Yay, a fellow Bombardment enjoyer! At first it was my pet card bc the art and mechanics matched up really well with a d&d character I was playing at the time capenna came out. It remained my pet card when I realized there were so many different things I could build around it
Secret fourth type: neat mythic you accidentally drafted 4 of on arena, that you should NEVER run more than 2 of even in the decks it's good in. But it feels bad to have two whole mythics you'll never ever use, so you convince yourself that if you deck build around it juuuust right you can make a "combo" deck that's "just GOTTA run it at 4. It's the keystone of the whole synergy!."
lmao i just finished painstakingly optimizing my decks for the last few hours instead of playing with them and this is the first thing i open youtube to
SAME and not me staring at my pet card, the card that literally inspired the deck to come into existence, as falling under the power level of a deck im really trying to push, literally just before seeing this!!
And that's why I prefer Battle of Wits format. Proxy friendly, it's like Legacy but everyone has to run 4 Battle of Wits, and make their deck able to resolve it somehow
out of all the cards i have polymorphist's Jest is probably my fave blue card, theres just something comical about "oops all frogs lol" that makes it a favorite of mine
It depends on your goals, I guess. When you have fun playing your pet cards, despite losing games because of them, what do you value more: Fun or winning? How important is winning to you? How important is having fun to you? Are you only having fun, if you win? Do you need to optimize your decks to have fun? I won't cut Boompile for a more reliable sweeper, because I like what it does to the game. :)
Winning is great for tournaments, but in reality it’s game that’s meant to be enjoyed in any fashion. If I wanted I could do a 1 mana deck for the fun of it, but definitely wouldn’t win
My buddy cracked a Whippoorwill in a pack of The Dark back in the day, then immediately took out a Sharpie and wrote "WHY THE HELL CAN'T I FLY?" on it. Also, my all-time pet card is Ifh-Biff Efreet. Look it up; I'll wait.:D
The Upstate Farm for my pet cards was actually the conceit for my Selvala Explorer Returned deck. She's generically powerful; the game plan of ramp on turn 1 to play her on turn 2 and have 6-7 mana on turn 3 is pretty strong and open ended, leaving all kinds of room in the deck for whatever interesting jank you might feel iffy about including in a more focused deck. Your Radha deck has a similar feel, so it makes sense that you also think of it as a comfy home for pet cards.
My farm upstate is the tokenbase of my Talrand deck. My favorite card is wind drake. I was collecting it casually for years. Always picking them up from draft chaff and asking friends if they have older or special ones in their shoe boxes. When I built my first commander deck I choose a budget Talrand and put all my wind drakes together as tokens for Talrand. Whenever I make a token I draw them from a deck of wind drakes. Some of these are very special, because of a strange language or because a friend marked it in some way before they gave it to me. The only real change aside from upgrading the card powerlevel of certain effects, was the manabase. At first I took all my favorite old islands (6th edition, Invasion, that odd Unglued, a foil Onslaught one, etc) but now I have gotten all of the versions of the John Avon one (first printed in Portal Second Age and part of a best of land cycle in 6th edition). The one with the drake on it!
A good psychological trick is assuring yourself that your pet cards already have comfortable homes. I recently put Boomer Scrapper in my Kardur deck and it's been an all star. I would never have discovered it if I stuck to Rakdos staples. My red and black pet cards already have decks to call home. Boomer Scrapper didn't, but now it does and I have a new card I love.
I had been introduced to Magic by a friend when I was probably 8 and we barely knew what we were doing. I think had managed to gather a few cards but didn't have enough for even multicolored deck. My first even real purchase was for a harvester of souls semi-precon thing. it had a bunch of black cards and I think barely functioned as a deck, but it came with an additional booster pack at the bottom. within that booster pack, the first I ever opened, was Gisela, Blade of Goldknight. she also had the most text of any card I had seen and an absolute insane ability but it would be a long time before I even had enough boros cards to make a deck she could fit into. I've since kept her throughout all these years, always moving her to whatever my strongest (or usually current) boros deck ended up being. usually it has been nothing but jank since I was little and eventually fell out of magic, but this past year Ive come back to it and I'm old enough to pay attention to proper deck building techniques/ strategies (hence why im here). she currently has a place in my Otharri deck as my favorite win con of letting my opponents duke each other out while I make myself as unassuming as possible/ focus on defensive. It's still a bit of a jank deck since its still boros and has some consistency issues but its better than any I had before it at least. Its always fun for her to hit the table, new opponents dont want to read the wall of text or dont fully understand the implications until a round or 2 of combat and think how cool it is that they get to slug each other out, until they then later realize how hard it is to deal with me
This video got me thinking aboot which of my pet cards would work in decks I already have so now I'm slamming Lifeline into my Preston, the Vanisher deck.
My "pet card that's just good" is Binding the Old Gods, running enough removal feels like a chore sometimes so I love when there's one that I'm actually enthusiastic for.
not so much pet cards but certain cards like [Witch's Mark] and [Abiding Grace] have art that inspires me, we need more HD desktop backgrounds from WOTC hell, sell them to us fot 5 bucks per set or something, it's not much, they can tip the artists with it, and we get to have cool art!
Teferi's Puzzle Box. 4 mana artifact that makes everyone at the table ship their hand to the bottom for a new one off the top at the beginning of their turn. It causes people to play more "fair magic," as it becomes difficult to set up plays in advance. (The card is even more fun when you have a Scroll Rack, or Sensei's Divining Top. That way you get to keep parts of your hand for next turn while your opponents likely won't.) Pretty niche and stacksy, but every time it's played the game becomes FAR more interesting. It's not as "feels bad" as most stacks effects as well. Opponents can play all their cards still. They can attack and block and play as normal. Just don't get too attached to the cards in your hand.
I don’t think people being able to plan out their turn makes anything inherently more or less fair. I dislike puzzle box because it makes games much longer, it has an effect that can become bothersome especially with other draw effects and makes turns last so much longer than they would normally, especially if you play with less experienced players who now have to re think their turn, every turn. Makes the game a drag.
I feel like as I continue making my collection of magic cards, rise of the eldrazi is going to find it's way into a lot of decks. It's incredibly expensive at 12 mana, and by itself it isn't even much of a win con, but destroying a permanent, drawing 4, and taking an extra turn is just so unbelievably crazy.
Two of my pet cards happen to be Prowess creatures (Monastery Swiftspear and Khenra Spellspear), and so now with Bria I have the excuse to build with them. The added benefit of which is that _any_ non-creature pet spell card also gains extra value by being in a Prowess deck. So I don’t feel so bad running cards like Withering Gaze as well. Also I run Fade from History in green decks entirely because the art is so cute.
The Jetsam side of Flotsam//Jetsam. It's been a blast to play. It feeds itself, doesn't require targets, and the mill has that surprise present for yourself feeling. When you cast it, you'll have a rough idea of what you want from each graveyard. But then you hit something spicy off the mill and fills you with excitement.
My pet mechanic is populate, and two of my pet cards featuring that mechanic are Sundering Growth and Rootborn Defenses. They both achieve something the deck needs - removal and protection - without sacrificing the mechanic.
Lol, I can't believe it. Not a week after I finished my first fully home-made deck on the premise of "Man, Trazyn was really cool in 'The Infinite and the Divine'" and "necron funshit," you release a video that tells me exactly how to build that same deck. Outstanding video, Snail
One of my favorite cards of all time is The Door To Nothingness. Its so absurd and looks incredibly scary, but I have loved it ever since I found out it existed. I am trying to make a deck around it at the moment, so it is fun finding the weirdest cards that synergize with it.
i looooove quirky cards with either weird interesting effects or with a lot potential one of them is Panglacial Wurm, so i made a Wurm deck, with Atla Palani as the commander to be able to drop the Wurms easier i have several others in my collection, that mostly haven't seen any use because just as you mentioned, i don't want to give them a diservice, things like Isochron Scepter Silence Time Stop most Split Second cards etc
At this point I must own at least 10 Phage, the Untouchable, which is my pet card. A deck got black and at most 2 other colors? She’s there, waiting to smack an unknowing enemy in the face. I even built a deck with her in the command zone which is really fun to pilot. A lot of tricks to get to play her and to win with her :)
*looks guiltily at the dozen copies of elixir of imortality slotting themselves into every deck I build* Yeah... I've had a bad experience or two with mill...
listen, it's re-usable anti-mill on a single card. And I'm not just coping because I just built a deck around scion of the ur dragon and re-usable options to put dragons back into my deck from the graveyard to copy them again aren't as plentiful as one would expect.
For real, I ran in in a Vazi treasure deck that had the tendency to draw most of the deck with greater good effects. One time I played against our ngathrod player, and with only 4 cards left in library shuffled everything back in with the elixir. Let's just say ngathrod hasn't been seen since
thankfully my favorite pet cards are already neatly nested into decks that work very well for them. certainly some of them bring the power level of the deck down a tiny bit by existing, but it's not enough to feel bad when you draw the card, and they do serve legitimate purpose in the decks.
My personal pet card is Reconnaissance. I think it has a ton of interesting interactions that are possible. Unfavorable block? Remove your creature from combat. Opponent flashed in a blocker? Remove your creature from combat. Your whole team just swung out at an opponent and killed them but now you’re wide open for the crack back? Remove all of your creatures from combat AFTER the damage step but before combat ends and untap them, keeping your shields up. Literally my favorite card of all time.
My first ever trip to a card store one of my friends found me a constant mists in a common bin for 20 cents. That and spore frog were the pet cards of my first ever deck, but they've just been doing nothing since I dismantled it. (deck was not fun, i had no idea what i was doing) You've inspired me to build a Questing Beast fog deck to bring out their potential! Thank you Mr. Snail
Speaking as someone, who either plays Naya Dino-Tribal or Kalamax spell-slinger decks, you don't have to worry about pet cards being good if all dinos are the goodest pets
My most loved pet card is Silver Erne in my Azrorius bird aggro deck. 3U for a 2/2 with Flample is just so fun, and the deck runs enough discounts/anthems to make the mana to power ratio more efficient. And we have many ways to pump it. It’s just so fun to turn really old cards sideways with a smile on my face
Mirage Mirror and Sculpting Steel. There's so many powerful artifacts and enchantments that people are playing now, and these are great for getting to try those without forking over the $40 for them...
I wouldn’t say I have any pet cards because I haven’t made a ton of decks, but my favorite is probably Body of Research. I started with Strixhaven and throwing that in my commander deck and casting it with Esix Fractal Bloom on the field is one of my happiest memories. Copy an opponent’s flyer with double strike and lifeline and haste, popped them, looked at the other guy and he said “good game”
There's a quote from the Pokémon games that I like a lot: "Strong Pokémon. Weak Pokémon. That is only the selfish perception of people. Truly skilled trainers should try to win with their favorites" Build your decks in a way that makes the cards you love shine.
You forget the other side of the coin "It's one thing to enjoy leisurely battles, but real battles can a severe trial. Truly strong Trainers sometimes must be prepared to choose Pokémon that can win rather than their favorite Pokémon. " - Gentleman Pokemon ORAS
This quote is referring to silvers arc in gsc pokemon. it's not relevant whatsoever to mtg or even competitive pokemon. It's maddening that i have to see this on an mtg video. Have i not suffered enough.
Tamiyo, Field Researcher. Being three colors makes it hard to run her. She worked fine in Derevi Merfolk, but her now forever home is Omnath, Locus of Creation. The deck is really just a Panharmonicon deck, so if I’m using her early she’s a source of cards; and if I’ve assembled “the apex death laser” by using her ultimate with Song of Creation on field then this awkward to run Planeswalker really does win me the game. Pet cards that can actually win feel particularly great cuz their moments to shine come with the real trophy moment of the game
My Jhoira (the suspend one) deck is the perfect place for big, meaty pet cards, as is my The Mimeoplasm. These were the only two decks I had for several years just because they were super fun to play. One day, I discovered Worldfire was removed from the ban list, and so I set out to make a deck specifically around casting it and winning. I am thinking of putting it in Jhoira as well. Some other specific examples of pet cards I have are Sindbad, Black Sun's Zenith, Blasphemous Act, Wild Ricochet, Ixidron, Bane of the Living, Mirror-Mad Phantasm, Psychic Battle, Valakut's Awakening, Memory Erosion, Mind Crank... I could keep going, but it turns out I have a lot of them.
I have an unhinged love for Moonsilver key. I love it since it goes in any decks that I NEED ashnods or phyrexian altar in which is most decks I play. It also finds homes in any decks that need a specific mana rock, namely chromatic lantern or something like extraplanr lens/caged sun. I also recommend it to basically everyone when their deck might need it. It's just too versatile not to love!
Off the back of reading this comment I quickly fired up moxfield and slapped it in my Imotekh deck, such a cheap option to search for ashnods/krark clan ironwork or various other pieces. Didn't realise how many artifacts with mana abilities I had that I wanted at every opportunity! Thank you!
Basalt Monolith is also searchable with Moonsilver Key. Pair it with Rings of Brighthearth or with Forsaken Monument, and you have yourself an infinite colorless mana engine, lol
Meren of Clan Nel Toth was my first really successful commander deck, and I ran a +1/+1 proliferate theme with it, using Reyhan Last of the Abzan, Myr Scrapling, and Gulping Scraptrap as key cards. As I've gotten better at the game, I've realized how much stronger the deck could be if I focused it more towards the standard the sacrifice-control archetype. I had very nearly remade the entire deck when I realized I would have more fun moving my favorite Myr around than I would making my friends suffer with crushing all their creatures, even if it meant the deck didn't win as often.
Rewind is my 'pet' counterspell. It's just so nice to be able to untap the lands for more nonsense, and in the rare world you've ultimated o.g. tamiyo that's infinite counters!
I love bearhug, and howling mine/howling mine effects have to be my favorite. Temple bell, cut a deal, bad deal, prosperity, black vise, font of mythos and effects like these are some of my favorite things in all of magic. I built a deck around them originally designed around Queza, Augur of agonies, is now headed by the Second Doctor and Vislor Turlough and it's one of my favorite decks to play of all time.
This is me adding the virtue cycle to every deck i can even if it doesnt truely benefit because goddamn it i love making triple mana on basics reanimating everything once an upkeep and buffing everything and dealing way more damage than i should
Another card ill try to fit into every black deck is slice from the shadows i love that card. And ill always try to fit invasion if segovia in any blue deck because who doesnt love casting counters with convoke or bounceles with convokwle or basically spellsling for free almost. Mix that with dopplegang and triple mana virtue and u got a recipe for being the most hated blue player ever as ull always have creatures to convoke ur nuisance pieces.
For me it's Possibility Storm and Wild Evocation. They can both bring out the top end of people's curve out of no where, but it's all random, so you can't plan for it. They also dissuade people from holding up instants as well, so no tricks, just everything on the table.
I don't have kids but if i had one it'd be called Guttersnipe. Is my deck red with atleast 30 instant/sorcery spells? Here you go buddy! We're gonna cast some spells and blast some fools tonight.
I am unreasonable attached to "Vanish into Memory" and jam it into basically every deck that features blue-white. The good thing is that the card is flexible and it never felt bad having it in my hand. At worst its a blink spell that saves your ass (by either saving something on your board or blinking an attacker) and let's you rummage through your library. At best it removes a 10/10 Orc army from the game and let's you draw 10 cards for 4 mana at instant speed.
Thieving amalgam is one of my favorites. I wish it was legendary so I could build it as the commander. I actually did that once with permission from my playgroup and it was super fun
While I can’t run it in *every* deck, I try to put fog bank in as many as I can. It was a part of my first ever magic deck, a hodgepodge of Izzet cards with no real game plan. But fog bank was always on top as the perfect blocker and I loved not having to worry if I would have to use another creature as a blocker because fog bank was there for me
Each of the Narset walkers are pet cards of mine (despite parter of veils being a generally viable card in any blue deck). Narset of the Ancient Way is a card that isn't particularly good but I still love, and I ended up taking her out of my Narset, Enlightened Exile deck and made an Oathbreaker deck with her. It was really neat. Signature spell was Narset's Reversal btw
Aqueous Form goes in any deck that may put a big creature on the board. I also love various Fog spells. Seems like people don't play them all that much, so it often comes as a surprise to an opponent who swings out with lethal only to be told "nah"
Restoration Specialist, Engulf the Shore, and Pia’s Revolution. Those are my three biggest pet cards. Restoration Specialist is just an incredibly efficient and versatile card that can go into any deck that expects artifacts and enchantments to end up in the graveyard with any regularity. Engulf the Shore and Pia’s Revolution are two cards that were key win conditions in two of my favourite (standard) decks of all time that both happen to have been omitted from the remastered sets on mtga which bothers me to no end because I could basically recreate both decks almost perfectly but without those cards I’ll never be able to actually play the decks that I’ve loved so much on arena as I did in paper. Engulf the Shore was a cheap instant speed board wipe for my mono blue instant speed control deck that was the only reason why the deck could work since without that option to wipe an aggressive deck’s board by turn 4 it wouldn’t be able to catch up from it’s slow early turns, and once I resolved an Engulf the Shore my opponent was essentially locked out of the rest of the game. Pia’s Revolution was run in a heavy artifact recursion deck along side Restoration Specialist, Scrap Trawler, Scrapheap Scrounger, Treasure Keeper, Bomat Courier, and Walking Ballista. The deck basically would perpetually get back all the artifacts that went to it’s graveyard at every opportunity and Pia’s Revolution put opponents into an impossible situation where they either let me freely get even more value or take the damage despite the fact that they know I’m going to get back my artifacts in someway anyway which will only lead to them taking even more damage. Also Pia’s Revolution seems even better in commander since it’s target player so you can just ask someone to not take damage to let your get back your artifacts.
One of my absolute favorite cards is spellweaver volute, just because of how insanely unique it is and I love the story of how it Finally found a home in a deck. There were several commanders I was wanting to build but had failed to actually get a deck up and running. Jadzi, neera, gale, and edgin. Then one day I saw 12 and an idea hit me, it's a generic value producer based off casting cards from places other than your hand and every single one of those commanders fit that theme, so I threw them all into a deck, added some cost reducers, ramp and a few foretell/aftermath cards for more value, including spellweaver volute. The deck is a blast, it's not really good but giving my opponents spells is fun and the deck csn get pretty wild from time to time. And it just occured to me, out of all the times I've played the deck, I've never drawn spellweaver volute.
Enter my entire deck built around Ochre Jelly. It runs tutors but they all only ever tutor for it, commander is Nethroi. It’s so fun to watch people try to figure out what the deck is trying to do before it’s too late
Pet card is Grim Feast. Mostly because it was in the first pack I ever opened. After coming back to Magic after many years adrift, and discovering commander, I’ve had and begrudgingly cut this from 2 Golgari decks so far. I think it definitely deserves to be part of the core of its own.
Fog is my only pet card, mainly because my table is very combat oriented, and whenever someone swings at me for lethal, I always have it. It's helped me win over half of my won games
Brainstorm is my favorite card (the mercadian masks one). A friend who is a well known alterist painted me an extended border playset for my birthday one year 🎨 . I put it in every blue deck. Luckily it's a good card.
I am big into playing around with pet cards. Finding a way to make them work. You provide a great framework to validate their use in a format designed to be casual. I like to keep my decks casual enough to have fun, but competitive enough to be considered a threat in most games. It's a challenging balance, but it's exactly what commander is for.
For a long time I only considered cards my "pet cards" when I played them and I knew they were suboptimal in the specific deck I put them in. Something like manabond in my Anikthea enchantment deck to instantly ramp on turn one and put enchantments in my graveyard (while manabond is basically a dead card if I don't draw it turn 1 or 2) or Maskwood Nexus in my facedown assassin tribal deck with Etrata, Deadly Fugitive as the commander. The one true pet card I built a deck around (that I didn't get to test yet) was Doppelgang. I specifically chose a commander that would let me ramp exceedingly well in those colors, "Troyan, Gutsy Explorer" with the aim of ramping to 8-9 mana, dropping some more mana accelerators, etb or landfall creatures and then pumping as much mana as possible into one big nuke Doppelgang, drawing cards, generating lands for mana, getting removal etbs etc. pp. As an added bonus there aren't any cards to cheat stuff into play so I can play two myojin from hand for insane value. This is also an example deck of how greedy you can go with the curve as there are ~10 1-mana ramp spells, the 3 mana commander and everything else starts at 5cmc
Personally, I love Artificer's Hex. It's hilarious VS Voltron, but even without a voltron deck at the table, things like Swiftfoot Boots are so common it's great to have as a niche removal piece at one mana.
I inherited a large collection of cards from around arabian nights-invasion block from my dad, so I have a huge number of cards like this from all those sets that aren't great by modern standards (at least not usually worth a slot) but have some really unique effects and awesome art. One of my favorites that comes to mind is City of Traitors.
Elvish aberration is the goat. He's a big mans dork taps for 3 but costs 6 (makes up for his price in two turns, the price is no big deal) AND Forest cycle for 2 tacked on there. He is the pinnacle of perfect dork for me because if you hit him early you get a land, late you get a big mana jump. Or you can just use him as an additional damage threat at 4/5
Gishath is my pet comander. Pulled it when I was first getting into magic, from the original Ixalan. I finally got to pull it out my box and make a commander deck with it, when the new Ixalan set came out and have had a blast with it. One of, if not my favourite decks I own.
gishath is one of those tribal decks where you can always be excited for upgrades. Same for stuff like dragons, angels or elves. There will always be new support for these tribes until the sun eats the earth
I’ve got a two and that are from the first deck I was given, Scuttling Doom Engine and Sands of Delirium. They’re the cards that got me into artifact sacrificing and mill decks. I’m not sure that they’re bad, but they’re still two of my favorite cards.
My favorite pet card is helm of the host and I've built several decks both on arena and in paper to get as much out of that card as possible. I've put helm every permanent type imaginable and learned in the process some hilarious rules interactions, like if you turn anything into an artifact with liquimetal coating then elk it with oko you can put a helm of the host on anything. Also if you turn blood moon into an artifact and then elk it with oko the blood moon effect STILL PERSISTS, because effects that change basic land types take place on layer 4 while oko's elk polymorph happens on layer 6. So you'll have a 3/3 elk with no effect that makes all nonbasics mountains. My favorite helm decks are both on arena, a 100 card brawl deck with gideon of the trials as the commander that seeks to use helm to duplicate the commander as well as runs an Oswald artifact toolbox fetching things like book of exalted deeds for as many "you can't lose and your opponents can't win" effects as I can possibly cram onto the board at once. And the other is a timeless WURG deck that runs sigardas aid and stoneforge mystic to fetch helm and Luxior Giadas Gift to stick helm on random planeswalkers like oko, 3 mana teferi, gideon of the trials, sarkhan the masterless. Both of these decks get really silly. TL:DR you DEFINITELY will get more fun from your pet cards flexing your creative muscles and building decks that they shine in
Hey I did a ramp deck with Myojin too! (Progenitus). I've started building decks specifically for pet cards and the results have been phenomenal. When i started thinking about every card in the deck in relation to that one card, I realized I needed to think about every card in that deck in relationship to every other card in the deck. So it kind of led me down this path of "each card must combo with every other card", leading to some pretty synergystic decks. It's kind of turned pet cards into pet synergies into pet decks that I'm excited to see unfold as the game goes on. Anyway. Build decks around cards in the deck! not just the commander.
I started playing by the time return to ravnica was a thing and my first constructed deck was dimir. I still got all the cards I played back then, and naturally, my pet deck is dimir with "Lazav, dimir mastermind" as it's commander. It was nice to build around a card that I like so much, bringing back some combos, synergies and pet cards I used to play back in the days. Also getting to put together in a cohesive way mill, draw, discard, copy and theft strategies, fitting the guild line of work.
I honestly don't have pet cards in commander. I have pet decks which are usually wierd or thematic more than powerful. However, my pet cards come from when I played in the 90s. My favorite deck was called "The Grind Warp" and my pet cards in it are The Rack, Hypnotic Specter, Megrim and Millstone. Generically in our group we loved Incinerate because everything was regeneration heavy, and Feldon's cane because people were afraid of my grind warp...
I cram one of my collection of masterpiece Lord of Extinctions and an altar of dementia into any deck that even vaguely gestures at the graveyard that can run them at this point. I love that stupid combo so much
Damn, I watched all the videos and now I don't have any more videos to watch on this channel. Will wait for new ones. Kepp up the good work! P.s. Also you have a pleasant voice. Especially for a snail.
I have these binders full of bulk rare and mythics that all grabbed my attention at one point and made my say "man, what a cool card, it MUST have a place somewhere, right?" Most of them are... debatably mid, but it's always an amazing feeling when I find a home for them while building. Recently I put the finishing touches on a Gonti, Canny Acquisitor deck (similar to the one in the last videos), where cards like Croaking Counterpart, Nightmare Shepherd and Uncage the Menagerie happen to slot perfectly, and I couldn't be happier. And then there's the "One with Nothing" type cards, so horrendously bad, yet funny that every couple month I want to build around one of them (currently an Orah, Skyclave Hierophant deck that generates advantage by wrathing their own board with Death-Pit Offering, the coolest designed "bad card" I've ever seen)
To me that has to be Baral’s expertise. It’s just such an efficient piece of removal that also lets you cast something for free. I never feel like it’s a dead card in my hand
Cedh decks have 0 pet cards High power have “a pet card” BUT, Casual EDH decks will have pet cards; its the spirit of the format to run what you like over what the best option would be. That mentality of needing the most optimal is for 60 card competitive. I just went to a buddies place and he brought out a bulk card shoebox. I found a Rayami in his trades and then out of his bulk shoebox of mtg, built an almost all commons and uncommons edh deck worth $20. 24 basics, some tapped duals/command tower, 35 creatures, sol ring & arcane signet, ramp/card draw/sac stuff.
I've been building around the Court of Vantress. This card just keeps on giving. In Lynde, Cheerful Tormentor, it can either spray tokens of curses everywhere, or if I'm not the monarch, I can have it itself become a copy of a curse, it immediately state-bases itself into the graveyard, then Lynde says "hey, that was a curse, put it back on the field on your end step ok sweetie love you x" and it drops as itself, monarchifying me again, with maybe a better board state to keep it this time. Now that we have the new Obeka, Upkeepmaxxing, I'm going to be doing everything I can to make as many copies of Court of Vantress as I can, which will absolutely snowball out of control and multiply every other court I can stuff into the deck for increasingly menacing board states. And to be clear, I have Savor the Moment as the ONLY extra turn spell. Probably the fairest extra turn effect ever printed.
Argh, just being reminded of how my friend cut Shigeki from a desert deck I built him. (we do deck exchanges) This was before any of the new thunder junction stuff mind you, I just thought he synergy was really clean, since it was repeatable self mill for Hazezon, and it could return a instants and sorceries from the graveyard at a decently cheap rate for the colors.
I just recently built myself a Gonti deck. Forty swamps and all my pet cards in black and colorless. It's a pile with a mana curve and I love playing it.
My biggest pet card is a black board wipe called make an example. I found it during my budget deck building days because its only $0.50 but i fell in love with the way it plays in a commander game. It can hit hexproof and indestructible which i find to be useful pretty often, and it also lets you play some serious mind games and politics with the table. You could ally with someone and they sacrifice none of their creatures or you can mind game an opponent who has to carefully make two piles that they value similarly. The gameplay loop of playing a 4 mana board wipe that can bring a player in check without resetting the game is so satisfying. Make an example goes in every black deck i have ever built. To top it off its also 3 generic and 1 black pip so its easy to cast
I'm running As Foretold in three different decks, which is probably three decks too many. But I cannot be stopped. I also run Decent Into Avernus in basically every red deck because every game with it out is a blast.
I ran into a problem where I had a ton of commanders that were neat, powerful, and fun but simply had no immediate plans of building decks for them. I had a pile of 30 or so of them when March of the Machine came out along with Compleated Omnath, and realized as almost all of them had 3 pips I could just throw them in with him. He's solid enough in providing an extra card and often +3 mana each turn, and sub-par cards don't feel as bad when they are cartable for 3 mana less. He also gets around the idea of a curve to an extent so you don't really need to worry much about the deck contents. I wouldn't call it great but it performs well if only from generating a lot of value and not having key pieces that cripple the deck if removed.
Midnight Clock. It can be anything from a 3 mana rock that wheels you in 6 turns if its down to 1v1 and you cant do anything else. It can be a "suspended wheel" that you opponents can see and either work way too hard to remove it or ignore it entirely. It can also be an infiinite mana outlet that if you can reapond to the self exile trigger and either flicker it or bounce and re-play it you can do it all over again. I love how modal this card with no actual modality to pick can be; this isnt mentioning just using your extra mana to keep pumping it up.
my pet cards are nephalia academy and reliquary tower. I started playing commander in 2016 on MTGO, getting wheeled with neccusar or leovold or any other deck was a daily possibility which made nephalia soooo good and also Cyclonic Rift with 10+ permanents often meant discarding to hand size. That time period really scarred me and both lands are an auto include in every commander deck I build.
Delina Wild Mage is my number 1 pet card. I had bought some cards off a friend to start trying magic out. The second I read her text along with the dice rolling I knew I had to fit her in as many decks as possible. This all culminated in one of the funniest games I've played where I had Wyll Blade of Frontiers and Delina where I technically went "infinite" since every successful roll added more and more dice making the odds of getting a 15 or less "impossible" We were all just laughing around the table as I was rolling heaps of more and more dice.
Stuffy Doll was the pet that my playgroup would chuckle at me for shoehorning into every deck - none of which it really belonged in. It never had a home, even after it's big brother Brash Taunter was printed. Then, one day out of the Who, Donna Noble extended her hand and whispered; "Rejoice, for their time is come. The First Doctor shall provide us access to card advantage, countermagic, and Pariah. I'll do the rest.", and I've been KOing players with Blasphemous Act and Star of Extinction ever since.
I started playing in Zendikar. Vampire Nighthawk is an instant include in any of my black decks. It won many games for me around the lunch table at school.
They're not my pet cards, they are my kids lol
Facts
Arcane bombardment and thousand year storm are just 6 mana counterspell removal, but I love them
Me with Sunbird’s Invocation
Me with Eye of the storm
Me with Mind's Dilation.
Me with forbid
Yay, a fellow Bombardment enjoyer! At first it was my pet card bc the art and mechanics matched up really well with a d&d character I was playing at the time capenna came out. It remained my pet card when I realized there were so many different things I could build around it
Secret fourth type: neat mythic you accidentally drafted 4 of on arena, that you should NEVER run more than 2 of even in the decks it's good in. But it feels bad to have two whole mythics you'll never ever use, so you convince yourself that if you deck build around it juuuust right you can make a "combo" deck that's "just GOTTA run it at 4. It's the keystone of the whole synergy!."
lmao i just finished painstakingly optimizing my decks for the last few hours instead of playing with them and this is the first thing i open youtube to
SAME and not me staring at my pet card, the card that literally inspired the deck to come into existence, as falling under the power level of a deck im really trying to push, literally just before seeing this!!
I feel that. I finally took Scute Mob out of my +1/+1 Selesnya deck a few weeks ago. That car was one of the original 99 of the deck
@@joecarey3969I had to take Raid Bombardment out of my boros weenies deck... It was the whole reason I built the deck, and I'm kinda sad about it.
Pet cards are more important than winning. Never ever cutting
And that's why I prefer Battle of Wits format.
Proxy friendly, it's like Legacy but everyone has to run 4 Battle of Wits, and make their deck able to resolve it somehow
Been fitting Witness Protection into every blue deck I've made for ages and I will definitely never stop.
We love a good Legitimate Businessperson
Witness Protection is a legitimate way to slow down an enemy commander.
You can take Telepathy from my cold dead hands
That shouldn’t be too hard, just need to wait until you draw the card and cast it xD
I am also quite the Telepathy enjoyer. Props on great taste mate 👍
out of all the cards i have polymorphist's Jest is probably my fave blue card, theres just something comical about "oops all frogs lol" that makes it a favorite of mine
I'm building a frog theme deck and I love this card.
My pet cards are Illusory Ambusher, Enduring Curiosity, and Michievous Catgeist.
It depends on your goals, I guess.
When you have fun playing your pet cards, despite losing games because of them, what do you value more: Fun or winning? How important is winning to you? How important is having fun to you? Are you only having fun, if you win? Do you need to optimize your decks to have fun?
I won't cut Boompile for a more reliable sweeper, because I like what it does to the game. :)
Winning is great for tournaments, but in reality it’s game that’s meant to be enjoyed in any fashion. If I wanted I could do a 1 mana deck for the fun of it, but definitely wouldn’t win
But does it do anything if you can't reliably use it?
@@drew-id It does make everyone hold their breath, when I toss the coin.
Edit: And it is usually followed by sounds of relieve or screams of pain.
My buddy cracked a Whippoorwill in a pack of The Dark back in the day, then immediately took out a Sharpie and wrote "WHY THE HELL CAN'T I FLY?" on it.
Also, my all-time pet card is Ifh-Biff Efreet.
Look it up; I'll wait.:D
That card is silly, i want it and why is it $100 :(
@@joshbowdish9851 Squallmonger is a very similar card, and arguably more functional since it doesn't fly and the ability is colorless.
The Upstate Farm for my pet cards was actually the conceit for my Selvala Explorer Returned deck. She's generically powerful; the game plan of ramp on turn 1 to play her on turn 2 and have 6-7 mana on turn 3 is pretty strong and open ended, leaving all kinds of room in the deck for whatever interesting jank you might feel iffy about including in a more focused deck. Your Radha deck has a similar feel, so it makes sense that you also think of it as a comfy home for pet cards.
My farm upstate is the tokenbase of my Talrand deck. My favorite card is wind drake.
I was collecting it casually for years. Always picking them up from draft chaff and asking friends if they have older or special ones in their shoe boxes. When I built my first commander deck I choose a budget Talrand and put all my wind drakes together as tokens for Talrand. Whenever I make a token I draw them from a deck of wind drakes. Some of these are very special, because of a strange language or because a friend marked it in some way before they gave it to me. The only real change aside from upgrading the card powerlevel of certain effects, was the manabase. At first I took all my favorite old islands (6th edition, Invasion, that odd Unglued, a foil Onslaught one, etc) but now I have gotten all of the versions of the John Avon one (first printed in Portal Second Age and part of a best of land cycle in 6th edition). The one with the drake on it!
A good psychological trick is assuring yourself that your pet cards already have comfortable homes. I recently put Boomer Scrapper in my Kardur deck and it's been an all star. I would never have discovered it if I stuck to Rakdos staples. My red and black pet cards already have decks to call home. Boomer Scrapper didn't, but now it does and I have a new card I love.
This is the most "Johnny" video I've ever seen.
How so
I had been introduced to Magic by a friend when I was probably 8 and we barely knew what we were doing. I think had managed to gather a few cards but didn't have enough for even multicolored deck. My first even real purchase was for a harvester of souls semi-precon thing. it had a bunch of black cards and I think barely functioned as a deck, but it came with an additional booster pack at the bottom. within that booster pack, the first I ever opened, was Gisela, Blade of Goldknight. she also had the most text of any card I had seen and an absolute insane ability but it would be a long time before I even had enough boros cards to make a deck she could fit into. I've since kept her throughout all these years, always moving her to whatever my strongest (or usually current) boros deck ended up being. usually it has been nothing but jank since I was little and eventually fell out of magic, but this past year Ive come back to it and I'm old enough to pay attention to proper deck building techniques/ strategies (hence why im here). she currently has a place in my Otharri deck as my favorite win con of letting my opponents duke each other out while I make myself as unassuming as possible/ focus on defensive. It's still a bit of a jank deck since its still boros and has some consistency issues but its better than any I had before it at least. Its always fun for her to hit the table, new opponents dont want to read the wall of text or dont fully understand the implications until a round or 2 of combat and think how cool it is that they get to slug each other out, until they then later realize how hard it is to deal with me
This video got me thinking aboot which of my pet cards would work in decks I already have so now I'm slamming Lifeline into my Preston, the Vanisher deck.
My "pet card that's just good" is Binding the Old Gods, running enough removal feels like a chore sometimes so I love when there's one that I'm actually enthusiastic for.
not so much pet cards but certain cards like [Witch's Mark] and [Abiding Grace] have art that inspires me, we need more HD desktop backgrounds from WOTC
hell, sell them to us fot 5 bucks per set or something, it's not much, they can tip the artists with it, and we get to have cool art!
Teferi's Puzzle Box. 4 mana artifact that makes everyone at the table ship their hand to the bottom for a new one off the top at the beginning of their turn. It causes people to play more "fair magic," as it becomes difficult to set up plays in advance. (The card is even more fun when you have a Scroll Rack, or Sensei's Divining Top. That way you get to keep parts of your hand for next turn while your opponents likely won't.) Pretty niche and stacksy, but every time it's played the game becomes FAR more interesting. It's not as "feels bad" as most stacks effects as well. Opponents can play all their cards still. They can attack and block and play as normal. Just don't get too attached to the cards in your hand.
I don’t think people being able to plan out their turn makes anything inherently more or less fair. I dislike puzzle box because it makes games much longer, it has an effect that can become bothersome especially with other draw effects and makes turns last so much longer than they would normally, especially if you play with less experienced players who now have to re think their turn, every turn. Makes the game a drag.
I feel like as I continue making my collection of magic cards, rise of the eldrazi is going to find it's way into a lot of decks.
It's incredibly expensive at 12 mana, and by itself it isn't even much of a win con, but destroying a permanent, drawing 4, and taking an extra turn is just so unbelievably crazy.
Two of my pet cards happen to be Prowess creatures (Monastery Swiftspear and Khenra Spellspear), and so now with Bria I have the excuse to build with them. The added benefit of which is that _any_ non-creature pet spell card also gains extra value by being in a Prowess deck. So I don’t feel so bad running cards like Withering Gaze as well.
Also I run Fade from History in green decks entirely because the art is so cute.
The Jetsam side of Flotsam//Jetsam. It's been a blast to play. It feeds itself, doesn't require targets, and the mill has that surprise present for yourself feeling. When you cast it, you'll have a rough idea of what you want from each graveyard. But then you hit something spicy off the mill and fills you with excitement.
My pet mechanic is populate, and two of my pet cards featuring that mechanic are Sundering Growth and Rootborn Defenses. They both achieve something the deck needs - removal and protection - without sacrificing the mechanic.
Lol, I can't believe it. Not a week after I finished my first fully home-made deck on the premise of "Man, Trazyn was really cool in 'The Infinite and the Divine'" and "necron funshit," you release a video that tells me exactly how to build that same deck. Outstanding video, Snail
One of my favorite cards of all time is The Door To Nothingness. Its so absurd and looks incredibly scary, but I have loved it ever since I found out it existed. I am trying to make a deck around it at the moment, so it is fun finding the weirdest cards that synergize with it.
i looooove quirky cards with either weird interesting effects or with a lot potential
one of them is Panglacial Wurm, so i made a Wurm deck, with Atla Palani as the commander to be able to drop the Wurms easier
i have several others in my collection, that mostly haven't seen any use because just as you mentioned, i don't want to give them a diservice, things like
Isochron Scepter
Silence
Time Stop
most Split Second cards
etc
At this point I must own at least 10 Phage, the Untouchable, which is my pet card. A deck got black and at most 2 other colors? She’s there, waiting to smack an unknowing enemy in the face.
I even built a deck with her in the command zone which is really fun to pilot. A lot of tricks to get to play her and to win with her :)
*looks guiltily at the dozen copies of elixir of imortality slotting themselves into every deck I build*
Yeah... I've had a bad experience or two with mill...
listen, it's re-usable anti-mill on a single card. And I'm not just coping because I just built a deck around scion of the ur dragon and re-usable options to put dragons back into my deck from the graveyard to copy them again aren't as plentiful as one would expect.
That's one I used to have in every deck. Then Underworld Breach was printed. Still have a few elixirs floating around since Breach can go everywhere.
For real, I ran in in a Vazi treasure deck that had the tendency to draw most of the deck with greater good effects. One time I played against our ngathrod player, and with only 4 cards left in library shuffled everything back in with the elixir. Let's just say ngathrod hasn't been seen since
thankfully my favorite pet cards are already neatly nested into decks that work very well for them. certainly some of them bring the power level of the deck down a tiny bit by existing, but it's not enough to feel bad when you draw the card, and they do serve legitimate purpose in the decks.
My personal pet card is Reconnaissance. I think it has a ton of interesting interactions that are possible. Unfavorable block? Remove your creature from combat. Opponent flashed in a blocker? Remove your creature from combat. Your whole team just swung out at an opponent and killed them but now you’re wide open for the crack back? Remove all of your creatures from combat AFTER the damage step but before combat ends and untap them, keeping your shields up. Literally my favorite card of all time.
My first ever trip to a card store one of my friends found me a constant mists in a common bin for 20 cents.
That and spore frog were the pet cards of my first ever deck, but they've just been doing nothing since I dismantled it. (deck was not fun, i had no idea what i was doing)
You've inspired me to build a Questing Beast fog deck to bring out their potential! Thank you Mr. Snail
Draining whelk and triskelion (with original art) are my derpy monster children. I love they.
Speaking as someone, who either plays Naya Dino-Tribal or Kalamax spell-slinger decks, you don't have to worry about pet cards being good if all dinos are the goodest pets
Primal storm was the bane of my Lunch tabel and i intended to keep that tradition alive!!
I love the card firbolg flutist! Such a fun premise and a lot of value with the myriad
My most loved pet card is Silver Erne in my Azrorius bird aggro deck. 3U for a 2/2 with Flample is just so fun, and the deck runs enough discounts/anthems to make the mana to power ratio more efficient. And we have many ways to pump it. It’s just so fun to turn really old cards sideways with a smile on my face
Mishra's Bauble is forever my precious. I'd put it in almost every single deck if I could
Mirage Mirror and Sculpting Steel. There's so many powerful artifacts and enchantments that people are playing now, and these are great for getting to try those without forking over the $40 for them...
I wouldn’t say I have any pet cards because I haven’t made a ton of decks, but my favorite is probably Body of Research. I started with Strixhaven and throwing that in my commander deck and casting it with Esix Fractal Bloom on the field is one of my happiest memories. Copy an opponent’s flyer with double strike and lifeline and haste, popped them, looked at the other guy and he said “good game”
There's a quote from the Pokémon games that I like a lot:
"Strong Pokémon. Weak Pokémon. That is only the selfish perception of people. Truly skilled trainers should try to win with their favorites"
Build your decks in a way that makes the cards you love shine.
Which is why in my opinion, Poliwhirl is the best pokemon in the game
Yea nice words, have you ever heard of powercreep?
You forget the other side of the coin
"It's one thing to enjoy leisurely battles, but real battles can
a severe trial. Truly strong Trainers sometimes must be
prepared to choose Pokémon that can win rather than their
favorite Pokémon. " - Gentleman Pokemon ORAS
This quote is referring to silvers arc in gsc pokemon. it's not relevant whatsoever to mtg or even competitive pokemon.
It's maddening that i have to see this on an mtg video. Have i not suffered enough.
@@zoninkspl6597 My favorite pokemon are Ferrothorn and T-Landorus
Rogue's passage is my ultimate pet card, together with the "you are already dead" type of cards
Tamiyo, Field Researcher. Being three colors makes it hard to run her. She worked fine in Derevi Merfolk, but her now forever home is Omnath, Locus of Creation. The deck is really just a Panharmonicon deck, so if I’m using her early she’s a source of cards; and if I’ve assembled “the apex death laser” by using her ultimate with Song of Creation on field then this awkward to run Planeswalker really does win me the game. Pet cards that can actually win feel particularly great cuz their moments to shine come with the real trophy moment of the game
My Jhoira (the suspend one) deck is the perfect place for big, meaty pet cards, as is my The Mimeoplasm. These were the only two decks I had for several years just because they were super fun to play. One day, I discovered Worldfire was removed from the ban list, and so I set out to make a deck specifically around casting it and winning. I am thinking of putting it in Jhoira as well.
Some other specific examples of pet cards I have are Sindbad, Black Sun's Zenith, Blasphemous Act, Wild Ricochet, Ixidron, Bane of the Living, Mirror-Mad Phantasm, Psychic Battle, Valakut's Awakening, Memory Erosion, Mind Crank... I could keep going, but it turns out I have a lot of them.
I have an unhinged love for Moonsilver key. I love it since it goes in any decks that I NEED ashnods or phyrexian altar in which is most decks I play. It also finds homes in any decks that need a specific mana rock, namely chromatic lantern or something like extraplanr lens/caged sun.
I also recommend it to basically everyone when their deck might need it. It's just too versatile not to love!
Same! Very underrated card for it's versatility and reasonable mana cost! Recently built 5 new decks and was sad to see, that I had run out of Keys...
Off the back of reading this comment I quickly fired up moxfield and slapped it in my Imotekh deck, such a cheap option to search for ashnods/krark clan ironwork or various other pieces. Didn't realise how many artifacts with mana abilities I had that I wanted at every opportunity! Thank you!
Basalt Monolith is also searchable with Moonsilver Key.
Pair it with Rings of Brighthearth or with Forsaken Monument, and you have yourself an infinite colorless mana engine, lol
Meren of Clan Nel Toth was my first really successful commander deck, and I ran a +1/+1 proliferate theme with it, using Reyhan Last of the Abzan, Myr Scrapling, and Gulping Scraptrap as key cards. As I've gotten better at the game, I've realized how much stronger the deck could be if I focused it more towards the standard the sacrifice-control archetype. I had very nearly remade the entire deck when I realized I would have more fun moving my favorite Myr around than I would making my friends suffer with crushing all their creatures, even if it meant the deck didn't win as often.
Rewind is my 'pet' counterspell. It's just so nice to be able to untap the lands for more nonsense, and in the rare world you've ultimated o.g. tamiyo that's infinite counters!
I love bearhug, and howling mine/howling mine effects have to be my favorite. Temple bell, cut a deal, bad deal, prosperity, black vise, font of mythos and effects like these are some of my favorite things in all of magic. I built a deck around them originally designed around Queza, Augur of agonies, is now headed by the Second Doctor and Vislor Turlough and it's one of my favorite decks to play of all time.
Pain's Reward will never stop being hilarious to me.
The Haunt of Hightower and Ornithopter of Paradise are two pet cards. Scuttling Doom Engine is up there too
This is me adding the virtue cycle to every deck i can even if it doesnt truely benefit because goddamn it i love making triple mana on basics reanimating everything once an upkeep and buffing everything and dealing way more damage than i should
Another card ill try to fit into every black deck is slice from the shadows i love that card. And ill always try to fit invasion if segovia in any blue deck because who doesnt love casting counters with convoke or bounceles with convokwle or basically spellsling for free almost. Mix that with dopplegang and triple mana virtue and u got a recipe for being the most hated blue player ever as ull always have creatures to convoke ur nuisance pieces.
Running eye of the storm alongside whirlwind denial is definitely up there, for me
For me it's Possibility Storm and Wild Evocation. They can both bring out the top end of people's curve out of no where, but it's all random, so you can't plan for it. They also dissuade people from holding up instants as well, so no tricks, just everything on the table.
I don't have kids but if i had one it'd be called Guttersnipe. Is my deck red with atleast 30 instant/sorcery spells? Here you go buddy! We're gonna cast some spells and blast some fools tonight.
I am unreasonable attached to "Vanish into Memory" and jam it into basically every deck that features blue-white. The good thing is that the card is flexible and it never felt bad having it in my hand. At worst its a blink spell that saves your ass (by either saving something on your board or blinking an attacker) and let's you rummage through your library. At best it removes a 10/10 Orc army from the game and let's you draw 10 cards for 4 mana at instant speed.
Thieving amalgam is one of my favorites. I wish it was legendary so I could build it as the commander. I actually did that once with permission from my playgroup and it was super fun
Gryff's Boon has been a favourite ever since I discovered it in my Eldritch moon starter deck.
I’m glad I lurk in the back of your mind
While I can’t run it in *every* deck, I try to put fog bank in as many as I can. It was a part of my first ever magic deck, a hodgepodge of Izzet cards with no real game plan. But fog bank was always on top as the perfect blocker and I loved not having to worry if I would have to use another creature as a blocker because fog bank was there for me
Each of the Narset walkers are pet cards of mine (despite parter of veils being a generally viable card in any blue deck). Narset of the Ancient Way is a card that isn't particularly good but I still love, and I ended up taking her out of my Narset, Enlightened Exile deck and made an Oathbreaker deck with her. It was really neat. Signature spell was Narset's Reversal btw
Shegiki is absolutely worth it to run(in a lot of decks) its ramp, self mill and multi target graveyard retrieval.
Here for the Mage artifact fetch cycle.
If you want to showcase the glory of your pet cards, build a cube full of them.
Aqueous Form goes in any deck that may put a big creature on the board. I also love various Fog spells. Seems like people don't play them all that much, so it often comes as a surprise to an opponent who swings out with lethal only to be told "nah"
Restoration Specialist, Engulf the Shore, and Pia’s Revolution. Those are my three biggest pet cards.
Restoration Specialist is just an incredibly efficient and versatile card that can go into any deck that expects artifacts and enchantments to end up in the graveyard with any regularity.
Engulf the Shore and Pia’s Revolution are two cards that were key win conditions in two of my favourite (standard) decks of all time that both happen to have been omitted from the remastered sets on mtga which bothers me to no end because I could basically recreate both decks almost perfectly but without those cards I’ll never be able to actually play the decks that I’ve loved so much on arena as I did in paper.
Engulf the Shore was a cheap instant speed board wipe for my mono blue instant speed control deck that was the only reason why the deck could work since without that option to wipe an aggressive deck’s board by turn 4 it wouldn’t be able to catch up from it’s slow early turns, and once I resolved an Engulf the Shore my opponent was essentially locked out of the rest of the game.
Pia’s Revolution was run in a heavy artifact recursion deck along side Restoration Specialist, Scrap Trawler, Scrapheap Scrounger, Treasure Keeper, Bomat Courier, and Walking Ballista. The deck basically would perpetually get back all the artifacts that went to it’s graveyard at every opportunity and Pia’s Revolution put opponents into an impossible situation where they either let me freely get even more value or take the damage despite the fact that they know I’m going to get back my artifacts in someway anyway which will only lead to them taking even more damage. Also Pia’s Revolution seems even better in commander since it’s target player so you can just ask someone to not take damage to let your get back your artifacts.
One of my absolute favorite cards is spellweaver volute, just because of how insanely unique it is and I love the story of how it Finally found a home in a deck.
There were several commanders I was wanting to build but had failed to actually get a deck up and running. Jadzi, neera, gale, and edgin.
Then one day I saw 12 and an idea hit me, it's a generic value producer based off casting cards from places other than your hand and every single one of those commanders fit that theme, so I threw them all into a deck, added some cost reducers, ramp and a few foretell/aftermath cards for more value, including spellweaver volute. The deck is a blast, it's not really good but giving my opponents spells is fun and the deck csn get pretty wild from time to time.
And it just occured to me, out of all the times I've played the deck, I've never drawn spellweaver volute.
Enter my entire deck built around Ochre Jelly. It runs tutors but they all only ever tutor for it, commander is Nethroi. It’s so fun to watch people try to figure out what the deck is trying to do before it’s too late
Pet card is Grim Feast. Mostly because it was in the first pack I ever opened. After coming back to Magic after many years adrift, and discovering commander, I’ve had and begrudgingly cut this from 2 Golgari decks so far. I think it definitely deserves to be part of the core of its own.
Fog is my only pet card, mainly because my table is very combat oriented, and whenever someone swings at me for lethal, I always have it. It's helped me win over half of my won games
Brainstorm is my favorite card (the mercadian masks one). A friend who is a well known alterist painted me an extended border playset for my birthday one year 🎨 .
I put it in every blue deck. Luckily it's a good card.
Smoke Spirit's Aid is the card I stare at longingly every time I brew, just trying to find something new and cool to do with it
My favorite pet card of all time is living dead. It's made for some really fun moments in a lot of games and I just really like how it works.
I am big into playing around with pet cards. Finding a way to make them work. You provide a great framework to validate their use in a format designed to be casual. I like to keep my decks casual enough to have fun, but competitive enough to be considered a threat in most games. It's a challenging balance, but it's exactly what commander is for.
For a long time I only considered cards my "pet cards" when I played them and I knew they were suboptimal in the specific deck I put them in. Something like manabond in my Anikthea enchantment deck to instantly ramp on turn one and put enchantments in my graveyard (while manabond is basically a dead card if I don't draw it turn 1 or 2) or Maskwood Nexus in my facedown assassin tribal deck with Etrata, Deadly Fugitive as the commander.
The one true pet card I built a deck around (that I didn't get to test yet) was Doppelgang. I specifically chose a commander that would let me ramp exceedingly well in those colors, "Troyan, Gutsy Explorer" with the aim of ramping to 8-9 mana, dropping some more mana accelerators, etb or landfall creatures and then pumping as much mana as possible into one big nuke Doppelgang, drawing cards, generating lands for mana, getting removal etbs etc. pp. As an added bonus there aren't any cards to cheat stuff into play so I can play two myojin from hand for insane value.
This is also an example deck of how greedy you can go with the curve as there are ~10 1-mana ramp spells, the 3 mana commander and everything else starts at 5cmc
Oh my very first little critter buddy, the card that got me into magic and deck building, sweet Serrated Scorpion my bug
Personally, I love Artificer's Hex. It's hilarious VS Voltron, but even without a voltron deck at the table, things like Swiftfoot Boots are so common it's great to have as a niche removal piece at one mana.
I inherited a large collection of cards from around arabian nights-invasion block from my dad, so I have a huge number of cards like this from all those sets that aren't great by modern standards (at least not usually worth a slot) but have some really unique effects and awesome art. One of my favorites that comes to mind is City of Traitors.
Helm of the Host and Rite of Replication the flashy fantasy of making clones of big ol lads always blinding me.
Elvish aberration is the goat. He's a big mans dork taps for 3 but costs 6 (makes up for his price in two turns, the price is no big deal) AND Forest cycle for 2 tacked on there. He is the pinnacle of perfect dork for me because if you hit him early you get a land, late you get a big mana jump. Or you can just use him as an additional damage threat at 4/5
Gishath is my pet comander. Pulled it when I was first getting into magic, from the original Ixalan. I finally got to pull it out my box and make a commander deck with it, when the new Ixalan set came out and have had a blast with it. One of, if not my favourite decks I own.
gishath is one of those tribal decks where you can always be excited for upgrades. Same for stuff like dragons, angels or elves. There will always be new support for these tribes until the sun eats the earth
I’ve got a two and that are from the first deck I was given, Scuttling Doom Engine and Sands of Delirium. They’re the cards that got me into artifact sacrificing and mill decks. I’m not sure that they’re bad, but they’re still two of my favorite cards.
My favorite pet card is helm of the host and I've built several decks both on arena and in paper to get as much out of that card as possible. I've put helm every permanent type imaginable and learned in the process some hilarious rules interactions, like if you turn anything into an artifact with liquimetal coating then elk it with oko you can put a helm of the host on anything. Also if you turn blood moon into an artifact and then elk it with oko the blood moon effect STILL PERSISTS, because effects that change basic land types take place on layer 4 while oko's elk polymorph happens on layer 6. So you'll have a 3/3 elk with no effect that makes all nonbasics mountains. My favorite helm decks are both on arena, a 100 card brawl deck with gideon of the trials as the commander that seeks to use helm to duplicate the commander as well as runs an Oswald artifact toolbox fetching things like book of exalted deeds for as many "you can't lose and your opponents can't win" effects as I can possibly cram onto the board at once. And the other is a timeless WURG deck that runs sigardas aid and stoneforge mystic to fetch helm and Luxior Giadas Gift to stick helm on random planeswalkers like oko, 3 mana teferi, gideon of the trials, sarkhan the masterless. Both of these decks get really silly.
TL:DR you DEFINITELY will get more fun from your pet cards flexing your creative muscles and building decks that they shine in
Hey I did a ramp deck with Myojin too! (Progenitus). I've started building decks specifically for pet cards and the results have been phenomenal. When i started thinking about every card in the deck in relation to that one card, I realized I needed to think about every card in that deck in relationship to every other card in the deck. So it kind of led me down this path of "each card must combo with every other card", leading to some pretty synergystic decks. It's kind of turned pet cards into pet synergies into pet decks that I'm excited to see unfold as the game goes on. Anyway. Build decks around cards in the deck! not just the commander.
I started playing by the time return to ravnica was a thing and my first constructed deck was dimir. I still got all the cards I played back then, and naturally, my pet deck is dimir with "Lazav, dimir mastermind" as it's commander. It was nice to build around a card that I like so much, bringing back some combos, synergies and pet cards I used to play back in the days. Also getting to put together in a cohesive way mill, draw, discard, copy and theft strategies, fitting the guild line of work.
I honestly don't have pet cards in commander. I have pet decks which are usually wierd or thematic more than powerful. However, my pet cards come from when I played in the 90s. My favorite deck was called "The Grind Warp" and my pet cards in it are The Rack, Hypnotic Specter, Megrim and Millstone. Generically in our group we loved Incinerate because everything was regeneration heavy, and Feldon's cane because people were afraid of my grind warp...
I cram one of my collection of masterpiece Lord of Extinctions and an altar of dementia into any deck that even vaguely gestures at the graveyard that can run them at this point. I love that stupid combo so much
Gem of becoming is my precious baby, I've even used it in guild or off color decks like jeskai or dimir instead of grixis.
Damn, I watched all the videos and now I don't have any more videos to watch on this channel. Will wait for new ones. Kepp up the good work!
P.s. Also you have a pleasant voice. Especially for a snail.
I have these binders full of bulk rare and mythics that all grabbed my attention at one point and made my say "man, what a cool card, it MUST have a place somewhere, right?" Most of them are... debatably mid, but it's always an amazing feeling when I find a home for them while building.
Recently I put the finishing touches on a Gonti, Canny Acquisitor deck (similar to the one in the last videos), where cards like Croaking Counterpart, Nightmare Shepherd and Uncage the Menagerie happen to slot perfectly, and I couldn't be happier.
And then there's the "One with Nothing" type cards, so horrendously bad, yet funny that every couple month I want to build around one of them (currently an Orah, Skyclave Hierophant deck that generates advantage by wrathing their own board with Death-Pit Offering, the coolest designed "bad card" I've ever seen)
To me that has to be Baral’s expertise. It’s just such an efficient piece of removal that also lets you cast something for free. I never feel like it’s a dead card in my hand
Cedh decks have 0 pet cards
High power have “a pet card”
BUT,
Casual EDH decks will have pet cards; its the spirit of the format to run what you like over what the best option would be. That mentality of needing the most optimal is for 60 card competitive.
I just went to a buddies place and he brought out a bulk card shoebox. I found a Rayami in his trades and then out of his bulk shoebox of mtg, built an almost all commons and uncommons edh deck worth $20.
24 basics, some tapped duals/command tower, 35 creatures, sol ring & arcane signet, ramp/card draw/sac stuff.
I've been building around the Court of Vantress. This card just keeps on giving. In Lynde, Cheerful Tormentor, it can either spray tokens of curses everywhere, or if I'm not the monarch, I can have it itself become a copy of a curse, it immediately state-bases itself into the graveyard, then Lynde says "hey, that was a curse, put it back on the field on your end step ok sweetie love you x" and it drops as itself, monarchifying me again, with maybe a better board state to keep it this time. Now that we have the new Obeka, Upkeepmaxxing, I'm going to be doing everything I can to make as many copies of Court of Vantress as I can, which will absolutely snowball out of control and multiply every other court I can stuff into the deck for increasingly menacing board states. And to be clear, I have Savor the Moment as the ONLY extra turn spell. Probably the fairest extra turn effect ever printed.
Argh, just being reminded of how my friend cut Shigeki from a desert deck I built him. (we do deck exchanges) This was before any of the new thunder junction stuff mind you, I just thought he synergy was really clean, since it was repeatable self mill for Hazezon, and it could return a instants and sorceries from the graveyard at a decently cheap rate for the colors.
I just recently built myself a Gonti deck. Forty swamps and all my pet cards in black and colorless. It's a pile with a mana curve and I love playing it.
My biggest pet card is a black board wipe called make an example. I found it during my budget deck building days because its only $0.50 but i fell in love with the way it plays in a commander game. It can hit hexproof and indestructible which i find to be useful pretty often, and it also lets you play some serious mind games and politics with the table. You could ally with someone and they sacrifice none of their creatures or you can mind game an opponent who has to carefully make two piles that they value similarly. The gameplay loop of playing a 4 mana board wipe that can bring a player in check without resetting the game is so satisfying. Make an example goes in every black deck i have ever built. To top it off its also 3 generic and 1 black pip so its easy to cast
My pet card is absolutely Silvos, Rogue Elemental. My problem really is building around what is effectively a vanilla 8/4 Trample
I'm running As Foretold in three different decks, which is probably three decks too many. But I cannot be stopped.
I also run Decent Into Avernus in basically every red deck because every game with it out is a blast.
I ran into a problem where I had a ton of commanders that were neat, powerful, and fun but simply had no immediate plans of building decks for them. I had a pile of 30 or so of them when March of the Machine came out along with Compleated Omnath, and realized as almost all of them had 3 pips I could just throw them in with him. He's solid enough in providing an extra card and often +3 mana each turn, and sub-par cards don't feel as bad when they are cartable for 3 mana less. He also gets around the idea of a curve to an extent so you don't really need to worry much about the deck contents. I wouldn't call it great but it performs well if only from generating a lot of value and not having key pieces that cripple the deck if removed.
Midnight Clock. It can be anything from a 3 mana rock that wheels you in 6 turns if its down to 1v1 and you cant do anything else. It can be a "suspended wheel" that you opponents can see and either work way too hard to remove it or ignore it entirely. It can also be an infiinite mana outlet that if you can reapond to the self exile trigger and either flicker it or bounce and re-play it you can do it all over again. I love how modal this card with no actual modality to pick can be; this isnt mentioning just using your extra mana to keep pumping it up.
my pet cards are nephalia academy and reliquary tower. I started playing commander in 2016 on MTGO, getting wheeled with neccusar or leovold or any other deck was a daily possibility which made nephalia soooo good and also Cyclonic Rift with 10+ permanents often meant discarding to hand size. That time period really scarred me and both lands are an auto include in every commander deck I build.
Delina Wild Mage is my number 1 pet card. I had bought some cards off a friend to start trying magic out. The second I read her text along with the dice rolling I knew I had to fit her in as many decks as possible. This all culminated in one of the funniest games I've played where I had Wyll Blade of Frontiers and Delina where I technically went "infinite" since every successful roll added more and more dice making the odds of getting a 15 or less "impossible" We were all just laughing around the table as I was rolling heaps of more and more dice.
Stuffy Doll was the pet that my playgroup would chuckle at me for shoehorning into every deck - none of which it really belonged in.
It never had a home, even after it's big brother Brash Taunter was printed. Then, one day out of the Who, Donna Noble extended her hand and whispered; "Rejoice, for their time is come. The First Doctor shall provide us access to card advantage, countermagic, and Pariah. I'll do the rest.", and I've been KOing players with Blasphemous Act and Star of Extinction ever since.
You had Borborygmos and Fblthp my guy!! Donna rules tho
I started playing in Zendikar. Vampire Nighthawk is an instant include in any of my black decks. It won many games for me around the lunch table at school.
Quicksilver Fountain my beloved. I’d love to slam it in every deck regardless of color, but giving it a proper home is good enough for me.