As someone who has only spent five bucks on the welcome package, my personal experience that Arena is very much playable without having to spend lots of money. The matchmaking algorithms take into account the strength of your deck, so you start out by playing against other people with precons or budget decks, and the in-game currency and card rewards for playing help you to quickly expand your collection and build actually competitive decks. I was pleasantly surprised how fluently and plain fun the progression goes. Also, the starter decks you get are considerably better than paper starter decks that are handed out in stores, because they include a fair amount of tournament staples such as Settle the Wreckage, Rekindling Phoenix or Carnage Tyrant.
Jesus Christ people, calm down, it's just a mulligan. Communicate in your group and do what the majority agrees on. Simple as that. I am part of two different regular playgroups and both have different mulligan rules. Nobody fights over this. Everybody has fun. It's Commander, not rocket science.
I see the counter arguments against Reliquary Tower and agree that it is not an auto-include in any and all EDH decks (I used to think so), but since I started this thread I have been paying attention to how my games went with respect to having / not having the Tower and I found that I was never mad to have it on the field and that it was actually quite useful in some instances.
reliquary tower - deck building trap, i'd say. even when it IS useful (i.e. when you have 8 or more cards in hand), having 7 of the best is 99% of the time as good as having 15 cards in hand. Also, it doesn't allow you to discard cards into the GY that's actually useful there (life from the loam et al). i'd give it a rating of 1/10 in almost all decks outside of builds where there are actual mechanical reasons to have a giant grip Multani, Maro-Sorcerer, for example
scavenger grounds vs bojuka bog - they're both good, i'd say. the bog is better against specific players with GY decks, and scavenger grounds if you won't end up hosing yourself. One thing that's worthy of noting, even though the act of putting a land into play is a special action that can't be interacted with, the trigger of putting them into play/activating scavenger grounds uses the stack (i.e. trickbind and stifle can stop them).
It's not on your list, but you might wanna look up a land called Thawing Glaciers. I've used it in slower control builds where land-drops matter, and also tried it out in a legacy deck (yes, it's potentially that good). combine it with land untap effects and you can end up ramping multiple lands within a turn (it bounces at the beginning of the cleanup step). it's especially good in non-green decks that need the ramp.
The others can be quite dependant upon the rest of the deck. i don't remember using any of the other lands you've mentioned in-game though. aside from my lands deck, all my other builds have a very specific strategy of killing my opponents, so they are rather light on removal and other utility things. whenever you try to assess whether or not a card is good in your deck or not, try to remember on what your strategy is, and if it builds to it or not. usually helps.
I know Thawing Glaciers of course, but currently don't own any copies. My MtG budget is not unlimited and I prefer investing it in nonland cards and/or lands with more unique effects than simple ramp (e.g. Phyrexian Tower or Yavimaya Hollow). I absolutely believe you that it is really good though!
I think negative emblems that you put on an opponent are much more interesting in terms of gameplay than than the classic emblems. Unfortunately, they are also considerably weaker.
Would this thread be a good place to recommend/promote EDH content on other sites, or is there a thread for that, or alternatively a forum policy that prohibits it?
The main change here is that I realized I needed to have some more ramp and card draw instead of going all in on blink. I cut a bunch of blink spells, which unfortunately meant that Zada became less good since I opted to keep the repeatable blink on a stick creatures rather than the single use spells at this time. Rest of the changes are upgrades of different sorts and some more answers to specific strategies such as Scavenger Ground and Meteor Golem. Also included Enlightened Tutor since my gameplan relies pretty hard on my Impact Tremors type enchantments.
I removed Cacophodon due to complaints from my playgroup about it comboing off too much. Also took out some Dinosaurs and Dino matters cards such as Temple Altisaur because they were more cute than anything else, and replaced them with some more noncreature damage sources. The other changes are mostly streamlining the deck.
On average, how many colorless utility lands do you guys run in your decks with three or more colors? How many in decks with two colors or less? Are there any utility lands that you almost always automatically include irrespective of the particular deck's strategy? Any other utility lands not mentioned so far that you often see but think are overrated?
In:
The main change here is that I realized I needed to have some more ramp and card draw instead of going all in on blink. I cut a bunch of blink spells, which unfortunately meant that Zada became less good since I opted to keep the repeatable blink on a stick creatures rather than the single use spells at this time. Rest of the changes are upgrades of different sorts and some more answers to specific strategies such as Scavenger Ground and Meteor Golem. Also included Enlightened Tutor since my gameplan relies pretty hard on my Impact Tremors type enchantments.
Out:
I removed Cacophodon due to complaints from my playgroup about it comboing off too much. Also took out some Dinosaurs and Dino matters cards such as Temple Altisaur because they were more cute than anything else, and replaced them with some more noncreature damage sources. The other changes are mostly streamlining the deck.
On average, how many colorless utility lands do you guys run in your decks with three or more colors? How many in decks with two colors or less? Are there any utility lands that you almost always automatically include irrespective of the particular deck's strategy? Any other utility lands not mentioned so far that you often see but think are overrated?