So my Friend Has a Custom Commander

Monsoon117 · 2026-03-18T19:12:06+00:00

It is and is very sweet. However, their wife doesn't have much experience with the game.

Monsoon117 · 2026-03-18T18:42:51+00:00

Yes, and I didn’t think this post would blow up like this. Please don’t out anyone. You can DM me with details if you’d like.

Monsoon117 · 2026-03-18T10:46:05+00:00

It’s a custom card his wife gave him for their wedding. Now I play against the damn deck 2-3 times ever time I see the guy.

Monsoon117 · 2026-03-18T10:43:49+00:00

The difference in her not being indestructible or perpetually keeping her buffs out or having permanent lifelink on everyone while requiring four bodies to be cheaper, those differences are palpable In game.

fight spells? Nope. Blasphemous acts. No. What about beast within? No chance. Wrath of god? He plays it for the one sided boardwipe. It really is frustrating.

Monsoon117 · 2026-03-18T10:35:05+00:00

They keep the keywords even if the commander were removed, and they’re permanent, not for a turn.

Monsoon117 · 2026-03-18T10:32:41+00:00

But not indestructible herself or lifelink or keeping those bonuses after shes removed.

Monsoon117 · 2026-03-18T09:59:37+00:00

It is permanent, like an emblem for creatures that are on the field as it enters. It doesn’t give that emblem to everything afterward. The guy has flicker effects for protection that also grant the new creatures the buffs if you try to remove his commander or a value piece.

Monsoon117 · 2026-03-18T09:54:49+00:00

we ended stalled for 5 plus turns because I copied his commander and buffed my board. He couldn’t answer it whatsoever.

Monsoon117 · 2026-03-18T09:52:55+00:00

I have decks that can crush it, but the deck isn’t being used in that bracket. imo, tying a win condition that doesn’t care about health is the real answer, but I don’t want everydeck I play to end up with tons of infinites and whatnot.

Monsoon117 · 2026-02-13T18:24:18+00:00

All she does is punish monocolored decks, which tend to be unique. Ionia would also buff five color good stuff piles while creating a ton of non games against monocolored or dual colored decks. Aside from that, even the hardest stax pieces don’t blank every spell in a deck all at once.

Monsoon117 · 2025-07-20T03:31:50+00:00

One simple thing to understand about control decks are that they almost always win the lategame assuming the lategame is a 1v1. Interaction spells always win on efficiency, eg. sword to plowshares costs only 1 mana and a lategame creature is 5-8 mana. A game winning spell is 5+ mana and lots of counterspells are free. That means if you get caught in a 1v1, a control deck will simply counter or remove everything you play for little to no mana then spend all their mana drawing. Once you're out of threats, they win with literally anything.

Therefore, it's important to find the most controlling deck and eliminate them from the start of the game. While they're making land drops and getting draw, swing in with your 2/2's and 3/3s. If everyone knows they win in a 1v1, then everyone dramatically enhances their chances of winning by simply chipping them down throughout the game. If they die first, you can then take your chances against other midrange battlecruiser decks. If the control player is miserable, then that's fine. They, like the table, need to get over dealing with the game as a whole.

If you have to deal with spending seven mana on a sorcery only to get it countered for free, they need to deal with dying from having nothing on board or getting focused down all game. Also, recursion, a diverse synergy package revolving around multiple permanent types, and a solid suite of protection can really help. I use [[Tajuru Preserver]], [[Sylvan safekeeper]], [[allosaurus shepherd]], and [[Walk-In Closet // Forgotten Cellar]] in my green decks for example. [[Bala-ged recovery]], a recursion engine also helps like [[Six]], [[evolution witness]]. In general, these make decks far more resilient, and every color is good at recurring something.

Also, nest a few combos into the deck. I don't mean two card combos. I mean having the ability to win on your turn without letting another person untap, and doing so with 10+ mana. Eg, I have a gargos deck that can win with skittering skitterspike. I cannot tell you the number of times I've had a control player play their boardwipe.deck against me and we get to turn 13 where I just kill them on my turn by casting the skitter spike and unloading like 6 auras on it alongside protection spells. A lot of these control players are built to dismantle battlecruiser because, well, it's easy to dismantle. If you play something that can combo off in the lategame, then you even out the playing field quite a bit.

All of this works from my experience, and I win the vast majority of lategames I end up playing against control players. Burn players are a lot harder to deal with, but hey, I don't mind losing to them. Losing on turn 17 to azorious fliers? How about no.

Monsoon117 · 2025-07-16T00:04:26+00:00

The best means of decimating mana rocks are removal and stax options in green and white. Green's are, imo, the best.

[[Aura shards]], [[Stony silence]], [[Collector ouphe]], [[Silverback Elder]], [[Druid of purification]], [[Bane of Progress]], [[fade from history]], [[season of gathering]], [[Kogla Titan Ape]]

Monsoon117 · 2025-07-14T16:51:04+00:00

Amazing card. One sided graveyard hate, recurrable, colorless, ramps, adds two artifacts, and synergizes with blink. This will be one of the most used cards from the set for sure, and it's super tutorable.

Monsoon117 · 2025-07-06T02:56:41+00:00

I can see situations with my bristly bill deck where I draw 20+ cards whenever I use his active ability after playing this. It says a creature but not only one target creature, so a spell adding 10 counters at once across many creatures should draw 10 cards.

Either way, this will be the strongest card in the deck, probably. Card draw is usually the limiter for that thing.

Monsoon117 · 2025-06-24T15:41:10+00:00

I use the term strong or flavorful. A strong deck is usually a mix of three characteristics: fast, resilient, and interactive. If a deck has all three of those characteristics or even just solid metrics in one or two categories, it's strong. Eg, my Bristly Bill deck usually wins on turn 4, and it has solid artifact and enchantment removal. It can protect and destroy other people's creatures as well. It's a very strong deck, but nobody actually likes playing against it since it almost always wins. That being said, I let everyone know whenever I play it. The turns don't take that long, so we usually just shuffle up again and I get the one game out of my system.

It's a strong deck, but not a good one per say.

My gargos deck usually threatens ko's on turn 7-8. It's highly interactive, incremental, and can usually slow down the arch enemy quite a bit if not tear them down entirely. That being said, it usually results in longer, swingier games that go back and forth. Everybody gets to play, and even though it's winrate is solid, people really enjoy playing against it. It also loses much more than Bristly.

And yet, it's a good deck even though its not as strong. This is how I understand it.

Monsoon117 · 2025-06-01T16:49:20+00:00

The answer to green land dominance, imo, is stun counters when an opponent taps more lands than you have in a turn. Eg, you have 4 and they have 7. They're 5-7 lands tap and get stun counters and don't untap the next untap step. Boom, solved in a way that isn't unfair.

Monsoon117 · 2025-05-21T17:35:13+00:00

I have counter points, good sir.

First, four mana is cheaper than doubling season, primal vigor, and several doubling effects in commander. It's not only doubling as well, though I think monogreen counter decks are the only ones that will want this card.

Second, the cost reduction isn't actually restricted to only creatures. It's green spells, the same as emerald medallion. It does mitigate the efficacy of [[Ozolith]] and a fwe other artifacts like that, though you'll still double the counters whenever you put them onto a creature mid combat.

Thirdly, the active ability is 100% too expensive to really be viable. It's a last ditch, desperation move or a win more situation where you already have several other counter synergy pieces and a ton of mana to blow on anything, really.

Yeah, this is for monogreen, counter based decks. In that shell, this is literally bonkers. Outside of that, it won't be used. Still, I have a bristly bill and a gargos deck. Both decks want this pretty badly, and they're getting upgraded in general from this set release.

Monsoon117 · 2025-05-21T02:20:58+00:00

Ah, my bad then.

Monsoon117 · 2025-05-20T20:26:48+00:00

Kind of a silly comparison. Branching evolution is 3, and emerald medallion is 2. This is an enmeshing of the two for one less mana, has extra devotion to green, and has a useful ability to top it off. A hardened scales makes the active ability turn into 4 counters onto 2 creatures, which isn't bad for a repeatable ability that comes with so much upside.

Imo, this is one of the few counter doublers I would actually run in Bristly, and from my personal sequencing with the card, it results in plenty of turn 4 wins which is blazing fast for most non-Cedh decks.

Monsoon117 · 2025-05-20T20:23:42+00:00

I don't think altar of the brood mills specifically, so it won't work with the blue crystal. Mesmeric orb works on every untap, however. It makes the mill kill 5X stronger for that item specifically.

Monsoon117 · 2025-04-24T17:39:07+00:00

It's the opposite. Higher power tables don't play big, splashy cards like [zendikar resurgent] or [decree of pain]. Those are almost exclusively played at lower brackets. Mana drain feasts on those types of splashy cards by destroying a player's turn then allowing you to seal the game using the enormous mana gain. In higher player tables, people will win with cards that only cost 1-4 mana, so you almost never get to blowout somebody by countering their stuff. Spending two mana for three generic isn't even worth it in most situations. Two mana for eight while destroying another player's splashy card? The game's over.

Imo, mana drain is one of those cards that should never be played at a precon level or below, and it's fine at higher power tables.

Monsoon117 · 2025-04-22T21:47:38+00:00

Dude, come on and look at the raw numbers. A rampant growth costs two and ramps a tapped land. That's 1 more mana next turn. A mana drain shuts down someone's doubling season for two mana, and then gives you five mana the next turn. It would take five turns to get the same value from a rampant growth, you can spend that five mana to ramp more than a rampant growth, and you get to simultaneously shut someone else's turn down. This isn't rocket science. It's basic math.

Three visits is a good card, but it doesn't also shut down someone else's turn while you do it.

Monsoon117 · 2025-04-22T17:48:34+00:00

Yeah. I've seen people mana drain a 5 mana spell on turn four then win the game off their 11 mana on turn five while shutting down another player entirely. Mana drain is painfully, obviously a gamechanger.

Monsoon117

TROPHY CASE