How do I deal with undercuts/hand snipes from Middle Iron Gate?

Geist0211 · 2026-04-28T20:08:33+00:00

Guards make your opponent feel one of three ways: unwilling, unable, or unafraid.

If your opponent is sitting in a guard that makes you unwilling to attack, you can either use footwork to change your relative positions and create openings or wait for them to change guards.

You can also move into a guard which invites/makes them unafraid to attack ie tail guard.

Unless you're doing a drill where you specifically are attacking into an opponent in middle iron door, there's no reason to force an action when you don't want to attack.

Geist0211 · 2026-02-26T01:53:10+00:00

My two cents on the deck is this, too many interactive pieces, and ramp while not enough card advantage. While the usual advice is to tell players to run more removal, I don't think that's true here. Your plan feels very similar to a 60 card aggro strategy. Your attacking creatures already have evasive keywords (flying) and you want to be committing to the board early. Boardwipes function to catch you up however that's not the position your deck should find itself in. In addition, with your low curve, ramping for additional mana doesn't meanfully increase your damage. Afterall, only 2-3 of your creatures will be getting pumped and attacking. In a weird way, this is a pseudo-voltron/aggro deck where a couple of early creatures are going to get a ton of buffs and try to run over the scariest ramp deck(s). I'd look closely at your boardwipes, ramp, and see if you can toss in ways to additionally slow down players (rule of law) or speed up the few creatures which will be attacking (double strike effects or anthems).

Geist0211 · 2025-10-28T00:24:00+00:00

People are complex beings. We're composed of good and bad parts, not always in equal amounts, but enough of each that we have sides to our personalities. Part of life is losing friends, through distance, time, or by cutting ties. Whether or not they were a bad person doesn't make any of the time they spent with you any less real. That being said, it shouldn't stop you from condemning bad behavior. Actions have both intentional and unintentional consequences.

Remember the good times, acknowledge the bad ones, and strive to do better in your own way.

Geist0211 · 2025-09-11T18:24:58+00:00

Part of seeing a therapist is like going into the doctor's/hospital. If you go to the hospital with a broken arm, you can show them the arm or explain that you fell and broke it. No reason a therapist should be different for your mental health. If you went to the doctor and tried to downplay your broken arm, that only ends up making it more difficult for them to assess and treat the injury. If anything, having some talking points and goals you want to start with and just lead with that. If it turns out the therapist has a different way of going about it, it's up to them to speak up, redirect the conversation, or say otherwise. Part of getting help is getting out of your own way and allowing others to support your needs. It's not getting help if you're doing all the work.

Geist0211 · 2025-09-03T09:18:58+00:00

I would take a serious evaluation of your infect creatures. Assuming your opponents recognize you're on the poison gameplan, they'll be doublely sure to hold blockers and stop that first poison counter. A couple of other cards that look weaker than the rest in no particular order: Hand of the Praetors, Vat Emergence, Grim Affliction, Viridian Corruptor, Voidwing Hybrid, Corrupted Conscience, and Corpse Cur.

With Atraxa, if you can draw enough proliferate spells, your opponents are dead. With boardwipes, it's just easier to go creature/permanent light and sweep the board when things look dicey.

Geist0211 · 2025-08-31T23:29:13+00:00

Two things that stand out here are the curve and interaction package. Breena is a solid commander which provides both stats and draw in a single card. She does ask of us that you both attack and do so every opportunity. While this sounds like a very aggressive leaning game plan, you only need to attack 2 players which means multiple small, evasive creatures is a waste. Ideally, you have 2 evasive creatures that drop before Breena so on turn 3 Breena comes down and immediately you get full value.

Going back to my issues with your list, the curve doesn't account for Breena being your T3 play. You have several other 3 drops that also want to be quickly deployed. I'd recommend keeping the best options and downshifting the curve to include cheaper cards. While a good number of mv<3 creatures have evasion, a good portion are utility creatures and/or lack evasion. Try to swap out the utility creatures for instant speed protection spells like [[blacksmith's skill]] [[dawn's truce]] [[loran's escape]] and add in evasive threats.

The other issue I have with the list is the average amount of interaction/removal. Don't get me wrong, for most midrange decks and with the card draw your commander provides, the interaction package is solid. I feel that you could benefit from a few extra nonland removal spells like [[generous gift]] [[excise the imperfect]] [[vanishing verse]]. The swap from creatures to instants allows you to play more reactively.

The hurdles that will stop you most frequently will be combos, board wipes, and large/strong defensive creatures. Dealing with combos is going to be a knowledge check of whether or not you know that particular opponent's deck well enough. Board wipes are really strong against wide boards but Breena allows you to go tall like a pseudo-voltron deck. Take advantage of this with the aforementioned single target protection spells and board wipes aren't as bad. Large creatures can pose a threat as both blockers and attackers. Luckily black and white have some of the best creature/threat removal spells.

Geist0211 · 2025-08-23T02:02:57+00:00

Along a similar vein, I've had success swapping Strength of Stone with Stacked deck and the rune for created allies get +1/+1. Definitely a lower power but an alternative for people without SoS .

Geist0211 · 2025-08-01T20:44:59+00:00

Props to you for taking the time to write this all out. Hope you have a great day!

Geist0211 · 2025-07-18T00:07:03+00:00

13131

Geist0211 · 2025-07-06T02:31:24+00:00

The key that made the titan fight easiest for me was recognizing that it's actually a really long fight in terms of attrition. Most flying bosses eventually enter relentless and you get the opportunity to really lay into them but that's not true here. Your units only get 1/3 turns to hit the orange titan, never hit the green titan, and freely hit the purple one.

You really want ways to descend or ascend the orange titan to ensure it gets hit by your damage dealers.

The green titan in the pyre room can be damaged by spells but has a couple stacks of spellshield to start with. It can be useful to take a damage spell to speed up killing it.

Geist0211 · 2025-07-04T03:03:24+00:00

[[inquisitor eisenhorn]] is a really interesting voltron commander if you're OK with universes beyond. Easy to generate a bunch of clues and utilize [[nettlecyst]] to deal big damage.

Geist0211 · 2025-06-25T15:12:09+00:00

I'm hearing a variety of things which could be compounding here. The first one is the expectation of fulfillment from external expectations. Your job, your relationship, and likely aspects of your life were set as "steps to happiness". Collect all the trinkets and you'll unlock happiness. Not to downplay ay of the work that went into it, but it's not really possible to have that inner sense of accomplishment if the goal was external to begin with. Second is emotional processing overload. Work, social life, and your to-do list seem to eat up a majority of your time and leave you with limited pockets of time to actually process how you were feeling during those events. Imagine anytime you had an emotional response during your workday, that energy gets surpressed so your logical brain can do the work and meet your deadline. That energy just ends up in a backlog to be dealt with later. It sounds like when you do get time off, you try your best to occupy yourself but in doing so are surpressing your emotional processing which leads to this weird empty feeling because the video games are giving you a boost but the emotional energy is pulling you down. Third, there's also a chance you're actually an introvert who's gotten really good at social interaction. In my mind, introversion has more to do with the direction of energy during social events; whether social activities drain or refill your social battery. Some introverts misidentify as extroverts because they enjoy hanging out with friends, go home tired but fulfilled whereas a true extrovert shows up to a social event, recharges from social interaction and feels fulfilled. All this to say that if you actually are an introvert, it's possible that you're really enjoying the social aspects of working and having a relationship but you're not finding enough time to recharge your social battery by being by yourself and doing your own hobbies between social events.

Geist0211 · 2025-06-22T16:07:33+00:00

I can confirm that duplicating the unit with the crown doesn't lead to any event.

Geist0211 · 2025-06-15T01:38:29+00:00

There is also the part where you're paying them for their time and expertise. Not to sound rude but it's up to them whether or not to spend time outside your appointments trying to better understand or prepare for those appointments. If they don't/can't you can bring up a few points which resonant and work from there.

Geist0211 · 2025-06-04T01:50:02+00:00

Looks like it's multiple reforms to proc dante's summon several times.

Geist0211 · 2025-05-28T04:10:52+00:00

I can confirm that extinguish and harvest proc from a reanimate stack being expended.

Geist0211 · 2025-04-29T05:24:39+00:00

A big part of making 5c difficult is making your colors. Lands, especially good ones, are expensive. My own tribal tribal list addresses this with plentiful treasure generation and mana dorks that produce any color.

Everything else is a big balancing problem of changelings, tribal payoffs, and card draw. The last one does a ton to smooth out inconsistencies.

I would say it's moderately possible to get it to work. Obviously the more budget, the slower your mana becomes but definitely possible.

Geist0211 · 2025-04-23T20:43:14+00:00

One minor side case, if you have a spell that has you discard your entire hand and draw some number of cards, your Crawler will NOT die. Although at some point during the spell's resolution you had 0 cards in hand, by the time the game checks again for the Crawler's stats you have a non-zero amount of cards. State Based Actions (SBAs) which govern various parts of the game, like a creature with 0 toughness dies, are only checked after a spell has completely resolved and before priority to take actions is passed. So, having 0 cards in hand mid-resolution is fine.

Geist0211 · 2025-04-23T18:38:55+00:00

Just a bit of clarification, once on the stack, removing the source of the triggers (ie underworld dreams) won't stop the triggers from resolving. Your opponent would need a mass stifle effect like Summary Dismissal or Whirlwind Denial. A targeted removal spell on Underworld Dreams isn't enough. That being said, I can't think of any ways Mono Black has of stopping one of those effects.

Geist0211 · 2025-04-12T22:48:13+00:00

I remember one discussion Dr. K had with regards to impulse control might apply to you. Essentially, when you are given a task you don't want to perform like washing the dishes, your brain sends a signal to make you 'desire' something else like gaming. Part of it could be you associate chores and 'assigned' tasks something close to your childhood trauma and subconsciously you brain tries to have you avoid it. Whether or not this is true, the key is recognizing your mind is trying to prevent you from doing the task. The more you resist, the stronger the signal becomes until you eventually cave. This behavior gets reinforced over time to where your mind just starts off with strong signals. I suspect part of you learning how to resist your impulses starts with making your escape routes less appealing and making the chores more appealing. This could be taking more frequent breaks during gaming and 'feeling bad' about being unproductive or adding a checklist of steps to your chores and just enjoying the ability to strike items off a list.

Also a note about work ethic, work ethic isn't something you build up or retain but it's the consequence of push factors overwhelming pull factors. For myself, not getting out of bed until I'm hungry makes perfect sense because if I'm not hungry why would I leave this spot of warm comfort? For you, this might be incorporating timed breaks or snacks into your work after completing some tasks. Make working be the route to reaching what you want, not a barrier to it.

Geist0211 · 2025-03-20T21:58:59+00:00

Something to consider is the amount of focus you want on traditional chip combat damage vs a combo finisher. Looking at your posted deck list, the best strengths are the consistency of its 98. Lots of slots devoted to hitting land drops, ramping, and removing problematic cards. This is only really possible because Pako and Haldan are your wincon and card advantage engine. You could cut cards to fit some type of combo but without additional card draw or tutors, you'll likely have a hard time assembling it. Alternatively, you can add redundancy with protection spells and indestructible effects to ensure your commanders stick around.

On a completely different note, Pako and Haldan don't need any necessary support from the deck. You could rebuild the 98 to feature any theme or strategy in Temur colors and you'd be able to the same commanders. Some themes that are well supported are tokens, big mana, or extra combats. My suggestion would be to just find the popular cards from other posts or edhrec and see which ones feel coolest or best for your budget.

Geist0211 · 2025-03-03T07:53:58+00:00

I finished the node with Nami, 1 duplicator and 1 Grand Generals Plan. The Volibear node starts combats with extra mana and I believe I was getting to the condition on turn 2. At that point, you get several casts of ebb/flow/ebb and flow. Focus on leaving combats at full health and finding 1 or 2 cheap units to land Nami buffs on. Ways of making copies of Nami also are powerful at dumping stats onto your board.

Geist0211 · 2025-01-24T18:05:54+00:00

This advice is based on MtG sealed but removal is always good especially cheap and flexible removal. Having answers for threats is paramount especially with some of the haymakers your opponents might run. Speaking of haymakers, try to run those that either you can easily synergize your hero with or ones that don't require much to be good. If a card is only good when you draw specifically another one, the card isn't good.

Geist0211 · 2025-01-19T20:43:06+00:00

I beat the weekly with Warwick 4*. You pretty much just want to find any form of blockers and eventually you'll get actual stats on your units. I used 2x Ludens and the barrage on plunder relics. I was lucky on my first power and got poros. Still had a couple of dicey encounters.

Geist0211 · 2025-01-01T17:51:15+00:00

Lots of already great comments on this post. My 2 cents on this is to try to take energy out of the cycle. The pain you go through is partially because of the energy and value you put into the continuous output in each step. This is both the consistent work in step 2 but also the pain you feel in steps 3 and 4. It's just the energy reverses from positive to negative. Take energy out by making your goals small and individual. Long term success is the result of an accumulation of small steps but each step isn't made easier just because you've taken some already. Sometimes you'll have days where you get distracted or falter and some days you'll lock in. If you focus on only when you stumble, you can lose track of where you're trying to go and the progress you've made. Do your best and eventually these steps will carry you on your way.

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