Grenzo was the first creature I ever saw that made me think "I wanna make a commander deck around this." I haven't made it yet, but I've been slowly adding things to the decklist. We actually had a lot of similar ideas for how to take the deck.
I didn't like spellslinger decks until they made Eris, Roar of the Storm because she makes dragons with spells. I didn't like combo decks until they made Siyitri, Dragon Master because she combos with dragons. I didn't like artifact decks until they made Galazeth Prismari because he is a dragon...
I never really liked spellslinger decks , but when I built melek reforged, it became one of my all time favorites. Something about stuffing it with so many big, splashy spells and 5 mana counterspells all discounted made it feel so incredible.
I first started playing with my wife. I liked Azorius fliers and tokens, and she liked Golgari "i gain life you lose life, muahahaha". It's beem fun seeing how we've developed, eventually I moved to Jeskai when we bought cards for commander decks, then Esper, especially the new Master of Keys. Was very apprehensive about graveyard decks, but was a ton of fun. My wife now plays bant with Galadriel because she's busted as hell. It was especially fun divying up all of the better blue and white cards amongst ourselves. Its great we've branched out. I do want to play Rakdos to get away from azorius teddy bear, but Im in no hurry really.
I had a hard time finding a simic deck I liked. All of them just ended up being pointless value engines that are either too strong or too weak and always boring. Recently I finally cracked an Uro deck that I like. While idk if its a permanent addition to my roster, I enjoy playing it.
I have a hard time finding other fun simic decks too. But some fun ones that I've stuck with are Rashmi, Eternities Crafter and Lonis, Cryptozoologist. Yes, it is a value piece, but there's a randomness to it that makes every game different.
The reason I don't like simic specifically is that I just don't like those cards that are value engines on their own without any setup or something whatsoever, and 70% of simic leaders happen to be that type of card
funny that you made this video, i recently built a lands deck in gruul, my least favorite type of deck in my least favorite color combo, but built it as a control deck and its been pretty fun
Hey trinket mage! I wanted to let you know I love this take. I think pushing your comfort zone in magic is crazy important and you need to play all sides to understand the strengths and limitations of them! That being said, my deck im forcing myself to build is a Glissa the Traitor list. I have never enjoyed artifact decks, but I love Golgari. This deck allows me to play in a design space I am familiar with while also trying a new batch of cards I have never tried!
I challenged myself to make some mono-colored commander decks as they seemed weaker and lacking options. They actually turned out really fun and are some of my favorite decks. Mono-Blue Jacob for big spells, Mono-Green Goreclaw for stompy, Mono-Red Ashling, Flame Dancer for spellslinging, and Mono-Black Endrek for artistocrats on overdrive. When goldfishing, each deck usually wins between turns 5-7, and can be decently resilient. I also made a Giada deck that was fine, but I didn't really like that one much. My wife on the other hand adores it so still a win.
I have a bunch of decks, but I usually choose a theme or mechanic that I can build around. The type of deck it becomes usually comes into shape after I find the essential cards to keep the theme / mechanism as efficient as possible
I honestly thought this deck would be about building a deck you thought you wanted until you played it and hated playing it. I guess it ended up being kinda that in part with Mr. Foxglove. But it also ended up being more about building into an archetype you hate and loving the deck. That's great. Finally, I am a big proponent of doing deck swaps as I play with friends to have fun and see what it's like from both sides. This helps you really learn the game better as well.
I find myself in a dilema rn, i don't know what archetype i don't like, in these 10 years or so that i play magic, i already tried almost everything and don't dislike any specific strategy
The solution imo, then is to pick a favorite archetype and then pick a secondary archetype that is somewhat antithetical to it, and then try to combine them. Or not even archetypes but just even deck properties. Like aggro? Maybe try an aggro-reanimator. Like group hug? Try to build a group hug/stax deck. Etc etc
I actually had a desert land destruction deck helmed by hazezon that was so hated that it basically never got played. It was quite good against anything that needed more than three lands in play
as a new player i avoided building mono colored decks because i figured they might be boring compared to multicolor. built a Mono black Syr Konrad, The Grim. and i love it. ive built mono red and two mono green decks. i’m gonna do one mono of each color. it’s insane how much i love leaning into one color
I'm a very aggro player. Any and every deck I play, I end up using a "hit em hard and fast" approach, even when I'm piloting a friend's deck. I have a deck with a goad subtheme I've been using to introduce myself to a more control style while still working with some aggro stuff. I have so often played impulsively, so it's been some serious effort to learn new, "slower" approaches.
I advise everyone to build your decks and before buying them, goldfish them a ton. Being a young adult, I do not have a lot of money, and an unused deck would be a great fail for me. Building a deck can be interesting, but the deck result can make you bored. I had an extort lifegain deck and an Arcane Bombardement deck that I had finished building, and goldfishing them to learn the decks made me realise I did not like to play this or that way.
I found it interesting when I did the same idea. I have always hated infinite combos, especially when they just win out of nowhere. I decided then to make an infinite creature combo deck with Rocco, Cabaretti Caterer that uses Rosie Cotton and Scurry Oak like effects to make the creatures, then a haste enabler or etb ping damage to kill on the same turn. It has turned out to be one of my favorite decks because while it is budget, it plays like a puzzle, trying to get all the pieces together with protection to complete the combo through any removal players might have.
They usually got about 20 board wipes, and then end up playing basically like a stax deck with removal. I actually really enjoy the playstyle, because being the archenemy is really fun, even though it usually doesn't end in a win. Just don't play Avacyn. It's boring for everyone at the table, including you.
@@seow5872 hahaha I have that deck built right now. I had it built with Candlekeep Sage, but I already have a Brago deck so I decided to change it to mono white with Far Traveller as the background. It can definitely get targeted once you get a couple good things exiled under him. It also goes infinite with 2 oblivion ring effects, along with a bunch of cards like Resto Angel or Glorious Protector
Great video! I normally play big stompy naya or golgari reanimator, but when I saw Josh Lee Kwai play Jolrael, Voice of Zhalfir on Extra Turns ep 45, it got me interested in her. I used his decklist as a base and took out all the stuff related to animating lands because I don't care about that. I realized I could focus more on controlly mass bounce effects like Flood of Tears and Consuming Tide, and rebuild faster than anyone else because for 4 mana I get a hasted flyer that draws me a card. I really liked the Seasons Past + Mystical Tutor value engine you mentioned in your "These Decks Never Run Out of Gas" video, so I basically built the deck around that, with lots of instants. I ended up really enjoying this deck more than I expected, because for the first time, I regularly had mana open and responses to the degenerate BS my friends were playing instead of tapping out every turn to turbo out my own threats. I recently added in some more stax like Winter Moon and Cursed Totem but they haven't showed up in a game yet. We'll see how my friends respond lol. I see Elesh Norn, Cyc Rift, and Grave Pact pretty regularly, so I think it will be fine.
I (an avid mill player) built a Tarrasque stomp deck and it honestly opened up my building skills quite a bit. And I did it with all those extra unused green cards sitting around.
I'm actually working on a control deck not a fan of control wanted to try something different to mindless aggro sadly my playgroup has claimed that they will never play against it because they can't get a board state I'm sitting here like that's kinda the point of a control deck I wouldn't even say it's that oppressive like it does the job but the commander is triad of fates super slow deck even when I have untap shenanigans in play
I appreciate the mention of the vulnerabilities of aggro, mill, and control, and how playing those kinds of decks can make their weaknesses much clearer. As a bit of a personal story, I spent a lot of time being an aggro/spellslinger player, and I still am, but my initial most hated decks were control. More and more recently though, I've found myself to be a heavy black control player, using Toshiro Umezawa and Kelsien. I found through Toshiro I could still achieve the big spellslinger payoffs, and with Kelsien, I can address the problems control has with aggro by telling the aggro players to point the nonsense elsewhere and their creatures get to live (it's very rude, I know). While I don't think I'll ever enjoy blue control specifically, I think I enjoy black control simply because there's more bargaining power in letting a big creature resolve but still having an answer for it, and that makes things far more interesting than just outright saying, "No.". All this aside, I appreciate this video a lot, and it's inspired me to see if I can make something enjoyable out of my current least favorite playstyle: Simic value pile. Great video and especially great breakdown, thank you very much Trinket Mage.
I've played rakdos on and off for a few years now, and recently started experimenting with grixis and azhof and found that I 1. Really love blue, it meshes SO well with the kind of stuff I like to do in rakdos, and 2. That white, played sparingly in conjunction with my rakdos tendencies, opens a world of other options in locking people out that I never would have gotten to enjoy otherwise. I really am learning to appreciate the value of branching out, even if its still tangentially the same schtick the new access adds a lot more flavor to the same old same old
Oh yeah definitely started expanding my deck library into slug and stax decks. I built a bant stax deck recently with Ms Bumbleflower which i would never have thought to make a stax deck like three-four years ago
I started playing magic early this year, but i feel in love with commander in magic, i had never played a red deck, it seemed like it was hard to get it to work other then burn your starter hand and then you die. So i forced myself to make a MONO red deck, it was a lot of fun, extremely fun to play, its an "Alexios, Deimos of Kosmos" commander with defensive and growing creatures and some enabling artifacts (NOT voltron) and a sub theme of treasures and some bolt bend effects. This worked great as a workaround for ramp, into draw and creaturs on board for defence and as cleanup crew (think "Kazuul, Tyrant of the Cliffs")
This video speaks directly to my heart. Variety is the best. That's exactly why i have 31 decks and am still making more. I'm a bit of an extreme example, but still. I especially feel your point about playing outside your comfort zone. I am a pretty creature forward player, but I found I really like my creature light decks because they force me to play and think differently.
One new deck I recently build was quite different because I didn't really care about the commander, I just wanted to play doppelgang (and aggressive biomancy) as a wincon. So for a change I had to construct it in reverse. As legendary copies aren't really worth the trouble and doppelgang can target lands as well, that resulted in a landfall/etb subtheme all about getting lots of mana in a short time. Best colors would be to stay in simic -> I went with Troyan, Gutsy Explorer (3cmc taps for 2 mana for big spells) The deck plays really differently because I only need the commander to survive one turn because the average turns are: 1: Land + ramp 2: Troyan 3: 6 mana ramp/mana doubler etc (Troyan has done his job) 4: play big creatures/card draw 5+: play whatever I've found, doppelgang if possible. Even just hitting the table with an X=2 doppelgang can be devastating. The one thing I wasn't prepared for was that one of the most consistent wincons of the deck at this point is a laboratory maniac. If it goes off I can legitimately draw my entire deck. In a sense it is a big mana based combo deck.
So much this, I used to hate infect to the point where I wouldn't play against it, but after playing the infect precon in all will be one I've realized just how much fun it can theoretically be depending on how you build the deck I found that that pre-con specifically played in fact in a way that was not as obnoxious
I think it’s amusing how different people have such different views about aspects of mtg. Personally, I love having a board state and using the combat step. I find decks that spell sling and control to be tedious and often dishonest. But the differences between play styles makes the game interesting.
I hated playing against blue and hated the idea of spellslinger until I made a Zethi, Arcane Blademaster deck. Ended up loving the combat spellslinger style and made it a go wide token deck to boot. Also, I thought I would hate Izzet but made a Neera Wild Mage deck recently that gambles and cheats out big dumb bombs, and it's an absolute blast! Found your channel and podcast recently and love the content. Keep up the good work man!
Reminds me of back when Ravnica first came out and my friends all decided we’d each be from one of the guilds. They all picked theirs and decided for me which one I’d get. They picked Izzet for me. At that time I hated mill, counter, and burn with a passion so I just bought the Izzet starter deck to appease them and just never bothered with it past that. Now one of my favorite commander decks is my Edgin wheels matter/wheel tribal deck where my goal is to see how many wheels I can play in a single turn with either Psychosis Crawler or The Locus God out or blow everyone away with a Molten Psyche.
Very similar to my Marisi breaker of the coil deck all about adding rules about how to block. Doesn’t do a lot of damage most of the time but that’s what opponents are for. I can usually muster one alpha strike to take out the last one standing
As a person that's sort of gone through this journey, I did end up sort of where I started, but I"m definitely different now. My first (and still best) deck, Kyniaos and Tiro is essentially bant control, funnily enough. That's home. So, (after years), I went and built what I thought would be an aggro deck, and then multiple typal decks, (which I still struggle with), fiddly artifact combo decks, more midrange-y creature decks (about 3 varieties of reanimator and a mothman), izzet spellslinger, and an oddly successful Bear voltron (Wilson, Noble Heritage). I built the decks because I wanted to enjoy a different style of deck, and through building and playing them, got to become familiar with what I liked and didn't like about each. Artifacts got too many triggers, I don't wanna manage that. Creature decks can be very sorcery speed. Stumbling into an infinite combo in spellslinger isn't my thing (vadrik is very good at enabling those buyback spells). Hitting someone with a very large bear is fun but I don't like knocking people out too early or being the obvious threat. And I just aint good at building creature types. So, in the end I ended back up in my controlly, rampy, simic bullshit sort of style, but with a much deeper appreciation of not just how the archetypes operate, and also a much deeper understanding of what I like. I keep the other decks around cause those cards aint going anywhere else, and they get played every once in a while, but now I feel much more focused and intentional about digging into the nuances of simic bullshit and 5 color nonsense piles. TLDR: try stuff out! you might hate it but at least you'll know!
One of my favorite decks I have is my mono red aggro. What makes it different though is my commander Livaan Cultist of Tiamat with the background Dragon Cultist and not a single spell other then three are lower than five mana! It's insanely fun cause she buffs a creature based on the mana value of noncreature spells! Nothing beats casting Volcanic Salvo for 12 then slapping someone with a +12 power creature.
My favourite colors have always been blue black and red, one of the first alt win cons decks i built was a ramses assasin lord poison deck where ramses swings for the final hit to win the game.
I played a grenzo tokens/evasion/funny goblins list that would frequently do comedic things for the first few turns and then struggle when the commander was inevitably removed a second time. Shoutout to mountain goat in that list, truly the GOAT of goats
One of the things I ask myself when I'm done building a deck is "would I enjoy playing against this?" And if the answer is no I probably won't play it often, and definitely not with friends.
I can attest to this method of trying things you don't like. I also didn't like red/white with my favorite color always being black. However after trying a bunch of combinations, I found my favorite color combos are Rakdos and Esper.
I've actually been working on trying more control decks since I've played almost every other archetype, just not a dedicated control deck. I'm working on a greenless 4 color political goad deck where everyone votes and I force them to beat each other in the face very loosely inspired by the Jeska/Tymna deck mentioned in the video.
I had a similar MTG journey to Commander and a similar idea for my first deck: I came over from Modern aswell and really disliked Selesnya stompy decks for their simplicity and "boring" game plan (usually playing either combo or control decks myself). So I went and built a Karametra deck without any mana dorks (too fast), instead opting for cards like Wood Elves that would add ramp to my ramp. I then added some underwhelming landfall cards and a few powerful finishers and called it a day. The deck ended up being quite the menace at my playgroup and was a lot more fun to play than I would have thought. I took the deck apart many years ago, but it was definitely a fun and rewarding experience in my early EDH journey.
I don't hate playing against combo decks, but I don't always love playing them myself and I don't think I've ever built one before. Though, I've been enjoying Rakdos Tree in pioneer and recently decided to make a commander version with Olivia Mobilized for War. Its been fun figuring out how to build it and play it. One of my favorite things in magic is to play a bunch of common and uncommons and make them more effective, and this combo does that in a way that doesn't feel stale.
I think when I started, I gravitated most towards graveyard and sacrifice decks, generally stuff that's slow, grindy, and tries to keep everyone in the mud with you haha. Over the years tho I've def embraced trying new things and now I got an artifact combo deck, a Voltron deck, a go wide beat down deck, and so on...
Archetypes I've played: - green/gruul/temur stompy (one of my favorites archetypes) - orzhov control political (edit: I didn't run any of the "Tempting" cards) - selesnya enchantress - grixis demon typal reanimator - selesnya human typal +1/+1 counter - blackless group hug control - azorious blink - mono black reanimator (played this wrong cuz I missed the part where Technomancer specifies ARTIFACT creatures... And I kept using it to loop Gary... My bad...) I think I've had a decent selection of decks over the years
limiting yourself from staples or your habitats is a good advice to open up new cool decks. also using themes, budgets and/or colors (eg. by play other colors or reducing them or try out a mechanic in other color combinations) as build restrictions helps alot. it took me a long time to understand the game i want to play so try and error was the way to break out and find what i wanted to play and its an ongoing learning process ;D so i understand where to hold punches and where to go all in to get the experience i want :) i like the video alot even with the politics baching... its THE best thing ever in casual!
Goad has been a very big thing that let me get into more aggressive decks. I had always been a control player (still am mostly, my all time favorite is a Gix control deck), but recently made a Rakdos Goad/Curse-centric aggro deck with a heavy Red lean, which was also one of my least favorite colors.
I tended to (and to an extended still do) dislike simic turbo value landfall strategies. Eventually, I ended up building Zimone and Dina to get out of my comfort zone, mostly cause it had that aristocrats/activated ability based playstyle I do enjoy. I ended up coming out with a deck I genuinely like, not really because I "learned to love" landfall, but because I identified what parts of the strategy I truly didn't vibe with (the go wide create value from the ether by just playing seven lands a turn) and find out what I did find cool of the strategy (the amulet titan-esque "lands that should be tapped come untapped" shenanigans you can do, for example). And it was neat
Never liked self-mill since i hate seeing value wasted until i decided to go all in with an vicone + hermit, where every single card in the deck can be regrown by multiple effects.
Listening to this, I went, "Well i love all archetypes! Except for....." Which made me pause think. Honestly, i think I'm going to try a stax deck now.
I really wanted to build Grenzo, Havoc Raiser as a mono red mill deck thanks to his second ability, but I couldn't get it to work. Maybe I'll take a second look at it now thanks to this video.
Not exactly the same, but recently i realised i didn't have any dimir decks in my collection, nor did i have any dimir commanders that ever called out to me. So after i realised this, I went home and searched for dimir commanders on edhrec. I did realise that most of them did in fact not call out to me, but i also found out about Runo Stromkirk... I'd been looking to build a sea creatures deck for a *while* but never got around to finishing it, so this was the perfect opportunity to get it done :p the deck is now built and i absolutely love it
didn't really like spellslinger, but love Voltron, so i built a Livaan/Sword Coast Sailor weird spellslinger-Voltron/Izzet enchantress list. It also acts as a good deck to borrow to people who struggle with deciding on where to attack, since the deck kind of automates that.
Ghave mentioned 🥰🥰🥰🥰 Ghave is my first deck and I have been religiously playing the deck and tinkering with it since I started playing edh 6 years ago. It is probably the most unique combo deck if you ask me since as long you have mana up and ghave on board you can usually do something to mitigate a bad situation. Notable exception farewell with all modes chosen Also the deck doesn't care about having all of the combo pieces for the loop usually one of the pieces ends up being a mana sink and an army in a can, giving you virtual card advantage Also very important uniqueness of my build, is the prioritization of card advantage over anything. The deck (given you are not playing the cedh version) needs as many card advantage engine you can afford since you usually aim for an inevitable end, but the problem is protecting your board and being relevant before that. Basically you don't want the blue players to drown you in value. Finally ghave often enough, depending how you it ofc, can play a very weird draw land go gameplay which is a favourite of mine. After ghave and an engine piece is in play you don't need to cast spells anymore to progress your board and gameplan. Anyway I feel I need to gather all that because I want to share with people the weirdness that is Ghave
jaxis plus imperial recruiter is my favorite little engine in my jaxis deck. so many little dudes you can get with him (looping solemn simulacrum for ramp and draw is my second favorite :D)
I recently made it a challenge for me to finally crack down and make a commander deck for every single colour combination in the game. All 32 of them. The idea was to try and broaden my horizons, to stop myself from stagnating into this pool of Black, Blue and Green in any combination. When taking on this challenge, I knew one particular colour was going to be a real struggle for me. Selesnya. It's funny really, because this is a very specific outlier. I like green. I like white. Using either or in any deck is no hassle for me. Just that when the two come together, it somehow always feels like the most underwhelming thing in the universe. I place most of the blame here on the pool of Commanders. It feels like any time I scroll through my options for this combo on EDHrec, the effects all begin to blend together into this grey soup of basically 3 playstyles. Make a shitton of tokens, pass around a fuckton of counters or enchantress. Not that there's anything wrong with any of it, just that it feels like every Commander feels like all it's interested in doing is giving you what I've often called "The participation award" effect. As in, you do the thing, you draw cards. Nothing more imaginative. You have some oddballs like Emiel or some of the oddly staxey commanders, but I don't see a world, where I'd play them over other options in better colours. It's not that Selesnya is bad at doing these anything it does, but it often times feels like it's the most boring in how it does it. Ultimately though, back against the wall, I'm probably going to end up with Captain Sisay as a legend toolbox plan. As I said, I love green and I love white individually, so when the commanders for the color-combo inspire no excitement, just run a soup of your favourite cards in the colour.
I always liked red as soon as i first picked up the game, nowadays mono blue is after I made a Kami of the Crescent moon deck focused on effects like Forced Fruiton (making every player draw more cards then they can handle), after which blue is def my favourite colour. Still hated playing control and probably always will though lol.
I've been trying to make a Foxglove deck and decided to try a control style, which I am unfamiliar with. I heard that you had a list so I started looking at it for inspiration. Those six-ish group hug cards were the first I cut, but am still trying find the balance of reactive and proactive cards.
my current control deck is a bant merfolk tribal with lullmage mentor, stonybrook schoolmaster, and intruder alarm. so when I tap all my merfolk to counter a spell, it creates another merfolk token to untap all my merfolk...
My playgroup hasnt had a superfriends deck, i always assumed they played weak due to multiple players being able to attack them- i also hated playing high cmc and creatures based When I made my Gruul Superfriends list I actually found that superfriends can be really powerful and that creatures can overwhelm people pretty fast.
i'm like you: i dont really enjoy red as a color. i dont like impulse draw and the "jankyness" / "randomness" of the color. But then my brother came around with his newly brewed mono red control list. At first i laughed at the idea, a few turns into the game is was absolutley hooked: mainly because of the commander: Jaxis, the troublemaker. Three mana for drawing/two discard one AND make a creature copy with haste is just insane value while casualy dodgeing commander tax. Long story short: i brewed about 10 hours in the last two days and the possabilies just seem endless. I'm in love
I tend to like making unique and relatively slow decks, such as my White/Blue dragons deck with Ojutai, Soul of Winter, or my Banding Tribal deck that runs all 5 of the Legends banding lands, or my Relentless Rats deck that uses Simic Nashi to make token Relentless Rats that I can populate. All that being said, I don't tend to make aggressive or stompy decks that often, also i don't tend to make decks with the intent of winning as much as the intent of playing a certain way and then winning and winning from doing that thing. My most recent deck is Vannifar, Evolved Enigma, which revolves around under-costed creatures with some sort of drawback, such as Phyrexian Dreadnaught, Eater of Days, Arixmethes, etc. (as well as cards that synergize with manifest) that I play face-down as a manifested/cloaked creature and then flip up for cheap. It is a quite aggressive deck that runs out of cards quickly and tries to win just as fast, and it's a stompy deck made my own way. I still have to think about what order I'm going to do things, but also I have big creatures to just slap people in the face with.
Cockatrice. It's how I test out deck before buying them. I build weird decks that often use expensive center pieces in weird ways to I use cockatrice to get some play testing in. It helps my pod has a lot of variety so cockatrice works well as a testing groups. If your pod doesn't have a verity of decks it isn't the best place to test. Currently working on a lich tribal rule 0 deck. WUB enchantress focused on some weird lich creatures and the lich enchantments. Lich, lich's mastery, lich master dual, and the one that starts with n and I can never spell. I decided on a rule 0 deck because of everlasting lich, lich dual master and one with death. Because I think it be funny to figure out a way to make the one with nothing spoof card work.
I actually just built grenzo! Looking at your list mine is a lot lower to the ground and DEFINITLY a lot more budget (the first version was at around 30€, with some additions now it's ended up a little over 40) I ended up building it because most of my decks have been either midrange value or control, and i wanted to make something where everything is a lot smaller. My list is in a bit of an intersection between forced combat, small things matter, and goblin token value. My favorite recent addition from duskmourn has been "Painter's Studio // Defaced Gallery" where someone at wotc decided to staple together goblin oriflamme and reckless impulse
I started playing magic towards the end of June this year. I love White and Green and Red, so Naya is an incredible thing for me. I love playing things like Hazezon or derivatives like Gruul beatdown or Boros Burn/aggro. I even found myself loving Black through a Kambal, Profiteering Mayor deck that was my first ever deck for commander (still probably my strongest). But through all of this, I couldn't STAND blue. Blue control took such a lax approach and passive mentality for playing the game. Until Duskmorn. Duskmorn introduced me to the Mindskinner, and I absolutely love this card from a comedic standpoint. So much so that they are now my newest addition to my commander decks as a mono blue voltron mill deck that "controls" just to be the scariest mf at the table. Still can't say I like Blue too much, but I am certainly more amiable to it.
My main (only) deck is a Mr. House deck, and his goal is either token beat down with emblems, burn damage from token creation and sacrifice, or if I get lucky, Revel in Riches. But I want to make a new deck Sarevok with Raised by Giants background is a deck I've been wanting to make though. Just, I ain't sure what to look for. I'm obviously thinking sacrifice for myself, and then I want to try and find ways to prevent opponents from losing their own permanents so his ability will trigger. Sacrifice is easy enough, but that second bit is giving me trouble
Extrapolating out from the point of stepping outside of your comfort zone - playing a tuned list made by someone else will make you a better deckbuilder. If you're a brewer and hate sticking to established ways of building, using something established will give you so much insight into why certain choices are popular, what works, and what doesn't. As someone essentially playing rogue decks, you gotta know the enemy. On the main topic, 3/3 Elk's Kura list got me looking at the NDK dragon cycle and I started playing around with an Atsushi list. I haven't played monored since my chaos draft days, and its been fun trying to make this weird dragon work as a commander.
I was never a huge fan of simic, I built a couple decklists and kept tearing them apart because they werent fun. But then, finally, Omo was revealed. Turns out the simic i love is one based on tribal tribal with a funny land base. Its now in my top 4 decks I play
Until something like a brand new set & storyline comes along & reinvents a color combination (Selesnya) I have promised myself & told my friend groups that Selesnya is the new Boros. Its color philosophy supports a sort of closed system in which Legendary creatures showcase one of three (pushing it with saying that there is a 4th one) circles I guess, since they are druids. These are Enchantress decks, Token decks & Stax. Each Legendary creature in these colors must walk up to a wheel with all of the archetypes in Selesnya on it, then they spin it & the R & D get to work. It is very similar to those 4-5 years of straight product featuring Boros Legenda that either did equipment or did stuff to tweak noncombat damage. If you wanted a cohesive deck with a theme other than those listed above you were pretty much forced to build with an older legend that is most likely and has either a mana cost that is way too high for the effect it has or has an effect that isn't as strong as the legends releasing currently.
Not quite the same but I always hated mill. So the logical step I took was making a Mycotyrant self mill deck. I got really used to watching cards I wanted in hand go to the graveyard lol. But it's one of my favorite decks now, and I don't hate playing against mill as much.
Well if it also helps, I did something similar with storm/combo. I go out of my way to make decks work with a token flavor. So I made a gruul storm deck with Wort, the raid mother and even though it has 3-5 creatures in it depending on how I am feeling it wins through creature combat. Featuring Chatterstorm, Elemental Eruption, Hunting pack, and empty the warrens. My pet card is Surge to victory, anyone who survives the initial hit gets to see me cast 5+ hunting packs or elemental eruptions for free.
I play creature-focused combat decks. I've liked graveyard matters, blink, tokens and even voltron. I loved all of it and generally use a mix of these strategies. I've tried playing other type of decks like spellslinger, stax, combo and aristocrats. I just find them unsatisfying to play.
I normally play GUW value stacks. I am known as the Bant mage in our group. Red and Black didn't really appeal to me at all. And attacking with creatures was not something I cared about, as I'd rather build my value engine. Thats where Magar of the Magic Strings came in. Rakdos? Check. Attacking every turn? Check. It wasn't just aggro city though. It was midrange "cast spells and attack with creatures", grindy value style. I love the deck, and it made me realize that decks can really go against your preconceived notions. I still love my bant value piles, but now I'm more open to other decks. I even built a mono red burn pile! (Imodane, the pyrohammer. Damage doublers go INSANE with her)
My current physically built decks are a decent range (I have way to much free time so I kind of sometimes will just sink a few hours into making a list on Tappedout) Got dimir mill/control/theft, dimir looting payoff, naya go tall artifact aggro, boros go wide token aggro, the Necrons precon with only 3 subbed out cards, and izzet draw cards. Also close to having a mono-white phyrexian tribal finished. Taking into account all the random lists I have put together online - my least built deck is simic. I like blue and I like green but together without any other colors with them I find it hard to brew simic without it being tribal or just piles of value engine. Hell, the one simic list I have I literally just called "Random Simic Bullshit Go!" with the new Tamiyo from MH3 being the commander with the idea being that you just get so much value so quickly that you can sneak in Tamiyo's -8 before anyone realizes what's going on. The new Zimones from Duskmourn interest me, the precon one because it is doing something really different that is still effective, and the main set one because of how hyper-specific its effect is. In all honesty though, that simic value pile might end up being my next physically constructed deck cause I got that Tamiyo from my first MH3 pack and the acquisition of said pack has some personal emotional stuff tied to it. As far as specific card "types" go? I have a weird aversion to stuff that just flat out says "you win the game". Combo loop that does infinite damage? That's fine. Simic Ascendancy or Thassa's Oracle? I despise that stuff.
When I'm playing a blue deck, usually I'll try to tell new players or people unfamiliar with my deck if my board state is threatening. I'm usually telling the truth, but they often think I am trying to trick them. But sometimes i have a pile of incoherent crap on board and am not a threat, and other times i have what looks like a weak board state, and will snowball off hard if I'm allowed to untap uncontested.
I agree with what you are saying, and in my opinion, playing a commander or a colour combo you don't like or is less experienced with makes you a better player in general. Fx, I made a kaylia deck that I was super excited to play, but I learned that it is a big threat, and whenever I played her, it got counted or removed, so I leaned to be better at politics and managen my bord state
Im a big gan of combo but i tend to have combos as a resource. My krark ishai deck is all about gaining value off coinflips snd discards. The deck has good recovery and its ability to clone pull form eternity means even exile is a resource pool for me to pull from. The decks combo lines often do close the game themselves but do tend to generate enough value for my coinflip and discard creadtures. The most common is getting 4 + krarks and turning my deck over as i dig for rituals and my 3 burn finishers. Mana clash is my preferred of the 3. But i can and do often use my combo cards to generic value throughout the game. With the expectation that aslong as pull from eternity isn't in exile i always have a chance to recover from anything. The deck also runs alot of tutors to grab thumb or grab tutors to grab thumb and those tutors become toolbox utility once thumb is in play. I also tend not to use them to pull combo's out of my deck. Because the deck requires one of 3 creature clones to be able to start combining and i dont have creature tutors intentionally. It means my combo happens organically as part of using my value engine. I often do even combo and win in combat dmg
I have a bunch of decks. Sure a decent amount of them are fairly normal creature decks (Dinosaur, Vampire and a few more). I have several combo decks, like the Ghave, Guru of Spores deck. That deck is insane. I made into both a combo and counter deck. I can honestly say that I can actually be a bit annoying to play cause there's so damn many effects to keep track of, that I have to take help from my friends. Though it is pretty fun. There are probably just a couple decks I haven't made. A pure aggro deck, and a pure control deck. I usually like playing decks that are decent at controling, but very rarely pure control. Even my newly built Superfriends deck isn't a pure control deck, it's also a Poison deck xD (couldn't choose one or the other LOL). I have a very hard time trying to exclude cards I like, or just focus on a single thing in a deck, but somehow I usually manage to make them pretty consistent anyway...
I HAD a massive distaste for spellslinger decks because they go infinite or close to it so often that you either die first or make everyone sit there as you win via combo. Also black has always felt really boring. It’s just creatures dying and coming back and dying again for profit. So easy to make loops that win out of nowhere. That was until I made orzhov spellsling using the kaldheim angel that gives you a free strategic planning whenever you cast your second spell. When you have very limited access to storm enablers and payoffs, the challenge is fun again. Racing your own life total to draw cards since you can’t use the aristocrats cards well gives you an entirely new axis to worry about. It’s been a blast watching my life total yo-yo around as I dig for removal and finishers I need to survive or end the game.
My playstyle is very stormy. I love chaining many small actions to win but i always try to bring something new to it and faced a problem that every idea that came into my mind is one way or another transphorming into storm 😅 My friends started to say me every game that it's not interesting and not casual. I built a new deck after it -> it falls into the same problem -> it becomes a cycle. I've already built control, creature tribals, stax, poison, aggro, true storm, artifacts, lands, enchantments and still worried about this because all that types are accidentally storms in addition...
I thought aggro in EDH was not efficient cause of the life totals and having three opponents. But then I tried to build a monored aggro deck with Imodane, the pyrohammer. As it let me deal dmg to every opponent at once. i added some fun cards and some red staples that i already had and in the end, i ended up with a combo deck that could win in turn 4 if it was not interacted with. But it's not super consistent and sometimes just messes with all the players' plans with things like Mana flare or Repercussion and can be very fun.
I don't like 5 color decks. I've never built a combo deck. I feel uncomfortable without any creatures on my side of the board. Following this video, I feel the sudden craving to build a Door to Nothingness combo deck with Codie, Vociferous Codex at the helm. What have you done to me?
It's so strange to me to even be asked to consider asking my friends if I can proxy something. I really don't adequately appreciate the bubble I live in where seemingly everyone is proxying most of their cards. It makes me dread ever going to a different LGS, I fear I've stumbled into a weird alternate universe where everyone proxies and buying cards is the outlier and I'm starting to get more and more afraid of what might happen if I ever go to a different community/LGS.
My fav color is black and for long time i dont like red, my least fav color. And for my 2nd commander deck i decide that I want to try bit more combat focused deck or aggro. So i make bria deck. Since i had 2 phase of upgrading it after like 20 games i realize i cant stop playing it and red is now my fav color. The way you try to offset weakness creatively just so interesting. Exiling card as draw, shooting people straight in their face with lightning bolt. Sometimes forcing yourself to just try new thing is the key. Start with budget first get the feeling so its not wasted spending. And only get card that at least flexible enough to fit in random deck
Can you do a video on "synergy" vs "reliant" cards? I try help people with a lot of decks and the main issue I find is people will put card that relate to their theme but do not advance their deck goal and do nothing when the is not performing averagely or ahead which leads to massive momentum swings. It normally comes in a vegetable form. For example kemba kha regent is a mono white Voltron equipment tokens deck for card draw Caretaker's Talent, Mentor of the Meek, Welcoming Vampire for tokens or Mask of Memory, Infiltration Lens, Rogue's Gloves for equipment related draw. In ramp it uses things like Sword of Hearth and Home, Explorer's Scope, Bitterthorn, Nissa's Animus and for removal lothlorien blade, sword of sinew and steel and Argentum Armor. All these cards in theory work great they provide card draw, ramp and removal but only IF the gameplan is going correctly, If you get an explorers scope you got a turn 1 ramp card but with nothing to equip it to it does nothing. You then are waiting till turn 3 to cast kemba, turn 4 to equip ramp only IF the is an op opportunity. What is you method of dealing with these cards? try to express them as "half cards" like yes it draws you a card half the time. But the other half of the reason you have it is to put it on your commander to make a token so classifying it purly as a card draw seems like lying to the self. In comparison the immortal sun is more costly. But it will draw you a card and it will reduce costs but thats it.
I am somewhat the opposite of you, in the sense that I dont particularly enjoy non-creature strategies. So to try out other archetypes I dug for the more creature adjacent builds. I have a Nicol Bolas the ravager list that is a tap-out control, but with a reanimator spin to actually close out games. I built a Saruman the White hand spellslinger list, to beat people up with a 30/30 army after casting spells like a mad wizard. It really just takes a slightly different commander for you to find stuff that you might enjoy
my first deck was simple animar "big creatures go bonk" midrange, and my second deck was an eriette deck, because i had pulled her from a pack. this eriette deck had cost me quite a lot of money, and turned out absolutely horrid to play. turns out, it wasnt that fun to slow the game down to a snails pace, angering the whole table because of the drain, and then losing anyway because everyone decided to kill me. so now i know that i do not like that deck, and have learned. my upcoming commander will be a jaheira+agent of the iron throne token deck, with a violence mode, and a aristocrats mode
I have like 4 rakdos decks and 4 dimir decks. I just really don't like green, I've been looking for so long to find a Simic commander that interests me and its just all boring generic value.
What about Kianne, Corrupted Memory? It gives you no value in terms of card draw or land ramp, but as she gets bigger she switches your gameplay of what you can flash in. If you like aggro you can flash in pseudo haste before your turn starts on odd, draw your card for turn and flash in weird artifacts and enchantments during combat for unusual combat tricks when she swaps to even. I've convinced myself 🤩
@@FranciscoJG The card advantage is nice but it's not like... the entire strategy. At least for my Dimir decks. I just feel like Dimir has a lot of funny shenanigans to work with that green doesn't have for me.
One thing you need to get used to when playing decks you dont like Mill is being hated out. People hate it and they will focus on you depending what you are doing. I run both Mill and Theft and while they are fun to play people dont like it and will kill you first a lot.
Creature heavy decks are generally what I gravitate towards. I just cannot wrap my head around the idea of a low creature count. A 1/1 will kill you eventually if you never have a blocker. I know it's not actually THAT simple, but you get the idea. But the biggest problem I run into with creature combat decks is that it never meshes well with the play group. Focusing the same player usually always results in hard feelings. "Dude, attack someone else for once and let them actually play the game." This is kind of the problem I have with "casual" play groups. They confuse smart gameplay choices with being a try-hard. Focusing the late-game deck early on while they're vulnerable is smart, but to a casual pod, they see that as bullying the player who isn't doing anything yet. Alternate win conditions aren't viewed favorably either because to the casual pod, they see it as me trying to avoid interactions and just winning a solitaire game.
Hey TH-cam, I need some insight (if you mind reading): Im your casual gruul ramp-big creture player (Svella), but I really like control in other formants. Problem is, creature-less control forces me to run sorcery win conditions that seem hard to interact with (less interaction = anticliamtic win). I dont know if I will enjoy ending a game (that other 3 people are playing) out of nowhere by copying a deal X damage spell, or stealling all creatures. But if I dont go for this explosive wincons, there is no wincon at all in draw-go control. Maybe I one of this "plays fair magic" guys, but i will love to enjoy "fair" control that actually has a gameplan. Maybe explosive wins dont feel that bad, idk, this conundrum has being in the back of my head for like 3 weeks, Im going bananas.
Have you tried draw go with a theft theme? The wins are still creature based and it can still be a control deck. Plus theft decks scale with the table very well
@@thetrinketmage Yeah, I was considering "instants to tokenes" but felt to Izzet storm for me. But theft scaling to table level/turns is intresting. Back to brewing, TY trinket person you are way to good at spreding knowleadge
I disliked aristocrat stuff, so imagine my surprise when my token spamming Chatterfang deck slowly morphed into an aristocrat combo deck I have plans on making a control, recursion, enchantress and storm deck at some point to broaden my horizons
Trinket mage is never pregnant but never fails to deliver
i can fix that
Not yet 😏
o_O
🤨
I mean... Not wrong, but what!?
Grenzo was the first creature I ever saw that made me think "I wanna make a commander deck around this." I haven't made it yet, but I've been slowly adding things to the decklist. We actually had a lot of similar ideas for how to take the deck.
I didn't like spellslinger decks until they made Eris, Roar of the Storm because she makes dragons with spells. I didn't like combo decks until they made Siyitri, Dragon Master because she combos with dragons. I didn't like artifact decks until they made Galazeth Prismari because he is a dragon...
I'm glad you know your type. 😂
Feels like hearing my own reasoning for building new decks
I'm sensing a pattern here.
Man let me tell you about skanos Dragonborn with the cultist of the absolute background for dragristocrats
perfect.
You're not tricking me into building stax, Trinket mage
I never really liked spellslinger decks , but when I built melek reforged, it became one of my all time favorites. Something about stuffing it with so many big, splashy spells and 5 mana counterspells all discounted made it feel so incredible.
I first started playing with my wife. I liked Azorius fliers and tokens, and she liked Golgari "i gain life you lose life, muahahaha". It's beem fun seeing how we've developed, eventually I moved to Jeskai when we bought cards for commander decks, then Esper, especially the new Master of Keys. Was very apprehensive about graveyard decks, but was a ton of fun. My wife now plays bant with Galadriel because she's busted as hell. It was especially fun divying up all of the better blue and white cards amongst ourselves.
Its great we've branched out. I do want to play Rakdos to get away from azorius teddy bear, but Im in no hurry really.
I had a hard time finding a simic deck I liked. All of them just ended up being pointless value engines that are either too strong or too weak and always boring. Recently I finally cracked an Uro deck that I like. While idk if its a permanent addition to my roster, I enjoy playing it.
What made this Uro list special?
I have a hard time finding other fun simic decks too. But some fun ones that I've stuck with are Rashmi, Eternities Crafter and Lonis, Cryptozoologist. Yes, it is a value piece, but there's a randomness to it that makes every game different.
The reason I don't like simic specifically is that I just don't like those cards that are value engines on their own without any setup or something whatsoever, and 70% of simic leaders happen to be that type of card
Had the same problem building an interesting simic token deck. Currently i have 2 that feel fine for now with inga and esika, and jyoity.
funny that you made this video, i recently built a lands deck in gruul, my least favorite type of deck in my least favorite color combo, but built it as a control deck and its been pretty fun
Hey trinket mage! I wanted to let you know I love this take. I think pushing your comfort zone in magic is crazy important and you need to play all sides to understand the strengths and limitations of them! That being said, my deck im forcing myself to build is a Glissa the Traitor list. I have never enjoyed artifact decks, but I love Golgari. This deck allows me to play in a design space I am familiar with while also trying a new batch of cards I have never tried!
I challenged myself to make some mono-colored commander decks as they seemed weaker and lacking options. They actually turned out really fun and are some of my favorite decks. Mono-Blue Jacob for big spells, Mono-Green Goreclaw for stompy, Mono-Red Ashling, Flame Dancer for spellslinging, and Mono-Black Endrek for artistocrats on overdrive. When goldfishing, each deck usually wins between turns 5-7, and can be decently resilient. I also made a Giada deck that was fine, but I didn't really like that one much. My wife on the other hand adores it so still a win.
I have a bunch of decks, but I usually choose a theme or mechanic that I can build around. The type of deck it becomes usually comes into shape after I find the essential cards to keep the theme / mechanism as efficient as possible
The giant into the wall of meat animation was fantastic! The monologue after it played was icing on the cake
I honestly thought this deck would be about building a deck you thought you wanted until you played it and hated playing it. I guess it ended up being kinda that in part with Mr. Foxglove. But it also ended up being more about building into an archetype you hate and loving the deck. That's great. Finally, I am a big proponent of doing deck swaps as I play with friends to have fun and see what it's like from both sides. This helps you really learn the game better as well.
I find myself in a dilema rn, i don't know what archetype i don't like, in these 10 years or so that i play magic, i already tried almost everything and don't dislike any specific strategy
That's not really a dilemma 😊
May I introduce you to land destruction group hug?
The solution imo, then is to pick a favorite archetype and then pick a secondary archetype that is somewhat antithetical to it, and then try to combine them. Or not even archetypes but just even deck properties. Like aggro? Maybe try an aggro-reanimator. Like group hug? Try to build a group hug/stax deck. Etc etc
I actually had a desert land destruction deck helmed by hazezon that was so hated that it basically never got played. It was quite good against anything that needed more than three lands in play
as a new player i avoided building mono colored decks because i figured they might be boring compared to multicolor. built a Mono black Syr Konrad, The Grim. and i love it. ive built mono red and two mono green decks. i’m gonna do one mono of each color. it’s insane how much i love leaning into one color
I'm a very aggro player. Any and every deck I play, I end up using a "hit em hard and fast" approach, even when I'm piloting a friend's deck. I have a deck with a goad subtheme I've been using to introduce myself to a more control style while still working with some aggro stuff. I have so often played impulsively, so it's been some serious effort to learn new, "slower" approaches.
try playing a mono blue combo or control deck, really helped me learn how to hold up my mana and think ahead
I advise everyone to build your decks and before buying them, goldfish them a ton.
Being a young adult, I do not have a lot of money, and an unused deck would be a great fail for me.
Building a deck can be interesting, but the deck result can make you bored. I had an extort lifegain deck and an Arcane Bombardement deck that I had finished building, and goldfishing them to learn the decks made me realise I did not like to play this or that way.
I found it interesting when I did the same idea. I have always hated infinite combos, especially when they just win out of nowhere. I decided then to make an infinite creature combo deck with Rocco, Cabaretti Caterer that uses Rosie Cotton and Scurry Oak like effects to make the creatures, then a haste enabler or etb ping damage to kill on the same turn. It has turned out to be one of my favorite decks because while it is budget, it plays like a puzzle, trying to get all the pieces together with protection to complete the combo through any removal players might have.
Listen, you’re absolutely right, but I’ll die before I build a mono-white control deck.
They usually got about 20 board wipes, and then end up playing basically like a stax deck with removal. I actually really enjoy the playstyle, because being the archenemy is really fun, even though it usually doesn't end in a win. Just don't play Avacyn. It's boring for everyone at the table, including you.
Me with Abdel Adrian and every single destroy/exile permanent: 😈
@@seow5872 hahaha I have that deck built right now. I had it built with Candlekeep Sage, but I already have a Brago deck so I decided to change it to mono white with Far Traveller as the background. It can definitely get targeted once you get a couple good things exiled under him. It also goes infinite with 2 oblivion ring effects, along with a bunch of cards like Resto Angel or Glorious Protector
Great video! I normally play big stompy naya or golgari reanimator, but when I saw Josh Lee Kwai play Jolrael, Voice of Zhalfir on Extra Turns ep 45, it got me interested in her. I used his decklist as a base and took out all the stuff related to animating lands because I don't care about that. I realized I could focus more on controlly mass bounce effects like Flood of Tears and Consuming Tide, and rebuild faster than anyone else because for 4 mana I get a hasted flyer that draws me a card. I really liked the Seasons Past + Mystical Tutor value engine you mentioned in your "These Decks Never Run Out of Gas" video, so I basically built the deck around that, with lots of instants.
I ended up really enjoying this deck more than I expected, because for the first time, I regularly had mana open and responses to the degenerate BS my friends were playing instead of tapping out every turn to turbo out my own threats. I recently added in some more stax like Winter Moon and Cursed Totem but they haven't showed up in a game yet. We'll see how my friends respond lol. I see Elesh Norn, Cyc Rift, and Grave Pact pretty regularly, so I think it will be fine.
I (an avid mill player) built a Tarrasque stomp deck and it honestly opened up my building skills quite a bit. And I did it with all those extra unused green cards sitting around.
6:24 less go OR6A2 gene Gang
I'm actually working on a control deck not a fan of control wanted to try something different to mindless aggro sadly my playgroup has claimed that they will never play against it because they can't get a board state I'm sitting here like that's kinda the point of a control deck I wouldn't even say it's that oppressive like it does the job but the commander is triad of fates super slow deck even when I have untap shenanigans in play
triad of fates seems like a super cool control commander! could u send the list?
I appreciate the mention of the vulnerabilities of aggro, mill, and control, and how playing those kinds of decks can make their weaknesses much clearer. As a bit of a personal story, I spent a lot of time being an aggro/spellslinger player, and I still am, but my initial most hated decks were control. More and more recently though, I've found myself to be a heavy black control player, using Toshiro Umezawa and Kelsien. I found through Toshiro I could still achieve the big spellslinger payoffs, and with Kelsien, I can address the problems control has with aggro by telling the aggro players to point the nonsense elsewhere and their creatures get to live (it's very rude, I know). While I don't think I'll ever enjoy blue control specifically, I think I enjoy black control simply because there's more bargaining power in letting a big creature resolve but still having an answer for it, and that makes things far more interesting than just outright saying, "No.".
All this aside, I appreciate this video a lot, and it's inspired me to see if I can make something enjoyable out of my current least favorite playstyle: Simic value pile. Great video and especially great breakdown, thank you very much Trinket Mage.
I've played rakdos on and off for a few years now, and recently started experimenting with grixis and azhof and found that I 1. Really love blue, it meshes SO well with the kind of stuff I like to do in rakdos, and 2. That white, played sparingly in conjunction with my rakdos tendencies, opens a world of other options in locking people out that I never would have gotten to enjoy otherwise.
I really am learning to appreciate the value of branching out, even if its still tangentially the same schtick the new access adds a lot more flavor to the same old same old
Oh yeah definitely started expanding my deck library into slug and stax decks. I built a bant stax deck recently with Ms Bumbleflower which i would never have thought to make a stax deck like three-four years ago
I started playing magic early this year, but i feel in love with commander in magic, i had never played a red deck, it seemed like it was hard to get it to work other then burn your starter hand and then you die. So i forced myself to make a MONO red deck, it was a lot of fun, extremely fun to play, its an "Alexios, Deimos of Kosmos" commander with defensive and growing creatures and some enabling artifacts (NOT voltron) and a sub theme of treasures and some bolt bend effects. This worked great as a workaround for ramp, into draw and creaturs on board for defence and as cleanup crew (think "Kazuul, Tyrant of the Cliffs")
This video speaks directly to my heart. Variety is the best. That's exactly why i have 31 decks and am still making more. I'm a bit of an extreme example, but still.
I especially feel your point about playing outside your comfort zone. I am a pretty creature forward player, but I found I really like my creature light decks because they force me to play and think differently.
One new deck I recently build was quite different because I didn't really care about the commander, I just wanted to play doppelgang (and aggressive biomancy) as a wincon. So for a change I had to construct it in reverse.
As legendary copies aren't really worth the trouble and doppelgang can target lands as well, that resulted in a landfall/etb subtheme all about getting lots of mana in a short time. Best colors would be to stay in simic -> I went with Troyan, Gutsy Explorer (3cmc taps for 2 mana for big spells)
The deck plays really differently because I only need the commander to survive one turn because the average turns are:
1: Land + ramp
2: Troyan
3: 6 mana ramp/mana doubler etc (Troyan has done his job)
4: play big creatures/card draw
5+: play whatever I've found, doppelgang if possible.
Even just hitting the table with an X=2 doppelgang can be devastating. The one thing I wasn't prepared for was that one of the most consistent wincons of the deck at this point is a laboratory maniac. If it goes off I can legitimately draw my entire deck. In a sense it is a big mana based combo deck.
So much this, I used to hate infect to the point where I wouldn't play against it, but after playing the infect precon in all will be one I've realized just how much fun it can theoretically be depending on how you build the deck I found that that pre-con specifically played in fact in a way that was not as obnoxious
I think it’s amusing how different people have such different views about aspects of mtg. Personally, I love having a board state and using the combat step. I find decks that spell sling and control to be tedious and often dishonest. But the differences between play styles makes the game interesting.
I hated playing against blue and hated the idea of spellslinger until I made a Zethi, Arcane Blademaster deck. Ended up loving the combat spellslinger style and made it a go wide token deck to boot. Also, I thought I would hate Izzet but made a Neera Wild Mage deck recently that gambles and cheats out big dumb bombs, and it's an absolute blast!
Found your channel and podcast recently and love the content. Keep up the good work man!
Reminds me of back when Ravnica first came out and my friends all decided we’d each be from one of the guilds. They all picked theirs and decided for me which one I’d get. They picked Izzet for me. At that time I hated mill, counter, and burn with a passion so I just bought the Izzet starter deck to appease them and just never bothered with it past that. Now one of my favorite commander decks is my Edgin wheels matter/wheel tribal deck where my goal is to see how many wheels I can play in a single turn with either Psychosis Crawler or The Locus God out or blow everyone away with a Molten Psyche.
Very similar to my Marisi breaker of the coil deck all about adding rules about how to block. Doesn’t do a lot of damage most of the time but that’s what opponents are for. I can usually muster one alpha strike to take out the last one standing
As a person that's sort of gone through this journey, I did end up sort of where I started, but I"m definitely different now.
My first (and still best) deck, Kyniaos and Tiro is essentially bant control, funnily enough. That's home. So, (after years), I went and built what I thought would be an aggro deck, and then multiple typal decks, (which I still struggle with), fiddly artifact combo decks, more midrange-y creature decks (about 3 varieties of reanimator and a mothman), izzet spellslinger, and an oddly successful Bear voltron (Wilson, Noble Heritage). I built the decks because I wanted to enjoy a different style of deck, and through building and playing them, got to become familiar with what I liked and didn't like about each. Artifacts got too many triggers, I don't wanna manage that. Creature decks can be very sorcery speed. Stumbling into an infinite combo in spellslinger isn't my thing (vadrik is very good at enabling those buyback spells). Hitting someone with a very large bear is fun but I don't like knocking people out too early or being the obvious threat. And I just aint good at building creature types.
So, in the end I ended back up in my controlly, rampy, simic bullshit sort of style, but with a much deeper appreciation of not just how the archetypes operate, and also a much deeper understanding of what I like. I keep the other decks around cause those cards aint going anywhere else, and they get played every once in a while, but now I feel much more focused and intentional about digging into the nuances of simic bullshit and 5 color nonsense piles.
TLDR: try stuff out! you might hate it but at least you'll know!
One of my favorite decks I have is my mono red aggro. What makes it different though is my commander Livaan Cultist of Tiamat with the background Dragon Cultist and not a single spell other then three are lower than five mana! It's insanely fun cause she buffs a creature based on the mana value of noncreature spells! Nothing beats casting Volcanic Salvo for 12 then slapping someone with a +12 power creature.
HEY! Ghave aristicombo is my longest running deck. gotta love seeing it getting some respect.
My favourite colors have always been blue black and red, one of the first alt win cons decks i built was a ramses assasin lord poison deck where ramses swings for the final hit to win the game.
I played a grenzo tokens/evasion/funny goblins list that would frequently do comedic things for the first few turns and then struggle when the commander was inevitably removed a second time. Shoutout to mountain goat in that list, truly the GOAT of goats
One of the things I ask myself when I'm done building a deck is "would I enjoy playing against this?" And if the answer is no I probably won't play it often, and definitely not with friends.
I can attest to this method of trying things you don't like. I also didn't like red/white with my favorite color always being black. However after trying a bunch of combinations, I found my favorite color combos are Rakdos and Esper.
I've actually been working on trying more control decks since I've played almost every other archetype, just not a dedicated control deck.
I'm working on a greenless 4 color political goad deck where everyone votes and I force them to beat each other in the face very loosely inspired by the Jeska/Tymna deck mentioned in the video.
I had a similar MTG journey to Commander and a similar idea for my first deck: I came over from Modern aswell and really disliked Selesnya stompy decks for their simplicity and "boring" game plan (usually playing either combo or control decks myself). So I went and built a Karametra deck without any mana dorks (too fast), instead opting for cards like Wood Elves that would add ramp to my ramp. I then added some underwhelming landfall cards and a few powerful finishers and called it a day. The deck ended up being quite the menace at my playgroup and was a lot more fun to play than I would have thought. I took the deck apart many years ago, but it was definitely a fun and rewarding experience in my early EDH journey.
Man, how many painful dinners did it actually take your parents to believe the greens they served you REALLY tasted like soap?
Not many actually my mom is Turkish and it’s cilantro isn’t used that much so it didn’t come up too often
I don't hate playing against combo decks, but I don't always love playing them myself and I don't think I've ever built one before. Though, I've been enjoying Rakdos Tree in pioneer and recently decided to make a commander version with Olivia Mobilized for War. Its been fun figuring out how to build it and play it. One of my favorite things in magic is to play a bunch of common and uncommons and make them more effective, and this combo does that in a way that doesn't feel stale.
I think when I started, I gravitated most towards graveyard and sacrifice decks, generally stuff that's slow, grindy, and tries to keep everyone in the mud with you haha. Over the years tho I've def embraced trying new things and now I got an artifact combo deck, a Voltron deck, a go wide beat down deck, and so on...
Archetypes I've played:
- green/gruul/temur stompy (one of my favorites archetypes)
- orzhov control political (edit: I didn't run any of the "Tempting" cards)
- selesnya enchantress
- grixis demon typal reanimator
- selesnya human typal +1/+1 counter
- blackless group hug control
- azorious blink
- mono black reanimator (played this wrong cuz I missed the part where Technomancer specifies ARTIFACT creatures... And I kept using it to loop Gary... My bad...)
I think I've had a decent selection of decks over the years
limiting yourself from staples or your habitats is a good advice to open up new cool decks. also using themes, budgets and/or colors (eg. by play other colors or reducing them or try out a mechanic in other color combinations) as build restrictions helps alot.
it took me a long time to understand the game i want to play so try and error was the way to break out and find what i wanted to play and its an ongoing learning process ;D
so i understand where to hold punches and where to go all in to get the experience i want :)
i like the video alot even with the politics baching... its THE best thing ever in casual!
Goad has been a very big thing that let me get into more aggressive decks. I had always been a control player (still am mostly, my all time favorite is a Gix control deck), but recently made a Rakdos Goad/Curse-centric aggro deck with a heavy Red lean, which was also one of my least favorite colors.
I tended to (and to an extended still do) dislike simic turbo value landfall strategies. Eventually, I ended up building Zimone and Dina to get out of my comfort zone, mostly cause it had that aristocrats/activated ability based playstyle I do enjoy. I ended up coming out with a deck I genuinely like, not really because I "learned to love" landfall, but because I identified what parts of the strategy I truly didn't vibe with (the go wide create value from the ether by just playing seven lands a turn) and find out what I did find cool of the strategy (the amulet titan-esque "lands that should be tapped come untapped" shenanigans you can do, for example). And it was neat
You're telling me to build a simic deck which is against my morals XD
Fair…. But what about Gor Muldrak? He is pretty weird and not normal simic!
@@thetrinketmage that is pretty interesting
Never liked self-mill since i hate seeing value wasted until i decided to go all in with an vicone + hermit, where every single card in the deck can be regrown by multiple effects.
Listening to this, I went, "Well i love all archetypes! Except for....."
Which made me pause think.
Honestly, i think I'm going to try a stax deck now.
I really wanted to build Grenzo, Havoc Raiser as a mono red mill deck thanks to his second ability, but I couldn't get it to work. Maybe I'll take a second look at it now thanks to this video.
Not exactly the same, but recently i realised i didn't have any dimir decks in my collection, nor did i have any dimir commanders that ever called out to me. So after i realised this, I went home and searched for dimir commanders on edhrec. I did realise that most of them did in fact not call out to me, but i also found out about Runo Stromkirk... I'd been looking to build a sea creatures deck for a *while* but never got around to finishing it, so this was the perfect opportunity to get it done :p the deck is now built and i absolutely love it
didn't really like spellslinger, but love Voltron, so i built a Livaan/Sword Coast Sailor weird spellslinger-Voltron/Izzet enchantress list. It also acts as a good deck to borrow to people who struggle with deciding on where to attack, since the deck kind of automates that.
Ghave mentioned 🥰🥰🥰🥰
Ghave is my first deck and I have been religiously playing the deck and tinkering with it since I started playing edh 6 years ago.
It is probably the most unique combo deck if you ask me since as long you have mana up and ghave on board you can usually do something to mitigate a bad situation. Notable exception farewell with all modes chosen
Also the deck doesn't care about having all of the combo pieces for the loop usually one of the pieces ends up being a mana sink and an army in a can, giving you virtual card advantage
Also very important uniqueness of my build, is the prioritization of card advantage over anything. The deck (given you are not playing the cedh version) needs as many card advantage engine you can afford since you usually aim for an inevitable end, but the problem is protecting your board and being relevant before that. Basically you don't want the blue players to drown you in value.
Finally ghave often enough, depending how you it ofc, can play a very weird draw land go gameplay which is a favourite of mine. After ghave and an engine piece is in play you don't need to cast spells anymore to progress your board and gameplan.
Anyway I feel I need to gather all that because I want to share with people the weirdness that is Ghave
jaxis plus imperial recruiter is my favorite little engine in my jaxis deck. so many little dudes you can get with him (looping solemn simulacrum for ramp and draw is my second favorite :D)
I recently made it a challenge for me to finally crack down and make a commander deck for every single colour combination in the game. All 32 of them. The idea was to try and broaden my horizons, to stop myself from stagnating into this pool of Black, Blue and Green in any combination. When taking on this challenge, I knew one particular colour was going to be a real struggle for me. Selesnya. It's funny really, because this is a very specific outlier. I like green. I like white. Using either or in any deck is no hassle for me. Just that when the two come together, it somehow always feels like the most underwhelming thing in the universe.
I place most of the blame here on the pool of Commanders. It feels like any time I scroll through my options for this combo on EDHrec, the effects all begin to blend together into this grey soup of basically 3 playstyles. Make a shitton of tokens, pass around a fuckton of counters or enchantress. Not that there's anything wrong with any of it, just that it feels like every Commander feels like all it's interested in doing is giving you what I've often called "The participation award" effect. As in, you do the thing, you draw cards. Nothing more imaginative. You have some oddballs like Emiel or some of the oddly staxey commanders, but I don't see a world, where I'd play them over other options in better colours. It's not that Selesnya is bad at doing these anything it does, but it often times feels like it's the most boring in how it does it.
Ultimately though, back against the wall, I'm probably going to end up with Captain Sisay as a legend toolbox plan. As I said, I love green and I love white individually, so when the commanders for the color-combo inspire no excitement, just run a soup of your favourite cards in the colour.
I always liked red as soon as i first picked up the game, nowadays mono blue is after I made a Kami of the Crescent moon deck focused on effects like Forced Fruiton (making every player draw more cards then they can handle), after which blue is def my favourite colour. Still hated playing control and probably always will though lol.
I've been trying to make a Foxglove deck and decided to try a control style, which I am unfamiliar with. I heard that you had a list so I started looking at it for inspiration. Those six-ish group hug cards were the first I cut, but am still trying find the balance of reactive and proactive cards.
my current control deck is a bant merfolk tribal with lullmage mentor, stonybrook schoolmaster, and intruder alarm. so when I tap all my merfolk to counter a spell, it creates another merfolk token to untap all my merfolk...
My playgroup hasnt had a superfriends deck, i always assumed they played weak due to multiple players being able to attack them- i also hated playing high cmc and creatures based
When I made my Gruul Superfriends list I actually found that superfriends can be really powerful and that creatures can overwhelm people pretty fast.
i'm like you: i dont really enjoy red as a color. i dont like impulse draw and the "jankyness" / "randomness" of the color. But then my brother came around with his newly brewed mono red control list.
At first i laughed at the idea, a few turns into the game is was absolutley hooked: mainly because of the commander: Jaxis, the troublemaker. Three mana for drawing/two discard one AND make a creature copy with haste is just insane value while casualy dodgeing commander tax.
Long story short: i brewed about 10 hours in the last two days and the possabilies just seem endless. I'm in love
Jaxis is such a fun card to use! She wasn’t a commander but in the 99 was always fun!
I tend to like making unique and relatively slow decks, such as my White/Blue dragons deck with Ojutai, Soul of Winter, or my Banding Tribal deck that runs all 5 of the Legends banding lands, or my Relentless Rats deck that uses Simic Nashi to make token Relentless Rats that I can populate. All that being said, I don't tend to make aggressive or stompy decks that often, also i don't tend to make decks with the intent of winning as much as the intent of playing a certain way and then winning and winning from doing that thing.
My most recent deck is Vannifar, Evolved Enigma, which revolves around under-costed creatures with some sort of drawback, such as Phyrexian Dreadnaught, Eater of Days, Arixmethes, etc. (as well as cards that synergize with manifest) that I play face-down as a manifested/cloaked creature and then flip up for cheap. It is a quite aggressive deck that runs out of cards quickly and tries to win just as fast, and it's a stompy deck made my own way. I still have to think about what order I'm going to do things, but also I have big creatures to just slap people in the face with.
Cockatrice. It's how I test out deck before buying them. I build weird decks that often use expensive center pieces in weird ways to I use cockatrice to get some play testing in. It helps my pod has a lot of variety so cockatrice works well as a testing groups. If your pod doesn't have a verity of decks it isn't the best place to test.
Currently working on a lich tribal rule 0 deck. WUB enchantress focused on some weird lich creatures and the lich enchantments. Lich, lich's mastery, lich master dual, and the one that starts with n and I can never spell. I decided on a rule 0 deck because of everlasting lich, lich dual master and one with death. Because I think it be funny to figure out a way to make the one with nothing spoof card work.
I actually just built grenzo! Looking at your list mine is a lot lower to the ground and DEFINITLY a lot more budget (the first version was at around 30€, with some additions now it's ended up a little over 40)
I ended up building it because most of my decks have been either midrange value or control, and i wanted to make something where everything is a lot smaller. My list is in a bit of an intersection between forced combat, small things matter, and goblin token value.
My favorite recent addition from duskmourn has been "Painter's Studio // Defaced Gallery" where someone at wotc decided to staple together goblin oriflamme and reckless impulse
I started playing magic towards the end of June this year. I love White and Green and Red, so Naya is an incredible thing for me. I love playing things like Hazezon or derivatives like Gruul beatdown or Boros Burn/aggro.
I even found myself loving Black through a Kambal, Profiteering Mayor deck that was my first ever deck for commander (still probably my strongest).
But through all of this, I couldn't STAND blue. Blue control took such a lax approach and passive mentality for playing the game.
Until Duskmorn. Duskmorn introduced me to the Mindskinner, and I absolutely love this card from a comedic standpoint. So much so that they are now my newest addition to my commander decks as a mono blue voltron mill deck that "controls" just to be the scariest mf at the table.
Still can't say I like Blue too much, but I am certainly more amiable to it.
My main (only) deck is a Mr. House deck, and his goal is either token beat down with emblems, burn damage from token creation and sacrifice, or if I get lucky, Revel in Riches. But I want to make a new deck
Sarevok with Raised by Giants background is a deck I've been wanting to make though. Just, I ain't sure what to look for. I'm obviously thinking sacrifice for myself, and then I want to try and find ways to prevent opponents from losing their own permanents so his ability will trigger. Sacrifice is easy enough, but that second bit is giving me trouble
Extrapolating out from the point of stepping outside of your comfort zone - playing a tuned list made by someone else will make you a better deckbuilder. If you're a brewer and hate sticking to established ways of building, using something established will give you so much insight into why certain choices are popular, what works, and what doesn't. As someone essentially playing rogue decks, you gotta know the enemy.
On the main topic, 3/3 Elk's Kura list got me looking at the NDK dragon cycle and I started playing around with an Atsushi list. I haven't played monored since my chaos draft days, and its been fun trying to make this weird dragon work as a commander.
I was never a huge fan of simic, I built a couple decklists and kept tearing them apart because they werent fun. But then, finally, Omo was revealed. Turns out the simic i love is one based on tribal tribal with a funny land base. Its now in my top 4 decks I play
Until something like a brand new set & storyline comes along & reinvents a color combination (Selesnya) I have promised myself & told my friend groups that Selesnya is the new Boros. Its color philosophy supports a sort of closed system in which Legendary creatures showcase one of three (pushing it with saying that there is a 4th one) circles I guess, since they are druids. These are Enchantress decks, Token decks & Stax. Each Legendary creature in these colors must walk up to a wheel with all of the archetypes in Selesnya on it, then they spin it & the R & D get to work. It is very similar to those 4-5 years of straight product featuring Boros Legenda that either did equipment or did stuff to tweak noncombat damage. If you wanted a cohesive deck with a theme other than those listed above you were pretty much forced to build with an older legend that is most likely and has either a mana cost that is way too high for the effect it has or has an effect that isn't as strong as the legends releasing currently.
Not quite the same but I always hated mill. So the logical step I took was making a Mycotyrant self mill deck. I got really used to watching cards I wanted in hand go to the graveyard lol. But it's one of my favorite decks now, and I don't hate playing against mill as much.
This is exactly the story I wanted to see in the comments
Well if it also helps, I did something similar with storm/combo. I go out of my way to make decks work with a token flavor. So I made a gruul storm deck with Wort, the raid mother and even though it has 3-5 creatures in it depending on how I am feeling it wins through creature combat. Featuring Chatterstorm, Elemental Eruption, Hunting pack, and empty the warrens. My pet card is Surge to victory, anyone who survives the initial hit gets to see me cast 5+ hunting packs or elemental eruptions for free.
I play creature-focused combat decks. I've liked graveyard matters, blink, tokens and even voltron. I loved all of it and generally use a mix of these strategies.
I've tried playing other type of decks like spellslinger, stax, combo and aristocrats. I just find them unsatisfying to play.
I normally play GUW value stacks. I am known as the Bant mage in our group. Red and Black didn't really appeal to me at all. And attacking with creatures was not something I cared about, as I'd rather build my value engine.
Thats where Magar of the Magic Strings came in. Rakdos? Check. Attacking every turn? Check. It wasn't just aggro city though. It was midrange "cast spells and attack with creatures", grindy value style. I love the deck, and it made me realize that decks can really go against your preconceived notions. I still love my bant value piles, but now I'm more open to other decks. I even built a mono red burn pile! (Imodane, the pyrohammer. Damage doublers go INSANE with her)
My current physically built decks are a decent range (I have way to much free time so I kind of sometimes will just sink a few hours into making a list on Tappedout) Got dimir mill/control/theft, dimir looting payoff, naya go tall artifact aggro, boros go wide token aggro, the Necrons precon with only 3 subbed out cards, and izzet draw cards. Also close to having a mono-white phyrexian tribal finished.
Taking into account all the random lists I have put together online - my least built deck is simic. I like blue and I like green but together without any other colors with them I find it hard to brew simic without it being tribal or just piles of value engine. Hell, the one simic list I have I literally just called "Random Simic Bullshit Go!" with the new Tamiyo from MH3 being the commander with the idea being that you just get so much value so quickly that you can sneak in Tamiyo's -8 before anyone realizes what's going on.
The new Zimones from Duskmourn interest me, the precon one because it is doing something really different that is still effective, and the main set one because of how hyper-specific its effect is.
In all honesty though, that simic value pile might end up being my next physically constructed deck cause I got that Tamiyo from my first MH3 pack and the acquisition of said pack has some personal emotional stuff tied to it.
As far as specific card "types" go? I have a weird aversion to stuff that just flat out says "you win the game". Combo loop that does infinite damage? That's fine. Simic Ascendancy or Thassa's Oracle? I despise that stuff.
When I'm playing a blue deck, usually I'll try to tell new players or people unfamiliar with my deck if my board state is threatening. I'm usually telling the truth, but they often think I am trying to trick them. But sometimes i have a pile of incoherent crap on board and am not a threat, and other times i have what looks like a weak board state, and will snowball off hard if I'm allowed to untap uncontested.
I agree with what you are saying, and in my opinion, playing a commander or a colour combo you don't like or is less experienced with makes you a better player in general. Fx, I made a kaylia deck that I was super excited to play, but I learned that it is a big threat, and whenever I played her, it got counted or removed, so I leaned to be better at politics and managen my bord state
Im a big gan of combo but i tend to have combos as a resource. My krark ishai deck is all about gaining value off coinflips snd discards. The deck has good recovery and its ability to clone pull form eternity means even exile is a resource pool for me to pull from. The decks combo lines often do close the game themselves but do tend to generate enough value for my coinflip and discard creadtures. The most common is getting 4 + krarks and turning my deck over as i dig for rituals and my 3 burn finishers. Mana clash is my preferred of the 3. But i can and do often use my combo cards to generic value throughout the game. With the expectation that aslong as pull from eternity isn't in exile i always have a chance to recover from anything. The deck also runs alot of tutors to grab thumb or grab tutors to grab thumb and those tutors become toolbox utility once thumb is in play. I also tend not to use them to pull combo's out of my deck. Because the deck requires one of 3 creature clones to be able to start combining and i dont have creature tutors intentionally. It means my combo happens organically as part of using my value engine. I often do even combo and win in combat dmg
This topic was going to be my question zone. I'm a big fan of dinky creatures and need help making other decks, much thank.
Grenzo is so funny as a theft commander. Like low to the ground dudes with evasion in red are so funny for theft
I have a bunch of decks. Sure a decent amount of them are fairly normal creature decks (Dinosaur, Vampire and a few more). I have several combo decks, like the Ghave, Guru of Spores deck. That deck is insane. I made into both a combo and counter deck. I can honestly say that I can actually be a bit annoying to play cause there's so damn many effects to keep track of, that I have to take help from my friends. Though it is pretty fun.
There are probably just a couple decks I haven't made. A pure aggro deck, and a pure control deck. I usually like playing decks that are decent at controling, but very rarely pure control.
Even my newly built Superfriends deck isn't a pure control deck, it's also a Poison deck xD (couldn't choose one or the other LOL).
I have a very hard time trying to exclude cards I like, or just focus on a single thing in a deck, but somehow I usually manage to make them pretty consistent anyway...
I HAD a massive distaste for spellslinger decks because they go infinite or close to it so often that you either die first or make everyone sit there as you win via combo. Also black has always felt really boring. It’s just creatures dying and coming back and dying again for profit. So easy to make loops that win out of nowhere.
That was until I made orzhov spellsling using the kaldheim angel that gives you a free strategic planning whenever you cast your second spell. When you have very limited access to storm enablers and payoffs, the challenge is fun again. Racing your own life total to draw cards since you can’t use the aristocrats cards well gives you an entirely new axis to worry about. It’s been a blast watching my life total yo-yo around as I dig for removal and finishers I need to survive or end the game.
My playstyle is very stormy. I love chaining many small actions to win but i always try to bring something new to it and faced a problem that every idea that came into my mind is one way or another transphorming into storm 😅 My friends started to say me every game that it's not interesting and not casual. I built a new deck after it -> it falls into the same problem -> it becomes a cycle. I've already built control, creature tribals, stax, poison, aggro, true storm, artifacts, lands, enchantments and still worried about this because all that types are accidentally storms in addition...
I hate tokens and counters, and shuffling my library. I just wanna sit there and drink a beer.
I thought aggro in EDH was not efficient cause of the life totals and having three opponents. But then I tried to build a monored aggro deck with Imodane, the pyrohammer. As it let me deal dmg to every opponent at once. i added some fun cards and some red staples that i already had and in the end, i ended up with a combo deck that could win in turn 4 if it was not interacted with. But it's not super consistent and sometimes just messes with all the players' plans with things like Mana flare or Repercussion and can be very fun.
I don't like 5 color decks.
I've never built a combo deck.
I feel uncomfortable without any creatures on my side of the board.
Following this video, I feel the sudden craving to build a Door to Nothingness combo deck with Codie, Vociferous Codex at the helm.
What have you done to me?
this has inspired me to make a masochist deck, one wich serves to torment its user rather than win the game
I recently used a combo of bolas citadel and syr konrad the grim to build up a bunch of creatures then hit everyone for 20 damage in a single turn
It's so strange to me to even be asked to consider asking my friends if I can proxy something. I really don't adequately appreciate the bubble I live in where seemingly everyone is proxying most of their cards. It makes me dread ever going to a different LGS, I fear I've stumbled into a weird alternate universe where everyone proxies and buying cards is the outlier and I'm starting to get more and more afraid of what might happen if I ever go to a different community/LGS.
My fav color is black and for long time i dont like red, my least fav color. And for my 2nd commander deck i decide that I want to try bit more combat focused deck or aggro. So i make bria deck. Since i had 2 phase of upgrading it after like 20 games i realize i cant stop playing it and red is now my fav color. The way you try to offset weakness creatively just so interesting. Exiling card as draw, shooting people straight in their face with lightning bolt.
Sometimes forcing yourself to just try new thing is the key. Start with budget first get the feeling so its not wasted spending. And only get card that at least flexible enough to fit in random deck
Can you do a video on "synergy" vs "reliant" cards? I try help people with a lot of decks and the main issue I find is people will put card that relate to their theme but do not advance their deck goal and do nothing when the is not performing averagely or ahead which leads to massive momentum swings. It normally comes in a vegetable form. For example kemba kha regent is a mono white Voltron equipment tokens deck for card draw Caretaker's Talent, Mentor of the Meek, Welcoming Vampire for tokens or Mask of Memory, Infiltration Lens,
Rogue's Gloves for equipment related draw. In ramp it uses things like Sword of Hearth and Home, Explorer's Scope, Bitterthorn, Nissa's Animus and for removal lothlorien blade, sword of sinew and steel and Argentum Armor. All these cards in theory work great they provide card draw, ramp and removal but only IF the gameplan is going correctly, If you get an explorers scope you got a turn 1 ramp card but with nothing to equip it to it does nothing. You then are waiting till turn 3 to cast kemba, turn 4 to equip ramp only IF the is an op opportunity. What is you method of dealing with these cards? try to express them as "half cards" like yes it draws you a card half the time. But the other half of the reason you have it is to put it on your commander to make a token so classifying it purly as a card draw seems like lying to the self. In comparison the immortal sun is more costly. But it will draw you a card and it will reduce costs but thats it.
I am somewhat the opposite of you, in the sense that I dont particularly enjoy non-creature strategies. So to try out other archetypes I dug for the more creature adjacent builds. I have a Nicol Bolas the ravager list that is a tap-out control, but with a reanimator spin to actually close out games. I built a Saruman the White hand spellslinger list, to beat people up with a 30/30 army after casting spells like a mad wizard. It really just takes a slightly different commander for you to find stuff that you might enjoy
my first deck was simple animar "big creatures go bonk" midrange, and my second deck was an eriette deck, because i had pulled her from a pack. this eriette deck had cost me quite a lot of money, and turned out absolutely horrid to play. turns out, it wasnt that fun to slow the game down to a snails pace, angering the whole table because of the drain, and then losing anyway because everyone decided to kill me. so now i know that i do not like that deck, and have learned. my upcoming commander will be a jaheira+agent of the iron throne token deck, with a violence mode, and a aristocrats mode
I have like 4 rakdos decks and 4 dimir decks.
I just really don't like green, I've been looking for so long to find a Simic commander that interests me and its just all boring generic value.
What about Kianne, Corrupted Memory? It gives you no value in terms of card draw or land ramp, but as she gets bigger she switches your gameplay of what you can flash in. If you like aggro you can flash in pseudo haste before your turn starts on odd, draw your card for turn and flash in weird artifacts and enchantments during combat for unusual combat tricks when she swaps to even.
I've convinced myself 🤩
Let's pretend none of your Dimir decks has free card advantage.
@@FranciscoJG The card advantage is nice but it's not like... the entire strategy. At least for my Dimir decks. I just feel like Dimir has a lot of funny shenanigans to work with that green doesn't have for me.
One thing you need to get used to when playing decks you dont like Mill is being hated out.
People hate it and they will focus on you depending what you are doing.
I run both Mill and Theft and while they are fun to play people dont like it and will kill you first a lot.
Creature heavy decks are generally what I gravitate towards. I just cannot wrap my head around the idea of a low creature count. A 1/1 will kill you eventually if you never have a blocker. I know it's not actually THAT simple, but you get the idea.
But the biggest problem I run into with creature combat decks is that it never meshes well with the play group. Focusing the same player usually always results in hard feelings. "Dude, attack someone else for once and let them actually play the game."
This is kind of the problem I have with "casual" play groups. They confuse smart gameplay choices with being a try-hard. Focusing the late-game deck early on while they're vulnerable is smart, but to a casual pod, they see that as bullying the player who isn't doing anything yet.
Alternate win conditions aren't viewed favorably either because to the casual pod, they see it as me trying to avoid interactions and just winning a solitaire game.
Hey TH-cam, I need some insight (if you mind reading): Im your casual gruul ramp-big creture player (Svella), but I really like control in other formants. Problem is, creature-less control forces me to run sorcery win conditions that seem hard to interact with (less interaction = anticliamtic win). I dont know if I will enjoy ending a game (that other 3 people are playing) out of nowhere by copying a deal X damage spell, or stealling all creatures. But if I dont go for this explosive wincons, there is no wincon at all in draw-go control. Maybe I one of this "plays fair magic" guys, but i will love to enjoy "fair" control that actually has a gameplan.
Maybe explosive wins dont feel that bad, idk, this conundrum has being in the back of my head for like 3 weeks, Im going bananas.
Have you tried draw go with a theft theme? The wins are still creature based and it can still be a control deck. Plus theft decks scale with the table very well
@@thetrinketmage Yeah, I was considering "instants to tokenes" but felt to Izzet storm for me. But theft scaling to table level/turns is intresting. Back to brewing, TY trinket person you are way to good at spreding knowleadge
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
I disliked aristocrat stuff, so imagine my surprise when my token spamming Chatterfang deck slowly morphed into an aristocrat combo deck
I have plans on making a control, recursion, enchantress and storm deck at some point to broaden my horizons