Hey Gashnaw. Honestly, while I typically like your posts, your asks here are too specific for me to get excited about making suggestions. The thing I like about tabletop (and I never left it, only branching out to edh after 24 yrs...two years ago), is being able to build freely with playsets of commons to mythics, from straight janky to carefully layered. I build to what I consider fun mechanics and themes without worrying about rarity. Maybe just let the deck theme brew itself by putting together things you would like to explore without restriction of cost and rarity? You can always sub ideas later before purchasing cards you don’t already own. I recently built a 5-color deck revolving around abusing rainbow themes like Maelstrom Archangel, Knight of New Alara, Fusion Elemental, and All Suns’ Dawn. In addition, I wanted to keep some Alara Blades from a recently broken-apart deck, play with some ultimatums (Cruel and Violent), and I had never played with Pernicious Deed before. Here’s what I put together.
Some of the lands and critters are not budget (fortunately I sprung them from my collection), but this is what the deck shaped up as. Is it going to work in my tabletop group? I have no idea, but I’m itching to find out. For me, it was just scratching itches I’ve wanted to try, and that’s how most of my decks start.
Another one was a Boros-themed deck that first tried to use as many Lightning Helix effects as possible, and also torch the board with Blasphemous Act and Spitemare-type creatures and Hissing Iguanar. I ended up splitting the two themes, but both decks are still together and the damage reflection deck is possibly my most powerful synergy, now RGB, using mostly commons, uncommons, and bulk rares. All three started from a whim, and just putting interesting cards together with some Gatherer research.
This is not a suggestion based on power. I personally play with less counter, more bounce/mass removal, but that’s personal taste. With your Rhystic Study playset, bounce cards like Aetherspout in 2-HG could be devastating to a critter player, and fairly easy to get to with red acceleration like Seething Song, so you could stop an aggro attack pretty fast. Cards like Polymorphist’s Jest and Curse of the Swine give some nice mass-removal ways around troublesome creature assaults, making your locusts more than squash bugs. Them and Desert could be quite troublesome with some of blue’s removal.
So I settled on the list below, I have it assembled, and I’m already noticing some trends. First, mana floods in fast with the ramp, reliably getting my bigs in ahead of curve. Horde of Notions is often the second creature in, meaning the color diversity is fine. Rite of Replication is a game breaker, already raping Magmatic Force, Celestial Force, Greenwarden of Murasa, Dread, and Fusion Elemental. I’ve seen the Vigor/Chain Reaction combo come up twice already. Torrent Elemental will win games, at least against my group. Earthquake/Hostility is godly, even more so when Purity is also out. Finally, Baleful Force and Cyclonic Rift are 100% deserving of the hype I’ve seen.
Can’t wait to test this on my friends, it’s going to be too fun and a half. Woot.
One real card draw card sems low to me...
Als the other parts seem good.
Hi Thijs1301, you raise a good point that I don’t have a snappy answer for, as one of the two source decks had Syphon Mind in the list along with Necropotence. It took some time to finally remove the Syphons to fit other things. This is basically a test to see if impact from synergies can overcome draw’s power, and it may not (even in my lower-powered meta). This is the part where Prid3 might chide me for being too greedy.
If you don’t mind, what would you remove personally to fit draw in (assume four slots) if this were your decklist?
So a bit of an update. Shuffled some cards around to re-make my Vintage discard/land destruct Dark Depths dueling deck. So I combined my two Gray Merchant decks, and managed to fit my two biggest synergies while still fitting Torment of Hailfire, Liliana’s Specter and support cards. Woot.
Tempo in multiplayer is more egocentric... so it's much easier to focus on upping your own tempo than slowing everybody else down.
And just to make sure I understand here, you are referring to stuff like blowing everyone else’s board up with a card that chain-synergizes with numerous cards of yours on the way out, to deal massive damage, gains lots of life, and spit out huge numbers of tokens at one time? Something like that?
That makes sense, and is certainly in line with deck advice you give most people. In lower-powered metas, or at least mine, that line of play is not generally preferred for any number of reasons not worth discussing here. Without going infinite or combo = win, is there a lower-powered, more meta-appropriate line of design? I get this goes against your normal tendencies, but I am interested in your opinion here. Is it something like a strong synergy that just happens to be not infinite. I realize the Gitaxias example above is not infinite, but it’s a harsh example wherein everyone is screwed immediately.
Something like building casually and then playing for the win as hard as you can. I’m fine finding that balance for myself for my group, but does this even enter anyone else’s calculus, or am I the only person who cares about the fun factor of the people I value more than the game?
I ask this not to be snarky, but because this is clearly aggravating to everyone who comments on deck designs (most often mine) only to have the person intentionally (most often me) pick a less-powerful move. Believe me, I’m not tone deaf or oblivious about that. Maybe by better understanding levels of tempo in MP (if any such notion exists), I won’t have to ask for feedback. I’ve learned a lot by posting the last two years, and I appreciate the feedback when I get it, hell I really enjoy seeing wide variety of ways people can screw their enemies instantly. I truly love the ideas but I feel constrained by my group’s inability to keep up with my appetite for design advancement for a host of reasons. I can literally build myself out of the stable play group group I co-founded a quarter century ago. I value my friends more than my deck performance, so I don’t make changes lightly. Does this make sense?
If I joined a new group I’d definitely go bonkers on broken stuff. It looks like a lot of fun.
I’ve been reading articles on tempo today, and it turns out that I tend to have a good understanding of it based on the way I build 1v1 decks. In MP, however, it seems to me tempo is much like card advantage and drawing wherein your conglomerated opponents have a much greater net tempo than you. They are playing more spells on average than you are and generating more mana than you each turn, something quite dangerous to you if those moves are all directed against you.
So what does tempo mean to you in MP, and how do you take advantage of it to generate a win? Is it more likely to be generated by cancelling out multiple moves with a sweeper, or are there other ways to take advantage of it in an MP game?
Thanks, guys, for the feedback! I appreciate it. Absolutely I’m still in the game if I keep those blades in. With Deed, spot removal, Knight of New Alara, and All Suns’ Dawn, that’s the potential for making quite the mess of the boardstate. That being said, I’ve actually been looking at swapping out some cards for fixing. My thought was to do the following as I’ve thought about options.
Here, I know I will reliably get five colors with five mana a decently high % of the time as I’ve played this land color-saturation successfully many times. I could make it 4x Darksteel Ingots instead of Dark Rits for steady resilient color ramp, but the Dark Rits accelerate faster into the Ultimatums and Deeds.
However I slice the mana, the goal here is to keep the shard blades so that they can go crazy with Knight of New Alara (who will also pump the higher curve critters.). To take them out is to nullify half the reason for this deck in the first place.
Is it vulnerable to sweepers? Sure, all creature decks are. But to say blades are obsolete because they can be swept is potentially as laughable as saying that non-black creatures are obsolete because they die to Doomblade. In non-spikish metas, one can certainly plan a creature deck around sweepers. I know that because I do it all the time successfully. That’s part of why I have the All Suns’ Dawn and Cruel Ultimatums, giving me lots of creature recursion.
Specifically, if my friends sweep 4cmc, that saves me using my Deeds because their creature decks just got wasted, too. There are a ton of aggro horde decks in my group. Ergo, they rarely do that. I totally understand you wouldn’t know that from my list, but that’s the background. Even if they do, I can Dark Rit, All Sun’s Dawn, then start casting the army back, then curve into the 5cmc cards. And the mana curve with the admittedly slower etb-tapped lands is easily sufficient to hit those 5cmc creatures without much lag.
Certainly, if I find myself wishing I had a Darksteel Ingot, then I can swap the Dark Rits out, but I’ll have that resolved via gold-fishing before it sees my friends. The Ingots or Rituals here are better than Relics or Signets because I’m using Pernicious Deed.
Re-working the Maelstrom Archangel idea here, I’ve come up with a radically different idea. Many thanks to feedback so far, as this latest idea is heavily based on that feedback. So the deck idea is called Skittles because, unlike Skithryx mbc decks, this one uses the rainbow concept throughout, from the smallest little dudes through the highest cmc spells. Something like a tagline of “Suck the rainbow, taste the rainbow!”
I’m posting this here because while I have the ultimatums in as first test for Maelstrom Archangel, I am concerned that enemies will stymie their use effectively by dealing with the angels, and it will take too lomg with the present list to get 7 colored mana. My meta being less-than-spikish will only let me get away with so much before I’m being too greedy.
Another option would be to have only one of each bringer mentioned above, one Chromanticore, and four Angel of Despair. But I’m honestly thinking that restricting my max curve to five is the best option here. Thoughts? I’m personally leaning toward the Ultimatums replaced by the 2 of each bringer and 2 Chromanticore.
Oh, right, I did not see the Dark Depths. It was listed under "Spells" in the original decklist. In that case Vampire Hexmage is great!
By the way, thanks for the feedback. I really looked hard at Geralf’s Messenger and Phyrexian Obliterator. And though they aren’t really what I’m going for with the deck since they would supplant the demigods and Bloodghast slots, they really are fantastic cards. Cheers.
Of the three games I’ve played so far with this latest list, I’ve closed two of them out with a Marit Lage token, with the Hexmage cracking Dark Depths. There have also been a win and two kills using Gray Merchant, but all three games have been mine, so the deck is performing well. The only thing left for new kills, realistically is a Demigod of Revenge aggro assualt with three of the four triggered from the graveyard, but they serve well for devotion count regardless.
@Dunharrow: Well, I usually am the aggro player, ramping into the big threats reasonably fast for my group. This is why I scratch my head at my friends not packing more answers. It’s not like they don’t know what’s coming. All but one of my decks have 30+ creatures. Most decks have about 15-20 hard answers, whereas Zegana has about 25 answers and 25 creatures. I make sure all the decks can sweep, but also deal with spot needs, and seek to have answers for all the card types somewhere in the deck.
@Reaper9889: oh yeah, Dustbowl is indeed. I have that in my Dune vorthos build.
@BaronCappucino: So the numbers above probably seem anemic, but this is stocked high for my group. I get I can’t stop everything, and sometimes I do get beaten. For example, I got hammered one game by Varolz fueled by a Phyrexian Dreadnought, making him massive. Next game, lol. By comparison, the same person that had the Varolz deck also has a Selvala deck where I have not seen him ever destroy anything I can recall. He’s got some good threats in there, but seems to like trick plays. Late in a game, I stymied his untargetable Blazing Archon with Sandwurm Convergence that he never even indicated he had anything in his deck to deal with.
@Macabre: I actually tend to put in fewer artifact/enchantments (I do very selectively) because I pack mass destruction specifically for them and instead use creature and spell based ramp so I’m not beholden to keep those card types on the table. I don’t run excessive sweepers, but I do include them to get more than incremental card advantage and deal with multiple threats at a time. I guess I just have a strange group of friends, but that’s why I was asking if many folks out there build as lazy. Shoot, if I start playing stores, I’ll have to overhaul my decks, too, to adjust to the new meta.
2 Esper Stormblade
2 Grixis Grimblade
2 Jund Hackblade
2 Bant Sureblade
2 Naya Hushblade
4 Knight of New Alara
4 Maelstrom Archangel
4 Fusion Elemental
4 Cruel Ultimatum
4 Violent Ultimatum
4 Bant Charm
4 All Suns’ Dawn
3 Pernicious Deed
Lands:
5 Alara Tri-lands (1 each)
5 Vivid lands (1 each)
4 Reflecting Pool
4 Exotic Orchard
1 Volrath’s Stronghold
1 Azorious Chancery
1 Gruul Turf
1 Selesnya Sanctuary
1 Rakdos Carnarium
1 Dimir Aqueduct
Some of the lands and critters are not budget (fortunately I sprung them from my collection), but this is what the deck shaped up as. Is it going to work in my tabletop group? I have no idea, but I’m itching to find out. For me, it was just scratching itches I’ve wanted to try, and that’s how most of my decks start.
Another one was a Boros-themed deck that first tried to use as many Lightning Helix effects as possible, and also torch the board with Blasphemous Act and Spitemare-type creatures and Hissing Iguanar. I ended up splitting the two themes, but both decks are still together and the damage reflection deck is possibly my most powerful synergy, now RGB, using mostly commons, uncommons, and bulk rares. All three started from a whim, and just putting interesting cards together with some Gatherer research.
What themes interest you?
Bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs...
I’m sorry, is this bugging you?
Counters are fine, too, though.
Can’t wait to test this on my friends, it’s going to be too fun and a half. Woot.
1 Horde of Notions
Creatures:
1 Tidal Force
1 Baleful Force
1 Magmatic Force
1 Celestial Force
1 Verdant Force
1 Dread
1 Guile
1 Vigor
1 Purity
1 Hostility
1 Embodiment of Spring
1 Fertilid
1 Spark Trooper
1 Ashling the Pilgrim
1 Incandescent Soulstoke
1 Smokebraider
1 Flamekin Harbinger
1 Reveillark
1 Bane of Progress
1 Shriekmaw
1 Ingot Chewer
1 Fusion Elemental
1 Flickerwisp
1 Mulldrifter
1 Animar, Soul of Elements
1 Slithermuse
1 Spitebellows
1 Wispmare
1 Nova Chaser
1 Supreme Exemplar
1 Soul of the Harvest
1 Wolf of Devil's Breach
1 Greenwarden of Murasa
1 Torrent Elemental
1 Walker of the Grove
1 Mirror Entity
1 Meadowboon
1 Darksteel Ingot
1 Expedition Map
Sorceries:
1 Merciless Eviction
1 Austere Command
1 Chain Reaction
1 Creeping Renaissance
1 Decimate
1 All Suns' Dawn
1 Farseek
1 Rampant Growth
1 Sylvan Scrying
1 Kodama's Reach
1 Cultivate
1 Journey of Discovery
1 Vindicate
1 Wargate
1 Rite of Replication
1 Hurricane
1 Earthquake
1 Torment of Hailfire
1 Whirlwind
Instants:
1 Beast Within
1 Cyclonic Rift
1 Biomass Mutation
1 Crackling Doom
Lands:
1 Tropical Island
1 Volcanic Island
1 Bayou
1 Scrubland
1 Plateau
2 Island
2 Mountain
2 Plains
2 Swamp
2 Forest
1 Vivid Meadow
1 Vivid Crag
1 Vivid Marsh
1 Vivid Creek
1 Vivid Grove
1 Primal Beyond
1 Cavern of Souls
1 City of Brass
1 Rupture Spire
1 Shimmering Grotto
1 Command Tower
1 Reflecting Pool
1 Exotic Orchard
1 Forbidden Orchard
1 Transguild Promenade
1 Undiscovered Paradise
1 Grand Coliseum
1 Dimir Aqueduct
1 Selesnya Sanctuary
1 Gruul Turf
1 Azorius Chancery
1 Rakdos Carnarium
Thanks, GFireflyE, loved your input. This may become my favorite edh.
If you don’t mind, what would you remove personally to fit draw in (assume four slots) if this were your decklist?
Devotion Kills synergy 1: Gray Merchant, Demigod of Revenge, Bloodghast, Buried Alive.
Token synergy 2: Nest of Scarabs, BSZ, Skinrender.
Both synergies blend well along with ToH and the support cards. It’s not insta-win, but it’s going to win games in my group, for sure.
4 Bloodghast
4 Liliana’s Specter
4 Skinrender
4 Gray Merchant of Asphodel
4 Demigod of Revenge
4 Dark Ritual
4 Nest of Scarabs
4 Black Sun’s Zenith
4 Torment of Hailfire
2 Buried Alive
2 Recurring Nightmare
1 Necropotence
24 Swamp
Something like building casually and then playing for the win as hard as you can. I’m fine finding that balance for myself for my group, but does this even enter anyone else’s calculus, or am I the only person who cares about the fun factor of the people I value more than the game?
I ask this not to be snarky, but because this is clearly aggravating to everyone who comments on deck designs (most often mine) only to have the person intentionally (most often me) pick a less-powerful move. Believe me, I’m not tone deaf or oblivious about that. Maybe by better understanding levels of tempo in MP (if any such notion exists), I won’t have to ask for feedback. I’ve learned a lot by posting the last two years, and I appreciate the feedback when I get it, hell I really enjoy seeing wide variety of ways people can screw their enemies instantly. I truly love the ideas but I feel constrained by my group’s inability to keep up with my appetite for design advancement for a host of reasons. I can literally build myself out of the stable play group group I co-founded a quarter century ago. I value my friends more than my deck performance, so I don’t make changes lightly. Does this make sense?
If I joined a new group I’d definitely go bonkers on broken stuff. It looks like a lot of fun.
So what does tempo mean to you in MP, and how do you take advantage of it to generate a win? Is it more likely to be generated by cancelling out multiple moves with a sweeper, or are there other ways to take advantage of it in an MP game?
2 Esper Stormblade
2 Grixis Grimblade
2 Jund Hackblade
2 Bant Sureblade
2 Naya Hushblade
4 Knight of New Alara
4 Maelstrom Archangel
4 Fusion Elemental
4 Dark Ritual
4 Cruel Ultimatum
4 Bant Charm
4 All Suns’ Dawn
3 Pernicious Deed
Lands:
5 Alara tri-lands (1 each)
5 Vivid lands (1 each)
4 Reflecting Pool
4 Exotic Orchard
1 Volrath’s Stronghold
1 Azorious Chancery
1 Gruul Turf
1 Selesnya Sanctuary
1 Rakdos Carnarium
1 Dimir Aqueduct
Here, I know I will reliably get five colors with five mana a decently high % of the time as I’ve played this land color-saturation successfully many times. I could make it 4x Darksteel Ingots instead of Dark Rits for steady resilient color ramp, but the Dark Rits accelerate faster into the Ultimatums and Deeds.
However I slice the mana, the goal here is to keep the shard blades so that they can go crazy with Knight of New Alara (who will also pump the higher curve critters.). To take them out is to nullify half the reason for this deck in the first place.
Is it vulnerable to sweepers? Sure, all creature decks are. But to say blades are obsolete because they can be swept is potentially as laughable as saying that non-black creatures are obsolete because they die to Doomblade. In non-spikish metas, one can certainly plan a creature deck around sweepers. I know that because I do it all the time successfully. That’s part of why I have the All Suns’ Dawn and Cruel Ultimatums, giving me lots of creature recursion.
Specifically, if my friends sweep 4cmc, that saves me using my Deeds because their creature decks just got wasted, too. There are a ton of aggro horde decks in my group. Ergo, they rarely do that. I totally understand you wouldn’t know that from my list, but that’s the background. Even if they do, I can Dark Rit, All Sun’s Dawn, then start casting the army back, then curve into the 5cmc cards. And the mana curve with the admittedly slower etb-tapped lands is easily sufficient to hit those 5cmc creatures without much lag.
Certainly, if I find myself wishing I had a Darksteel Ingot, then I can swap the Dark Rits out, but I’ll have that resolved via gold-fishing before it sees my friends. The Ingots or Rituals here are better than Relics or Signets because I’m using Pernicious Deed.
Re-working the Maelstrom Archangel idea here, I’ve come up with a radically different idea. Many thanks to feedback so far, as this latest idea is heavily based on that feedback. So the deck idea is called Skittles because, unlike Skithryx mbc decks, this one uses the rainbow concept throughout, from the smallest little dudes through the highest cmc spells. Something like a tagline of “Suck the rainbow, taste the rainbow!”
I’m posting this here because while I have the ultimatums in as first test for Maelstrom Archangel, I am concerned that enemies will stymie their use effectively by dealing with the angels, and it will take too lomg with the present list to get 7 colored mana. My meta being less-than-spikish will only let me get away with so much before I’m being too greedy.
2 Esper Stormblade
2 Grixis Grimblade
2 Jund Hackblade
2 Bant Sureblade
2 Naya Hushblade
4 Knight of New Alara
4 Maelstrom Archangel
4 Fusion Elemental
4 Cruel Ultimatum
4 Violent Ultimatum
4 Bant Charm
4 All Suns’ Dawn
3 Pernicious Deed
Lands used:
5 Alara tri-lands (1 each)
5 Vivid lands (1 each)
4 Reflecting Pool
4 Exotic Orchard
1 Volrath’s Stronghold
1 Azorious Chancery
1 Gruul Turf
1 Selesnya Sanctuary
1 Rakdos Carnarium
1 Dimir Aqueduct
Alternate changes if playtesting doesn’t pan out for using ultimatums
-4 Violent Ultimatum
-4 Cruel Ultimatum
+2 Chromanticore
+2 Bringer of the Black Dawn
+2 Bringer of the Blue Dawn
+2 Bringer of the Red Dawn
Another option would be to have only one of each bringer mentioned above, one Chromanticore, and four Angel of Despair. But I’m honestly thinking that restricting my max curve to five is the best option here. Thoughts? I’m personally leaning toward the Ultimatums replaced by the 2 of each bringer and 2 Chromanticore.
By the way, thanks for the feedback. I really looked hard at Geralf’s Messenger and Phyrexian Obliterator. And though they aren’t really what I’m going for with the deck since they would supplant the demigods and Bloodghast slots, they really are fantastic cards. Cheers.
@Reaper9889: oh yeah, Dustbowl is indeed. I have that in my Dune vorthos build.
@BaronCappucino: So the numbers above probably seem anemic, but this is stocked high for my group. I get I can’t stop everything, and sometimes I do get beaten. For example, I got hammered one game by Varolz fueled by a Phyrexian Dreadnought, making him massive. Next game, lol. By comparison, the same person that had the Varolz deck also has a Selvala deck where I have not seen him ever destroy anything I can recall. He’s got some good threats in there, but seems to like trick plays. Late in a game, I stymied his untargetable Blazing Archon with Sandwurm Convergence that he never even indicated he had anything in his deck to deal with.
@Macabre: I actually tend to put in fewer artifact/enchantments (I do very selectively) because I pack mass destruction specifically for them and instead use creature and spell based ramp so I’m not beholden to keep those card types on the table. I don’t run excessive sweepers, but I do include them to get more than incremental card advantage and deal with multiple threats at a time. I guess I just have a strange group of friends, but that’s why I was asking if many folks out there build as lazy. Shoot, if I start playing stores, I’ll have to overhaul my decks, too, to adjust to the new meta.