Tag Archives: deck

Deck Time: Immortal Servitude, Black or White

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Historically, in Magic, two drop creatures are usually the most efficient. There’s a reason people play maindecked [scryfall]Spell Snare[/scryfall]s in Modern. Some examples: [scryfall]Snapcaster Mage[/scryfall], [scryfall]Tarmogoyf[/scryfall], [scryfall]Spirit of the Labyrinth[/scryfall], [scryfall]Meddling Mage[/scryfall], [scryfall]Putrid Leech[/scryfall], [scryfall]Scavenging Ooze[/scryfall], [scryfall]Pack Rat[/scryfall], [scryfall]Dark Confidant[/scryfall], [scryfall]Baleful Strix[/scryfall], [scryfall]Thalia, Guardian of Thraben[/scryfall], [scryfall]Arcbound Ravager[/scryfall], [scryfall]Quirion Dryad[/scryfall], [scryfall]Lord of Atlantis[/scryfall] and its ilk, [scryfall]Young Pyromancer[/scryfall], [scryfall]Precinct Captain[/scryfall] and so forth. This is only what I can come up with from the top of my head. Sure, there are creatures with other casting costs, which are definitely good, but two just seems to be the sweet spot.

What can we do with this information? Well, the title of this post says pretty much: if all our creatures are of the same casting cost, we can bring them all back with [scryfall]Immortal Servitude[/scryfall] and since we don’t want to go too high on the curve, two is a good spot to put all our creatures in. So, now the question is, what do we use here. Since I tend to go with monocolored decks, we can choose either white or black as our color. So, the first step is figuring out all the creatures we can use use in standard:

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EDH Pauper Deck Time: Centaur Battlemaster Voltron

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So, I couldn’t leave this topic to yesterday’s [scryfall]Bloodbraid Elf[/scryfall] as I felt I could do more with a [scryfall]Centaur Battlemaster[/scryfall], a card I’ve grown very fond of in Theros limited, although our relationship is sometimes strained as I’ve [scryfall]Spark Jolt[/scryfall]ed and even [scryfall]Shredding Winds[/scryfall]’d my own battlemaster to grow it. But hey, its won me quite a few games, sometimes basically oneshotting an opponent.

So, what can I do with one in EDH?

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EDH Pauper Deck Time: Bloodbraid Elf

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To keep our EDH games fresh, we decided to take a break from the normal games and go for Pauper next week, maybe for longer, you never know (as we don’t really plan these out). Some of the players are very excited about this and I find it hard to contain myself with my deck ideas.

The rules are simple: You can choose any uncommon creature to be your general and the deck is the normal EDH singleton deck, except that each card has to a common (or has been printed as common at some point, such as [scryfall]Doom Blade[/scryfall], which used to be common, but was moved into uncommon in M14). The number of potential generals is huge compared to the number of legendary creatures, so this is going to bring some diversity, but on the other hand, most uncommon creatures are still pretty simple and don’t necessarily have that flashy abilities or stats.

After contemplating most of the guildmages (from both Ravnicas), [scryfall]Centaur Battlemaster[/scryfall], [scryfall]Shipwreck Singer[/scryfall], [scryfall]Krosan Warchief[/scryfall] and many others, I went with [scryfall]Bloodbraid Elf[/scryfall].

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Deck Time: Return of the Suicide King

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Back in maybe ’95 or so, me and a couple of my friends took part in one of my first tournaments (see Gaming Stories in the top of the page to see my actual first tournament) in small municipality some hours drive outside of our hometown. I was playing a black and white weenie deck with [scryfall]Armageddon[/scryfall]. Don’t really remember, but it probably looked something like this:

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Deck Time: Green Aggro in Modern

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I don’t play much modern. I just lack the knowledge of the format. I’ll probably accumulate that over time, but I’m not in a real hurry. I’m much more interested in the formats with limited cardset I can master on my own. Since I don’t have that much time, I’d much rather stay with standard and block, as well as limited.

What I do know is that aggro is pretty bad in modern. Sure, there’s affinity, but that’s pretty much it. What I’ve heard from more active players is that affinity is just so good that it simply displaces all other aggro decks. Well, at least to me this means I should be playing aggro, and not affinity.

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Kiora Deck Speculation

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Note: This was written before the Born of the Gods spoilers really started, so this is very preliminary and I can’t really say whether this is a workable idea, but its fun to speculate.

Kiora, the Crashing Wave 2GU
Planeswalker — Kiora Mythic Rare
+1: Until your next turn, prevent all damage that would be dealt to and dealt by target permanent an opponent controls.
-1: Draw a card. You may play an additional land this turn.
-5: You get an emblem with “At the beginning of your end step, put a 9/9 blue Kraken creature token onto the battlefield.”
Loyalty: 2

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EDH Deck Time: Sisters of the Stone Death

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Its time to build a deck for EDH.

I played Sisters of Stone Death as my commander some time ago, but that deck was mostly just my former [scryfall]Nath of the Gilt-Leaf[/scryfall], who got usurped by the sisters after being in the deck and noticing that they were fun. So, it may have taken me almost a year, but here we are. Usurping Nath’s deck wasn’t that good an idea, because Sisters need a lot of mana, whereas Nath isn’t that greedy for an EDH deck. With a deck built around the sisters, this has a much better chance of thriving. After three games with this deck (one win), its fun to play, although not necessarily very competitive (which it doesn’t necessarily need to be).

So, lets go through the cards. If you want to take a better look at the deck, I put it up on TappedOut.

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Deck Time: Prognostic Sphinx

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A couple of days ago I took part in a THSx3 draft. Always fun. Not that I’ve had chance to do it very many times. Still… I enjoy Theros, so this was fun. Although I misread signals (or someone else was making the conclusions on my right, which lead me to falter a bit), I managed to go 2-1 with my blue-white deck of pretty eclectic good stuff. I did have two [scryfall]Griptide[/scryfall]s and two [scryfall]Wingsteed Rider[/scryfall]s. I didn’t have any [scryfall]Journey’s End[/scryfall]s, [scryfall]Gods Willing[/scryfall]s or other instant speed tricks to tricker my heroic guys. I also had only on Bestow-creature. It was a curious, but apparently fairly good, deck.

The highlight of the deck was the [scryfall]Prognostic Sphinx[/scryfall]. Granted, you can’t really rely on being able to pick it, because its a rare, but it was definitely good. I didn’t have too many answers in my deck, but if I had the Sphinx on my side, I could at least dig one up quickly. Going from Griptide to Griptide was easy and the Sphinx would just keep hitting at the same time. Makes me think if he’s usable in Standard…

I’ve seen him in some U/B-decks, especially one tested by PV on his channel on Channel Fireball. However, since I only play monocolored decks, I’m thinking about some sort of Big Blue. It probably isn’t that viable these days, but there are precedents:

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