MTG Salvation

One of my friends wanted to try out brawl, so despite having given up on the format a year ago, I'm back to try it again.

Lot of fun options, but I couldn't help myself from wanting to play Ugin. Not only is he a cool character with a powerful card, but he also gives you massive reason to play an all-colorless deck since he functions as a double-power stone calendar when your whole deck is colorless. Also it makes the deck reeaaal easy to build since you've got to run nearly 1/3 of the legal cards for it.

Because of that, the deck doesn't really have a strategic structure - it's basically just the best 36 colorless cards in standard right now, and as soon as rotation hits the deck will instantly become terrible despite ugin still being legal, because after these 36 the quality starts to drop off FAST. So the cards are basically just sorted by card type since there aren't defined roles for them in an overarching strategy per se.

Also, because there are so few options, good luck suggesting something I didn't already think about! Muahaha.

Yeah, there isn't a ton of room here for improvement.

- Cards I am unsure are worthwhile: Awakened Amalgam (just a dumb beater here), Manalith (not sure you need 7 rocks and this is the weakest in the list).

- Cards of interest: Guardians of Koilos (not sure you can combo off here but at worst it resets the counters on a 'walker or rebuys the EtB on another artifact), Wand of Vertebrae (it can rebuy used Karns?), Fountain of Renewal (a little life early, extra card late).

Yeah, guardians might actually be decent. Could reset transmogrify wand, that's pretty solid value. Not sure how amalgam will work out, but it seems...reasonably efficient? I mean it's probably a hill giant T4, but it could pretty easily grow to be like 2/3 of a dakkon blackblade, which isn't toooo bad for 4 (or 2 under ugin). Wouldn't even be close in commander, but in brawl I feel like an efficient beater that scales with the game could be at least ok. Especially when I need to defend my commander.

Manalith = powerstone = dragon's hoard = chromatic lantern...I'll see how I feel about the ramp. The fact that they're essentially free under ugin is a pretty nice bonus, but it does mean I've got a lot of cards dedicated to mana in a deck that doesn't have a real high power level, which is annoying. I'll probably be leaning a lot on the commander to provide the value I need. Biggest bummer is that there's no reasonable way to get him out earlier than T5 without any <=2 cmc rocks in standard for him. I do think it's worth ramping twice (or more) before he hits, though, since it means we can play a 3-4 cmc spell alongside him T5...so we'll see. Hopefully we'll get the meta together sometime next week and I can start trying it out.

Quote from DirkGently »

Yeah, guardians might actually be decent. Could reset transmogrify wand, that's pretty solid value. Not sure how amalgam will work out, but it seems...reasonably efficient? I mean it's probably a hill giant T4, but it could pretty easily grow to be like 2/3 of a dakkon blackblade, which isn't toooo bad for 4 (or 2 under ugin). Wouldn't even be close in commander, but in brawl I feel like an efficient beater that scales with the game could be at least ok. Especially when I need to defend my commander.

Manalith = powerstone = dragon's hoard = chromatic lantern...I'll see how I feel about the ramp. The fact that they're essentially free under ugin is a pretty nice bonus, but it does mean I've got a lot of cards dedicated to mana in a deck that doesn't have a real high power level, which is annoying. I'll probably be leaning a lot on the commander to provide the value I need. Biggest bummer is that there's no reasonable way to get him out earlier than T5 without any <=2 cmc rocks in standard for him. I do think it's worth ramping twice (or more) before he hits, though, since it means we can play a 3-4 cmc spell alongside him T5...so we'll see. Hopefully we'll get the meta together sometime next week and I can start trying it out.

Technically Powerstone is good because you can animate it with Karn, the Great Creator, slam a Helm of the Host on it, and start going ham :p. Is that good? I have no idea, but it is extremely funny. Otherwise on further reflection you are probably right and if anything Manalith is "better" than the others because there is no badness that happens if it gets ninjaed (sorry, pirated) by Hostage Taker or Admiral Beckett Brass or Hijack, wheras an opponent stealing Lantern or Horde might lead to them getting extra value.