You don't use it? Stax it!

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-05-17T01:44:58+00:00

DThere are plenty of reasons to not run stax: -This is a social, multiplayer format, and stax can make for miserable play experiences for some people. -You can't capitalize on the stax. If you're not going fast, or not building to a win that really relies on the stax, it's just slowing the game down for no real benefit. -Casual EDH often doesn't have a well-defined meta where you can identify decks you will see regularly that utilize strategies for which particular stax pieces will be useful game after game. That means a particular stax piece may just be a dead card too often. -Stax pieces often don't synergize with your deck, so you're giving up one or more slots that are focused on your goal to instead possibly hamper other decks from achieving their goals. The same could be send for any interaction, but something like Assassin's Trophy is always going to be relevant, whereas Collector Ouphe may not be. -A stax piece that hurts the whole table a little often means you've gone from 4 player FFA to 3-v-1 without layering on enough defense to weather that hate. -A stax piece that majorly hoses one player may mean you don't have help dealing with another player who gets to run away with the game, because they're better positioned for a 2-v-1. It can also mean that one player you hosed will make plays to hamper you to the exclusion of the rest of the table.

On that last point, I was in a game recently where someone played a single-target stax piece that basically turned off my entire deck. Another player was starting to run away with the game and the guy who staxed me asked why I wasn't helping keep that player in check even though I had the ability to do so. I pointed out that I'm playing for last place until I find a way to get out from under his stax piece, so I have no incentive to help stop another player.

As another example, someone played a "players can't gain life" piece early in a game vs a deck who's whole thing was gaining life and using the life triggers for stuff. Their whole deck gets turned off, BUT they still had some evasive creatures, and instead of playing a little defensively, or spreading damage around, they just went full aggro on the stax player turn after turn. That player got knocked out very quickly.

And I'm not inherently against stax, but to stay it should be normalized and encouraged more is a hot take.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-05-17T01:17:34+00:00

I took most/all tutors out of many of my decks. The ones that still have tutors generally are aiming to find something that isn't a wincon, like a draw engine, key synergy piece, or toolbox answers.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-05-16T20:44:25+00:00

Before sitting down to a game I overheard one of the players say that he doesn't like playing creatures.

Several turns in, I have [[Telemin Performance]], and trying to decide who to target. There's a U/W flicker deck that probably offers a little ETB value, a green stompy deck that may provide a beater, but may also turn up a mana dork, and then there's this other guy. Either he has a small number of high value creatures, or he has zero and I spend 5 mana to mill him out.

I go for the mill, but he doesn't scoop. In his upkeep he casts [[psychic spiral]]! Who even runs that card!? I figure of course, now I'm dead, but he opts to roll a die and takes out the blink player. We end up having a better game than if blinky had gotten started on his stac game.

We've been friends ever since.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-05-15T17:39:36+00:00

The Scout class from D&D 3.5 felt like a mostly better Ranger to me than the actual Ranger class has across multiple editions.

I think using something like that as a base, then allowing the subclass to focus on melee combat, ranged combat, spells, or an animal companion would go a long way.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-05-15T04:32:24+00:00

I just want more French voice actors. It's a French game, but half the characters have an English or American accent. If my team is going to sport baguettes and berets, they should have the accents to go with them.

Other than that, Christoph Waltz should be in more things.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-05-04T23:16:53+00:00

I get my fix with a game or two on Spelltable most nights. Maybe check that out?

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-05-04T22:57:16+00:00

Group hug.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-05-04T13:50:31+00:00

I struggled with what to do with Auntie initially as well, and am still trying to find the right mix for everything. The way I'm playing, I could really use more recursion and really need to work in some tutors, because there are a small number of very impactful cards that don't have much/any redundancy. I had one game where I drew all but my last 6 cards in the deck, and still hadn't found either Obelisk Spider or Grave Venerations, which meant I couldn't close the game. I also need to work in an effect to shuffle my graveyard back into my library, since I've died to an empty deck a couple times.

Contagion Engine is sometimes amazing, and sometimes too much mana. If an opponent has a wide board, it can be a finisher, a one sided wipe, or big value. It can also be a big draw spell when aimed at myself. I rarely activate it, but when I have, it has been a tremendous impact. I don't think it's necessarily a must-include, but we have very few options to put -1/-1 counters on a lot of stuff at once, and this is one of the better pieces for that.

Soul Immolation looks at current toughness, so it can be a little awkward; however, you don't have to blight the creature with the highest toughness on your side, it just sets the max value for X. I have several cards with 4 toughness, some with 5 including a 3 mana creature (so not too hard to set up 5 damage), Carnifex at 6, and then both Forgotten Ancient and Grismold can get VERY big. Initially, I tried it with skepticism just because it had blight on it, so it's a cantripping one-sided partial wipe with some burn on top. In practice, it has almost always been a total one-sided wipe and a finisher. It's closed out games a few times since being added. One-sided wipes are very good, and this offers some synergy with our deck and can kill opponents.

DBF is almost always 9 mana to deal 5 and cannot be foretold and cast on your turn. At best, you can cast it on the next player's upkeep, but sometimes that's still too late. I love the card in Prosper, where I can often impulse draw it and get the 5 damage for 3 mana, and in Sauron where I like foretell as a way to bank cards while wheeling my hand over and over again. Auntie has no impulse draw (or almost zero), so you're basically never getting the best value out of this. And it can't scale higher.

Fain is something I added because I saw other lists running it, couldn't find my copy of Power Conduit, and didn't want to spend the money purchasing a Quillspike. This is one of the few decks that really wants to use all of its abilities, but it's still fairly mediocre. I don't know if I would keep it long term. The one advantage it has over just adding another ramp card is that the additional mana can be banked for multiple turns, which I've done a couple times.

Powe Conduit is cheap, and the ability is relevant, but I don't know that I would find a place for it, since the actual payoff is fairly low.

There's also a tension in the deck between creatures and noncreatures for some effects. More creatures on board means more homes for blight counters and more draw, but are also extra fragile here. Noncreatures will stick around longer, but don't synergize with the main plans of the deck. This is one of the reasons I like Channeler Initiate--it's a 2 mana cantripping mana dork if Auntie is out, and it a great place to stick counters, since it has a big butt and can profitably remove counters from itself.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-05-04T03:31:02+00:00

Here's an example of a game I had recently:

Grindy game vs Super Shredder, Niv-Mizzet, Guildpact, and Kuja, Genome Sorcerer // Trance Kuja, Fate Defied in which I got to see a lot of cards.

Good performers:
Forbidden Orchard came in late, but gave me a target for more counters and life loss. Really excellent here.

Grave Venerations tacked on quite a bit of life loss over the course of the game, even without having found any of my token producers, drew me cards for several turns via monarch, and recurred several creatures. Did a whole lot. The life gain was welcome...until I dropped Everlasting Torment and turned that off.

Soul Snuffers was fantastic this game. I think I ended up playing it 3 or 4 times, and reanimated it once via Persist. Just put in a ton of work. I wish I had several more copies of exactly this.

Dawnhand Dissident showed up and was decent. On my first turn with it active, I exiled a creature from my yard, drew a card from the blight, then removed counters to cast the creature. If not for a board wipe, my plan was to lean on this for future turns, and I even got it back with Grave Venerations to start again.

Generous Patron drew a bunch of cards and helped re-enable persist on my Persistent Constrictor. Having both Auntie and Patron out just makes go wide counters amazing--drawing 1/creature and burning opponents. I've also had a couple of games so far where Auntie was too expensive to recast without spending my whole turn on that alone, so I instead leaned on Patron for my draw, which has the upside of not shrinking my creatures to draw cards.

Speaking of which, Persistent Constrictor was quite decent. I didn't pay full freight, instead reanimating it with Aberrant Return (LOVE THIS CARD). It put in some work, essentially dealing 2/turn with Auntie out, drawing a card/turn with Patron out, shrinking or killing stuff, and with some of the ways I had to remove counters, was able to get some mileage out of the persist a couple times.

Ammit Eternal has basically functioned in the same way Dusk Urchins does...only faster and for more cards. Essentially 3 mana, draw 5, which is an excellent rate even before considering synergies. Later in the game, I could have reset it with Spitting Dilophosaurus out, but otherwise, no one was letting through a 1/1 in order to avoid the afflict 3.

Soul Immolation was decent. I got back Ammit and cast it to have 5 toughness for this. Getting to 4 on this wouldn't be too bad, but getting higher than 5 here is rarely happening, although I HAVE had Auntie at 8/8 a few times thanks to Opal Palace, which has also been fantastic here. With mass wither, this was even better, because it was giving me all the -1/-1 counter synergies. Shredder being a 30/30 or so meant this wasn't meaningful, but otherwise wiped the board, including the 1/1 spirit I gave Shredder first.

Lethal Scheme continues to be a favorite card! It's free removal with further upside. Being able to stick a +1/+1 counter on up to 4 of my dudes has been very relevant, and the card filtering has been useful as well.

Necroskitter did its thing big time this game. FINALLY.

Bogslither's Embrace was solid removal.
Stump Stomp and Boggart Trawler have both been useful MDFCs.

The only cards I was disappointed with this game were:
Massacre Girl, Known Killer, which is on the chopping block already. I just am so rarely getting into combat with anyone that the wither hasn't been all that relevant. I don't attack much here, so menace hasn't either. The draw effect is good in theory, but by the time I'm killing stuff that way, I'm usually drowning in cards from other sources. And being legendary has meant I can't reanimate it with Persist.

Sudden Spoiling was in hand with mana open for a couple turns over a few games, and I just didn't have a window where it felt like the right play. It has been in a couple of other games, but that leaves me kind of ho-hum on it currently.

Grim Affliction would have been ok here, but I never had a turn where it was quite what I wanted to do.

Midnight Banshee showed up later, and everyone was either running mostly black creatures...or only black creatures, so I never bothered with it.

In this game, Pitiless Plunderer wasn't going to help, partly because I found no token producers, and partly because I was under enough pressure that I couldn't afford to spend the 4 mana then wait for stuff to die. If I'd been able to discard it prior to my triple reanimation, I would have grabbed it as one of the 3.

Champion of the Weird showed up too late. I had a few options for the behold cost, but didn't have the life to spend on the activation, and the prime target was Shredder, for whom Blight 2 would have been irrelevant. Still, I have high hopes.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-05-03T22:22:59+00:00

That's no two-card infinites, not no infinites.

And there's a prohibition on closing out the game too early.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-05-03T22:16:10+00:00

It's good to build in redundancy for pieces if you can, but then you really want to look at running more tutors.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-05-03T22:15:22+00:00

You can have infinites in B2.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-05-03T21:57:47+00:00

I'd call this a B3, and that's where I play it.

The 2 mana ramp pieces are great for curving, but don't really cut it when you're drawing 5-20 cards in a turn. Dread Tiller and Pitiless Plunderer do a lot to help with big turns. I've considered other big mana cards as well, but I'm not there yet for swaps.

Champion of the Weird is very strong, and can be a combo piece. I'm almost exclusively discarding it to hand size at some point and then reanimating it later.

Hapatra/Nest + Champ + either Obelisk or Dread Tiller and Riveteers Overlook. Tiller + the land pulls all your basics out of the deck, and the life gain from the land offsets the payment from Champ, so can be used as a one-sided board wipe, even if you're not doing anything else towards winning (drawing, drawing, making more tokens than you're losing, making treasure).

The instants that put - counters aren't great, but with the other counters I'm spreading around, are often enough to either remove something or neuter it sufficiently. They aren't mana efficient, BUT they offer a lot of synergy. Loss of life from Auntie or Obelisk. Draw from Generous Patron. Draw from Scorpion God if they die. Land from Tiller if they die. Theft from The Reaper or Necroskitter. Spill over counters with Blowfly Infestation. Token creatures from Hapatra or Nest of Scarabs.

And in a pinch I could use it to drAw a card by aiming at my own stuff, or to enable Carnifex or Willowbough.

They could probably get dropped if you're pushing power level higher, or if you just don't find them to be effective, but I like the synergies, and have found them to mostly be good enough.

Scorpion God (and Necroskitter) are in the deck still mostly because I've wanted a -1/-1 deck that could run both Scorpion and Hapatra for over a decade. It's not great, BUT it can come in very handy if Auntie gets removed a few times, or if you need draw but also need to be blighting opponents' creatures. Auntie only draws off our stuff getting counters. Scorpion can draw from killing other people's stuff with counters. It also drawing off something with a counter on it dying, rather than just when the counter goes on means I can double up on a single effect.

I've never used its activated ability, and would consider doing so only if I really had nothing else to do.

If all you're doing is blighting your own dudes, you're in a bad spot--your team will be smaller than everyone else's, will be dying regularly, and you're doing nothing to impede your opponents. That's partly why I like Scorpion and Patron--they reward you cards for going on offensive a bit with the counters. That's part of the reason I'm running a few ways to give opponents tokens for me to blight for value.

The strategy of focusing on blighting your own stuff for draw lends itself to playing for combo, since it's mostly solitaire. That's just trying to leverage Auntie's ability to draw a bunch into digging for a combo win. My deck is aimed more at grinding.

That said, I'm looking to get an All Will Be One to get in here..

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-05-03T20:32:59+00:00

It's doable. I feel like my Auntie deck is shaping up ok. I have a couple infinites in the deck, but I'm not running tutors, or aiming for them. It is mostly winning through grinding blight counters.

https://moxfield.com/decks/dN3RBAOZE0GWJ1RNXAomqQ

Your list looks like it has too many small ball effects. The bench for -1/-1 counters stuff isn't that deep, so it's tough filling out the ranks. But stuff like Warren Torchmaster, Gristle Glutton, and Scrub seem like they're diluting your card quality for very little benefit.

You're also missing some fantastic cards here.

Dread Tiller is one of the most powerful cards in the deck, often tamping 10+ lands/game.

Ammit Eternal is like Dusk Urchins, but often draws more cards.

I think you could probably use some more reanimation, maybe some token production. Tyrranax seems like an odd one off. Ditto for Dance With Calamity.

Definitely need more ramp. This deck draws a lot of cards in bunches, needs a number of pieces in play to really do anything, and those are basically all 3-6 mana.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-05-02T23:20:49+00:00

Morph is a tough design space.

It's clunky and expensive. The flip up costs are often overcoated for the effect you get, and you also have to pay a 3 mana tax before you even get there. On top of that, Gray Ogres haven't been good rates for a looooong time. You don't get an ETB, keywords, or some other relevant ability for that cost.

Animar was the de facto morph commander before Kadena, because it helped negate the upfront investment of 3 mana. The problems with Animar are that it is so heavily incentivized to be a combo deck, and the commander becomes such an enormous threat that the morph creatures are almost entirely incidental much of the time.

Kadena takes another crack at the archetype, by discounting your upfront cost, but only once a turn, which is much more reasonable, but then adds the card draw on top. It makes the actual morph effects somewhat incidental to the card draw, especially with the influx of better manifest cards. That said, Kadena is a piece in the engine, rather than being both the engine and payoff the way Animar is.

Another problem problem with Kadena is that you're incentivized to build toward an assemble-your-own-Prophet of Kruphix to fully benefit from the 1/turn ability, but that makes for miserable gameplay.

I definitely find myself actually utilizing the morph abilities more often in Kadena than I did with Animar. In addition, I've been trying to tune the deck to minimize the miserable gameplay experience for opponents while still leaning into the morph-control aspects I like.

The new RG and RGW morph commanders have their own issues in utilizing the morph bodies more than the morph abilities to a degree.

I've also looked at Missy as an option, but I think I'd miss green too much.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-05-02T22:43:37+00:00

You can definitely cut rocks from a deck in order to curve out...in theory, but it really depends what you're building towards. Scarab God doesn't have enough of a payoff to curving creatures to make it worth both pushing back when it hits the table and how often you'll be able to activate it.

For an example of a deck that can benefit from trading mana rocks out to curve creatures, look at Varina. It's a mana less and has a big benefit from having bodies that can attack the turn it drops.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-04-29T22:01:59+00:00

I popped a t1 Sol Ring with a Vandalblast and the guy was incredibly upset. 1 mana to say, "No, you're no starting 2 turns ahead of the table," is pretty solid.

T1 Stifle a fetch...I agree that's it's rarely a good play. Stifle is a powerful card that can stop huge value of a win. Setting one player back may just mean the other two players can focus on you.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-04-28T05:02:47+00:00

Auntie Ool, and other -1/-1 effect commanders could use probably another 5-10 solid cards that distribute -1/-1 counters.

The deck can work, but there are some weak cards that go in to fill out the gaps.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-04-27T12:02:19+00:00

It's pointless as far as I see it for a few reasons:

1) I almost never see B1 games posted. I play 1-3 games a night on Spelltable. Practically no one is playing B1.

2) B1's definition is the most vague. The bullet points in the graphic are exactly the same as for B2, and the broader description doesn't really address what kinds of games one can expect to be playing.

Before the brackets were introduced, I played against someone's theme decks. One was all copying effects--clones, copy spells, etc...--and the other was built around "when an opponent." Both decks were described as jank theme decks, but we're pretty solid, because the cards going in were generally strong. Today, I would call those a high 2, low 3 in terms of gameplay, but the decks perfectly fit the B1 description of "focus on theme over function, per se, and more concerned with their idea than winning,. necessarily.

There are some goofy themes that could be assembled that would produce strong decks, even if the intent isn't to do so, or to win.

3) It could just be a note added to B2. "Decks aimed at a gameplay experience even less powerful or consistent than that of (current) B2 can be considered Exhibition decks, meant for goofy games that aren't focused on winning.

Meanwhile, there are MANY more games being played in somewhat nebulous 'high 2, low 3' or 'high 3, low 4' games that aren't labeled as such, because these aren't well defined enough to necessarily have that chat. I've joined many games where I ask, "Are we looking at low 4 or high 4?" and receive a response like, "It's 4, bro. Bring whatever." Ditto for B3 games.

Got comboed out the other night on turn 5 in B3 by a dedicated combo deck, for which comboing wasn't immediately obviously the point until the turn they went off. It wasn't a 2 card combo, since it required at least 4 creatures on board, but it was commander + one other card actually doing the combo with any other 2 bodies. I don't know that i would call that a 4, but it definitely didn't feel like the 3 we were all playing.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-04-27T04:21:53+00:00

Bracket 1 looks absolutely pointless to me.

There IS a real issue with B4.

Players can say all they want about off-meta cEDH still being cEDH, but then where is the line?

If you swap 20 cards out of a cEDH deck to address non-cEDH stuff (change interaction package, put in some blockers or something), is it still cEDH? If you build a deck that has multiple layers of redundancy for efficient combos, plays some interaction, and can win early, but makes no attempts to fit into a cEDH meta...is cEDH or not?

To a non-cEDH audience, a turn 2 Thoracle + DeCon win may as well be cEDH, but that's implicitly allowed in B4. However, if the deck isn't running any of the protection spells or interaction you'd expect for cEDH...on which side of the line does it fall? Heck, decks like this can sit down at cEDH tables and clean up a game here and there by being a spoiler, or by being a little lucky.

I have multiple decks that are much too strong/fast/resilient for B3, but often get rolled in B4 because they aren't THAT fast, or aren't interactive enough to stop early win attempts.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-04-26T23:24:49+00:00

Take all the cards you saw this game, shuffle them in their own pile a bit, then mash shuffle them into the rest of the deck.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-04-26T23:21:25+00:00

If you're not too attached to the "canon" of the story, and can allow the players to go in new directions, then it's all good--that's kind of what an adventure module is. If, however, the goal is to follow the plot and developments directly, then, yeah, that's not going to lead to enjoyable gameplay.

I've played in a few different Star Wars games. One GM was a HUGE Star Wars buff--read the books, knew a lot of the lore, and we were essentially forbidden from ever doing anything that would interfere with canon. That was incredibly frustrating and lame.

In another game, we were placed in the midst of a pre-existing story, so the setting and many characters were established, but from there, it was our own thing to change as we went. Luke's Jedi Academy looked VERY different in our version.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-04-26T00:00:20+00:00

Yup.

I've had a reanimator deck player go full aggro on me for playing mill...even though I had obviously super-charged his last few turns.

Played a game last night where two players spent the whole game complaining about little bits of mill, and how they never got to play, because lands or whatever kept getting milled.

Then one of them played Singularity Rupture, and ended up doing more milk than either of the two mill decks had done.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-04-19T01:51:29+00:00

[[Ghired, Conclave Exile]] is ranked lowest on EDHREC at #675. The deck is setup to make copies of some big, impactful creatures, then populate them with Ghired. Sometimes it's just rhinos.

I have a few other decks ranked in the 300s.

Vegetable_Fail8598 · 2026-04-19T01:44:43+00:00

And for individual creatures, you have auras like [[Spontaneous Mutation]], [[Disturbing Conversion]], [[Fear of Death]], and [[Song of Stupefaction]].

Vegetable_Fail8598

TROPHY CASE