The only time I've seen the one flier I had in a deck was due to a chaos warp on a thiCC token. Chaos warp with all of the bad flips has made me switch to liquimetal torque and friends in my red blue and black decks.
I appreciate your pain, however I must also appreciate that clearly all my good luck with Chaos Warp(my opponent usually hits a land) is due to your unfortunate luck. I thank you all for your sacrifices. I wish you better luck in the future.
Geting your one blocker chaos warped while being attacked for lethal Comander Damage: $1 Flipping over a Whiptail Hydra and getting 90% of the board including the lethal commander?: Priceless
Very recently I had someone ask if my shrines deck was playing anything like lab man or thoracle to mitigate the risk posed by Honden of Seeing Winds. I said no and they started to assume I just hadn't thought of the situation but no, I told him, the fact that I can deck myself is by design. I didn’t want to take slots away from the other fun cards. Besides it's already happened once and I think it's funny as hell.
I recently died to a Windfall while playing my enchantress deck because I had Reliquary Tower in play with 47 cards in hand and 33 in the library. Anyway, I cut Reliquary Tower.
Removing Tutors makes the play experience within a consistent playgroup soooo much better. It prevents the "every game feels the same" problem the most. My playgroup is at a point where we run a good amount of combos and we run some tutors, but we are openly trying to mitigate an arms race by each having acces to decks with certain restrictions so we can decide if we would like a fully loaded game with tutor heavy combo finish decks or more of a battlecruiser no tutors, no combo game :) Imo, I dislike tutors in their gameplay as well, since I often feel like I am missplaying, being too "eager" on winning or taking up to much time thinking about what I want to tutor, so I tend to avoid them in most decks, especially those that don't have a specific wincon that is gonna be my go to target if I dont need removal or other tech pieces.
I removed tutors from my deck because of that, sometimes people don't get it... but, man... if you have a solid strategy and not only one wincon, why put so many fucking tutors? Why you wanna buy always the same cards? Fuck...
That's pretty much one of the founding principles of Conquest. Most of the tutors are on the reserve list now, so banning the reserve list makes the games more unique each time. Same reason Fetches are banned in Conquest.
Playing devil's advocate: Tutors allow you to bring more whacky of strategies to the table. I have experience in my established play group that we frequently use tutors to elevate bad strategies to a point where they can compete with normal power level decks. An example being, I have a "pot of greed" Gavi, Nest Warden deck. It has a hidden commander of Purphuros. I need multiple tutors to get Purph out in order to get the deck up and running. Without the tutors the deck could never function. People enjoy playing against it and it feels unique each game I play it.
Tutors are a must because a lot of ideas for deck you can have that is some hidden combo you found you will need a tutor to search it because you may never find the answer you need
I love that you're telling Landfall to actually RUN LANDS. I run 45 in Tatyova, and it might not be enough. I think Aesi needs even more. Even then, the deck is still crawling with ways that can generate infinite value, including life loss (untargeted! Psychosis Crawler is a good card), mill, creatures, card draw, mana, deck cycling, infinite countermagic, the list goes on. The glue that holds the pile of combo together is the massive land count, because while I can actually win off of a land-shorted hand sometimes, I have to draw a perfect hand to do so, so I'm almost always better off running enough lands to ensure hitting land drops as the game goes on. There is space to do almost anything you could need to do in that deck, and it's at 45 lands and is my most redundant deck for everything but removal, which it runs roughly an average amount of (but it's generally bad removal since most of it works with my combo shenanigans). It's a fun deck to run, because I'm pretty sure it's well above my actual skill level, it's not unusual for me to find something new about it in almost every game, and it STILL RUNS 45 LANDS.
Yep, sometimes it is more fun or flavorful to allow a weakness to exist. My Werewolf tribal deck's only answers for flying creatures is one flip effect that fights and I think a ranger that does some damage and maybe fights as well, but the point being I think it makes sense that a bunch of Werewolves can't appropriately fight a bunch of birds lol.
I don't really agree with that method. You can still do what your deck wants to do, just use higher or slow cmc cards, you don't have to use functionally square -> round hole thing.
My favorite method of shoring up weaknesses is what I call "Counter target player" spells, my Rith the Awakener deck has no trouble getting 40+ tokens, and I've used Massive Raid to stop people from comboing off ,to kill pillow fort players I couldn't attack, and to stop board wipes when I'm set up to win.
One of the weaknesses in most of my decks is that I don't run enough draw spells, but that's by design. The ones I do run tend to be really big spells like wheels or Rishkar's Expertise, so they're usually enough to power me into the next one if I do draw the first one, and as a result it's very feast-or-famine. My decks would be more consistent if I ran more, but I really enjoy the feeling of running on fumes, topdecking a draw spell, then immediately becoming the biggest threat!
I tend to run fact of fiction effects and scary effects over draw since when I was new to magic narsett and eidelon wer heavily played and the game I played prior (lotr trading cards) had almost no ways to view the top of your library so I love feeling like I'm cheating playing magic. Though some decks like artifacts don't seem to draw enough so I've started to *gasp* include card draw in them.
Leaning into a color's strength can sometimes wrap back around to covering a weakness too. Like mono black has very few "blow up enchantment" cards available to it but it does have tons of reanimate spells you can get other folk's creatures with. You can use that Beacon of Unrest or Reanimate to snag their Rec Sage or Acidic Slime and solve the problem that way. I also do think something like Scour From Existence or Unstable Obelisk is actually a little better in mono black than y'all give it credit for due to how often you'll have coffers up in those decks.
I was hoping April fools you’d pretend you weren’t gonna tell dad jokes and then BOOM when you least expect cavalcade of dad jokes in the middle of challenge the stats
I build my decks to specifically make myself the constant threat at the table. I barely run any 'answers' like board wipes or targeted removal. I run 95% cards that are on theme and synergize with my Commander so that every card I play is scary and gets me closer to a win (almost always aggro combat damage based win). I rarely win games, but I don't care as it's so fun to watch every game be 3 players having to team up to stop me. I know run a lot of protection spells and hope that my opponents will try to board wipe in order to deal with me and I make it a 1-sided wipe.
I'm on the same boat as Joey, I prefer taking a whole turn bringing everything back with a big recursion spell rather than holding up 2 or 3 mana every turn to play a boros charm or other protection spell. It ends up being more efficient in the end
Shoring up my weaknesses in Shadrix Silverquill was adding fogs and white/black control spells like Dawn Charm, Batwing Brume, Inkshield, Kami of False Hope, and other protections like Robe of Stars, Athreos the shroud Veiled, Ozolith, Angel’s Grace, Sudden Spoiling, and board wipes. Other great fairly unknown gems are Cowed by Wisdom, Awe Strike, and Soul Tithe.
Speaking of Grand Abolisher effects, Blue has Tidal Barracuda. All players can cast spells as though they had flash, but opponents can't cast spells during your turn :)
Giving flash to all your opponents is overall a bit of a major downside. It suddenly gives three players access to all sorts of spells during two turns where they normally wouldn't be able to do anything. Add onto that the 4 mana cost and that's going to make it hard to want to use outside of chaos/for the funsies.
I have a counterargument for Cultivate in Sythis decks. Your opponents know that BECAUSE it's a Sythis deck, you're going to be playing a lot of Enchantments. They know they need Enchantment-hate before you've even played a land. Cultivate gets around the problem of all your Enchantments being destroyed by getting lands directly out of your deck which, while possibly being a dead draw, also removes 2 dead draws from your deck for the future of the game. Which is a net -1 dead draw instead of a net-neutral draw. Now, I could see an argument to remove a card like Farseek which only tutors for 1 land, but Cultivate tutors for 2 so it's a MUCH better card than you think it is.
@@Kryptnyt aura thief is unreal, i run it in both my dimir decks. Being able to sac it makes people cry haha love how the errata from Enchant Creature to Aura has forever made Aura Thief's name a contradiction 🤣
@@brendans1983 I'm not getting "technical". Changing ownership of Rest in Peace, or possibility storm, or anything that has a symmetrical effect (as most stax peices tend to do) does absolutely nothing. I don't give a shit whether I control rule of law or you do, either way, we can't cast more than one spell per turn.
I find it important to differentiate between covering my weaknesses and stopping other people's win conditions. My weaknesses are simply what can keep me from winning, not what my opponent can do to beat me. Sometimes they're the same thing, but most of the time, those are two distinct categories.
My challenge: Ghoul’s Night out in non-zombie reanimator deck. It’s only in 1.50% of Sidisi and 1% of Ayara and Gonti. This card is an insane 4 for 1 at five mana and should see way more play than Sepulchral Primordial. You lose the body but it’s -2 mana and you also get something from your own graveyard! Decayed doesn’t matter much in reanimator as you always target ETB creatures. After intense testing I can guarantee it goes in all reanimator decks.
Illustrious Strategist Sun Tzu said “Know Thyself & know Thy enemy. Then, you can fight a hundred battles fearing no defeat” Not knowing what the problem is, would be akin to walking into battle unprepared
It's only too many when you can only tell them apart based on the commander. I have a couple. My favorite is actually a Grolnok the Omnivore deck that combines landfall with self mill. I mill and exile all my lands and payoff cards, then I basically have a second hand in exile I play all my cards from. It only ended up being a landfall deck because I also wanted a deck with the Retreat to Coralhelm infinite land drop at the time I built it, but it's ended up being really fun to play.
Besides being speed bumps for your own deck, answers to the wrong problems also carry the risk of the other players making assumptions that lead to them targeting you. Put a Ghostly Prison effect in a token swarm deck, and they may decide to 1: destroy the GP, and 2: take you out before you get other pillow fort cards out or assemble your combo. You might not be running any other GP effects or combos, but they don't know that. So you get a little ramp and maybe 6-8 1/1s out, and those get run over or wiped before your creature buffs come into play. Instead, play another buff or another token generator or a recursion piece.
Sultai landfall. 42 lands, casts giant X spells with counter backup or field of the dead. Weakness 1: Deck strat could be stronger with better lands (why run 1 field/Cabal Coffers, when I could copy them with Vesuva/Thespian's Stage to double/triple up?) Weakness 2: Aggro (go tall or go wide). Chose 5 board clears for go wide (Deluge, Damnation, Crux of Fate, Culling Ritual, Cyc Rift). For go tall, slotted in Maze of Ith to make them have untargetability also. Weakness 3: Oh, Blood Moon. Guess I need me some channel lands, huh? Typically, I hope to counter/Assassin's Trophy it.
I run unstable obelisk, scour from existence, and invoke despair in my mono black decks, as well as feed the swarm I have a stax player in my pod and auto losing the second they play an enchantment is worse than overcosted removal
Dude. An answer to a lot of token decks that I had never seen before: Caltrops. Deals one damage to all attacking creatures. Flying or not. Hoses most token decks… I try to always have a way to exile a graveyard, remove a problem land/ artifact/ enchantment. Almost always a great thing to have and almost always a good target for every game.
Rakdos Charm is probably my personal favorite answer to a token deck, the mode "each creature deals 1 damage to it's controller" no target bypasses pesky Hexproof and all that, if their army exceeds their life total they just die, lolz. Other modes include: Destroy target artifact Exile target player's graveyard So super utility
@@Ixidora I’ve managed the rakdos charm player kill once, and it was glorious! More so because the player was swinging lethal at me. It’s a versatile charm with good modes, if it’s in your colors it’s a great include.
Keep Watch is one of my favorite blue cards. I discovered it after pulling a Judgement foil in a re-pack from my LGS and now I can't get enough of it. I have yet to draw it in a game and not get incredible value from it.
to the enchantress have dificulties to end the game: HOOOOWWWW???!!!??!??? my win options are (i play Kestia, the Cultivator): - Indrik Umbra (to get in) - Beastmaster Ascension (anthem) - Felidar Retreat (token + "anthem") - Helix Pinnacle (100 mana to win) - Luminarch Ascension, Sigil of the Empty Throne and a huge load more tokenmakers (go wide) - Colossification (voltron) - enchanted evening + aurashards + enchantment etb poope token (combo) btw all options are enchantments outside of some few token makers and to be sure everything works i have 1 brilliant restoration (it could also be every other get things back or even 2or more of those effects but that was my choice) But here a list of options i can think of in 5 minutes: you have 4 win the game cards that are enchantments you have outside of that aproach of the second sun you have every card that wins if you have a ton of life if you subthemed that way you have your token poopers for enchantments that overrun the enermies you have anthems to punch even harder or True Conviction to give keywords you have Archetype of Imagination or Corrupted Conscience if you play with blue for a finisher you have endless combos you can go voltron you can take subthemes like allready told with lifegain, landfall or others. you can use x-spells or big spells cause you will have a huge amount of those. even if you take blue wincons out, there are a lot of options that are mostly enchantment based and that doesnt mean you dont have the option to smash a second subtype or take an alternative winoption. So yeah its maybe the other way around. you have too much options and cause of that you really need to fokus.
Agreed. I have a Naya (Marath) enchantress deck that is a Cat 5 hurricane. Mostly wins with big tokens and either combat or ETB burn (Purphoros, Warstorm Surge, etc). I think the people who can't win with enchantress are running too many 1-2 drop auras and/or no recursion or protection.
A lot of the hostility to basic interaction in low-power games seems to stem from players who have just not planned to actually play Magic. There’s a big difference between accepting the risks of strong opponent counterplays, and players who have no plan on how to win if they lose one or two cards and do nothing to prevent it.
I build and play Mardu decks (except for Karona), so I know going in that I’m not going to be able to ramp like green or do broken bs… err, I mean counter spells and draw cards like blue. This forces me to rethink how I’m going to gain resources. I think Mardu isn’t as popular because people cannot get their brains out of that green/blue mentality. Often I see people use cards that mimic the abilities of those colors rather than focus on the ways their colors can attain them. In terms of deck specific weaknesses, my Edgar Markov deck is built to combo into a big, single turn win. It’s not the most resilient however. I can get the combo pieces back, but there’s only a couple cards that do that and can’t keep up if everyone has a lot of removal. Licia, who is probably my favorite atm, is the one that is the most commander focused. It requires casting her often and sacrificing her for a lot of the value. Shutting down gaining life or casting her outright with something like Drannith Magistrate severely hampers how smoothly she runs. Stigma Lasher is exile on sight. Queen Marchesa is a very defensive build. She can handle big creatures and can handle go wide strategies. In fact there’s a card called Impulsive Maneuvers that I stumbled on. For each attacking creature you flip a coin. Win and that creature’s damage is prevented, lose and it does double the damage. She doesn’t use a lot of blockers, but the ones she does use are like Brash Taunter. This lets me ignore the ones who are not going to deal damage and increases damage that Brash Taunter will be dealing. She can’t attack very well though and is not as adept of shutting down more passive play styles.
The reason why I only have two mardu decks (snapdax damage prevention not fog or mutate, and jirina kudro ) is that mardu like esper has all of the good removal like esper and I only the only way to have fun with a deck for me is if I'm challenged playing it.
@@kingfuzzy2 perhaps you should try to expand on what’s possible. People often overlook synergies because they aren’t as good in a vacuum. There’s nothing challenging about playing blue/green. It does everything you could want a commander deck to do. It’s seriously like playing a video game on the easiest setting.
The weaknesses in my Ur-Dragon deck are a nightmare in themselves. Currently trying re tune it whilst keeping is realatively the same but it's an annoying task.
So what about using the return lands to hand tactic to play again tactic for omnath, personally i use the four colour omnath and ive chucked in things that allow me to play multiple lands and things that return them to give an effect and it never lets me down and i dont have to worry about having more than 34 lands in my deck
People complain about Grixis not being able to deal with enchantments like it’s not one of the most powerful color combinations in the game…the colors need a weakness
Me who plays all is dust, nevinyrrals disc, and several ways to make everything I own indestructible while playing selesnya tokens....And aura shards for enchantments and artifacts...
As for graveyard protection Joey, consider playing perpetual timepiece and endurance. Timepiece helps fill the yard but also has an emergency button to save your graveyard, and Endurance works as graveyard protection and graveyard hate
I disagree with NOT PLAYING Cultivate and Kodama’s Reach in enchantress decks. I run Exploration, Wild Growth and Utopia Sprawl. Well, that means I hit three mana on turn 2, AND the biggest limiting factor for enchantress decks is not being able to cast everything when you’re “going off”.
I don't really do this at all. My decks are *pure* synergy. I don't run niche cards, hate pieces, or secret tech. I get around my deck's weaknesses by relying on high-quality removal/interaction and the power of my deck's strengths to just overpower the weaknesses. P.S.: I have no playgroup. 100% PlayEDH for me.
This is another reason why dockside is a necessary type of card when the budget allows. There needs to be a way to punish artifact and especially enchantment decks more easily.
Recently I saw content creators talking about how the format has become much faster. Usually citing "power creep" as the reason why. And yet every week these three content creators tell us why the cards we aren't running are more efficient. I just hate challenge the stats so much.
I wouldn't cut Cultivate or other land ramp out of sythis, enchantment removal is very prevalent in our format and you're not going to be happy when all of your ramp gets blown up
I don't tend to agree with the cultivate topic. If someone mass enchantment boardwipes your board your now down lands and enchantments. Personally I'd rather go for land ramp when land ramp is harder to get rid of
I still think the Iono point is weak, you could literally say that about any stax piece that stops someone form playing the game (Stasis, Winter orb, Blood Moon, Collector Ophe, Rest In Piece, Stasis Orb, Choke, etc). I don't personally run Iono but saying that a card stops someone else from playing that game is the reason for banning it while not banning the others is so cherry picked its kind of ridiculous. There are many more egregious cards that make the game not fun that are allowed (Dockside, Thassa's Oracle, all the free spells, all the fast mana, all the tutors, etc) but singling out this one for such a weak reason seems odd.
I once chaos warped an Avacyn angel of hope and the opponent shuffled and flipped Avacyn, angel of hope…
I had this happen with Sidar kondo
I had this happen with an Avenger of Zendikar...
The only time I've seen the one flier I had in a deck was due to a chaos warp on a thiCC token. Chaos warp with all of the bad flips has made me switch to liquimetal torque and friends in my red blue and black decks.
I appreciate your pain, however I must also appreciate that clearly all my good luck with Chaos Warp(my opponent usually hits a land) is due to your unfortunate luck. I thank you all for your sacrifices. I wish you better luck in the future.
Geting your one blocker chaos warped while being attacked for lethal Comander Damage: $1
Flipping over a Whiptail Hydra and getting 90% of the board including the lethal commander?: Priceless
Very recently I had someone ask if my shrines deck was playing anything like lab man or thoracle to mitigate the risk posed by Honden of Seeing Winds. I said no and they started to assume I just hadn't thought of the situation but no, I told him, the fact that I can deck myself is by design. I didn’t want to take slots away from the other fun cards. Besides it's already happened once and I think it's funny as hell.
I recently died to a Windfall while playing my enchantress deck because I had Reliquary Tower in play with 47 cards in hand and 33 in the library.
Anyway, I cut Reliquary Tower.
@@adamloomos oh god I did that * exact thing * to my buddy playing his Reki deck a couple months ago, it was hilarious.
@@nathanmoore3866 If I may be so bold as to offer my theory, based on personal experience: sometimes enchantress decks are just Like That (tm).
@@TrueTgirl Can confirm, Enchantress *does* draw a lot of cards. 😁
@@TrueTgirl amen, Tuvasa Enchantress draws like nothing I've seen so far, and I freaking Love It
Removing Tutors makes the play experience within a consistent playgroup soooo much better.
It prevents the "every game feels the same" problem the most.
My playgroup is at a point where we run a good amount of combos and we run some tutors, but we are openly trying to mitigate an arms race by each having acces to decks with certain restrictions so we can decide if we would like a fully loaded game with tutor heavy combo finish decks or more of a battlecruiser no tutors, no combo game :)
Imo, I dislike tutors in their gameplay as well, since I often feel like I am missplaying, being too "eager" on winning or taking up to much time thinking about what I want to tutor, so I tend to avoid them in most decks, especially those that don't have a specific wincon that is gonna be my go to target if I dont need removal or other tech pieces.
I removed tutors from my deck because of that, sometimes people don't get it... but, man... if you have a solid strategy and not only one wincon, why put so many fucking tutors? Why you wanna buy always the same cards? Fuck...
That's pretty much one of the founding principles of Conquest. Most of the tutors are on the reserve list now, so banning the reserve list makes the games more unique each time. Same reason Fetches are banned in Conquest.
@@styfen I wish I would get my playgroup to ban Non Basic Land Tutors, including fetches. It would make our mana bases much less convoluted
Playing devil's advocate: Tutors allow you to bring more whacky of strategies to the table. I have experience in my established play group that we frequently use tutors to elevate bad strategies to a point where they can compete with normal power level decks.
An example being, I have a "pot of greed" Gavi, Nest Warden deck. It has a hidden commander of Purphuros. I need multiple tutors to get Purph out in order to get the deck up and running. Without the tutors the deck could never function. People enjoy playing against it and it feels unique each game I play it.
Tutors are a must because a lot of ideas for deck you can have that is some hidden combo you found you will need a tutor to search it because you may never find the answer you need
I love that you're telling Landfall to actually RUN LANDS. I run 45 in Tatyova, and it might not be enough. I think Aesi needs even more. Even then, the deck is still crawling with ways that can generate infinite value, including life loss (untargeted! Psychosis Crawler is a good card), mill, creatures, card draw, mana, deck cycling, infinite countermagic, the list goes on. The glue that holds the pile of combo together is the massive land count, because while I can actually win off of a land-shorted hand sometimes, I have to draw a perfect hand to do so, so I'm almost always better off running enough lands to ensure hitting land drops as the game goes on. There is space to do almost anything you could need to do in that deck, and it's at 45 lands and is my most redundant deck for everything but removal, which it runs roughly an average amount of (but it's generally bad removal since most of it works with my combo shenanigans). It's a fun deck to run, because I'm pretty sure it's well above my actual skill level, it's not unusual for me to find something new about it in almost every game, and it STILL RUNS 45 LANDS.
i also let sometimes weaknesses in my decks.
I know sounds insane, but also im not here to race every game away, i want the pull and take.
Yep, sometimes it is more fun or flavorful to allow a weakness to exist.
My Werewolf tribal deck's only answers for flying creatures is one flip effect that fights and I think a ranger that does some damage and maybe fights as well, but the point being I think it makes sense that a bunch of Werewolves can't appropriately fight a bunch of birds lol.
I don't really agree with that method. You can still do what your deck wants to do, just use higher or slow cmc cards, you don't have to use functionally square -> round hole thing.
thats one of alot of ways to build weaknesses.
@@Zookmottin perfectly valid stance on the topic, that's the beauty of a deck building game.
My favorite method of shoring up weaknesses is what I call "Counter target player" spells, my Rith the Awakener deck has no trouble getting 40+ tokens, and I've used Massive Raid to stop people from comboing off ,to kill pillow fort players I couldn't attack, and to stop board wipes when I'm set up to win.
One of the weaknesses in most of my decks is that I don't run enough draw spells, but that's by design. The ones I do run tend to be really big spells like wheels or Rishkar's Expertise, so they're usually enough to power me into the next one if I do draw the first one, and as a result it's very feast-or-famine. My decks would be more consistent if I ran more, but I really enjoy the feeling of running on fumes, topdecking a draw spell, then immediately becoming the biggest threat!
I tend to run fact of fiction effects and scary effects over draw since when I was new to magic narsett and eidelon wer heavily played and the game I played prior (lotr trading cards) had almost no ways to view the top of your library so I love feeling like I'm cheating playing magic. Though some decks like artifacts don't seem to draw enough so I've started to *gasp* include card draw in them.
That challenge on replicate//repudiate. As a twincasters player myself i love that card so much.
Leaning into a color's strength can sometimes wrap back around to covering a weakness too. Like mono black has very few "blow up enchantment" cards available to it but it does have tons of reanimate spells you can get other folk's creatures with. You can use that Beacon of Unrest or Reanimate to snag their Rec Sage or Acidic Slime and solve the problem that way. I also do think something like Scour From Existence or Unstable Obelisk is actually a little better in mono black than y'all give it credit for due to how often you'll have coffers up in those decks.
You finally did it! Keep watch finally made it to the Challenge the Stats list 😄
I was hoping April fools you’d pretend you weren’t gonna tell dad jokes and then BOOM when you least expect cavalcade of dad jokes in the middle of challenge the stats
I build my decks to specifically make myself the constant threat at the table. I barely run any 'answers' like board wipes or targeted removal. I run 95% cards that are on theme and synergize with my Commander so that every card I play is scary and gets me closer to a win (almost always aggro combat damage based win). I rarely win games, but I don't care as it's so fun to watch every game be 3 players having to team up to stop me. I know run a lot of protection spells and hope that my opponents will try to board wipe in order to deal with me and I make it a 1-sided wipe.
I'm on the same boat as Joey, I prefer taking a whole turn bringing everything back with a big recursion spell rather than holding up 2 or 3 mana every turn to play a boros charm or other protection spell. It ends up being more efficient in the end
Now if you're running Boros Charm and Tefprot with Armageddon or the like, now you're cooking with Pine-sol!
@@Kryptnyt now that's the smell of petrol/gasoline baby!
I just run 8+ recursion pieces in every deck even my Karn deck highly recommend since you get to see your opponent swear repeatedly.
Will be adding keep watch to my pauper blue deck. Good catch!
Shoring up my weaknesses in Shadrix Silverquill was adding fogs and white/black control spells like Dawn Charm, Batwing Brume, Inkshield, Kami of False Hope, and other protections like Robe of Stars, Athreos the shroud Veiled, Ozolith, Angel’s Grace, Sudden Spoiling, and board wipes.
Other great fairly unknown gems are Cowed by Wisdom, Awe Strike, and Soul Tithe.
Batwing brume and comeuppance are where it's at!!
Q: When does a joke become a "Dad joke"?
A: When it leaves and never comes back
Speaking of Grand Abolisher effects, Blue has Tidal Barracuda. All players can cast spells as though they had flash, but opponents can't cast spells during your turn :)
Giving flash to all your opponents is overall a bit of a major downside. It suddenly gives three players access to all sorts of spells during two turns where they normally wouldn't be able to do anything. Add onto that the 4 mana cost and that's going to make it hard to want to use outside of chaos/for the funsies.
@@styfen They'll be too busy trying to interfere with one another that you can execute your game plan in peace 😎
Overcharged Amalgam is a sweet card for blue aristocrats decks and it can also save you from a Bojuka Bog.
I have a counterargument for Cultivate in Sythis decks. Your opponents know that BECAUSE it's a Sythis deck, you're going to be playing a lot of Enchantments. They know they need Enchantment-hate before you've even played a land. Cultivate gets around the problem of all your Enchantments being destroyed by getting lands directly out of your deck which, while possibly being a dead draw, also removes 2 dead draws from your deck for the future of the game. Which is a net -1 dead draw instead of a net-neutral draw. Now, I could see an argument to remove a card like Farseek which only tutors for 1 land, but Cultivate tutors for 2 so it's a MUCH better card than you think it is.
I think blue gets misunderstood, it has an amazing ability to deal with enchantments. Steal them 👍
I gotta play more Aura Thief honestly, card is solid
@@Kryptnyt aura thief is unreal, i run it in both my dimir decks. Being able to sac it makes people cry haha
love how the errata from Enchant Creature to Aura has forever made Aura Thief's name a contradiction 🤣
But stealing them doesn’t necessarily deal with them though.
@@HomeCookinMTG if we're getting that technical, nothing is ever 'dealt' with.
@@brendans1983 I'm not getting "technical". Changing ownership of Rest in Peace, or possibility storm, or anything that has a symmetrical effect (as most stax peices tend to do) does absolutely nothing. I don't give a shit whether I control rule of law or you do, either way, we can't cast more than one spell per turn.
I find it important to differentiate between covering my weaknesses and stopping other people's win conditions. My weaknesses are simply what can keep me from winning, not what my opponent can do to beat me. Sometimes they're the same thing, but most of the time, those are two distinct categories.
My challenge: Ghoul’s Night out in non-zombie reanimator deck. It’s only in 1.50% of Sidisi and 1% of Ayara and Gonti. This card is an insane 4 for 1 at five mana and should see way more play than Sepulchral Primordial. You lose the body but it’s -2 mana and you also get something from your own graveyard! Decayed doesn’t matter much in reanimator as you always target ETB creatures.
After intense testing I can guarantee it goes in all reanimator decks.
Illustrious Strategist Sun Tzu said “Know Thyself & know Thy enemy. Then, you can fight a hundred battles fearing no defeat”
Not knowing what the problem is, would be akin to walking into battle unprepared
Matt i totally feel you on the having more then one landfall deck. How many landfall decks is to many? Asking for a friend.
It's only too many when you can only tell them apart based on the commander. I have a couple. My favorite is actually a Grolnok the Omnivore deck that combines landfall with self mill. I mill and exile all my lands and payoff cards, then I basically have a second hand in exile I play all my cards from. It only ended up being a landfall deck because I also wanted a deck with the Retreat to Coralhelm infinite land drop at the time I built it, but it's ended up being really fun to play.
Besides being speed bumps for your own deck, answers to the wrong problems also carry the risk of the other players making assumptions that lead to them targeting you. Put a Ghostly Prison effect in a token swarm deck, and they may decide to 1: destroy the GP, and 2: take you out before you get other pillow fort cards out or assemble your combo. You might not be running any other GP effects or combos, but they don't know that. So you get a little ramp and maybe 6-8 1/1s out, and those get run over or wiped before your creature buffs come into play. Instead, play another buff or another token generator or a recursion piece.
Sultai landfall. 42 lands, casts giant X spells with counter backup or field of the dead. Weakness 1: Deck strat could be stronger with better lands (why run 1 field/Cabal Coffers, when I could copy them with Vesuva/Thespian's Stage to double/triple up?) Weakness 2: Aggro (go tall or go wide). Chose 5 board clears for go wide (Deluge, Damnation, Crux of Fate, Culling Ritual, Cyc Rift). For go tall, slotted in Maze of Ith to make them have untargetability also. Weakness 3: Oh, Blood Moon. Guess I need me some channel lands, huh? Typically, I hope to counter/Assassin's Trophy it.
Loved the episode great jobs guys
I run unstable obelisk, scour from existence, and invoke despair in my mono black decks, as well as feed the swarm
I have a stax player in my pod and auto losing the second they play an enchantment is worse than overcosted removal
yeah you can stop fogs (constant mists being the worst) with grand abolisher, but it can't stop glacial chasm + graveyard land recursion :P
Dude. An answer to a lot of token decks that I had never seen before: Caltrops. Deals one damage to all attacking creatures. Flying or not. Hoses most token decks…
I try to always have a way to exile a graveyard, remove a problem land/ artifact/ enchantment. Almost always a great thing to have and almost always a good target for every game.
Rakdos Charm is probably my personal favorite answer to a token deck, the mode "each creature deals 1 damage to it's controller" no target bypasses pesky Hexproof and all that, if their army exceeds their life total they just die, lolz.
Other modes include:
Destroy target artifact
Exile target player's graveyard
So super utility
@@Ixidora I’ve managed the rakdos charm player kill once, and it was glorious! More so because the player was swinging lethal at me. It’s a versatile charm with good modes, if it’s in your colors it’s a great include.
Keep Watch is one of my favorite blue cards. I discovered it after pulling a Judgement foil in a re-pack from my LGS and now I can't get enough of it. I have yet to draw it in a game and not get incredible value from it.
Play more lands? My Omnath, Locus of Rage deck has 64 lands.
to the enchantress have dificulties to end the game:
HOOOOWWWW???!!!??!???
my win options are (i play Kestia, the Cultivator):
- Indrik Umbra (to get in)
- Beastmaster Ascension (anthem)
- Felidar Retreat (token + "anthem")
- Helix Pinnacle (100 mana to win)
- Luminarch Ascension, Sigil of the Empty Throne and a huge load more tokenmakers (go wide)
- Colossification (voltron)
- enchanted evening + aurashards + enchantment etb poope token (combo)
btw all options are enchantments outside of some few token makers and to be sure everything works i have 1 brilliant restoration (it could also be every other get things back or even 2or more of those effects but that was my choice)
But here a list of options i can think of in 5 minutes:
you have 4 win the game cards that are enchantments
you have outside of that aproach of the second sun
you have every card that wins if you have a ton of life if you subthemed that way
you have your token poopers for enchantments that overrun the enermies
you have anthems to punch even harder or True Conviction to give keywords
you have Archetype of Imagination or Corrupted Conscience if you play with blue for a finisher
you have endless combos
you can go voltron
you can take subthemes like allready told with lifegain, landfall or others.
you can use x-spells or big spells cause you will have a huge amount of those.
even if you take blue wincons out, there are a lot of options that are mostly enchantment based and that doesnt mean you dont have the option to smash a second subtype or take an alternative winoption.
So yeah its maybe the other way around. you have too much options and cause of that you really need to fokus.
Agreed. I have a Naya (Marath) enchantress deck that is a Cat 5 hurricane. Mostly wins with big tokens and either combat or ETB burn (Purphoros, Warstorm Surge, etc). I think the people who can't win with enchantress are running too many 1-2 drop auras and/or no recursion or protection.
that tennis-intro was perfection xD
When you make tennis jokes, Nadal of them are going to be winners :)
A lot of the hostility to basic interaction in low-power games seems to stem from players who have just not planned to actually play Magic. There’s a big difference between accepting the risks of strong opponent counterplays, and players who have no plan on how to win if they lose one or two cards and do nothing to prevent it.
I build and play Mardu decks (except for Karona), so I know going in that I’m not going to be able to ramp like green or do broken bs… err, I mean counter spells and draw cards like blue. This forces me to rethink how I’m going to gain resources. I think Mardu isn’t as popular because people cannot get their brains out of that green/blue mentality. Often I see people use cards that mimic the abilities of those colors rather than focus on the ways their colors can attain them.
In terms of deck specific weaknesses, my Edgar Markov deck is built to combo into a big, single turn win. It’s not the most resilient however. I can get the combo pieces back, but there’s only a couple cards that do that and can’t keep up if everyone has a lot of removal.
Licia, who is probably my favorite atm, is the one that is the most commander focused. It requires casting her often and sacrificing her for a lot of the value. Shutting down gaining life or casting her outright with something like Drannith Magistrate severely hampers how smoothly she runs. Stigma Lasher is exile on sight.
Queen Marchesa is a very defensive build. She can handle big creatures and can handle go wide strategies. In fact there’s a card called Impulsive Maneuvers that I stumbled on. For each attacking creature you flip a coin. Win and that creature’s damage is prevented, lose and it does double the damage. She doesn’t use a lot of blockers, but the ones she does use are like Brash Taunter. This lets me ignore the ones who are not going to deal damage and increases damage that Brash Taunter will be dealing. She can’t attack very well though and is not as adept of shutting down more passive play styles.
The reason why I only have two mardu decks (snapdax damage prevention not fog or mutate, and jirina kudro ) is that mardu like esper has all of the good removal like esper and I only the only way to have fun with a deck for me is if I'm challenged playing it.
@@kingfuzzy2 perhaps you should try to expand on what’s possible. People often overlook synergies because they aren’t as good in a vacuum. There’s nothing challenging about playing blue/green. It does everything you could want a commander deck to do. It’s seriously like playing a video game on the easiest setting.
Keep watch is a staple in Locust God, sooooo good!
Those tennis jokes should land you in federer prison
The weaknesses in my Ur-Dragon deck are a nightmare in themselves. Currently trying re tune it whilst keeping is realatively the same but it's an annoying task.
I just re-made the deck as Ramos dragon deck and solved all of my issues.
So what about using the return lands to hand tactic to play again tactic for omnath, personally i use the four colour omnath and ive chucked in things that allow me to play multiple lands and things that return them to give an effect and it never lets me down and i dont have to worry about having more than 34 lands in my deck
People complain about Grixis not being able to deal with enchantments like it’s not one of the most powerful color combinations in the game…the colors need a weakness
Joey you need a partner you cannot have Dana and Mat playing doubles verse you.
Thinking back to when my thousand year storm got scour from existenced 5 years ago and rocking back and forth ptsd style
By a mono black player ofc
Me who plays all is dust, nevinyrrals disc, and several ways to make everything I own indestructible while playing selesnya tokens....And aura shards for enchantments and artifacts...
Oblivion stone and Nev disk are so underrated.
As for graveyard protection Joey, consider playing perpetual timepiece and endurance. Timepiece helps fill the yard but also has an emergency button to save your graveyard, and Endurance works as graveyard protection and graveyard hate
I use board wipes, stax, redirects, pinpoint removal and boseiju who shelters all to fix my decks weaknesses.
Grixis has Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker to destroy those pesky enchantments.
Cultivate and similar has no place in Sythis.
You probably don't want Arbor Elf either, though, Matt.
Arbor Elf would be the one dork I would play in sythis since it can untap an enchanted forest that tap for 2-3 mana.
That Extra Turns thumbnail got me thinking, in a game against Ladee Danger, Mana Curves, and Mr. Infect, what is Joey's superhero name?
Also, I'm pretty sure this is the second time Dana has mentioned Keep Watch on Challenge the Stats.
I have love to run all is dust + it that betrays in my svella, ice shaper deck 😈
Rabid Wombat worked for enchantress back in the day.
What episode was it where them electricity puns kept being made that Joey lost it?
Introduction to annihilation is 5 mana
I disagree with NOT PLAYING Cultivate and Kodama’s Reach in enchantress decks. I run Exploration, Wild Growth and Utopia Sprawl. Well, that means I hit three mana on turn 2, AND the biggest limiting factor for enchantress decks is not being able to cast everything when you’re “going off”.
33-land Landfall deck. No regerts.
Nadal of us know enough about tennis to keep up with these references.
Netherborn phalanx great card against tokens and never a dead card because of transmute.
storm of souls is so underplayed, not even 3k decks though
It costing 6 mana rather than 5 is such a major problem in a format that's become as fast as Commander now is.
I don't really do this at all. My decks are *pure* synergy. I don't run niche cards, hate pieces, or secret tech. I get around my deck's weaknesses by relying on high-quality removal/interaction and the power of my deck's strengths to just overpower the weaknesses.
P.S.: I have no playgroup. 100% PlayEDH for me.
Bullets. My only weakness
Can we please get a timestamp past the intro and the jokes
That blows my mind that 23% of sythis decks have cultivate. What are people thinking?
Every time data tells a solid joke then the other two just ignore I get a little set
Dad jokes on fire!!!
Matt's reaction to Dana's jokes is what keeps me coming back week after week.
This is another reason why dockside is a necessary type of card when the budget allows. There needs to be a way to punish artifact and especially enchantment decks more easily.
I have 2 dragon tribal decks because I can't fit all the dragons in 1 deck! Problem solved.
Number 23!
"jokeovic" 😭
Recently I saw content creators talking about how the format has become much faster. Usually citing "power creep" as the reason why. And yet every week these three content creators tell us why the cards we aren't running are more efficient. I just hate challenge the stats so much.
I wouldn't cut Cultivate or other land ramp out of sythis, enchantment removal is very prevalent in our format and you're not going to be happy when all of your ramp gets blown up
Typical Deck: Commander, sol ring, 98 solutions
Cultivate is dog poop lol. There's a half dozen if not a dozen more better green ramp. Three Visits and Skyshroud Claim, are my two favs.
I don't tend to agree with the cultivate topic.
If someone mass enchantment boardwipes your board your now down lands and enchantments.
Personally I'd rather go for land ramp when land ramp is harder to get rid of
Play more stax everyone! You don't have to try to come up with answers to spells if your opponents can't cast them!
I still think the Iono point is weak, you could literally say that about any stax piece that stops someone form playing the game (Stasis, Winter orb, Blood Moon, Collector Ophe, Rest In Piece, Stasis Orb, Choke, etc). I don't personally run Iono but saying that a card stops someone else from playing that game is the reason for banning it while not banning the others is so cherry picked its kind of ridiculous. There are many more egregious cards that make the game not fun that are allowed (Dockside, Thassa's Oracle, all the free spells, all the fast mana, all the tutors, etc) but singling out this one for such a weak reason seems odd.