Decks That Challenged Us | EDHRECast 316

Gotta get the 90s bands jokes in while the youths are away

I’m using Sheldon’s model of having a deck in each color identity. It’s a project that’s been going for years and may go much longer until I finish because I also break decks apart or change them completely if I’m not happy with them. Not only do I avoid having two decks in the same color identity, I’ve also started making sure I only have 1 deck of any given theme/restriction. Not only has it gotten me to try new strategies but also entire new formats like pauper edh. At first it seemed like a convenient excuse to just keep building more decks until I had every color, but now it actually limits the decks I consider building and pushes me to review my existing decks

I made a Dimir Dragon tribal inspired by something I heard Dana brewed. It plays so much like a green deck it is kind of hilarious. I have a ton of cost reducers including color specific stuff, urza's incubator, and heartless summoning. Also packed full of clone effects that can copy Silumgar, Drifting Death and ignore the legend rule. Basically I just try to beat back my opponents boards by having creatures that outclass them and kill them by swinging.

Building decks for other people as gifts has really broadened my play style scope. I playtest with it so I can show them the ins and outs even though it might not be something I usually enjoy.

On Matt's point about not liking Izzet, I was in the same boat until Sarkhan, Soul Aflame came out. I'm a Timmy at heart, and Sarkhan lets my play dragons without the groans from the tablet when you pull out a Mirrym deck.

One thing that challenged me was making a hidden commander deck where the actual commander is part of the 99 and the card in the command zone is just there for one or two additional colours

Beautiful day EDH friends, I love building sub-optimally decks. I own most of the spicy cards in EDH (up to mana crypt value) but I love taking a commander or deck idea and building out what is left in my many boxes of rares and mythics. I have around 40-50 active lists (allot of medium tribal like gargoyles) and I add so much to my collection with every set because it is easy to find an upgrade or a slot for something new. Magic is so much fun and I wish you all love and laughter in your lives :)

You might not read it, but Dana, I think for Glissa Sunseeker you could try to leave the space of "what does this card do mechanically" and embrace her flavour, maybe work of her flavourtext to "seek the truth" and "gain it's power". Try to build a story telling deck around what Glissas true power is :) Just a thought! Love hearing you guys talk about magic ^.^

8:00 My wife had me make the same kind of deck for her. She wanted all subsets of grixis, couldn't find a mono red she cared for, so she had me make her mono red najeela! Weird mana base to be nearly mono red but be able to activate najeela, and we ran ognis because you make your own rules, but essentially mono red.

My favorite part of this conversation was how build philosphy changed from "What commander do I want to build around" to "What kind of deck am I wanting to build and what commander helps me make that happen". Most of my decks were build from the strategy first and the commander was found later and I have found they've gotten stronger and more resiliant since the decks tend to rely on the commander less.

That Faith No More joke was Epic 😉 Just like my obsession with MTG, I want it all but I can’t have it

I'm glad I wasn't the only one to build ognis as mono red!

My best example of deck challenges is a deck that I wasn't the initial creator of. One of my LGSs had a 2 pack of homemade starter commander decks for $15. Rakdos Lagomos and Dimir Vohar. Friend and I went 50/50 on them, and as the only commander deck I had at this point was Phenax I decided to go with the Vohar one because was comfortable with graveyard strats. I was successful with the deck, but I didn't enjoy the way it played - being slow burning by tapping Vohar then getting a finisher out of something like Rise from the Tides. Over a period of time diving into the 25 cent and 1 dollar bins, the deck evolved into what I call the "Don't Flip Rona" deck. It does effectively what the name implies - it plays Rona, Herald of Invasion and doesn't flip her over. Effectively it is a mess of draw, second draw, and discard triggers with some reanimator instead of purposefully dealing damage to the flipped Rona to cheat stuff in for free. It's all laughs around the table when I tell everyone my intent is to NOT flip Rona ... until I build an army of Drakes with Drake Haven, a 20/20 zombie army with Lazotep Chancellor, or build Knights of Dol Amroth to similar heights.

My "theme first, commander second" deck is my Zimone and Dina Skeletal Swarming deck. I wanted a deck that could make as many copies of SS as I could which put me into Sultai, and I chose Z&D since they dig through the deck and are a sac outlet to make extra skellies.

I played against a Tom Bombadil deck and Doctor Who Timey-Wimey deck today...😫 we got to turn 8 after an hour. I had to concede.

This video really speaks to me. My absolute favorite deck, and my pride and joy when it comes to edh is my Pharika, God of Afflictions deck. And I only made it specifically to challenge myself. A buddy of mine was interested in the Theros Gods, and I told him that pretty much all of them would make a good build-around-me Commander, except Pharika, she has very little practical application. Then I told my self, 'F it, I'm a decent edh player/brewer, I bet I could make a good deck based around Pharika. It took a lot of playtesting, and many iterations, and a few times I thought maybe I was wrong and can't make this Commander any good after all. But I can proudly say now that it is one of my best decks, and I cannot tell you how many times I've surprised people at various LGS's spectacularly winning with a relatively unknown/laughable commander against real decks. Was an amazing experience all around brewing and playing something that I thought would never be good. Forced me to deckbuild creatively and really dig to find relatively lesser-known cards that could synergize with the deck well. Loved the video guys

My most recent deck is a full control deck in Oskar, Rubbish Reclaimer. It's been a weird challenge learning to pilot a style I'm wholly unfamiliar with but the quirks of the commander have helped pull it together for me in ways that previous attempts at control lists haven't.

Dana, i am on the same boat for i feel on red aswell. Though i found a deck that is not about beat face fast but ramp up to do big spells. The commander is Orthion, hero of Lavabrink. Get to enough mana to make 5 tokens of on particular creature on your board can win games by themselves. Ex: Fanatic of Mogis, and Terror of the Peaks deal more than 120 damage to each or split up. I also love that you can also hit legendary creatures aswell.

Even just approaching archetypes with different strategies is a great way of challenging you sometimes. I have a zombie tribal/graveyard deck that i enjoy, but it just didnt punch fast enough so I went another route; treat my graveyard as currency. Using Gyrus, Waker of Corpses still is an aggro/reanimator but it exiles the creatures at the end of combat, so I have to use my creatures as multi-use combat tricks essentially. It is a way riskier way to play with essentially much bigger pay-offs if I can manage it

One of my favorite decks in my Clones and Copy deck. I started with Riku of two reflections but he was so mana intensive I never cast him so I switched to using Rashmi and Ragavan. It allows me to take one thing off the top but also ramp allowing me to get have mana to hold up.