Dimir House Guard

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Legality

Format Legality
1v1 Commander Legal
Archenemy Legal
Block Constructed Legal
Canadian Highlander Legal
Casual Legal
Commander / EDH Legal
Commander: Rule 0 Legal
Custom Legal
Duel Commander Legal
Highlander Legal
Legacy Legal
Leviathan Legal
Limited Legal
Modern Legal
Oathbreaker Legal
Pauper Legal
Pauper Duel Commander Legal
Pauper EDH Legal
Planechase Legal
Quest Magic Legal
Vanguard Legal
Vintage Legal

Dimir House Guard

Creature — Skeleton

Fear (This creature can't be blocked except by artifact creatures and/or black creatures.)

Sacrifice a creature: Regenerate Dimir House Guard. (The next time this creature would be destroyed, instead tap it, remove it from combat and heal all damage on it.)

Transmute *(, Discard this card: Search your library for a card with the same converted mana cost/mana value as this card, reveal it put it into your hand, then shuffle your library. Transmute only as a sorcery.)

Adny888 on MossyFungoid

3 months ago

Hey unleashed Havoc

Thanks for looking over my decklist and for the suggestions! The Tendershoot Dryad looks like a solid addition, and I will add to my potential buy list.

The Tutors sound like a good inclusion too, (along with the sac outlets) but they are all pretty spenny here in Aus... what do you think on these guys as cheaper alternates? Dimir House Guard, Shred Memory and Fierce Empath

Thunderfoot Baloth looks ace too, just... its like $15.00 here or not avaliable anywhere, so ill keep an eye out

I actually forgot the wording that focused on premanants going in to the graveyard, so maybe I should look more closely at teh instants and sorceries there for sure.

DreadKhan on Chatter

5 months ago

I feel like your Commander would like One with the Kami and Mazirek, Kraul Death Priest. You just need a free sac outlet like Viscera Seer, Carrion Feeder, Woe Strider, Dimir House Guard (does double duty as a tutor for MV 4 stuff), or Sadistic Hypnotist. Most of these don't have a very good payoff other than killing a creature, but some have useful upsides.

I wonder if you could shave a few lands by running some of the following: Golgari Rot Farm, Blighted Woodland, Myriad Landscape, Castle Garenbrig, Guildless Commons, and Mosswort Bridge. Most of those are fairly budget, and getting a ramp effect out of a land feels extremely good in my experience. The best options also help with fixing your mana.

If you want to add something really pushed, Pitiless Plunderer is really good with your Commander, it looks like it's had a reprint, but it's still up there for a single card. Another card to keep an eye out for is Swarmyard. Toski, Bearer of Secrets is a solid Squirrel pick, if not the cheapest. If you often have 1/1 creatures you aren't super attached to their is always Skullclamp, it's a few bucks but it can do a lot of work with 1/1 tokens.

I'm not sure how desperate you are for tokens/are afraid of flyers, but I always have fun with Sandwurm Convergence. Transmogrifying Wand is a nice way to put pressure on your opponents' creatures, it plays well in budget decks. Grim Haruspex is a pretty nice card if you expect to lose creatures, it doesn't even charge life.

Madcookie on Pattern Recognition # 288 - …

8 months ago

Transmute is one of my favorite mechanics precisely because of how flavorful but also fair and limiting it is. You mention tutors that cost less than 4 mana have a drawback and make transmuting for 3 sound OP, while the main downside of the mechanic is its extremely limiting scope - you can only get a card of the same CMC. On top of that everything except Muddle the Mixture, Dimir House Guard (only in some K'rrik cEDH), maybe Shred Memory does not have any meaningful effects for the mana cost and excluding the transmute ability, is essentially unplayable.

Most tutors that are played in various formats are very versatile either grabbing almost any card you want like Demonic Tutor(deck) or Fae of Wishes(sideboard), or can get a card type that synergizes with your deck like Buried Alive or Fabricate. Transmuted cards can only grab a card with certain CMC usually a specific combo piece, which means in the majority of situations they can't be used to tutor for something else like an answer or a different combo piece, increasing the chance that they are dead cards in your hand.

Sure, Transmute is uncounterable but in situations not involving storm you are better off countering the stuff your opponent searched for, instead of the tutor itself. Last but not least most of the Transmute cards have black in them and generally black tutors do not reveal what you search for, unlike Transmute which always makes you share that information with everyone.

Because your topic bled into "Are tutors bad for the game" I'll touch on that too. No. If you ban tutors then cards that overflow with value take their place - Consecrated Sphinx, Rhystic Study, Esper Sentinel, Smothering Tithe. Prices skyrocket even higher. Then you probably ban those. Then what? Where do we draw the line? When 99 Colossal Dreadmaw becomes the meta?

If anything players should discuss power-levels and have some consideration for their playgroup when deckbuilding.

nothingstar on

10 months ago

This is a good start, you have some really nice lifegain synergies going. It doesn't really seem like a card draw deck to me, though. It leans more towards the lifegain world of Aetherflux Reservoir than to the U/B world of card draw. There are a lot of black cards that exchange life for cards; if you want card draw, you should get a Graveborn Muse leave the Reservoir behind.

If you go the true lifegain route, you might add transmute effects for tutors, like Clutch of the Undercity or Dimir House Guard. And another good wincon could be Celestial Convergence + Solemnity. And Test of Endurance. Though those will require more counters/protection than you have right now.

I have learned from experience that strategies that ping your opponents for one or two life every turn get you killed very quickly, because they make you stand out even when you're doing very little. So things like Drana's Emissary are kinda dangerous.

In that same vein, Vito, Thorn of the Dusk Rose will draw hate. It's Sanguine Bond on a stick, and when people see half of the Sanguine Bond/Exquisite Blood combo, they shoot it immediately.

One final bit of overarching advice -- since this is a 3-color deck, I suggest staying away from cards that require a lot of one kind of mana. Particularly lots of black mana, like Underworld Dreams or Peer into the Abyss, since this deck is heavily U/W right now.

Okay, now some slightly more nitpicky things about card choices:

  • Since the Mages only seem to fetch mana rocks at this point, might you switch them out with myrs? Like Alloy Myr.

  • I'd replace Folio of Fancies with Temple Bell, personally, because I like having to spend less mana per draw.

  • Serra Avatar might be better than Celestial Force. But also I just really like Serra Avatar.

Again, this is quite good, just needs a bit of focusing towards the endgame. All the nitty-gritty of the mana curve and stuff you'll work out in playtesting, and what you have so far is workable.

CruelEntertainment on Date Night with Phage

10 months ago

Have you Though about adding any transmute cards to the list, like Dimir House Guard or Brainspoil, if anything just to save a bit of money, also, thanks for making the list, I feel like it is a cool primer for how to

Flarhoon13 on Kenrith, the Cycling King

10 months ago

Inaugural game went perfectly. Time of Need got Zirda, the Dawnwaker. An early Fluctuator allowed me to cycle about 7 cards early. Zur the Enchanter got Astral Slide, Escape Protocol and Training Grounds. So, when Kenrith, the Returned King finally came out, all of his abilities were reduced to a single coloured mana. Razaketh's Rite got a Palinchron, probably should've gotten a Herald of the Forgotten. My opponent had been kind enough to mill my Scholar of the Ages so I could search with Razaketh's Rite again, this time for the Dimir House Guard to loop Palinchron via Kenrith, the Returned King for infinite mana and the win.

DreadKhan on EDH Merens Reanimator

10 months ago

In my Meren deck, I don't run a lot of bigger creatures, even though the deck has decent odds of ending up with huge amounts of mana, stuff like Beast Whisperer/Grim Haruspex draw cards off of creatures either entering or leaving the battlefield, there are lots of variants of both of those effects, and these will let you play many spells in a turn, rather than play one huge thing. I don't think your MVs are a huge problem, but the 'top of my curve' creatures are Razaketh, the Foulblooded, Protean Hulk, and Sheoldred, Whispering One, the first two can win on the spot or very quickly, while Sheoldred is a bit more questionable, a lot of people find stuff like Sheoldred tends to be too slow in todays game, so even that is a card I'm considering switching out for lower to the ground stuff. I checked and atm I have 14 1 drops, which is a few more, there are plenty of decent 1 drop mana dorks you could throw in to both lower your curve and possibly raise your consistency, though the best is Elves of Deep Shadow, since your deck cares more about Black mana.

As a general rule of thumb for Meren, if you can do a thing with a creature instead, you probably should unless the creature option is truly awful, I run 55 creatures in the 99, and I'm still thinking about sneaking more in by taking out things like Artifacts. Creature payoffs are better than artifact payoffs in Golgari, and Meren can't recur non-creatures.

For sac outlets, you ideally want a selection of 'free' sac outlets, ones that only use a creature and no other input, so stuff like Viscera Seer, Carrion Feeder, Woe Strider, any of the good altars (Phyrexian Altar, Ashnod's Altar, and Altar of Dementia are my all very good), Sadistic Hypnotist is insanely useful (it is a 5 drop though), if you have 4 drops that matter you can use Dimir House Guard because Transmute is a good mechanic if you care about the MV and it's also a free sac outlet. I think you can throw in a few sac outlets that are more limited, stuff like Helm of Possession, Phyrexian Tower, Hell's Caretaker, Altar of Bhaal, and Ritual of the Machine are all beefy effects, even if you can only use them once per turn. I really like stuff like Sakura Tribe Elder because the card provides it's own sac outlet (but only for itself), ymmv but I think you're taking a risk by running something like Solemn Simulacrum over Dawntreader Elk or Diligent Farmhand, 4 mana is a ton and it lacks a self destruct feature.

One option some people end up taking is replacing Meren as the Commander, not because she isn't strong enough but because the play patterns are pretty consistent, once you've figured out what your deck is trying to do, Meren is usually very predictable, so some people prefer something like Baba Lysaga, Night Witch. She offers card draw and a sac outlet in the Command zone while caring a lot less about creatures in particular, so you'd have more freedom in terms of card types.

Hope some of this is helpful!

psionictemplar on Mortal Kombat

1 year ago

The time counters do need to be gone for auramancers to work like you want. Unless they are already out of counters, then "kombat" away. Suggestion wise, I have Dimir House Guard for you as a way to tutor auramancers at the very least.

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