces for a combo which lead to me learning to better organize my combos. Never even once won with it, only had the chance to go infinite with one of my combos but that was foiled by an epic counterspell duel involving 5 counterspells.... long story short.getting rearranged for a meren-deck and heavily updated... at least I learned to not be hiding comboes behind comboes and only use direct combos now.. sheesh
I LOVE mazirek sad to hear you had to pull that one apart.
@@33elk Same boat. Loving Mazirek, still loving him although the deck is practically dead.
I can see why he performs well as part of the 99 in Meren, Ghave or Korvold but as a leading act? Too much attention I guess.. My experiences with him are that, no matter if people know the deck or not, he instantly draws too much attention... people with good threat assessment see how he can escalate easily while people with lesser threat assessment see him and are scared of the gameplan he suggests ("he will let me sacrifice everything and then run me over") while in reality he feels more like a parasite benefiting from other strategies and adding to them like adding salt for flavoring instead of having strategies around him involved as he's more of a "Link" of mechanics, rather than being a "Part" of them... surely not something for a Novice / intermediate builder to work with as he needs too many factor to keep staying on board and do stuff. Sadge :( thx for the reply
Kadena! I love morph and when I first saw Kadena years ago it was an easy fit for a new build... But she ended up being to simple and easy, basically piloting herself and vomiting cards onto the board. So I took her apart and looked around for someone else to fill the niche, and set my eyes on Sidar Kondo. He makes creatures with power 2 or less evasive so my morphs can connect more easily, and has partner so i can squeeze in blue. To this day it's the only Bant deck I have and the mind games of morph are simultaneously easier to pull off and more fun with someone who forces enemies to hem and haw over their own interaction rather than a static value engine.
@@scorpiosystem8082 sidar kondo morphs is really funny
I always feel bad taking apart decks, just end up rebuilding them with a slightly different theme
When i started playing commander, I got the March of the Marchine Back-up deck with Bright Palm, but thought that Shalai and Hallar was the cooler card to build around. It turned into basically whatever 'enters the battlefield with some counters' cards and ping ppl with the commander
When I did that, I realized that the red in the deck was mostly just for the commander and like blasphemous act. And the gameplay got a little too samey of playing the commander and pray it doesnt get removed after drawing aggro from shooting your opps.
So, I took out the red, took a lot of the cards from the precon, and made it into a hamza counters and x-spells deck
LOL in my analytics I had like 1 view from a search for "Hamza EDH" was that you? I was curious about that.
Hamza is a fucking beast though I playtested that guy a ton but ultimately decided against it. I don't think I have the list anymore sadly.
@@33elk lol that search wasnt me i dont think but that is funny
I love starlight spectacular
Outside of my other comment. Decks that I have taken apart recently:
- Goldbug: Azorious Humans is fun, but the soldier support made for a better deck and he ended up being replaced before I eventually just fully took the deck apart.
- Nylea, God of the Hunt: Actually a deck I mained and built over 7 years. I took it apart because I got tired of Craterhoofing people. It was such a resilient and hard to slow down deck as long as I got to 5 mana. I still love Nylea, but I’ll likely never put the deck back together. Still waiting to find a mono-green commander besides her that I genuinely love, but nothing yet.
nylea was on i thought about building using her trample enabling with klothys's design
@@33elk she’s definitely got some tricks. I a lot of the time I found myself wishing she could trigger heroic.
I retired an old gitrog monster deck a few years ago and fhen suddenly jolted upright and unretired it
I've built and taken apart Gyome 2 or 3 times now. On paper it does a lot of things I enjoy in a deck but in execution it just doesn't deliver it seems.
the amount of self restraint i need not impulse by gyome every passing set is getting to a level of causing me pain
when we got bargain in WOE i had to take a second to stop myself from dropping a stupid amount of money on another commander deck i didn't need
I've lost track of the number of decks I took apart, but I do remember a few.
Feather, The Redeemed........ moving on
Colorless Eldrazi: I had this deck back in 2019. I found out the hard way that Eldrazi tribal and Big Eldrazi are two separate archetypes that don't mesh well together. Or they didn't at the time.
Marchesa, The Black Rose: this deck never even made it to my LGS. It was infuriating enough just goldfishing it that I shelved it instantly.
Mayael of the Anima: she's just not good enough anymore, even by the time I built her ~2021. She's too slow, requires too much mana, and too inconsistent without forking out for top of deck tutors.
Taniwha one sided MLD. Deck had trouble getting online, and even if it could do its thing, my life total was usually too low to stabilize
Delina is still my favorite mono red commander lol
Sweet video subject 👍
The elk is cooking with Avacyn.
Letsgooooo
One of my retired decks is also still one of my favorites, I just stopped enjoying playing it. The concept was forced draw with Gluntch, the Bestower. It had two different win cons, but both involved Helm of the Host, which made the deck have a rather large reanimating package for artifacts. It was fun, but felt bad to play because if your opponents didn’t remove Gluntch fast enough you just won the game out right.
Wow that sounds fun to play against though?
Is your elk doodle by any chance inspired by Twig from Hilda? It really reminds me of him
Nope, just something i doodled in 5 minutes on ms paint, i can see the resemblance though!
I had a combo satuoro umezawa deck which felt too samey and slow I'd just try and make infnite mana and blink some big etb creture for the win I then made araumi the dead tide and I pulled it apart for being the same just straight cars draw and stuff until I combo and now that deck is going too become a estior the warding wind and Francisco deck with gyruda as a companion
omg i love your voice, i just found your channel and wanted to tell you that
Please make more videos, they're awesome
Right now I have 3 decks that I have retired.
Wilhelt Aristocrats: Wilhelt is good. In fact, Wilhelt is great. I generally lost interest in the deck because of 2 reasons: a) the turns take FOREVER because you're double-dipping all of your dies triggers, this is a problem especially when you cannot immediately end the game and b) in order to not take 60 work days turns you have to lean into some pretty boring combos. Tried going combat route instead of sacrifice and honestly? Zombies are pretty lethargic when it comes to combat.
Greven, the Predator Captain: This was my signature deck for a long while, it is absurd the things you get to do with it. I love Voltron but I'm not a fan of artifacts and I don't really like the fragility of auras so Greven's suicide charges were incredibly fun and the deck is terrifying when it gets to do its thing. I still love this deck to death and would definitely reassemble it one day, but I took the pieces apart for a Rowan, Scion of War deck that I'm also having a lot of fun with.
Firesong and Sunspeaker: If you're interested in building an F&S deck, do not bother. Sure, getting 6 damage and 9 life out a Lightning Helix is fun and all, and it's actually a boardwipe tribal masquerading as a spellslinger deck, but the 6 mana on a Boros commander that barely does anything on its own and makes the deck fall apart once it is removed is a big ask that wont work in any way, shape or form.
new judith must be extra salt in the wound for f&s. These sound like decks I would've built about 2 years ago and disassembled the same way ahaha
@@33elk Judith kind of is yeah lol, the thing with FS&SS is that it was among the first standard legal box toppers in the game ever, so they wanted avoid having a box topper that could hurt the meta but they were quite heavy handed with its mana cost. A Rakdos lifegain focused spellslinger deck would have sounded rad a long while ago, before I made multiple Rakdos decks so I don't think I will lol