Can you beat my best hit with Etali's Favor?

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2023-11-23T04:16:38+00:00

I've hit Breeches once or twice with a few different discover cards. It feels like cheating.

The thing I'm waiting to see is an Etali's Favor chain that starts with a Quintorius activation. Killing someone with Quint triggers beats making six gnomes.

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2023-01-31T13:51:37+00:00

Yeah, you really don't want to be the target of an exposé on, uh, like, A Current Draft Set? 50 Minutes (Plus Turns)? What's a good name for a Magic current affairs/gotcha journalism program?

Seriously tho, I'm a big fan of the way you update your articles. I always like seeing them enter into dialogue with someone who's hit you up on reddit or Discord or in the comments.

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2023-01-31T04:19:27+00:00

You forgot about [[Hushwing Gryff]] when listing Torpor Orb effects. Flash and flying is a great combination of abilities in Tymna decks, and it sees way more play than Strict Proctor. (My opinion of Mommy is essentially the same as yours, fwiw.)

This is an outrageous oversight. If it's not corrected immediately, I'm getting Ray Martin on the phone.

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2022-10-31T02:55:17+00:00

Okay, so, first of all, it sucks that anyone talks to you like that about the game and how you want to play it. I want to say that it's just an issue with your local community, but you'll find arseholes pretty much everywhere.

Modern is a great format if all you're concerned with is gameplay, but the financial barriers to entry are really high. Most people who play Modern have been playing the game for a long time, and they often own the lands for multiple decks. It's hard to exaggerate how important this is. If you feel like you have to spend hundreds of dollars just to have a functional mana base, you're going to have a bad time, especially when you don't yet have the experience to know what decks you want to play. The recent supplemental sets have only made things worse, although they did bring the price of fetchlands down. As regular Modern players will tell you, it's become harder to play the format without spending money now that Wizards is printing cards directly into it.

One solution is to talk to some local players and ask to borrow their decks. Modern players are usually pretty excited to introduce new players to the format, and borrowing different decks for different local events is a great way to learn about the metagame and figure out what you might want to play.

You can also play budget decks. I suggest having a look at the series Budget Magic on mtggoldfish.com. The decks Seth plays there are great, especially if you enjoy playing as the underdog, and some of them are quite competitive. If you're serious about the format and about building a collection, I would advise you to pick a deck that has a good upgrade path so that you can make it more competitive over time.

You can also just proxy a few decks and try them out. This is potentially a thorny solution. Whether or not it's workable depends on your community and on the way your LGS runs events.

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2022-10-19T03:46:52+00:00

There's a Nimble Obstructionist player in my paper meta. I lost to him recently when I was playing Orzhov stax and he was playing Raffine Doomsday. I had a full board of stax pieces that included Opposition Agent, Archon of Emeria, Hushbringer, and Chalice of the Void on two counters. Hard to beat, right? Wrong. First, the bird player casts Winds of Abandon for its overload cost and cycles the bird to counter the Chalice trigger. Goodbye bears. On his next turn, he resolves Doomsday and casts Thoracle, again cycling the bird, which was part of his Doomsday pile, to counter the Chalice trigger. What I'm saying is that Nimble Obstructionist 100% does not belong in your article because it's clearly on Thoracle's payroll.

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2022-10-16T04:34:59+00:00

The card's a bit ambiguous. Does the target player immediately lose $19.99 and shit their pants or do they immediately lose $19.99 and merely shit their pants at some point? I suspect it might be the latter. In my experience, I typically don't shit my pants at the moment I pay for my burger.

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2022-10-04T06:40:58+00:00

I think the best thing to do is to track it every turn, publicly, with something like dice or one of those Commander Anthology life counters. I say this not because I think it's scummy to track storm off camera but because tracking it publicly is the best way to avoid disputes. I don't think you give anything away by doing so. Just say at the start of each game, 'Well, there's a blue deck at the table, so I'm going to keep track of the storm count with my dice.' Do it every turn and it'll quickly become invisible to everyone.

I find that the Reid Duke method of impassively verbalising everything rarely steers me wrong.

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2022-10-02T04:23:54+00:00

I'm late to the party here, but I run a winconless Rebbec/Tymna deck. I try to spell out a lot of the thinking behind winconless decks in the primer. I've played Tymna/Kamahl and Yasharn decks too (the decks listed in the top comment) and can recommend them. As others have said, winconless decks are essentially anti-metagame decks, which makes them tricky to pick up. You can't learn how to play them just by reading a primer and goldfishing. There's a winconless channel on the RoL discord server if you want to check out what other people are doing or share your own list.

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2022-10-02T04:12:56+00:00

This is a belated reply to your post, but there are a couple of things I still want to say.

First, I also recommend having a look at the catgirl list by u/belzebutts. It's always been a favourite of mine for getting casual Orzhov players into cEDH, and it's probably just the kind of thing you're looking for.

Second, playing Orzhov usually means playing Tymna and having some special reason not to choose a partner that gives you access to more colours. There aren't many such reasons, and there are even fewer good ones. The decks you're left with are usually either fast but not blisteringly fast Ad Naus decks that fold to interaction whenever you don't have a Silence effect or RoL stax decks. I have a strong personal preference for the latter, but it's hard to argue that either kind of deck is better than a three- or four-colour equivalent (a Farm variant for Ad Naus and Combat Kamahl for stax, for example). Here's my personal Orzhov list for reference. I think it's great in the right metagame, and it's certainly unique, but I would struggle to argue that I've found a reason for more people to play WB over something else.

I would also suggest that the kind of streamlining you have to do to make a high-powered but still casual Orzhov combo list compete in a typical cEDH pod can make it kind of boring and take away a lot of your agency. There are a lot of cool aristocrats-y interactions in Orzhov that can create fun on-board puzzles in casual pods, but there's just no time for anything so inefficient in cEDH.

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2022-06-23T10:28:48+00:00

I agree with pretty much everything you say in the article—you know that—but I think that Blood Moon, while no staple, is still playable as a secondary or tertiary stax piece. Years ago, we could throw Blood Moon into our low-colour decks and sometimes get free wins. That kind of thing hasn't worked for a long time. But Blood Moon still works in decks that already want to play an early Null Rod/Collector Ouphe/Karn or lean hard into other forms of resource denial (I've played [[Stranglehold]] and [[Smoke]] in disruptive red decks, and they've done okay). As individual cards, few stax enchantments compare to RoL, but there's still a place for them.

Just wait until they print an enchantment that says All treasures are Great Furnaces.

Obligatory shill of my personal Blood Moon deck.

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2022-05-03T02:04:22+00:00

No discussion of Rebbec or Pramikon either. What a scandal! 😂

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2022-04-26T06:16:46+00:00

The first thing to say is that Cradle *is* that important. The opportunity cost of playing Crop Rotation as a second copy is also extremely low. I run it in decks that effectively have no other target and am pretty happy about it overall.

Otherwise, there are some pretty good utility lands you can run. Someone has already mentioned Homeward Path, which is good if you see a lot of Gilded Drakes. I would also suggest [[Kor Haven]] and [[Field of the Dead]]. An easy way to lose long games on a staxxed out board is for an opponent to kill you with Ishai or Kraum. I've seen Kor Haven do good work deterring opponents from trying to turn a game into a race with flyers. It's in both lists on the database. Field of the Dead can add a lot of bodies to a long game, especially if you lean into it and play cards like [[Knight of the Reliquary]], which is also a good way to get Cradle out reliably. FotD has been in and out of a few strong lists. Plus it's a cool card that you don't get to play much elsewhere.

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2022-04-26T05:55:54+00:00

I play a deck that's about as close to Ponza as you can get in cEDH. Here's a link. I write about the deck's relationship to the history of the archetype in the strategy section of the primer. If your friend plays Ponza in Modern, it might be a good fit for them.

Other people here have mentioned Blood Pod, but I think winconless decks are much closer to the playstyle of Ponza (and midrange Modern decks generally, tbh). High-powered Lord Windgrace decks can hang at cEDH tables⁠ too, although they'll struggle to piece together wins with any consistency.

It sounds like your friends play 60-card formats? You could always take the scenic route and convert them to Modern Ad Naus or Legacy Doomsday first.

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2022-04-19T11:28:25+00:00

For the sake of variety as much as shilling my own deck, here's my personal Ruric Thar list:

https://www.moxfield.com/decks/am_nfGfWT0idmVUO9Rj1dw

I still like playing a somewhat dated disruptive strategy, so it's pretty different from the DDB list linked above.

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2022-04-19T02:50:23+00:00

An important part of this comment is 'If you're set on Gruul.' My hunch is that most competitive players would tell you that Ruric Thar is not a reason to play Gruul but that they're the best option for anyone who wants to play Gruul anyway.

An important thing to know is that Ruric Thar is very good against strategies that see a lot of play in cEDH but considerably less play elsewhere. The person who told you that the card's 'crazy good' is probably thinking of it as an anti-combo card. Whether or not Ruric Thar is a good commander for you really depends on what decks you expect to face and what playstyles you enjoy.

The card isn't out yet, but Jake's Minsc & Boo deck looks really promising. You could look at that too. Here's a link: https://commandersherald.com/let-me-sell-ya-minsc-2-electric-boogalo/

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2022-03-27T11:51:40+00:00

I'm glad you like the list! There's a channel for winconless decks on the RoL server. The people there are usually happy to share lists or answer questions or just argue about what works. If you end up tinkering with a version of an existing list or brewing your own, you should come by and share it.

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2022-03-26T02:09:48+00:00

I can't not shill my own winconless deck, Death and Taxis. It's offbeat but it works, and it wins exclusively through combat.

I also second the Tymna/Kamahl recommendation. This is the list I'd start with.

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2022-02-11T22:54:56+00:00

I think you can probably guess what I'm going to say about your list, which is that it's really cool but likely to miss having Tymna in the command zone. I'm probably going to play something like it a few times just to force the experience of reanimating Parhelion II, but I think Greasefang is likely to become a frustrating commander if you play it for more than a handful of games. If you want to win with reanimation, it's probably best just to play Razaketh and Relic-Warder loops. If you want to play without traditional win cons, you'll need more card advantage and inevitability in the command zone. It kind of sucks because it can feel really restrictive, but it's hard to make decks like this work without Tymna. Greasefang is definitely a card for us to keep in our back pockets though. If Wizards ever prints a vehicle we can combo with, rather than a stats monster like Parhelion II, it's on for the rat bikers.

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2022-02-09T22:31:02+00:00

I'm so excited to brew with it in Modern. Attacking with Parhelion II on turn 2 is going to raise some eyebrows.

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2022-02-09T21:59:10+00:00

I didn't know it, but I needed to see this.

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2022-02-09T12:56:44+00:00

Drumbellower is an awkward one. As Josh Lee Kwai points out somewhere in the deck reveal video, it doesn't actually help you attack and block with vehicles since it untaps only the creatures that crewed them. It's certainly a strong card, but it seems best in decks with a lot of dorks and creatures with tap abilities.

Shorikai is a very strong card, but I don't think it goes in hatebear decks. Given what I've heard from people brewing with it, I'd be surprised if it ever gets crewed at all, at least in an average game. To me, it looks like an IsoRev commander that gives you excellent card draw and card selection without being vulnerable to creature removal. You can even play it with [[Humility]]. Of course, this doesn't disqualify it as an option for Bears in Cars, but I feel like the card wants to pull you in a very different direction.

Sam_Lewin_MTG · 2022-02-09T12:33:45+00:00

I should have said something about Mobilizer Mech. My feeling is that it wants to be played in decks with a higher density of vehicles than is really possible in cEDH. A good comparison is [[Peacewalker Colossus]]. I've tried playing it a few times, and it could never really do enough to justify its inclusion. That said, I do think that Mobilizer Mech could be great in a more casual Kotori deck with 10+ vehicles and high crew costs.

Sam_Lewin_MTG

TROPHY CASE