Catalyst Elemental

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Legality

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

Catalyst Elemental

Creature — Elemental

Sacrifice Catalyst Elemental: Add .

PaulMuadDib on Grenzo Take the Wheel

2 years ago

Carnival of souls is quite the pick! I don't think I would run it, seems too easy to kill yourself. Though with enough aristocrats effects, I suppose you can get by.

In my grenzo deck I have about 20 non-creature cards. 2 of them inherently can be used in the graveyard and I decided on the others because I needed more interaction in the group I was playing against. Out of those ones which you aren't running and I don't see in your maybe pile or deck that you should consider are:
Thran Turbine essentially a sol ring that you can use only during your upkeep on grenzo
Elixir of Immortality a way to protect your graveyard from someone trying to exile it
Desecrated Tomb makes each successful grenzo activation net you a Bat
Tel-Jilad Stylus lets you do 2 things -- repeat an etb of a creature already out, protect a creature from being interacted with. You can even activate grenzo and then use this in response to avoid targeted destruction. I've used this thing on Faceless Butcher to save grenzo from boardwipes.
Dark Privilege lets you block most creatures with grenzo, use it as a sac outlet and increases his power and toughness by 1. It also avoids lots of targeted removal, though not the most popular boardwipes.
Songs of the Damned depending on where the game is, this can be worse than dark ritual or net you 10 mana.

I would additionally suggest giving Warp World a spin because it is some very good disruption, removes enchantments and lands. If you're lucky it can be a red timewalk due to bringing in the lands untapped.

A land you might want is Scorched Ruins . As far as you are concerned, once grenzo is out, this is like playing 2 lands for one. though there are obviously downsides.

My mana base consists of 36 lands and 12 creatures that produce mana, or in the case of Burnished Hart ramp you.
You have 6 out of the 12, and are running palladium myr which isn't a bad pick and I honestly forgot about it. The 5 which I haven't mentioned are Basal Thrull , Generator Servant , Treasure Nabber , Blood Vassal and Catalyst Elemental . With the exception of Nabber, they all replace themselves manawise due to generation 2 mana. I would avoid putting in manadorks that do not make 2 or more mana.

You might additionally want to consider Junktroller which lets you recur creatures or disrupts someone else's grave.

Since a grenzo deck usually does not cast that many spells, you can try throwing in some asymmetrical effects, such as Soot Imp or Eidolon of the Great Revel to leverage that, though with the direction your deck is currently in, that doesn't seem necessary.

Additionally Shrieking Mogg can be used both offensively and defensively. If you know it's on the bottom, you can tap down an opponent before their declare attackers step. If it's your turn, tap down their creatures during your declare attackers step and all of their blockers will be tapped. It also neatly fits into the goblin theme you already have present.

TheMadRocketeer on Landfall Elementals

2 years ago

My current thinking is that, as much as I love them and as much as I've kind of partially built the deck's theme around them, the whole Omnath, Locus of Rage and elementals theme is something this deck really doesn't need in its current form. So I either need to accelerate it somehow, slow the opponent down somehow, or sacrifice some of the high-CMC stuff and the focus on elementals in order to enhance the lower end of the mana curve. That could be combined with adding the interaction that I've known from the start that I need.

Possible Changes:
Out:
1X Elixir of Immortality - Trying to remember why I put this in.
2X Omnath, Locus of Rage
2X Catalyst Elemental
1X Nahiri's Lithoforming
Anything that's CMC >= 4 is a candidate to remove.

In:
1X Brushfire Elemental - I recently got a second one.
2X Scythe Leopard
1X Murasa Rootgrazer
2 to 4X Nature's Way / Ram Through
Something in green that provides instant speed hexproof / shroud protection

Monomanamaniac on Bosh throws a fit

3 years ago

So you might think if adding even more mana rocks like Mind Stone, Thran Dynamo, Hedron Archive, Worn Powerstone, Blinkmoth Urn, Everflowing Chalice, Gilded Lotus, Palladium Myr, or Iron Myr. You should be ramping as much as possible, you could even consider Extraplanar Lens if budget is no concern. You could consider cards like Myr Retriever, Goblin Welder, Buried Ruin, Goblin Engineer, Junk Diver, purphorous, bronze-blooded or Daretti, Scrap Savant to bring artifacts back from the graveyard. You could consider Mystic Forge, Planar Bridge, or Kuldotha Forgemaster for getting artifacts out of your deck and onto the battlefield. Darksteel Forge, Soul of New Phyrexia, or Eldrazi Monument so you're killing your artifacts only when you want to. Unwinding Clock it's good if you combine it with flash from Shimmer Myr or Vedalken Orrery. Ugin, the Ineffable or Foundry Inspector to reduce the casting cost of your artifacts without affecting the cmc. You could go full ham on some big artifact creatures like Myr Battlesphere, Meteor Golem, Duplicant, Ancient Stone Idol, Mycosynth Golem, Darksteel Colossus, Blightsteel Colossus, Platinum Angel, or Platinum Emperion just to name a few. Other ideas might be Hellkite Tyrant to steal your opponents artifacts Mycosynth Lattice to turn your non-artifacts into artifacts, Illusionist's Bracers or Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient to copy bosh's abilities, Swiftfoot Boots and/or Lightning Greaves to protect your big guy, Voltaic Key or Manifold Key to untap your rocks, or Mind's Eye or incidental card draw. Some lands to think about are Myriad Landscape, Darksteel Citadel, and Phyrexia's Core but not much else.

As per suggestions to take out : Catalyst Elemental, Destructive Digger, Forge Armor, Walking Atlas, Nahiri's Wrath, Wily Goblin (use Dockside Extortionist), Azor's Gateway  Flip, Furious Rise, Generator Servant, Pirate's Pillage, Scarecrone, Filigree Familiar just to name a few.

I would like to start by saying I'm not trying to say your deck is bad, just trying to give you a lot of ideas to go off of and pointing out things that don't really go with the theme of the deck, which is ramp super hard, drop a bunch of big threats, drop bosh and kill opponents. Secondly, I am not a competitive deck builder by any means, I just use the data I have and suggest the things I like. I actually like seeing gosh in the command zone.

SharpRaptor on Omnath: Locus of landfall & combos

4 years ago

Hi, I hope that at least some of what i'm going to put here will be useful, and even if you don't use any of my advice then maybe you will be able to see where I am coming from and use the logic to find your own improvements :)

Ramp

As the previous commenter has suggested the amount of ramp spells that put lands in to play in your deck is a bit to low for a ramp deck especially one that has subthemes of landfall. Typical commander deck building suggestions say that you should have 10 pieces of ramp to tide you into the midgame. This goes for any deck, not just ramp decks. In ramp decks you will want more. At my count you have 12 ramp cards that are reusable (ie, aren't the one shot sacrifice elemntals) this will want to be more really, with a focus on them being ones that put lands in to play. Another of note, is that cards like Zendikar Resurgent don't really count as a ramp slot, as by the time we can cast it, we have a lot of mana already. 'Ramp' cards are ones that you want to see in your opening hand to get you into your game plan faster.

For this reason I would look into replacing some of the creature based ramp and some other low impact cards with this ramp that will get us executing our main game plan faster and better.

These can all be easily replaced with land based ramp spells as they don't get you any further ahead on mana than 1 land, or are one shot abilities when we want to be dropping big things multiple times over multiple turns.

Smokebraider Is unique because it produces 2 mana for only 2 investment, but only if we focus in on elemtals so can be left on a short list to be evaluated. We'll list other potential cuts later when looking at more over all deck evaluation.

The previous commentor has provided a list which at first glance seems to be comprehensive enough to provide some ideas for what to add.

Removal

More conventional commander wisdom suggests that you have at least 5 ways to directly interact with your opponents game plan. I personally nearly always play more than this, but you should have at least 5. This direct interaction is preferred to be the targetted simgle response cards that can remove threats in any shape or form. Of note, this removal count is seperate from the count of mass removal. At my count you have Song of the Dryads , the down tick of Domri, Anarch of Bolas and Ingot Chewer as easily accessable removal. Things like the trigger from your commander or things like Magmatic Force are more incedental as you can't rely on them doing what you want when you need it.

Cards that could be added in this slot are many. But it is a good idea to have as many as you can being generic answers to anything, but also you need to make sure that they are ones you can realistically weave into your game plan instead of leaving up those answers at all times. This is mostly a balncing act that is where fine tuning comes in from playing the deck. But potential recommendations for all purpose would be Beast Within and Chaos Warp . After that they become more specific but can be cheaper in mana,

Wrath

This may seem counterintuitive, seen as you are planning on being the big creature deck that wants the board presence. But sometimes the opponents boards just need answering (Not to mention that you might end up getting a lot of elemental death triggers from Omnath). As such having 2 or 3 creature wraths might be worth trying. And having 2 or 3 artifact and enchantment wraths will be good to have access to aswell. Something you already have so I assume you already know.

Creature wraths to consider in green red include

You already have the cards for mass removing artifacts and enchantments so I won't bother listing any more.

Card Draw

One of the most common recommendations I have to make to people about their deck is to up the amount of card draw or selection in their decks. There is no point in having sweet cards and synergies in here if we never get to see them! Normally I recommend having 10 ways of drawing cards in your deck, with some of them being repeating and some being one shot. At my count you currently have 7 (Or 8 if you count Praetor's Counsel which can do effectively a similar job), so you are nearly there but I would recommend adding a couple mr just to smooth out the deck running.

  • Harmonize is the most obvious recommendation withit being notorious for its colour pie break with not haveing a restriction based on creatures or similar.
  • Horn of Greed is universal, but we should be getting more value from it.
  • Greater Good is amazing if you keep having big creatures to sacrifice. Thankfully due to our commander triggers, we do!
  • Chandra, Flamecaller can cover multiple bases of what we need, it can be counted as both a wrath AND a card draw engine :) IT also even makes elementals (of note, they get exiled at end step instead of dieing so you won't normally get Omnath triggers. Sacrificing them to Greater Good though....... )
  • Rishkar's Expertise can be great card draw as you don't need to take a full turn off to refuel, you still get to cast something that costs less, which could be that removal spell or something you needed!

These overview sections are recommendations for generic cards that could go in. From here on, we will be looking at more specific card options, and possible cuts from the existing deck

Deck Applications

Now, again as the previous commentor mentioned, there are multiple ways you can take an Omnath deck. My take on them being

  • RG Big thing Ramp. No specific synergies in mind except for incidental ones like, I need land to cast my big spells, and this card cards about land. Not a bad deck by any means, just less commander or theme focused.
  • Elemental Tribal Ramp. This seems to be closer to what you are currently going for. Similar to the RG ramp deck, just with tribal synergies from elementals
  • Landfall / Lands Matter. Here we are focusing on many landfall triggers, and keep cycling our lands round and round to get them. This deck will likke having access to things like Crucible of Worlds and many effects like Exploration

Here, i will suggest some cards for each of them and maybe later on if you want we could look more into one or a mix of these strategies.

RG Ramp

  • Ruric Thar, the Unbowed This card is very very powerful. Expecially as the decks around you get more and more powerful and wanting to do more combo and storm bsaed strategies.
  • Gruul Ragebeast A good way of keeping the board under control when you play your 'large and incharge' creatures
  • Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger We have mana, they don't. Enough said really. Just beware that with this creature, sometines the adage If you can't remove the problem, remove the player can be applied to just killing you.

Elemental Ramp

Other than ones recommended here, perhaps a good idea would be to use Gatherer or mtg.wtf to find elementals in your colour. Or cards which reference elementals in your colours, the example in wtf would be this

  • Chandra, Acolyte of Flame can rebuy your ramp spells and can make elementals that will die to trigger Omnath.
  • Chandra, Awakened Inferno A wrath that doesn't kill elementals and can provide a reasonable clock on the game with her uptick.
  • Omnath, Locus of Mana Store mana for a rainy day. Or for hitting your opponents upside the head with it. Both work.
  • Parallel Lives Double the tokens, double the elementals, double the damage. We like.
  • Tornado Elemental clears out any things like Dragons, or Flying Slivers or similar. Also good at picking of planeswalkers as it has sudo unblockable.
  • Liege of the Tangle we can go REALLY all in on making all our lands elementals and meaning that if someone wraths us we can basically kill everyone from Omnath triggers
  • Budoka Gardener Ramp early game, big guys late game.

Lands Matter

This deck idea might have elements that are closer to a combo deck than the others, but will still mostly be a midrange deck.

Possible Cuts

Cutting Criteria

I won't re-list the cuts recommeneded in the ramp section. I will be evaluating cuts in the assumption that the deck is wanting to be a combination of an elementals ramp deck and a lands value deck. A lot of these recomendations for cuts will have very similar reasonings, which I will elaborate on first to be able to be brief later on. These recommendations will possibly sound rather brutal, however I find that it makes it a lot easier to have too many cards that are on the cutting block rather than not enough.

  • Too Slow. If the card takes too many turns to start pulling its weight then it could be replaced with something that does what we need sooner. This is common in cards which have 'at the beginning of your upkeep' effects as they will normally have to wait an entire turn cycle to start doing something. Enters the battlefield triggers or similar things that have an effect the turn you play them are often preferred.
  • Too expensive. This should be self explanatory. If the card costs too much mana, especially if the same effect can be achieved for less mana then it should be exmined.
  • Doesn't do enough. While the effect might be interesting and maybe something we actually want in the deck, The card just doesn't pull its weight in whatever role it is supposed to be doing
  • Doesn't contribute to our game plan This might be a good card, maybe even a great card in other decks. But perhaps the effect just isn't one we need in this deck

Cards

Creatures

  • Cytoplast Root-Kin Too slow. Doesn't contribute to our game plan.
  • Dragonmaster Outcast Too slow. Doesn't do enough
  • Grazing Gladehart Doesn't do enough. While we like landfall triggers. The life gain is small enough to be negligable unless we are massrecycling all lands from our yard multiple times.
  • Magmatic Force Too Slow.
  • Magmaw Doens't contribute to our game plan / Doesn't Do enough. We can run other sac outlets if we want ways to sacrifice our elementals
  • Scute Mob Possibly too slow. But I love me a scute mob so I'm fine with this staying in :D
  • Spawnwrithe Doesn't do enough. However this one can stay in if you have found that you realistically get to connect with it at least twice to have four of them
  • Tendershoot Dryad Doesn't contribute to our game plan. Though it is very good at gummin gup the board
  • Tyrant of Discord Doesn't do enough. However if you change to having some ways to knock your opponents off of lands then the chances of this hitting multiple nonlands go up and its value does too. However there are enough control players where the onlything this will do is destroy a land at random
  • Undergrowth Champion Deosn't do enough. It's got all the right keywords but thats about it

Enchantments

  • Retreat to Kazandu Doesn't do enough. THe landfall idea is good, but putting 1 counter an a guy once or so a turn isn't worth the slot really

Artifact

  • Sword of the Animist Too Slow. We want this effect, but we aren't attacking multiple times in one turn so there are better effects to get lands from our deck. We don't neccessarily even have than many small creatures to equip this too to get it active early enough for the ramp to be that useful as ramp

Sorcery

  • Animist's Awakening As much as i want this spell to ever be good. It's just not really at all.
  • Journey of Discovery Too slow. For this to be actual search out ramp you need to entwine it which is then 6 mana. Any of the 4 mana double basics would be better here. Or just Explore type effects that cantrip too.

Planeswalker

Turns out there is only slightly too much Nissa. (And not enough Chandra ;) ) All of the Nissas' contribute to our gameplan well except for Nissa, Voice of Zendikar . The general rule of Planeswalkers in commander is to assume that you will only get two activations if you are lucky. So with this one you will at best buff your team a little. Consider Garruk Wildspeaker instead maybe?

Other random Card Recommendations

Closing

Well I hope some of this helped at least a little :)

SharpRaptor

BMHKain on Some ideas for Cuts & …

4 years ago

3Days? That BUMPing Killer goes: "Omae Wa Mou Shindeiru", & DEAD. The repeating 3 Day cycle restarts, & is infinite.

I dun suppose anyone cares about this post at all? Well, to the cEDH Players who use Boros, I still have questions left unanswered:

  1. Is Pierakor az Vinrenn D'rav good at all here in a deck where she's not CMDR? If not, what cEDH friendly variant would you suggest? I know Sunforger Blows, but is there a 3rd Alt outside the former 2?

  2. Should I keep Eldrazi Displacer or not? & should I add Legion's Initiative ?

  3. As I have so many plans, I still need to make a cEDH Boros Community Deck. Anyone know how to make a Community Deck?

  4. How good in cEDH is Generator Servant & Catalyst Elemental compared to Either Altar ?

I'm now desperate for answers. This is 5 Posts long; w/ only me to comment. I seriously would love an opinion by you.

Last Note: Pierakor az Vinrenn D'rav is the real name of Feather in case you guys care.

BMHKain on Some ideas for Cuts & …

4 years ago

Uh... Bump? Apparently Bold does nothing; & the same with Italics...

I'm asking again as nobody seems to understand; & the few that do mock it.:

  1. Do you think Pierakor az Vinrenn D'rav deserves a spot on the 99/98? We already have a cEDH Commander Deck based on her, & she's Tier 3; which is where I'm starting; very young. If so, what would you suggest for better variants of the Instants/Sorceries I have now? If not, remember that Sunforger is also trash here. Same for how broken Panoptic Mirror is, & unbanning that would lead to infinite destruction (As long as it doesn't have & is Upkeep Friendly...); just remember we still have Dramatic Reversal + Isochron Scepter

  2. Is Eldrazi Displacer worth keeping here? What about Legion's Initiative ? Just found out about a card in Boros' colors than cleanses you of Poison Counters. How about Leeches ?

  3. UPDATE: Grindstone & Painter's Servant = awesome. This is resolved; now I am thinking of making Dream Combos for Boros; There was one out there for Doomsday , but I wonder about the others...

  4. How does one make a Community Deck? I plan to make one for the few cEDH Boros Users in the subformat.

  5. For Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker & Village Bell-Ringer , how good is Generator Servant , or Catalyst Elemental good, or should I stay with the usual Phyrexian Altar & Ashnod's Altar ?

I'd really like your opinion on this; is any of this worth it?

dickinsm on Omnath, All You Can Eat Lands

4 years ago

I would strongly reccommend decreasing creatures/elementals in favor of more dedicated ramp like Khalni Heart Expedition , Harrow , Kodama's Reach , Sakura-Tribe Elder and Myriad Landscape . In my experience if you can cast Omnath and then focus on triggering landfall you'll assemble a board state quickly. In terms of card draw Elemental Bond , Life's Legacy and Greater Good are incredible with those 5/5 elementals. Because Omnath is such an expensive general playing Swiftfoot Boots would probably help.

I would recommend replacing high cmc creatures like Bloodpyre Elemental , Silverglade Elemental , and Hearthcage Giant to speed up the deck. I'd also look at replacing cards like Pilgrim's Eye , Crater Elemental , Fire Shrine Keeper , Cinder Elemental , and Catalyst Elemental as they don't really have payoff without lots of mana or omnath, in which case ramping into a 5/5 seems better

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