EDH Deck Time: Arixmethes

Weirdly enough (although obviously it doesn’t actually mean anything) I was designing a card for just this thing in a dream recently. I just don’t remember what it did. I do have a design of this on our Guild forums. Funnily enough, it was also a 12/12 with a casting cost of 2UG, but that’s pretty much the extent of the similarities. Well, that and it couldn’t attack early either. Mine required you control 20 lands. It also had a partner and it gained a +1/+1 counter any time any player revealed a land card from their library or put a land card into play from the library.

Aaanyhow…

Wow. What to do with this?

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Magical History of Blue Grizzly Bears

Continuing this voyage of weird corners of the Magic design, we come to [scryfall]Grizzly Bears[/scryfall], but I’m limiting this to a very specific subgroup of blue.

Why blue? Because it’s the only color that hasn’t received a true [scryfall]Grizzly Bear[/scryfall] yet, meaning a 2/2 vanilla creature with a casting cost of 1U.

There’s a total of 204 2/2 creatures with a casting cost of 1C (including Un-Cards). Each other color has some of them and has even creatures that are strictly better than that. It took a while for black and red to get to that point, but here we are and now they aren’t even interesting any more. But blue is still making it’s way towards that goal and I’m not sure it will ever reach it. (Although it should be noted that in order to be truly strictly worse or better than something, the cards should be of the same color.)

Blue only has ten Grizzly Bears throughout the history of the game, and I’m going to leave out the Un-Card, which leaves us with nine total, meaning that they are quite rare.

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Hour of Devastation Brews, pt. 4 – UR Flash

As usual, there are some potentially very impactful cards hidden in the final bunch of spoilers. One of them could very well be this one.

I didn’t really expect that to be back any time soon, as they have recently nerfed this ability somewhat, but it is a good answer to Eternalize. However, in Standard, just the tempo can also be important.

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EDH Deck Time: The Scarab God

Black and blue are my favorite colors, but for the longest time, I’ve had trouble finding commanders from that combination. Sure, there’s 24 previous ones, but most of them just don’t feel like good commanders. Well, fun commanders. The last of Bolas’s secret weapons, [scryfall]The Scarab God[/scryfall], just might work.

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Amonkhet Brews, pt. 8 – Nissa Energy Ramp

No [scryfall]Elven Mystic[/scryfall] available, but that part of Standard seems to be permanently over. However, there is several fairly efficient manaproducers in the format, like [scryfall]Servant of the Conduit[/scryfall] and [scryfall]Rishkar, Peema Renegade[/scryfall] and then there’s these two:

There’s also [scryfall]Kiora, Master of the Depths[/scryfall], which might work, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

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Amonkhet Brews, pt. 3 – UR Haven

Even if this one isn’t actually the bomb certain people want it to be, I don’t see why I couldn’t dream about using it. This could be Grixis as well, but the mana requirements might be a bit too much, although we could probably just use the cycle-duals to splash something. I’m not entirely sure what, though.

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