MTG Salvation

As others have said, instead of using card slots to lean even harder on your two card win con, use the slots to add more ways to win. It's a cute way to win but obviously your meta has caught on and is Swording or Pathing those cards intentionally. It's dead, Jim.

Yeah this is pretty degenerate and a ton of combinations would have to be banned right off the top for it to get any kind of traction.

As others have said, the instigator of mana destruction thing is pretty bizarre. And the six minute turn is kind of tricky - do you clock everybody's turns? You basically have to do that to be consistent, otherwise the rule won't come to mind until someone is a few minutes into an overlong turn and people figure "gee we should have timed this" and then just ham it as far as how much time has passed?

I know the question is pertaining to which deck to play (probably 5C Slivers and friends) but the challenge aspect seems pretty questionable in general

Quote from Mergatroid_Jones »

The only reasons to pay attention to these prices are (A) you are buying into standard, or (B) you are trying to get cash value out of cards that you open.

Well, or if you're trying to respect your money or spend wisely or support products that provide benefit to the game they represent. The game isn't healthy if only Standard is healthy!

When I play Magic, especially Commander, "winning the game" is pretty low on the priority list, coming after practicing the deck, practicing good play, learning the opponent's deck, keeping good conversation, thinking about how to improve, making a mental note of foils I'm missing and plays that I was impressed by, etc., etc. - I barely notice that a victory or defeat has gone by and since I'm always having fun when I'm playing cards, I guess that means they were "fun defeats". That said, if I play against decks that are a little too Winter Orby and I wind up not playing Magic at all, that can knock me out of the groove and start to feel like a waste of time.

I really like Overburden and don't see it mentioned here, I have a suicide Nekusar deck that just resolves stuff like that and Tainted Æther while Havoc Festival and Nek's card burn ability to chew on people

I've actually played it a little bit in dredgey combo EDH decks and it works fine as long as you're doing the G/B classic Buried Alive, Entomb, Deathrite Shaman, Life from the Loam, Golgari Grave-Troll dealio but I'd be curious to see the approach a monoblack would take. It certainly loses some validity without those Golgari pieces, I will say that.

It's pretty tricky to nail down, but essentially I try to make the deck almost 50% mana, with a quarter of that being non-land sources - so like 38 lands and 12 accelerants, which can be anything from mana rocks to Kodama's Reach effects depending on how the deck is set up. Then I try to balance the speed - basically for every land that's going to enter tapped I try to provide something that will bump my mana ahead - so if I use a Temple of Plenty then I try to throw in something like Talisman of Unity, so that on average I'm "on curve" while still getting the benefits of scries and manlands and stuff. I don't know how effective something like that actually is or if it's helping my mana or anything, but I've stuck by it for a few years and it makes things feel more steady, in my opinion.

After that I just use the little pie-and-wheel graph on Tapped Out to try and line up my fixing. So no algebra here for you, just a list of steps to try and follow that I always use to make sense of my mana

Masterpieces and double Heart of Kirans notwithstanding (as they should be) even if your box is completely perfect you're still going to fall below 100$.

There's no set contents intended for legacy, modern, commander, pauper, vintage, or any other format aside from Standard, so you're essentially voting with your wallet and saying "forget the rest of the game, I don't want anything but Standard content!"

And the hottest card in the set, which you have a 1 in 51,840 chance of opening, is an alt-art Chalice of the Void at 100$ - AKA breaking even

Compare with KTK - fetches were good for everyone, there was popular new commanders for EDH, pauper got some good tribal support, the chase cards were just regular rares in foil, Ascendancys became total staples, cards like Treasure Cruise were COMMON, we got wedge tris - it's only been a few years since Khans and the quality has slipped depressingly low.

If people keep buying sets like this then nothing's going to change, so I honestly feel like I'm missing something. What's the appeal of AER?

As others have said, you've spent several hundred dollars doing it the hard way - you could have a handful of expedition Polluted Deltas by now instead. Booster boxes are intended for businesses to sell pack by pack over the course of a few days or weeks, the idea of a consumer buying the whole thing for themselves just never made sense to me. You wouldn't go to a convenience store and grab an entire display case of chocolate bars or mints and buy it all on the spot, right?

Beyond that, you can get guaranteed value by just spending this money on things you want. If you had the choice of doing your own groceries or just handing the cash over in exchange for "some amount" of "maybe what you want", what do you think you'd pick? I've got pages of masterpieces by now but WOTC hasn't made a dollar off of me with KLD because I don't support the set.

tl;dr you're being silly with your money and this makes it hard to sympathize

RTR is really fun, with the guildgates and guildmages it was always pretty consistent to set up guild themed decks. Otherwise I'd go for either OG Innistrad or if you have to, SOI because that plane had really quality tribal support

If others are curious and don't want to go through that old thread - WOTC didn't print the older cards, they gathered them up from the secondary market and repackaged them. Figured I'd clarify because the implications of P9 printed during Zendikar would be pretty insane

If a mod sees, this can probably get locked

Now that we know three of the mythics are Griselbrand, Domri Rade and Snapcaster Mage it's pretty funny to see how optimistic everybody was. Who knows, maybe they shifted Stoic Angel up and we know four of the mythics!

After reading the thread I'm really surprised how many people here don't really know how the archetype works - the OP still seems active so I'll try to be super brief

You're just playing a ramp deck and using some incentives to give you enough space to meet your win con - if you play regular Azusa, Lost but Seeking then everybody knows to go after you and stop you from resolving Craterhoof Behemoth - but if you play a group hug deck, you're still ramping, you're just also providing your acceleration to the rest of the board, as well as pillow-forting up.

This means for players 2-4 there's a bit of a logic game - why would they spend resources (because of prison effects) to go after the one person who's actually helping them when they could use less to go after someone who isn't? Ideally, and usually, this works the way you expect and you go on to have access to your acceleration, without having to worry about interference.

So the construction means you can keep, and consistently cast your big game-enders, while not "wasting" card slots and mana on early game protection/value - "staying alive" isn't on the to-do list anymore so you get to allocate more of your "budget" on getting the big win

Personally I prefer group slug and I think if you're a devoted mono black player then hug might not be your game, but I just wanted to chime in and explain away some of the weird misnomers that showed up in this thread

Sure, responding to spell casting is part of the game's mechanics, that's not really the point I was aiming to make - I'm just meaning to point out that every other competitive format handles problem creatures just fine and almost all of them with a smaller suite of removal options than Duel Commander (is there a banned removal card in the format?) so it's a testament to why the format isn't actually going to be taken seriously any time soon - Duel Commander can't claim to be grown-up Magic and then at the same time fret over three mana do nothing with a side of maybe deal big damage next turn, that's just having the cake and eating it too. Besides, Vial is used as the commander! He's not even a surprise, you're literally doing your opening turns and mulligans fully aware that in three turns you'll have to answer a Vial Smasher. That's staggeringly difficult to screw up.