Mirrorweave on a Phylactery Lich for a completely one-sided boardwipe. Alternatively, targeting any 0/0 creature alive through the grace of having a +1/+1 counter will kill all creatures without +1/+1 counters on them.
Ended up finally getting around to putting this deck mostly together, cards are in the mail. I ended up doing some paper proxies and playing it with a couple of my friends. I love the deck, it feels dirty in the best possible way. I just need to liquidate a couple handfuls of my modern staples to get me a Bazaar now. Will be playing with an alter until that point. One question though, if you're not able to get Jin on board in the early game, is there a better Entomb/reanimation target (Outside of DEN/Palinchron). One game we played I drew a hand and had to run to the BR, so I just kept what I was a 5 land hand with Brainstorm and something else inconsequential. By the time I got a Jin on the board one of the other players had enough to start casting Maelstrom Wanderer, and the Leviathan is just not a good answer to that.
GoT references are completely lost on me. I really should watch the shows or read the books sometime. But as you could probably tell, I really want to find cohesive generic fantasy art instead of references for various characters. What can I say, I'm boring but I like things to look consistent.
Awesome, much appreciated. So I'm curious, has your group just printed these out on paper and slid them in front of cards like proxies, or have you gone through and done something more fabulous with them?
Yeah the PW template works fine too, not much difference. Having the win conditions on the card is pretty important though, especially for new players of the format, as having to ask a question about how, for example, Bandits work, basically gives up the surprise. Note that not all knights have the same loss conditions, Most die when the King dies, but some of them can live on if they are able to turn their card face up (as long as the bandits don't win immediately). If the 'reference sheet' contained all the relevant information about all the roles, it would be pretty damn cluttered I think and hard to find the information that you need for your specific role. It might seem longwinded specifying the win/loss conditions on each card, but in game, players will be able to work out how their role works simply by reading their card, which cuts down on "complexity creep" considerably. You also won't be able to save any space on the Renegade cards, as all of them work completely differently. By all means, try it out if you like. I can give you the magic set editor file if you are keen (it is way more work than it sounds like though, especially getting the syntax and oracle text right, trust me).
On a side note: I noticed that you changed some of the wording of the cards, and that your Priestess card mockup only activates when you have "more than 10 life" (11 or more life). Interestingly, this was how the Priestess was originally, until we realized that paying someone back for a Magister Sphinx or Sorin Markov was really funny ("10 or more life").Note also that the Priestess is considerably less powerful than it seems at first glance, as the King usually has the ability to gain the Priestess 5 life in response, effectively raising the minimum life swap to 15 most of the time if targeting the King. So much play testing has gone into little things like this.
I understand that having all the information on the cards for new players would be very helpful, but I don't really think it's necessary. Every card which has a unique ability would have it on the card that's for sure, but the win condition for Knights/Bandits/Nobles, which are all the same respectively, could easily be put to a reference sheet. I'm really big into many many different types of boardgames, and coming from a design perspective it's usually better to have little information on cards as possible, and including general win conditions in a rulebook, which are explained from the outset, and then have a handy reference for people to look at.
I've at least seen anecdotal evidence of this working because for quite some time my group had been playing a not-base game of Kingdoms which supported up to 8. I did a rethemeing, and used the Ultimate Wereworld cards that I had in order to deal out roles, so literally no one had relevant information on their cards, and I put everything about those characters on a 5X8.5 sheet, and no one had any issues with it.
As for the sidenote, I think I intentionally only changed two things, the wording on the mana ability for the king, and Kingsguard to Royal Guard. The mana ability of the king, I completely derped thinking that there wasn't wording for that kind of an effect, and there is (no surprise) I just wish that there was a more succinct way to reference colorless mana, but my font set doesn't have the colorless symbol yet. The wording screw up on priestess was completely my bad. I was doing that right before I went to bed and messed up copying it.
If you wanted to supply either the raw text, or the Magic Editor files, that would be awesome and sometime in the next week or two I'd find time to do the rest of the set as well as do up a reference sheet, and see how it all shapes up.
Here is an idea I ended up reworking a PW template for something similar to this, and this seemed like a decent application for it. What do you think?
Something else, you'll probably pretty easily see that I took out some of the text that is on the cards. While I can understand the importance of that text being there, I think that it would be better handled to have the text which applies to all the roles in general in a separate reference sheets for people to easily look at as well as look at the rest of the rules. I think creating a somewhat nicely designed 5"x8.5" sheet would be able to fit all of the rules, as well as reminders nicely. And taking this text away from the cards makes them look a lot cleaner (IMO).
For card pool I would say all card Printed in Core Sets 8th-Current, All expansion sets Mirrodin-Current, and all non-reprint cards from modern bordered supplemental products.
Reason for this technicality, the commander decks, specifically the reprints in them were chosen due to the power level of what normal commander decks are. Including those reprints in playable cards will skew card choices in the direction of decks which have had older cards reprinted for them, which I think is less than ideal.
So being the mono-red player that I am with Pia and Kiran Nalaar being released it got my deckbuilding juices flowing. Here is my idea, use a bunch of artifact cards which can readily hose certain strategies/decks. I've heard tech for specific decks called Silver Bullets before, and it makes sense to call them that.
What I'm looking for is as many of these that I can find, it doesn't even matter if you'd usually run them, they can be hyper specific as long as they're artifacts, because the ones that don't apply to a current game can always be turned into extra damage with P&K.
By the time the primer committee got around to reviewing this thread and denying it primer status, I had actually fallen out of playing this deck, and since it didn't get primer statused I was discouraged from really picking it back up to maintain it. So the list is really quite out dated, and not as refined as it could be. As I said in the OP though, the way that I had this deck built it wasn't supposed to be hyper competitive, with blue permission being the biggest bugbear. In a meta that is very fast, blue heavy, and combo oriented I couldn't recommend this deck, as listed at all. You could cut down on some of the fatties, put in more value stuff and possibly some more ramp to make it more consistent, but that wasn't what I was aiming for with the deck. Basically if a creature didn't have trample or do something else very important for the deck, it wasn't considered.
If you like spellslinging and huge creatures you might want to look at Riku of Two Reflections. Personally though Melek is one of my favorite commanders when played as a Storm Combo deck, it plays different everytime since you're having to utilize the top of the deck, it's a combo deck which is my personal favorite archetype, and it's usually a non-infinite win condition. Toonamiguy has a great Melek list that I've used online pretty frequently and loved it, it'd be a good place to start if that's who you want to go with.
Are there specific lists that we're going to be testing these with or are they intended to be of our own creation? I'm a notably terrible deckbuilder but like to consider myself a competent player. If lists are provided I feel confident I could play:
- Narset Goodstuff
- Maelstrom Wanderer Battlecruiser
- Animar Combo
- Niv-Mizzet Combo
- 5c Hermit Druid
- Jeleva/Melek Storm
- Kaalia Aggro
Another deck which I think would be good to look at is Purphoros Tokens which is another deck that I can pilot pretty well. As far as what to play on I'm a firm supporter of Cockatrice, it's easy to use, has all of the cards, is free, and playing with experienced people there is no need to have rules enforcement like Modo/XMage and are actually a huge hindrance when testing combo decks. Another thing which would be really nice is setting up or crashing a Teamspeak or Vent server for people that are playing for discussion outside of in client chat.
Instead of Necroing a thread, it's usually fine to start a new thread with your specific questions. Also putting
[card][/card]
around cards that you're referencing help out everyone.
Spirit Shield & Zelyon Sword: You have these interaction correct. They will copy and resolve, as long as they remain tapped you'll get +0/+4 or +4/+0 respectively. However, because of how Kurkesh works you'll only need to pay their activation cost + R from Kurkesh. Crystal Ball: Kurkesh doesn't double effects, he creates another instance of the ability and puts it on the stack. So you would Scry 2, then Scry 2 again. Conch Horn: Same thing, draw 2, put 1 back. Draw 2, put one back. Most people would be fine with you short cutting it to Draw 3, put one back.
So being the mono-red player that I am I got around to getting my set of Snow Mountains and Extraplanar Lens. This lead me to trying out big red this weekend with Bosh as the helm. Red with 5 mana doublers is insane. Gauntlet of Might,Gauntlet of Power,Caged Sun, Extraplanar Lens, Mana Flare. The thought occurred to me that it would be really awesome to have Kumano, Master Yamabushi driving something with that much mana. Then thinking about that I realized that it might be possible to make EVEN MORE mana, with a similar general.
So this has brought me to the point where I'm curious if there are any other color(s) that could pull this kind of strategy off. I know that even mono-green can give this a run for it's money, especially when you get a good Gaea's Cradle rolling along, but am looking at something else for hugely absurd amounts of mana. My friend put it the best, infinite mana is boring, creating triple digit mana is impressive.
As a sidebar, are there any other cards that I could be looking into to extend this idea even further?
I understand that having all the information on the cards for new players would be very helpful, but I don't really think it's necessary. Every card which has a unique ability would have it on the card that's for sure, but the win condition for Knights/Bandits/Nobles, which are all the same respectively, could easily be put to a reference sheet. I'm really big into many many different types of boardgames, and coming from a design perspective it's usually better to have little information on cards as possible, and including general win conditions in a rulebook, which are explained from the outset, and then have a handy reference for people to look at.
I've at least seen anecdotal evidence of this working because for quite some time my group had been playing a not-base game of Kingdoms which supported up to 8. I did a rethemeing, and used the Ultimate Wereworld cards that I had in order to deal out roles, so literally no one had relevant information on their cards, and I put everything about those characters on a 5X8.5 sheet, and no one had any issues with it.
As for the sidenote, I think I intentionally only changed two things, the wording on the mana ability for the king, and Kingsguard to Royal Guard. The mana ability of the king, I completely derped thinking that there wasn't wording for that kind of an effect, and there is (no surprise) I just wish that there was a more succinct way to reference colorless mana, but my font set doesn't have the colorless symbol yet. The wording screw up on priestess was completely my bad. I was doing that right before I went to bed and messed up copying it.
If you wanted to supply either the raw text, or the Magic Editor files, that would be awesome and sometime in the next week or two I'd find time to do the rest of the set as well as do up a reference sheet, and see how it all shapes up.
Something else, you'll probably pretty easily see that I took out some of the text that is on the cards. While I can understand the importance of that text being there, I think that it would be better handled to have the text which applies to all the roles in general in a separate reference sheets for people to easily look at as well as look at the rest of the rules. I think creating a somewhat nicely designed 5"x8.5" sheet would be able to fit all of the rules, as well as reminders nicely. And taking this text away from the cards makes them look a lot cleaner (IMO).
For record, that would ban any reprints that are in supplemental products, such as Sol Ring, Akroma's Vengeance, Cabal Coffers, Forgotten Ancient, etc. But keep Krond the Dawn-Clad, Etherium-Horn Sorcerer, Vela the Night-Clad, Sakashima's Student, etc legal. (Unique cards printed in Planechase 2012) This also makes all the commander unique cards legal, which makes sense.
Reason for this technicality, the commander decks, specifically the reprints in them were chosen due to the power level of what normal commander decks are. Including those reprints in playable cards will skew card choices in the direction of decks which have had older cards reprinted for them, which I think is less than ideal.
What I'm looking for is as many of these that I can find, it doesn't even matter if you'd usually run them, they can be hyper specific as long as they're artifacts, because the ones that don't apply to a current game can always be turned into extra damage with P&K.
Some Examples:
I want to have fun = Hugs
Everything Goes = Hardball
----
I care what people think = Friendly
I don't care what people think = Spiteful
- Narset Goodstuff
- Maelstrom Wanderer Battlecruiser
- Animar Combo
- Niv-Mizzet Combo
- 5c Hermit Druid
- Jeleva/Melek Storm
- Kaalia Aggro
Another deck which I think would be good to look at is Purphoros Tokens which is another deck that I can pilot pretty well. As far as what to play on I'm a firm supporter of Cockatrice, it's easy to use, has all of the cards, is free, and playing with experienced people there is no need to have rules enforcement like Modo/XMage and are actually a huge hindrance when testing combo decks. Another thing which would be really nice is setting up or crashing a Teamspeak or Vent server for people that are playing for discussion outside of in client chat.
Spirit Shield & Zelyon Sword: You have these interaction correct. They will copy and resolve, as long as they remain tapped you'll get +0/+4 or +4/+0 respectively. However, because of how Kurkesh works you'll only need to pay their activation cost + R from Kurkesh.
Crystal Ball: Kurkesh doesn't double effects, he creates another instance of the ability and puts it on the stack. So you would Scry 2, then Scry 2 again.
Conch Horn: Same thing, draw 2, put 1 back. Draw 2, put one back. Most people would be fine with you short cutting it to Draw 3, put one back.
Olivia Voldaren. Between me and a few of my friend we hatched this idea of creating what is basically a Red deck, splash black for mana cards. Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth and Blanket of Night being used to transform the majority red mana base into swamps for cards like Cabal Coffers, Crypt Ghast, and Nirkana Revenant to get tons of mana. Other great mana cards to mention, Braid of Fire, Black Market, Candelabra of Tawnos, Sword of Feast and Famine, Doubling Cube.
So this has brought me to the point where I'm curious if there are any other color(s) that could pull this kind of strategy off. I know that even mono-green can give this a run for it's money, especially when you get a good Gaea's Cradle rolling along, but am looking at something else for hugely absurd amounts of mana. My friend put it the best, infinite mana is boring, creating triple digit mana is impressive.
As a sidebar, are there any other cards that I could be looking into to extend this idea even further?