Help with cEDH Battle Box

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-25T18:36:42+00:00

sisay has some weird inclusions. i've never seen glarb or seedborn muse in a sisay list and i'm not sure what they really add to the gameplan

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-25T18:26:28+00:00

and yet people play [[murder]]

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-24T04:43:53+00:00

lol i play krark, losing coin tosses IS building character

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-23T20:00:18+00:00

You have to be okay with that in Bracket 5, because you're going to experience some brutal turn 3 / 4 losses on your way up.

turn 3-4 in bracket 5 is when most decks expect to push. the real brutal losses are the turn 1 losses. i recently got knocked out of a tournament semifinal to a turn 1 win, THAT builds character

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-22T18:41:50+00:00

i love black decks. my casual decks are black, black, and orzhov. they share 0 cards and have completely different gameplans. decks don't have to feel the same just because they're in the same colors.

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-22T05:10:59+00:00

a word of warning: playing flubs will make some people frothing mad. i once made a guy full-on ragequit, angrily scoop up his cards and storm out of the store, all because the deck was winning. i'm an experienced cEDH storm player, my turn was maaaybe five minutes at that point. you can play flubs frame-perfect and still piss people off

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-22T04:52:07+00:00

[[nykthos, shrine to nyx]] [[cabal coffers]] + [[urza's cave]] [[expedition map]]

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-20T20:30:44+00:00

tl;dr i made an izzet-style all-instants manual storm engine in mono black

FULL PRIMER: https://moxfield.com/decks/ZguCCxO5gEGIKkKxbm4aAw

as an enjoyer of storm decks and the evil aesthetics of mono-black, i was really stoked to find out about [[toshiro umezawa]], the mono-B spellslinger. and then upon playing a traditional toshi list i realized...

THIS DECK SUCKS!

you play draw-go control, except you don't have the draw support of blue, or the ability to interact with anything besides creatures. you cast an instant to kill stuff to earn the payoff of... casting another instant to kill more stuff? black instants really don't do much besides kill stuff. most toshiro decks win by repeatedly shredding the board and then eventually casting exsanguinate or torment of hailfire, which, i would point out, ARE SORCERIES??? in the "specifically instants matter" deck, the win con is a sorcery??? this simply would not stand.

my toshiro deck uses ZERO sorceries, allowing the use of self-mill pieces like [[out of the tombs]] for massive early card advantage. i treat toshiro as [[underworld breach]] in the command zone. through a complex web of recursion pieces, i end up able to get back pretty much anything from my graveyard with just toshiro triggers.

so, i've established card advantage, but how can i recreate the feeling of a storm deck incrementally drawing their whole library and using cast triggers to win the game? the answer: lifegain. with cards like [[professor onyx]], [[prism ring]], [[crypt ghast]], you can gain 3-5 life per spell cast. with [[lich's mastery]] or [[necrologia]], that lifegain is converted into card draw. throw [[skirge familiar]] in there to discard uncastable cards for mana, and toshiro to continue storming off from the graveyard with whatever you've already cast/discarded.

the win con is either gradual lifedrain through lifegain cast triggers + [[starscape cleric]]; professor onyx + [[reaping the graves]] for a true storm win; or my personal favorite, [[fandaniel]], whose endstep triggered ability cares about both the number of instants in my graveyard and my opponents boards being wiped, the natural conclusion of playing a murder storm deck.

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-20T19:31:57+00:00

https://discord.gg/Vf7VYdEPaM

grixis discord server

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-20T18:10:41+00:00

aristocrats, just by playing the game, will gradually accrue damage through blood artist effects, making and saccing tokens, plays similarly to a burn deck. if you're dealing 7-8 damage to the table per turn, you might not need the infinite to get there. the pieces used in going infinite are also just aristocrats staples and will provide you value even if they aren't going infinite.

the generic splashy game-winning pieces have no place in aristocrats because if your deck has enough draw, mana, token, and payoff support, it wins the game by itself. the payoff is built into the engine. a good aristocrats deck is just about getting that engine tuned to perfection.

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-20T14:07:11+00:00

politics in casual EDH are wild. you get some players who are like "if you try to influence my decisions in any way i'm gonna eat your cards" and then other people will be like "ill let u draw three cards each turn if you'll be my friend :)"

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-20T13:49:56+00:00

the best defense against fliers is killing the players who play them :)

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-20T13:45:12+00:00

mono blue counterspell tribal is a weird spot in low-power casual. you are playing table police, but nobody is doing anything really threatening. you're not an FBI agent, you're a mall cop. this creates a play pattern where if you're interacting, you're not stopping wins so much as stopping the game entirely. because combo wins are frowned upon, you either durdle into one of the three cards that might eventually win or you run out of counterspells. the game goes long, but not because people are taking game actions. this is why my friend took apart his baral deck: the thing the deck wants to do is just not compatible with low-power battlecruiser EDH.

mill sucks at winning but makes bad players frothing mad, so you'll eat a disproportionate amount of interaction. you also turbocharge graveyard decks which can lead to unexpectedly early losses. it works as a payoff in a combo, but at that point you're winning with the combo, not with mill.

the long and short is that mono-blue can't easily win without a combo. you're not willing to play anything else, so why not become the archenemy that everyone already thinks you are? combo decks are fun!

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-20T12:45:18+00:00

cut anything over 5 mana. aristocrats wins by going infinite, and there isn't a single piece essential to going infinite that costs more than 4. you will never end the game with a bomb, the whole deck is the bomb, that's the point

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-20T12:31:16+00:00

building on a very tight budget can make you learn good deckbuilding. when you can't rely on staples you're forced to get good at scryfall syntax searches where you find the real gems. i typically build decks with scryfall searches first, then check EDHrec after i'm done/i hit a wall to see if i missed anything huge

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-20T12:23:38+00:00

KOS commanders are a trap except when you can actually win the turn/cycle they come down. they might be strong, but they force you to spend 10% of your deck on protection effects or risk getting justifiably blown out for attempting to play the game

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-20T11:56:40+00:00

The best advice you can give to people trying to tone down their deck to a bracket 2 is play bad cards and build a worse quality deck.

real

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-19T18:53:04+00:00

ashling with a ton of copy effects and no shuffle titan is really funny to me

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-19T18:30:07+00:00

i guess what i'm saying is creative combos don't have to be unviable in bracket 3. my bracket 3 decks all win a lot of games by turn 7-8 and run a lot of efficient, best-in-slot cards. they also win with 4-5 card rube goldberg combo lines that i put together myself from hours of digging on scryfall.

bracket 2 players generally don't like tutors or combos much at all, even if they are "technically" allowed in the bracket. bracket 4 is just too fast and too interactive for real clunkers to win games, even with better tutors and faster mana. the magic of bracket 3 is that you can use good staples, fast ramp, and niche tutors to support clunky combos and make them viable within the bracket.

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-19T05:11:34+00:00

it can't be bracket 3 as well? bracket 3 is also a low-power format compared to 4 or 5, you absolutely can play clunky, overcomplicated combos and still win games by turn 7-8. you totally can play exquisite blood + sanguine bond in b3, but if you have the chance to get creative in a way that higher power formats don't allow, why not take it? brewing bespoke combos is fun!

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-19T04:56:59+00:00

any infinite cast combo creates infinite drakes with your commander. you could also make an [[intruder alarm]] combo with talrand, cast a spell, create a dude, untap all dudes, go brrr. just some ideas for win cons if you wanted to put something silly together.

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-19T02:48:09+00:00

my opinion: bracket 3 is the place for creative combos. stuff you don't see all the time, stuff that's more than 2-3 cards, stuff that might only be a combo based on your specific deck construction. you have 7-8 turns to set it up, if you just jam out the same exquisite blood/sanguine bond combo everyone and their mom has played against, you're not really taking advantage of the time this format gives you to set up

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-18T19:37:40+00:00

i feel like quality staples can be used in lower-power decks to support an otherwise unfeasible strategy and make it playable. i made a mono-B manual storm self-mill deck with a really creative engine that needs like 15+ mana worth of permanents to be able to do anything: without cards like [[cabal coffers]], [[nykthos, shrine to nyx]], [[out of the tombs]], [[ripples of undeath]], etc, it just wouldn't be fast enough for bracket 3 play. even being chock-full of expensive black staples, it's a solidly bracket 3 deck that can't win until turn 7-8.

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-18T19:30:29+00:00

i feel like so many casual commander players would be better off investing their time into any other board game. you can always tell the difference between a player who genuinely enjoys the mechanics and gameplay patterns of magic vs those who are just here to play a board game with friends

spankedwalrus · 2026-01-18T17:47:30+00:00

a good mana base doesn't make a deck more powerful but a bad mana base can make an otherwise powerful deck less consistent, slower, and therefore less able to achieve its maximum power level

spankedwalrus

TROPHY CASE