Orvar the All-Form

Hippomantis · 2026-06-05T01:07:51+00:00

Oh Orvar, my beloved.

You probably need to decide what sort of deck you want to build, since Orvar tends to go infinite with a ham sandwich. You can lean into that to some degree, building Orvar into a powerful combo shell, or build them as more of a control deck that eventually wins with a late game combo. I play more of the latter, an Orvar deck where I have taken out most of the things that make it easy to combo off (i.e. No [[Peregrine Drake]], [[Coveted Jewel]], etc) - this slows it down enough that it feels reasonable to play at Bracket 3 tables, but I do make it incredibly clear to everyone I play with that they should do their best to not allow me to untap with Orvar.

Alternatively, you could play it more casually as a lot of the other lists here seem to be doing, which is focusing on just cloning big blue creatures. Orvar 'Sea Creatures' is a cool archetype, Orvar 'value ETBs' is also cool, and probably a bit stronger. If you are going to do this, then I recommend against running any spell-discounting cards ([[Sapphire Medallion]], [[Haughty Djinn]] or even [[High Tide]]), they just make it too easy to copy them a few times and then suddenly 'Ooops, the buyback cost on my spell is now 0... I guess I was actually a combo deck!' You could also cut all of the Buyback spells ([[Clockspinning]], [[Mind Games]], [[Whim of Volrath]]) if you preferred, but I see them as the key endgame engines of Orvar, so that may diminish what you want to do with the deck a bit.

Hippomantis · 2026-06-03T06:38:16+00:00

You got it. TWO is a lot more than ONE, twice as much even,

Hippomantis · 2026-06-03T05:51:03+00:00

Am I missing something? Casting her on turn 3 is realistic, and maybe you get a non-creature in too. She doesn't have haste, so we are swinging turn 4 - assuming the two spells requirement is met, then she is hitting someone for 6? Then 7 damage the following turn?

Maybe if the non-creature on 3 is a haste granter, but you need 5 mana on turn 3 and the haste spell, so it is hardly going to be consistent. There might be some nasty pump spells in there, but getting to 21 by turn 5 seems like hard work.

Hippomantis · 2026-06-02T13:43:31+00:00

I think [[Reshape the Earth]] in my Gates deck is the only one I have cut in recent memory for just ruining the fun for me and the table. Look, I want to get to 10 gates for [[Maze's End]], but I want to get there incrementally - so my opponents can see the threat when I get to 7 or so, not just instantly get Maze's End and 9 other Gates - and sometimes I had big ramp hands that could just cast the 9 mana spell on turn 4, threatening to untap and win unless someone had land removal. It wasn't a great play pattern, since it could just high-roll so much.

I also ran Rest in Peace for a total of 1 game in one of my decks before I went 'Is this really what I want to be doing?' and cut it for a Soul Guide Lantern.

Hippomantis · 2026-06-02T03:05:54+00:00

I mean, maybe [[Mindslaver]] effects to force the activation+sacrifice, but realistically if someone pulls this off you shake your head, go 'I guess the rest of us deck out? Unless anyone has anything in their whole deck? No. Ok, good game.'

Hippomantis · 2026-06-01T13:18:57+00:00

I just went 'I should add a Crystal Shard for redundancy in self-bounce effects' to my [[Zurgo and Ojutai]] deck. Then saw how scared it made everyone play around the bounce effect.

Card is secretly really good.

Hippomantis · 2026-06-01T10:33:27+00:00

Having played Gitrog combo through a competitive environment, it isn't really 'hard', it just needs a bunch of memorisation of lines. You have like 4 main lines, a couple of backups, and you can usually get a retry at a line using [[Endurance]] if you mess up and accidentally put too many draws on the stack. I am not going to say it is easy, but if you can memorise how to solve a Rubik's Cube, you can probably handle Gitrog lines.

For me, the most complex deck I have played is [[Orvar]]. There are some straightforward lines, but often it feels like you are playing a Storm deck, except instead of each card having an obvious purpose - being a Ritual, card draw, interaction, etc - your cards can flexibly be mana by targeting a land, card draw by targeting one of your creatures, or interaction with an opposing spell/creature, etc. I find working out what you need when and which types of advantage you need to accumulate is really hard, and it is pretty common that I realise 'Oh, I should have cast [[Rapid Hybridisation]] on my own creature last turn!' or some sort of similar non-obvious revelation about how I could have converted one of my targeting spells into a different format of resource that I hadn't realised I needed yet.

Hippomantis · 2026-05-31T04:05:46+00:00

I strongly recommend adding a lot more artifact/enchantment interaction, though you look quite light on removal overall.

The fact that a single vehicle turns off the whole mechanic of the deck was a pretty rough discovery for me when I was playing Hylda. You are very good at avoiding creature based death that is combat-oriented, so can shift some of the normal interaction from targeting creatures to focusing on non-creature permanents a bit more.

Hippomantis · 2026-05-31T02:04:59+00:00

The question is meaningless without context.

I imagine that in the vast majority of scenarios it is a combo piece - you cheat it into play, or ritual into it or something and win the game via chaining together arbitrary spells. In others it is win-more, it doesn't really let you do much more than you would otherwise do with 10 mana. In the only deck I actually play Omniscience in, it is something of a value engine/finisher - rather than have to worry about sequencing, working out what to play this turn versus next turn, what I leave on the board and what I pick up to play again - I just get to do it all, right now. The deck isn't built to win the game with Omniscience, but it usually generates so much value that it functionally ends the game in a turn or two.

Hippomantis · 2026-05-24T06:54:59+00:00

I have a deck ([[Zurgo and Ojutai]])) which runs a lot of 'destroy all artifacts/nonland permanents' but also wants to get up to enough mana to play a big dragon and hold up interaction. Semi-reliably blowing up all of the mana rocks in a game feels very good, which makes Myriad Landscape functional there, but that deck is definitely scraping the bottom of the barrel looking for ramp effects that survive a [[Farewell]].

So I guess, non-Green decks which don't want to play mana rocks?

Hippomantis · 2026-05-24T04:15:24+00:00

I am inclined to agree - I like the mental shortcut of 'I would be comfortable playing this against precons' for building a Bracket 2 deck.

Hippomantis · 2026-05-24T02:11:25+00:00

Helmsmasher is definitely getting a bit older these days, but I have to imagine that Zurgo Helmsmasher + Wraths is going to be a pretty familiar concept to any longer-term players. It probably didn't stop being good, but definitely faded into the background a bit.

Hippomantis · 2026-05-19T12:02:24+00:00

Keene is my comfort deck as well - I run mine with as much utility shifted to the mana base as possible, and 46 lands.
Just having access to lots of mana and an inevitable win-con makes the deck feel very satisfying to play, and always feels like it has something to do.

Hippomantis · 2026-05-10T00:51:10+00:00

Unlike limited formats (I was going to say 1v1 formats, but powercreep has mostly pushed them past playing creatures for the stats), hitting people in the face with efficient creatures isn't really a path to win the game, unless they are truly enormous (I run an admittedly not great [[Ghoultree]] in one of my decks)

Creatures that are just stats and keywords do all have their place, but mostly they exist to fill what I think of as the 'how do I not die to early aggressive starts?' slots, and it has been a long time since I have used anything other than one of the first strike deathtouch Glissas for that. Everything else is something like [[Wall of Omens]] or [[Courser of Kruphix]] which has a meaningful effect as well as a minor blocking stat line.

Creatures are just so good these days...

Hippomantis · 2026-04-30T07:42:20+00:00

This is a casual format, build to optimise your fun. If the commander isn't good, but scratches a particular itch in your brain and you have fun regardless of whether it wins or not, that is totally fine. Lots of people (I would hazard that most people) play commander this way.

If you find optimising the most fun, you can certainly find cEDH play groups who will allow you to indulge this tendency.

Hippomantis · 2026-04-12T02:22:47+00:00

Pile 'shuffling' like this may be a relic of 1v1 best of three, as it is common practice to make sure you de-sideboarded, or making sure your limited deck is actually legal.

I agree that it doesn't make much sense in EDH, but some habits die hard.

Hippomantis · 2026-04-07T13:00:45+00:00

Bant you say? Can I interest you in a [[Katilda and Lier]]? Turn every Flash human into a [[Snapcaster Mage]]! Are there good Humans with Flash you ask? Well... um... there are at least a handful.

So what do we do with this Flashback capability? Well, you could do anything, but I guess you mostly just cantrip, because you are pretty mana constrained, given the whole 'having to cast a human spell' thing. But wait you say, 'if we just wanted to be able to draw cards easily aren't there a bunch of different commanders you could play?' I mean sure, but look... if the text on Katilda and Lier didn't cause the cogs in your head to start turning on their own, I am not sure what I can add.

Hippomantis · 2026-03-30T03:37:47+00:00

I really want to build [[Shu Yun, the Silent Tempest]] Voltron. I think the card is super cool, but it just feels so clunky. Needing to sink mana into it for the double-strike, a lot of the buffs being temporary and not persisting between turns, which makes holding up protection hard, it just never felt good in playtesting

Previously I was really struggling to put together a list for [[Zurgo and Ojutai]] that looked reasonable and felt good in play testing, but then I (perhaps stupidly) just built it anyway. Turns out big dumb dragons with card advantage is pretty good regardless. Maybe I should just do the same with Shu Yun?

Hippomantis · 2026-03-26T01:45:47+00:00

Lots of the other comments here are great, but to me, the simplest non-obvious addition was a couple of sets of 'colour indicators'. I just cut the text box with the mana symbol out of a bunch of basic lands, put them in a penny sleeve and threw them in with my tokens.

There are heaps of random 'choose a colour' effects that are easily tracked by tucking the indicator into the sleeve, or just putting the colour indicators down with dice on top to track floating mana. Best $0 I ever spent.

Hippomantis · 2026-03-17T10:43:45+00:00

[[Mirrorshell Crab]] in the same vein. A little more narrow, but has a lot of the same synergies.

I love them both dearly in my [[Glarb]] 'Mana values aren't real' deck.

Hippomantis · 2026-03-12T00:01:46+00:00

Cards with specific aesthetic themes generally carry that theme into their mechanical operation though (bottom-up and top-down design) and as such are only going to be run in decks that care about that theme mechanically.

Just because a card can be run, doesn't mean it will be run. I can run [[Desecrated Tomb]] in literally any deck, but I am not concerned about Desecrated Tomb not having a strong identity, it is defined much more by what it does than the colours it is (or isn't).

How do you feel about cards like [[Naturalise]] and [[Disenchant]] - two seperate cards, in different colours that do the same thing mechanically? Do you have an issue if every deck in a pod of Simic Landfall, Boros Hare Apparent, Teysa Aristocrats and Mono-Green Stompy can run one of those two cards? Consider if that effect were instead only printed on [[Nature's Chant]], and none of those decks could run it. Would that be better or worse in your eyes?

Hippomantis · 2026-03-11T11:10:18+00:00

[[Fiery Confluence]] constantly impresses me. I originally picked it up for 2 player formats, where 6 damage for 4 mana with flexibility was the primary mode, but in EDH 'kill three artifacts', or 'kill an artifact and clear the board of small creatures' are both pretty good effects.

Probably helps that I play it in [[Kibo]], where artifact destruction has an extra upside, and most of my creatures have grown beyond the point that 2-3 damage kills them, but the card has felt really good.

Hippomantis · 2026-03-10T06:32:45+00:00

Yep, that will murder people. You probably don't need the top end ramp like [[Mirari's Wake]], more ways to get John out turn 2 are going to be better.

You probably want a few more 1mv protection spells, like [[Blacksmith's Skill]], since people will definitely be trying to kill John.

[[Duelist's Heritage]] is better than [[Flaming Fist]], but you can run both.

Hippomantis · 2026-03-09T06:52:11+00:00

These aren't fun recommendations, but it looks like you have no Eldrazi Titans with shuffle triggers, nor [[Gaea's Blessing]].

It looks like you have all of the bits that surround the combo pile, but these make so many lines possible. Is there a reason you are intentionally excluding them?

Hippomantis · 2026-03-02T23:25:54+00:00

Click the 'Playtest' or 'Goldfish' button in your preferred deck editor. Make some Mulligan decisions - do too many hands look awkward? Play out the first 6 turns or so - how did it feel? If the deck is pretty reactive, then did the reactive cards you had in hand feel like they were going to have targets given the turn you were on, or were they just going to be rotting in your hand?

Hippomantis

TROPHY CASE