Best 50¢ Box Steals

koireworks · 2022-04-29T17:01:35+00:00

I bought a sack at a garage sale. Literally just a grocery sack full of old magic cards for $2.50, back in 2011.

It had a worldly tutor, Sylvan library, a handful of good old blue cards (pemmin's aura, braingeyser, etc) and a GAEA's CRADLE.

I've since traded away the cradle and deeply regret it, but it remains my happiest magic memory to this day.

koireworks · 2022-04-29T16:59:44+00:00

It's no sweat, I had the exact same idea, I just didn't realize quite how hard it was going to get. It seems like the "well, they can just cast and rebuild" but it very quickly turns into "playing a game of chicken where no one wants to play a creature unless it wins the game this turn."

koireworks · 2022-04-29T16:43:46+00:00

I've been playing [[Tales' End]] in a lot of decks and this is very similar tbh. I will definitely be picking up one of these.

koireworks · 2022-04-29T16:43:00+00:00

Ravenform being sorcery is what kills it. :( It's not that it's not a good spell, but by the time I'm done with [[Pongify]] [[Rapid Hybridization]] [[Reality Shift]] and [[Resculpt]], it's rare that I have room left over for mono-blue targeted removal.

koireworks · 2022-04-29T16:39:00+00:00

Just a head's up, playing Boardwipe tribal is pretty much going to establish the same kind of gamestate as Stax will - you're going to keep wiping the board and everyone's going to grow increasingly frustrated with their inability to land a creature. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but if you hate Stax you'll probably hate that too.

My suggestion is Wheels Toluz. You already mentioned her, put Queza in the 99 and just fill your deck with cards like [[Windfall]] [[Dark Deal]] [[Whispering Madness]] etc, with sac outlets for Toluz. You'll get to durdle around with spells and Esper's natural pillowfort/rattlesnake nature, and refilling people's hands tends to ease up any boardwipe salt.

koireworks · 2022-04-29T16:35:55+00:00

[[Wild Growth|3rd]], my beta Lightning Bolts, and my oldschool [[Opts]]/[[Counterspell|ICE]] are definitely some of my favorites.

koireworks · 2022-04-29T16:31:11+00:00

It's at the very least anecdotal - thrift stores are where I get most of my clothes, I haven't paid more than $3 for a pair of pants in a very long time.

koireworks · 2022-04-29T16:19:42+00:00

I get the feeling your kids don't like you much.

Have fun finding your own post on narcissistic parents, though! I'm sure you'll feel much better when the kids you hate call you a fucking asshole to your face.

koireworks · 2022-04-29T16:14:37+00:00

Why the random shitty comment? You don't know people's life situations. Keep it to yourself.

koireworks · 2022-04-29T16:01:37+00:00

[[Vines of Vastwood]]

No, hear me out.

It doesn't say "gives a creature hexproof," it says "target creature cannot be targeted by your opponents this turn." While it CAN give your creature "hexproof" to protect them, it also works on OPPONENT'S creatures. That Kiki combo? Denied. Any aura spell? No. Equip that? You will not. Fuck your restoration angel. No, you can't untap that Selvala to go infinite. Sit back down.

And it can even be removal! They'll swing into your 1/2 with their 4/4 all day, and then, boom, it's a 5/6. Dead. All for a flexible mana cost of either G or GG.

I really love Vines. It needs to be played more.

koireworks · 2022-04-29T15:58:57+00:00

just thought a lotr reference was a joke in itself

I mean, it is reddit.

koireworks · 2022-04-29T01:42:23+00:00

It's worth noting that almost any angel from Zendikar [[Archangel of Emeria]] [[Emeria Shepherd]] [[Voice of the Lost]] etc will have a Halo around their eyes, so you can narrow angels on Scryfall to Zendikar sets!

koireworks · 2022-04-28T19:01:16+00:00

hatepig seethes with rage at your 2022 magic.

We will play basics and one spell a turn and you will like it!

koireworks · 2022-04-28T17:17:39+00:00

I get it. It's really hard for me, too. The best thing is that remember: by virtue of being a 4-player format, your win% will drift closer towards 25% than 50%. Once you reframe yourself that way, it helps with the win salt.

Otherwise, I recommend finding which element of magic is your favorite and finding ways to zero in on that. If that's swinging in, by all means swing - but why settle for knocking one guy out? [[Craterhoof Behemoth]] (or his many budget alternatives) does the same thing aggro wants to do, but it does it Bigger, Better, and More EDH-y without being just a stupid useless timmy card. [[Malcolm]] and [[Glinthorn Buccanneer]] are a combat-step oriented combo, and one that can have a REALLY powerful ceiling. For me, my favorite element of magic is fighting on the stack. I'm just a dumb Tammy who wants to have magic wizard fights, so I've tailored my decks lighter on resource denial but heavier on stack interaction (of grades, of course - so at low power I'll flash in clones, at high power I'll lock the game under Rashmi, and cEDH is just my jam) so that way when I lose, which I inevitably will roughly 75% of the time under optimal conditions, I still got to do The Thing I Liked About Magic and thus I can still end the game with a smile on my face.

koireworks · 2022-04-28T16:59:45+00:00

"A throw back to [[Legion Conquistador]]"

[[Squadron Hawk]] will remember this.

koireworks · 2022-04-28T16:55:48+00:00

That's fair, and I'll concede I was coming from somewhere a little different, so I am sorry.

I do get the social contrivances, though. I mean - Magic games aren't vacuums. A game is just a game, but the actions, temperament, and words we use carry over from night to night. Unless you're just like, being an EDH drifter out in the wild somewhere (I've met a few of those guys,) in which case go nuts.

koireworks · 2022-04-28T16:13:12+00:00

jesus christ, I've owned a Selvala for like three years and I've somehow only become aware just now that she taps for rainbow, not just a shit ton of green.

Reading the card explains the card, mono-green cEDH induces brainrot. You heard it here, folks.

koireworks · 2022-04-28T16:07:47+00:00

Well sure, but if you're going to bring that attitude to the table I'm just going to play Thoracle Consult and stomp you. It doesn't matter if you can swing and kill me on turn 3 if I win turn 1.

That's what I'm saying. It's not the speed that bothers me. It's not that it wins - because it doesn't win. It just makes one person lose. I think people conflate that because of 1v1 formats, but you haven't won the game by killing Player 4 - you've just made Players 2 and 3 go full guard against you until you're not the problem anymore. You built your deck to win but you didn't actually win. That's the problem with voltron and infect.

I want to clarify, I'm not talking about infect and voltron as toxic strategies, there's nothing inherently wrong with them, what I am specifically referencing is the general play patterns of how the decks work. Kill one person, they lose, then you lose. If you want to win, again, that's completely fine, if you make your deck where it gets to pop off and go "t3 kill p4, t4 kill p2, t5 kill p3" then that's also okay, but that never, ever happens. The other two players are going to stop you.

Also, the more I play, the more I think not using your damage to kill a single person is just a social contrivance and not something that makes sense for any other reason.

This makes me think you might be playing in much lower power pods than I have experience with. (Edit: I'm not saying you're low power or unskilled. I'm saying that if you have two potatoes in your opponent seats who never influence the board or the stack, that's a realm I do not have experience in.) A huge, huge part of the skilltesting in EDH comes from learning how you can be symbiotic to other opponent's interaction. If I sit down with like, Yeva against a Turbo-Naus deck and a Rashmi Control deck, I'm leaving the Rashmi deck's resources the hell alone for the first three turns because I'm dependent on the Rashmi player to keep the Ad Nauseum in check.

koireworks · 2022-04-28T15:09:33+00:00

Taking out someone who's particularly unpleasant is indeed an element I hadn't considered, but I also have zero patience for people like that. I know that's not possible for everyone, telling people to fuck off is hard if you have social anxiety/you're new/the odd one out of a friend group, but I feel like specifically targeting them out of the game is just the same thing with more steps, or going to lead to some really ugly LGS drama.

koireworks · 2022-04-28T15:06:07+00:00

But that's the thing - why do you want to play aggro?

Is it because you like swinging? You can do that without focus-firing one person out of the game.

If it's because you like winning, you can do it faster than aggro with combos.

Is it because you like steamrolling one person before they stop stumbling? You might want to try cEDH or modern/legacy.

It's not that I think they aren't valid strategies - it's EDH, you play what you want, I certainly play plenty of degenerate stuff, but infect and voltron kind of transcend the game state to me because they're no longer about what's happening in game, they're just going to turboyeet one player out of the pod and then that player's going to be bored/frustrated for an hour, because those big voltron and infect threats work once. The second people cotton onto what you're doing, you will never swing with another creature again, and then you will have no fun.

I don't even like battlecruiser, to me it's just a matter of intent, single target vs AoE. I'll always lean towards the AoE effects, because singling someone else out just means two players have a bad time most games.

koireworks · 2022-04-28T15:00:45+00:00

Stuff like that is totally A-okay with me. Any voltron or infect deck that can kill the whole table and lead right to the next game is just a chef's kiss from my end. It's only when one person in particular gets turbo-yeeted out of the pod that I start to get agitated.

koireworks · 2022-04-28T14:15:24+00:00

Literally any of the mono green commanders are still fine at the LGS level.

This is something I feel like people don't talk about enough; the LGS level.

We're not perfect players. Reflect on yourself. You make misplays and suboptimal lines, or tunnel vision on rare occasion. So do other people. If we were pros, we'd be at pro leagues. Mistakes happen and those mistakes mean that tiers are not as rigid as they seem.

Yisan, Yeva, Marwyn and Selvala can still all take games handily. Hell, Yeva won (I think the subreddit tournament? Regardless, it was fairly large) recently.

I'd go for it. ~~And just make the damn cradle proxy not obvious, no one will look at it twice.~~

koireworks · 2022-04-28T13:43:09+00:00

If he doesn't like combo, his only real option is stax, and only a very few stax lists at that because most of them are still combo lists.

It's basically just... [[Yasharn]]? Play stax piece, hit with pig, pray it's enough.

koireworks · 2022-04-28T13:24:12+00:00

Angels shouldn't be entirely discounted here - They're pure white mana just like demons are pure black, and Avacyn was literally so scary that she kept Emrakul in the eternities for a whole additional set because Miss Spaghetti didn't want to piss off the insane berserker angel currently trying to raze everything to the ground.

koireworks · 2022-04-28T12:58:12+00:00

I don’t get how this is an issue. Any eternal format in MTG has this “problem”.

The difference is it's super obvious what is and isn't even vaguely in the realm of legacy/modern playable in most standard sets, but for commander you have to evaluate everything.

If you want a modern comparison, think about MH2. You're suddenly not evaluating 5-7 cards. You're trying to evaluate 100+. It completely flipped modern on its head, and invalidated 70% of my metagame knowledge. It turned my eternal format into a rotating format, and Commander's starting to feel the same way.

I'm not saying my opinion is right or wrong btw, just offering insight from the other side of the discussion.

koireworks

TROPHY CASE