MTG Salvation

Souls of the Faultless was the first thing that came to mind. That thing deters SO MUCH it's almost not even funny.

I play Athreos myself, and one thing I've found useful is having something like Phyrexian Reclamation on the table. It tends to make itself oddly useful by making itself useless - by making people not want to pay for Athreos (since I'd get the cards back I want anyway).

Also Martyr's Cause is probably a good for trigger-heavy Athreos deck.

I have one or two that might fit the bill... taking a silly deck idea and making it still tick is kind of my jam.

Trying to think which of mine are specifically 'as good as they can be'. Mind you, some of these might border on 'jank', though that's more dependant on card choice than theme IMO.

Athreos, God of Passage discard/sacrifice/endless recursion - but with everything in the deck being 3 CMC or less. Very fluid, very coherent deck that does a lot of incremental grind in a turn to attrition people to death. Despite the self-imposed limitation, there's more cards the deck could play in the above context than one can. Arguably more efficient because it never has a 6cmc card in hand it can't play.

Arjun, the Shifting Flame 'card draw/hand size matters'. Pretty much centers around just those, veering more on the aggressive side rather than control. Many, many things that get ridiculous once you start drawing through 1/6th of your deck once or twice a turn.

Thromok the Insatiable token 'combo' - making a big Thromok, Flingin it to opponent's faces is the core of the deck. And every variant thereof. While it possibly can be made powerful, it's sometimes pretty fragile to wraths as you need to get to 7+ tokens to really get anywhere with Thromok itself.

Zedruu the Greathearted voltron. Eeyup. Instead of the obvious 'mean gifts' or pillowfort... this Zedruu intends to go to town, by virtue of fueling up the pseudo-enchantress by donating auras on Zedruu to opponents (they still stay on Zedruu which tends to trip up newer players).

Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit, monowhite blink/reincarnation deck. Very resilient, and very fun to pilot... started from the thought as I just pondered how much only white can do with such effects... turns out, a fair amount of cards for such a purpose has been printed over the years.

...Yep, gonna build that Omnath. With the goal of 'make all the elemental tokens, blink Omnath a few times' as the stupidest, jankiest wincon.

The second ability being mostly gravy that's nice to have by that point in the game.

So I was braining Ephara flying/token deck just moments before I saw Kykar, Wind's Fury. If red had more to offer to 'I intend to beat down with small flying creatures, most of which tokens'... I was heavily tempted to do a swap.

'Course the other problem is that my Zedruu is kinda awesome and I try to not have multiple decks of same color combos for just sheer logistics' sake. Sometimes I fail, but... I try?

...though the moment an Azorius legend comes out that screms to me 'create a deck', that swap might be rather more likely and I'll find myself with two Jeskai decks.

Arjun, the Shifting Flame Maro/draw deck, for relatively obvious reasons.

And my Zegana 'play creatures to be able to play more creatures' deck that wants to pick and choose from a huge toolbox in hand. Usually not to the point where it would matter hugely, but the deck has a tendency to draw a fair bit and on a two-color ramp deck it has pretty much zero opportunity cost.

Zedruu Voltron where some of the stuff are Empyrial Armor, Righteous Authority and the like.

But I think those are the only ones where I have it. Most of my decks don't even draw enough to keep a consistent full grip, let alone have any use for having more than seven in hand any given time.

As a more general thing: remember to pack your removals regardless. There will always be stuff to get rid of, even if everyone is playing precon-level, and if a more dedicated combo deck is on the table, the more removal you have the bigger chunk of them you can dedicate to the player wanting to combo off. I am plenty guilty of building a deck, playing a game, and then realizing I have three counterspells and couple of path variants in the entirety my UW deck...

The usual answer of "extended borrowing.dec" also works. If you're playing with your opponent's stuff, you're scaling to the table naturally.

That... is a really open-ended question. Most any commander can make an 'interesting' deck that's fun.

What do you like as far as colors, themes, game mechanics, playstyles, tempo approaches go? Let's narrow it down and then folks can help you find "the fun one".

Extra turns are annoying. Toss in a Stranglehold for the expression on your friend's face. Or a Possibility Storm to mess any gameplans up if you're just ramping and playing big things.

Karador, Ghost Chieftain tokens would be my recently-built suggestion. With relatively minor grave recursion besides Karador himself, most of the deck is dedicated to creatures that bring more creatures with them, and milking those for benefit(life/cards/Blood Artist effects) until critical mass of creatures + anthems is achieved. The deck ends up being nicely resilient to both wraths and grave hate (basically the opponents need both to halt my progress for long), as unlike most Karador decks I am not overly reliant on my graveyard, but unlike a lot of token decks I have recursion in my command zone...

Or in other words, Karador is my backup, not the main game plan.

My meta has a bit much of 'tutor for 2-card combo and win' to my tastes, but I'll fully admit my bias towards semi-casual midrange and aggro-style 'duking it out'.

Quote from ilovesaprolings »

Quote from FoxOfWar »

I built a deck around the pretty-effective Boros 2-drops a la Akroan Hoplite, Honored Crop-Captain, Swiftblade Vindicator and Sky Terror + anthems + the multitude of white cards that get 2-drops back from the grave.

Looks nteresting, can i see a list?

I don't have a list online, but I can give a quick rundown what to look for: said Boros 2-drops, and the white effects that get a 2-or-smaller-cmc (or 3 or less, 2 or less power, etc.) back from the graveyard. There's surprisingly plentiful amount of both around by this point. Then just add anthems to make the punch bigger... and... well, that's about it. Other than that deck doesn't have anything too interesting, most of the rest is just the usual draw/removal/support.

Usually not, but there is the occasional deck I remember fondly and might return to one day, since after a few years said deck idea would have a lot of new toys to play with as noted above.

If I retire a deck, it's probably for a reason related to how little I play it - be it because it's underpowered, not fun to pilot, not fun for my opponents, plays too close to another deck of mine, plain boring/streamlined, or I just have a better commander idea for same color combo. I try to keep to one-per-color-combo. (Even then, I have two vastly different from each other Mardu and Esper decks because just too many tasty things.)

I have had the occasional case where I took apart a deck I had just built and thus "wasted" the money put into it, but given that the cards I actually have to buy for decks these days are pretty much old oddballs we don't have a copy of, it's not much of a monetary loss. (I admit that sometimes I buy a card just because I can't find a copy of random Mirrodin uncommon despite being pretty sure there's several floating around somewhere...)

Rattlesnakes are fun.

"So I'm not saying you can't cast that Silence the Believers, but..."

A lot of them get closer (getting new cards at increasing intervals), but not as long as we keep getting new shinies, no. Some decks are at a point where it's one or two cards a year that'll change, though.

Though it's rare more because of relatively narrow themes, not because newer "better" cards don't exist if I wanted to just go for the win with my decks. I have a handful of older decks that are so honed within their theme that unless more cards of pretty narrow category come up, they won't get much.

Granted, War of the Spark proved to be an exception to this. All but two decks got something, as a combination of good cards for the decks... and just generally cool stuff I wanted to find a home for (think Parhelion II).

It's been one of the cornerstones of my Prime Speaker Zegana 'spam creatures to be able to spam creatures' deck since its' inception, and it's partially in the deck's name for a reason.

Much like Primeval Bounty, it's a very dangerous thing for opponents to leave be for any amount of time.

Also puppy and birdie tokens.

Aggressive small creatures. They get a lot more early damage through than they should.

I built a deck around the pretty-effective Boros 2-drops a la Akroan Hoplite, Honored Crop-Captain, Swiftblade Vindicator and Sky Terror + anthems + the multitude of white cards that get 2-drops back from the grave. It's effective because no one expects aggro in the average table, especially aggro that doesn't fold to a single wrath. The creatures don't seem like much, but being so small it feels like no one wants to 'waste' their removal on them either, so folks end up on the receiving end of a lot of 3-, 4- and 5-power beats. I tend to be only classified as a threat when I've taken out the one player most likely to drop big creatures later, and playing suicidal aggro is sometimes really fun.

But even outside a dedicated deck, early effective creatures can get a lot of chip damage in while folks are casting their manarocks and other ramp. I don't mind including some 2-3 drops in every deck that don't necessarily advance the "grand plan", that are just efficient early beats.