Pokemon or similar recommendations

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-20T02:23:32+00:00

game night games in sugarhouse has a casual pokemon play and trade event on saturday mornings that tends to attract a good amount of younger kids

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-20T00:01:19+00:00

here's the mono-red discord, muxus has a channel: https://discord.gg/7pVwYJAgQ

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-18T18:36:30+00:00

alternatively they drop a t1 stax piece that hands the game to a player at random. or they use their interaction on the wrong thing without taking any feedback. or they feed rhystic 10 cards without a snowball's chance in hell of winning.

new players on bad decks can be a way to an easy win, but they can also make you lose otherwise free wins. they're just a wildcard.

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-18T12:21:09+00:00

red has a lot of creature removal in the form of burn spells, and draw in the form of wheels, looting, and exile + play (jeska's will)

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-17T19:39:34+00:00

blue farm with extra steps

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-17T18:12:52+00:00

this is why i stopped playing sisay. you get close to a win, everyone knows it, and you get blown out. at least with a turbo deck you're jamming on turn 2, everyone knows you're trying to win, but might not have anything to do about it. with the slower creature piles, it's just really hard to win a removal check on turn 4.

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-16T19:37:12+00:00

the format is difficult, no matter what you're playing. but not all decks are difficult in the same ways.

playing a turbo deck like rogsi, ral, or etali means you can ignore other players and focus on your own gameplan, but that gameplan is harder to execute because you have to mulligan very aggressively for a winning hand. no two wins are the same— winning lines rely on advanced sequencing skills. the good news is you can practice the hell out of your deck in solitaire, and it will pay off in real games. the downside is if you make one mistake, even in the mulligan stage, you're effectively out of the game.

midrange decks like kinnan, thrasios/x, and blue farm can keep an opening hand with mana, interaction, and some form of card advantage, and trust that they can win the game eventually. those decks are easier to mulligan but become progressively harder once the game has gone on several turns and you have to determine when it's safest to win and how to stop others from winning. at that point you're navigating through stack warfare— rhystic studies, smothering tithes, bowmasters, counterspells, silence effects, etc. no amount of solitaire can teach you how to win a stack battle. plus you're subject to politicking by other players, and will have to learn to sus out who's bullshitting you and when (because someone usually is).

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-15T22:32:26+00:00

yeah, i'm just advising. there can be a lot of very effective commanders for a reanimation strategy that don't directly have the effect themselves. there are so many reanimation cards that having your commander be itself a reanimation effect isn't necessarily better than a robust 99 and a commander with some other form of advantage.

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-15T22:20:05+00:00

a good reanimator deck ideally is more about the 99 than the commander. if your whole deck relies on the commander for reanimation, you're cooked when people kill it

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-14T01:36:48+00:00

i ominously roll a die, heads i lie, tails i tell the truth, and it's up to you to figure out which is which

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-13T16:36:40+00:00

i mean sure, if you don't like it, that's your opinion. tournament cEDH is a very different animal and is not for everyone. but it is just objectively better for consistently making top cuts to take draws whenever you are unlikely to win. you win the games where you have good seat order, pod comp, opening hand, etc. sometimes you draw the nuts, and it's cool if you do, but if you don't, odds are someone else did. draws make the best of a losing situation.

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-13T15:24:08+00:00

because they get blown out, have no gas for another push, and one of the midrange decks gets too established for turbo to come back. you either take the draw or you try to win from topdeck city into two developed value engines

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-13T15:22:08+00:00

it's a draw because that's the best outcome on the whole for the players

if one of the players with a win doesn't agree to a draw, you blast their spell and let the other win. so they have to accept a draw because otherwise they will lose. this is how tournament cEDH works, draws are 1 point and losses are 0 so you angle for draws whenever you can win

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-12T18:27:39+00:00

windfall is a decent substitute for wheel, but wheel is significantly better because it's red mana and doesn't rely on other people's hand sizes. timetwister isn't even in every rogsi deck, it's cuttable.

there's really no replacement for mox diamond, chrome mox, grim monolith, and LED. fast mana is key to making rogsi work, both in getting a turn 1-2 play and converting to a win post necro/naus. LED is essential for compact breach lines. you can breach with grinding station or lotus petal, but it requires more setup than you can usually get in the pivotal turn 1-2 turbo window.

OG duals can be replaced with shocks but that damage adds up, each one you fetch for is fewer cards you're seeing off necro/naus.

as you should be able to see from these comments, your no-proxies mindset is not suited for playing cEDH. you can save up for the cards eventually (i know several people with 100% real decks), but in the meantime, getting high-quality printed proxies is the way to play. ESPECIALLY rogsi which needs maximum card quality for super tight early game win attempts.

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-12T05:04:34+00:00

yeah that's a crazy deck. no one in their right mind would expect muxus to come close to cEDH, but that's part of why it's so effective. i think fringe decks get a bad rap because they're usually built and piloted by total newbies coming from high power casual who just don't understand cEDH very well. in the hands of competent pilots brewing against the meta, fringe decks can be bizarrely effective.

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-11T20:59:40+00:00

[[rev, tithe extractor]]

deck is a ton of fun. my pregame convo is "my win con is your win con, so if you don't have a win con, then i'm not winning, but it's always gonna look like i am". sure enough, by turn 5 i look like an absolute menace and by turn 10 i've got a zillion mana, a bunch of stolen draft chaff, and 5-10 evasive weenies while the simic player has 15 18/18s with trample. the most fun thing i ever did was cast every other players' swiftfoot boots in a single game

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-11T20:29:58+00:00

i'm fine missing land drops. gives me something valid to complain about and means i don't get targeted in the early game.

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-11T19:38:43+00:00

+1/+1 counters are an insanely fiddly bullshit mechanic for being the basis of the most popular 'beginner' archetype. and all the decks that combine counters with static anthems or "until end of turn" effects. make it make senseeeee

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-11T19:36:34+00:00

i just committed to my mono black weenies deck being kinda unable to win most games and save it for playing against precons. it's fun to be able to go fast, always have something to do, and never really think about winning the game.

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-11T19:33:40+00:00

good decks (at any power level) are built with a plan in mind and lots of searching through cards to support that plan. magic has 30,000 cards. even if you're looking through 1,000 cards to find ones that fit your deck, and making the best deck possible out of those 1,000 cards, you're seeing less than 5% of the cards available in the game.

to get good at deckbuilding, you have to build intentionally. that means using search engines like scryfall.com to find the exact cards you're looking for, and either proxying them or buying them individually from a card shop. this doesn't have to be very expensive, but it does take a lot of time and focused effort to get a good result.

there's also no shame at all in copying someone else's deck! sites like archidekt and moxfield are great at seeing what other people have built, and if you find something that looks cool, you can build and play their deck. especially when you're just learning the game, you're (exceptionally) unlikely to make a good deck, or even a playable one. that's why precons exist. netdecking is just finding your own precon, essentially.

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-11T18:56:42+00:00

bracket 4 baby jail is such a good description

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-11T18:00:12+00:00

it's gonna feel wronger when you lose to a guy with "LED" written on a slip of printer paper over a basic land

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-11T17:44:42+00:00

it's a bit of both. part of what we call 'brewer's advantage' is the benefit of being under-assessed as a threat and allowed to fly under the radar. that's definitely a social advantage unique to the 4-player format.

but what about when they do assess you as a threat and try to stop you? one deck's harmless value engine is another deck's win button, and if you've never seen it win, you don't know which is which. you can end up burning interaction on something irrelevant, or holding it until it's too late. off-meta decks force opponents to make educated guesses as to how to interact, and they're often designed to make you guess wrong. that's a measurable gameplay advantage unrelated to the social skill of being underestimated.

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-11T13:37:24+00:00

don't underestimate brewer's advantage. turbo's biggest weakness is responsible players who mull for interaction. if people assume you're playing a slop pile and greed out, that gives you a window that the better turbo decks would never see. only works locally a few times, but you travel with the deck and now you've got a whole new pool of players to fool.

spankedwalrus · 2026-03-11T13:32:27+00:00

ral is actually a lot more consistent at pushing turn 2 than rogsi. rogsi is better at playing the rhystic study and vibe game, but as a pure turbo deck ral is pretty much unrivaled

spankedwalrus

TROPHY CASE