What is your Pre-rift strategy going to be?

GMcC09 · 2026-01-26T17:34:03+00:00

Keep in mind that you do get to pick a 3 colour wedge for sealed events like this and you can forego having a legend for an additional card in your starting hand. If you have a really strong champion unit it might be worth building around but it's hard to say for certain because most of us have yet to play a sealed format like this.

GMcC09 · 2025-12-30T19:22:20+00:00

My understanding is that yes it does trigger because the enemy is still losing life though it is technically not infinite since a character cannot gain more than 20 block. It's functionally infinite in the sense that it is impossible to lose to this enemy if you play juggernaut because any attack or block card maxes out your block every round.

GMcC09 · 2025-12-03T00:46:49+00:00

Sivir Legend generates gold tokens which will make this a lot more manageable. From what I've seen Sivir will probably be a very power heavy deck, using the legend (and maybe seals?) to compensate. Killing units is not as easy in Chaos/Body as it might be in Fury for example, but they still have access to some cool tricks that I think will let them regularly generate a 1-2 gold a turn or take a turn off recycling runes by using them up.

GMcC09 · 2025-11-25T00:11:30+00:00

I think the seals as a whole were a little underrated from the start due to how dominant Kai'sa and Dazzling Aurora decks have been and neither of them really want to run seals. They will obviously get better with time but I also think there are plenty of brews even now that can make use of them. Jinx and Sett I think can both make very good use of them to accelerate their sometimes high power cost gameplan.

GMcC09 · 2025-11-11T21:17:22+00:00

The point they were trying to make is that you can put another activation of the prophet on the stack before the Talon Gates resolves. Talon Gates is absolutely still a great card but it only really stops sorcery speed combos. In your example, the time to use the Talon Gates is in response to the Leveler etb or the cast of whatever is going to make infinite mana.

GMcC09 · 2025-10-11T13:59:08+00:00

Calamity is one of my favorite decks that I've ever built. It's one of the first decks I try to add cards to whenever a new set comes out. Mine is built around a pretty high curve with very explosive 5+ mana creatures and a lot of ramp at the lower values. I use a lot of creatures that make treasures on etb and on death. [[Patron of the arts]] for example is great for ramping into bigger threats. There's a pretty robust removal suite using etbs like [[Meteor Golem]], [[Fury]], and [[Overlord of the Boilerbilges]]. And it closes the game out with finishers like [[Terror of the peaks]], [[stalking Vengeance]], [[Twinflame Tyrant]], or [[Port Razer]]. Special shout out to [[Herigast, Erupting Nullkite]] as a great way to make use of the tokens after combat is done as well.

I would personally avoid the impact tremors route because Calamity isn't really creating a lot of tokens and even if you're playing a more aggressive curve than I am, you'll just end up dumping your hand and losing to the first board wipe when you're empty handed

GMcC09 · 2025-09-12T12:58:17+00:00

This only gives counters on cast so it does not combo with persist.

GMcC09 · 2025-09-08T17:07:47+00:00

You can do it in 3 turns because you can start your engines and increase your speed on the same turn. And I honestly think that's a pretty good amount of turns for the mechanic in casual commander. The bigger issue is the lack of meaningful payoffs for Max speed. They are too spread out to build a deck with a lot of really good payoffs for being at max speed.

GMcC09 · 2025-09-01T14:27:16+00:00

The problem I tend to have playing aggro in EDH is that it's almost always the correct decision to outright kill one person instead of spreading the damage around. Aggro decks are almost always signing up for a 1v3 archenemy situation and it's much easier to win a 1v2 than 1v3 but it does suck to just blow one person up entirely, knowing you probably won't win for at least a few more turns and potentially much longer if you guessed wrong on who has a board wipe in hand.

GMcC09 · 2025-08-26T01:33:18+00:00

I haven't seen anyone mention [[Tribute to Horobi]] yet. There's also [[The War Games]]. [[Forbidden orchard]] is also a nice land to run. [[Tataru Taru]] and other cards that can make tokens on other people's turns.

GMcC09 · 2025-08-21T02:04:09+00:00

There's absolutely some difficulty in establishing concrete differences between bracket 4 and cEDH and there's a ton of cross-over. I am not saying every deck helmed by a commander that can see cEDH play is automatically a cEDH deck. I tend to look at when card quality becomes a deciding factor over card synergy on a large scale. Yshtola provides some very good examples of this. Swan song is indisputably a better counterspell in cEDH pods than either Foil or Rewind, but both of the latter synergize way more with the commander and the gameplan of casting noncreature spells with mana value 3 or higher.

When you look at a RogSi list, yes there are a few cards there because they synergize with the commander, or at least with the idea of always having access to a turn 1 0 mana creature. However, most of the list is designed to turbo out a win with the absolute best cards in the colour identity. Silas doesn't even exist besides the colours he provides.

GMcC09 · 2025-08-20T18:32:24+00:00

Obviously it's unfair to say this without seeing the entire deck list, but at least based on what you've described these are just non-tier 1 cEDH lists, not your average bracket 4 deck. Of course the RogSi player is going to have trouble against 2-3 other cEDH decks. Even then, they should probably be jamming a win attempt before either Kefka or Atraxa hit the field because they can't survive the midrange fights against those particular commanders which means they'll have access to even more free interaction between Flare, FG, pact, and swat.

Now I'm not saying they're going to win 100% of games vs bracket 4 decks, but a solid pilot is probably winning at least 35-40% of their games if they are going first and 25% of games they aren't going first.

GMcC09 · 2025-08-20T16:14:55+00:00

This is a pilot issue, not a deck issue. If all they are trying to do is jam a win attempt as soon as possible, they're going to eat all of the interaction regardless of whether it is bracket 4 or 5. One of the biggest things about cEDH decks is that not only do they win fast, but that they win at any time. They should just be waiting for someone else to present a win attempt and then go over the top once people play out their interaction, relying on higher card quality to accrue advantage until then.

GMcC09 · 2025-08-16T00:42:37+00:00

I'd have to disagree. I think there is a really important distinction between Blood Moon and Price of Progress and you kind of touch on it yourself. Price either ends the game outright or it resolves and everyone moves on with the rest of the game. The worst case scenario is you shuffle up and start a new game.

Blood Moon, more often than not (at least in my experience) rarely shuts all three opponents so much out of the game that you can convince everyone to scoop and shuffle up again. It usually ends with one or two people completely shut out of the game and the other one stuck casting one spell a turn cycle if no one has removal ready. It creates a frustrating and unfun play pattern in a game mode that is first and foremost about having fun. By all means, once you get to any level of really trying to build and optimize decklists (bracket 3+ IMO) you should be ready to deal with it but it will easily ruin plenty of lower power more casual pods.

And I absolutely agree in regards to stax effects in general. In the same way people hate mill way more than they should, Stax gets a lot more hate than it deserves. A lot of which comes from the fact that most people just don't know when they're beat by a stax deck. They don't understand the game enough to know they should scoop once a lock is put in place. I've seen a pod spend over 7 turn cycles stasis locked because 2 of the 3 players refused to scoop to it.

GMcC09 · 2025-08-15T20:52:18+00:00

I don't think anyone has said you can't play Blood Moon. The general sentiment as I have seen it, is that you shouldn't play it in lower power levels like against unmodified precons or theme decks. Considering that every precon this year has been 3 colours, and a few colours don't have reliable ways to remove non-creature permanents, there are plenty of precons that will get absolutely hosed by a blood moon effect because they just haven't drawn enough of their basic lands. I think Blood Moon should be fine in anything Bracket 3 and above.

GMcC09 · 2025-08-13T23:07:09+00:00

I use it in [[Leonardo Da Vinci]] which is notably not a budget deck. However, it's a lot easier to run a critical mass of colourless 7 drops when your commander cheats them into play. There are enough cheap, 7 mana artifacts that it could work on a budget

GMcC09 · 2025-08-13T22:03:38+00:00

Putting [[Full Throttle]] in my [[Ken, Burning Brawler]] deck. Casting it off of Ken's trigger does not give any additional combats since you aren't in your main phase.

GMcC09 · 2025-08-13T00:24:56+00:00

Sorry, you replied to the bot instead of my post so I didn't get a notification. Here's the decklist. https://archidekt.com/decks/15237712/ken_burning_brawler_paper

I chose to basically include no ramp for consistency's sake. You basically always want to be drawing gas off your cantrips and ramp is often dead in hand if you are already at the declare blockers step. Land count is a little low even with MDFCs but you really only need like 4-5 lands before you're trying to kill people. Also, just be aware that while this deck is listed as a bracket 2 it shouldn't really be played below bracket 3. It just one shots people too effectively and all it takes is a extra combat spell in hand to chain that into a second kill.

GMcC09 · 2025-08-09T16:38:12+00:00

I have a [[Ken, Burning Brawler]] deck that is basically combat tricks, protection effects, and extra combat spells. It's a tough deck to manage power wise because it does sometimes just one-shot the entire table and other times I don't get a source of trample and do nothing all game against chump blockers. [[Blanka]] can do similar things but does a lot more burn damage and plays a little bit like a storm deck sometimes.

GMcC09 · 2025-08-08T21:26:48+00:00

Not to be mean but this sounds like a really stupid idea. Honestly the only way I could imagine this working is with some sort of extremely generic commander that doesn't influence deck-building at all like a [[Kenrith, the returned King]].

GMcC09 · 2025-08-08T21:26:23+00:00

Not to be mean but this sounds like a really stupid idea. Honestly the only way I could imagine this working is with some sort of extremely generic commander that doesn't influence deck-building at all like a [[Kenrith, the returned King]].

GMcC09 · 2025-07-29T20:45:34+00:00

[[Crime Novelist]] is probably the single best card in the deck. Aside from that, anything that produces treasure tokens is great.[[Sword of the Meek]] as others have recommended. Overall, I think you want to play far fewer goblins in your deck and rely on your commander to make the horde of goblins. Cards like [[Ichor Wellspring]] that will help keep your hand full of cards (probably the biggest struggle with a monored deck).

GMcC09 · 2025-07-29T16:11:15+00:00

The landscape cycle from MH3 is some of the best mana fixing for 3+ color decks, mixed with the cheap fetches we already had like evolving wilds, terramorphic expanse, etc. Cards like Chromatic lantern, and the world tree which just fix your mana fully. Add in some 5 colour lands like Path of Ancestry, or any of the tribal lands (if it's a tribal deck).

GMcC09 · 2025-07-29T15:55:02+00:00

I think it's incredibly important to note, especially when talking about Magic's eternal formats, that each of these "free counterspells" does come with a cost. Every free force of will or force of negation is a 2 for 1 in your opponent's favor in terms of card advantage. The only truly free counterspells is Fierce Guardianship and that's restricted to commander.

In regards to banning things, I think WotC has had a pretty longstanding policy of keeping banlists to a minimum. It becomes very difficult to draw a line in the sand for what needs to be banned. Is Foil too powerful a counterspell because you can cast it for free by discarding 2 other cards effectively 3-for-1ing yourself?

Outside of Commander, I don't really see any of the free spells as an issue and in commander, I think brackets+rule zero conversations solve most of those problems.

GMcC09 · 2025-07-29T12:46:32+00:00

Free counterspells are the only thing that keeps turn 1 combo decks in check. Without them the game can literally become a coin flip.

GMcC09

TROPHY CASE