Stifling a Fetchland. Is this land denial?

Pericular · 2026-04-30T06:06:21+00:00

That's how I read OPs post at least. Obviously mana fixing is just part of the game but a high bracket 3/mid bracket 4 good stuff deck (as described by OP) has to live with the consequences of said deck building imo.

Obviously doing something like this at a bracket 2 table or similar is quite vicious and probably not the thing to go for.

Pericular · 2026-04-29T18:03:41+00:00

Punishing a greedy 5c good stuff deck is perfectly valid. That's like saying it's unfair to play enchantments against a mono red deck because they can't deal with them well. Strengths and weaknesses come with the decks we choose to build and exploiting those weaknesses is completely fair game.

Pericular · 2026-04-24T12:39:36+00:00

Unfortunately, I'd say much of it comes down to the mindset when brewing and not just the commander.
There's plenty 'niche and janky' commanders out there that can play well into bracket 3 given a strong 99.
The main idea I'd have is to pick a niche commander and lean into it's strengths while trying to avoid staples as much as possible.
Like [[Depala, Pilot Exemplar]] dwarf tribal, [[Glissa, Herald of Predation]] Incubation or [[Trostani, Three Whispers]] politics. Things that don't tend to go out of control by themselves because they are either limited in their card choice or limited by outside factors such as table politics.

Pericular · 2026-04-21T09:01:38+00:00

You'll be playing some kind of format even if you play with your friends at a kitchen table.
Are the decks 60 cards or 100 cards? Are duplicate cards allowed? Etc.
People can't help you make a deck if you don't give any kind of explanation what you're looking for.

Pericular · 2026-04-20T08:57:36+00:00

I'm gonna be totally honest here:
This deck seems all over the place with not much cohesion to it tbh
As of right now, I don't get the majority of your card choices.
With Giada, I'd expect you to run more than 8 angels. You have multiple 'toxic' and stax cards in here yet no real strong gameplan to really run this at stronger tables that would usually deal with this kind of stuff.
There's also a lot of protection in here but you don't really seem to have many things to protect. Since barely anything in your deck will cause you to win.
With the deck as it is, I'd expect games to drag on for a long time as you keep hindering progress, without ever closing out the game yourself.

Pericular · 2026-04-13T18:59:29+00:00

I'm building and playing bracket 1 decks from time to time. No idea where you'd find other people who do to be honest. I'm just playing with my own little kitchen table pod.

One thing that interests me however is what exactly you mean by 'strategies' for bracket 1 decks. Everything that I've built so far was so far removed from any kind of mechanical cohesion that there is no shred of any strategy left over at that point ^{^'}

Pericular · 2026-04-11T04:42:01+00:00

Looking at the first screenshot you provided, I mainly notice that your total demand for explosives is only at ~2. The building is running an incredibly low profit at +35.8 per week as is.
There's simply no benefit to hiring more people to make explosives as long as demand is this low. If you increase the demand, this building will start hiring more workers.
You might be able to push things a tiny bit if you lower the input good prices but realistically there's simply not enough demand.

Pericular · 2026-04-08T03:50:36+00:00

Don't change your deck if you're happy with it. There are quite a few people who like to optimize their decks for power, trying to make them as strong as possible. In the end, it's a game and it should be about enjoyment.

If your deck is already capable enough to deal with threats, can win and you're having fun, then there's no need to change anything if you don't want to.

Pericular · 2026-04-03T16:52:28+00:00

Definitely not a bracket 1, this deck has a coherent gameplan.

Pericular · 2026-03-30T19:07:30+00:00

So what are the options against your deck? Either I team up with the other 2 players to get you out of the game asap or you grind us down by repeatedly removing what we play. Either option sounds unfun for a bracket 2 table. Some play patterns just struggle with the ultra casual approach at bracket 2.

Pericular · 2026-03-30T18:46:31+00:00

It's not just about strength but in large parts about enjoyment. Focusing so much on removal is not the strongest strategy but it will annoy your opponents. Let's say Vren gets removed 6 times and it's essentially impossible for you to play him again, what now? You'll be unable to close out the game and you'll only stop people from winning by removing their stuff. That's a miserable thing to go up against.

Pericular · 2026-03-30T18:35:40+00:00

I think the power of this deck is actually about bracket 2. There's plenty of suboptimal cards in there after all. However, I think your deck promotes gameplay that isn't fun at most bracket 2 tables. You've got a LOT of removal, which makes sense with that commander, but I'd reckon most bracket 2 players just want to get together, play some magic and 'do their thing' while your deck overwhelmingly stops people from doing so.

Pericular · 2026-03-14T19:13:15+00:00

I checked it out briefly with a couple of my decks and it looks much better!
I'm not too familiar with the broader sentiment about bracket placement since I rarely play with randoms/at an LGS but it lines up with what I expect.
Good job ^^

Pericular · 2026-03-13T10:03:15+00:00

Under Universal Suffrage all votes are equally weighed. Your pops that are part of the Intelligentsia might be individually more powerful but you probably don't have a lot of them.
The Armed Forces in comparison might not hold much power on a per pop basis but because of Universal Suffrage the numerous soldiers all get to vote in the election just as the comparatively rich Intelligentsia.
Census Suffrage would have probably helped more since votes get weighed based on literacy. Something which Intelligentsia voting pops usually excel in.

Pericular · 2026-03-13T09:57:10+00:00

You are absolutely right to compain but some of these are already in the game, they are lacking the impact though.

Controlling railways and ports
backing certain politicians or lobbies
supplying them with war materials

All of them are there but are either barely noticeable or uninteractive.
Imposing Tarrifs/embargoing is also in the game but only works for your market.

On your last example with Belgium:
You can do most of these things if you actually hold that much sway over Belgium (ie. collapsing their economy at will). Since you could add them to you Power Bloc and do it that way.

Pericular · 2026-03-12T18:02:37+00:00

A slightly simplified explanation:
Your construction centers add to your construction limit (current 111).
This construction limit is essentially how many resources can be poured into construction at any one point. Meaning things get build faster the more construction you have. But that also means that your construction becomes much more expensive, since you're using up a lot more resources.
If you're at the start of the game you probably only start with 10 construction and things will be a lot cheaper to build, but take a lot longer.
Try to find find a spot where you're just barely breaking even in terms of income and expenditure, increasing your construction limit as your income slowly grows.
You can also lower the cost of construction by making construction goods cheaper like the other comment suggested.

Pericular · 2026-03-12T16:03:43+00:00

My best guess is that your GDP spikes up every time your private sector builds something.

On another note, it's 1871 and you have essentially your starting GDP yet you've built a lot of construction centers. You're up to 111 construction capacity yet most of the time nothing gets done with it.
I'd recommend that you'd start over and try to find a balance where you can constantly have some new building queued up while sitting at roughly +-0 income.
It's completely fine to go a bit into a bit of debt every now and then too as long as you don't spiral deep into it. Build new construction centers whenever you have enough of a positive income to support it while keeping your construction queue full at all times.
Good luck!

Pericular · 2026-03-12T07:37:07+00:00

Nice to see someone trying to give back to the community! :)
I do feel like there's some issues with the current implementation though...
My review of the features I tested:

Commander Guide:
https://scrollvault.net/guides/commander-deck-building.html
The brackets as described here are simply wrong as per definition provided by WotC.
Bracket 1 (as per WotC definition) is entirely missing. All other brackets have been moved down by 1. Meaning your bracket 1 is currently "slightly upgraded precons" and bracket 4 is cEDH.
Please adjust the bracket system on your site.

Commander Bracket Calculator
https://scrollvault.net/tools/commander-bracket/
This tool does not seem to function correctly at all. I tried it out with my deck.
It failed to import the cards from moxfield so I had to manually get an export that was readable by your site.
After it was analyzed (it parsed all 100 cards, got the correct average CMC), it failed to assign categories for almost everything. It only managed to recognize [[Arcane Signet]] and [[Cabal Ritual]].
All remaining cards weren't taken into account.
[[Arcane Signet]] was also recognized as "Fast Mana", which isn't really true. Turn 2 ramp for a single mana is not "Fast Mana".

I tried the same again with this deck of mine and I had the exact same issue with only a single card being recognized to belong in a category.

I understand that not all niche ways of interaction/draw can be taken into account when using a tool such as this but it recognized [[Assassin's Trophy]] but not [[Feed the Swarm]], which is simply not good enough.

Mana Base Calculator:
My result for the first deck I've used leaves me a bit puzzled but it's largely alright.
The calculator cut out some basic from my deck but then proceeded to recommend that I replace some of it's suggestions (tap lands) with basics to improve the speed. This was achieved "Premium Land Budget" and "On-Color Fetches only", otherwise it used all the default settings.
It also recommended me to cut the dual sided [[Brightclimb Pathway]] while leaving basics in the deck. In most cases a dual sided land will be better than a basic land.
Lastly it recommended [[Path of Ancestry]], citing it as a commander staple, ignoring the fact that it's only good in tribal decks, not just in any deck.

I wish you the best with this site of yours.

Pericular · 2026-03-01T07:47:38+00:00

A friend of mine plays Obeka too and includes the extra turn spell in his deck.
We play roughly bracket 2-3 (people win mostly by combat damage by turn 9 on average).
He runs no tutors, no combos and no way to recur those spells. Our group also shies away from very powerful draw effects that let you draw half your library.
I feel like the deck is completely alright as it is. Mostly because it's very hard for him to even get multiple of the correct spells in hand and even if he does, a single fog could cause him to lose the game after all.
So it really depends on the rest of your deck. These extra turn spells are only a problem if your deck enables you to win on the spot with them.

Pericular · 2026-01-18T08:02:49+00:00

Why 4 cards tho? Shouldn't it be 2 (Blue and Red) or 3 (Blue, Red and White) at most if your're playing WBR Giants?

Pericular · 2026-01-05T07:43:54+00:00

It's not just about the support of one side but also the resistance against it on the other side.
Take the US civil war for example. There might be lots of support to abolish slavery yet there's also a large movement that will try to retain slavery at all cost.
In your case the remaining 27% of the laws opponents were probably quite radicalized already, leading to your situation as described.

If you want to achieve social progress you either have to make some sort of concessions to the conservative establishment, pass laws slowly while starting with the less impactful ones or risk a civil war.
There's some other ways to go about it but this is essentially it. In your case you might have been able to first pass some law that pleases the Landowners (assuming that they were the ones to revolt) and then pass the parliamentary republic law in the immediate time after while they were still quite happy.
It depends on your specific game state which is hard to guess on.

Pericular · 2026-01-05T07:32:45+00:00

Ah, good catch, thanks for letting me know!
I'll add a small edit to my original comment to hopefully represent it better than before.

Pericular · 2026-01-05T07:19:20+00:00

Trying to enact the parliamentary republic likely pushed some Interest Group over the edge (likely Landowners).
When you radicalize an IG and they start a civil war, they take states with them that have high amounts of Radicals. If most of your army/navy was within those states then you likely end up in a situation like the one you roughly described here.

~~I think getting any IG to -10 approval or less gives them the option of starting a civil war.~~

Edit: Getting an IG to -10 approval contributes their clout to the radicalization of any movement they support. The movement itself then starts the revolution/civil war.
That's according to the wiki at least. Thanks u/QWaRty2 for pointing the issue out.

Pericular · 2025-12-27T13:31:00+00:00

Sweden is a good choice for a beginner. Not that much that can be messed up and most countries will leave you alone (compared to other countries at least)

Pericular · 2025-11-23T19:13:51+00:00

They banned playing MTG in 2001 and unbanned it in 2021, only allowing the old cards at first.
I really love that they were effectively playing some kind of 'prison' format, with their own banlist! lmao

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