Caves of Koilos
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Legality

Format Legality
1v1 Commander Legal
Alchemy 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
Historic Brawl Legal
Legacy Legal
Leviathan Legal
Limited Legal
Modern Legal
Modern Beyond Horizons Legal
Oathbreaker Legal
Pioneer Legal
Planar Constructed Legal
Planechase Legal
Pre-release Legal
Premodern Legal
Quest Magic Legal
Standard Legal
Standard Brawl Legal
Tiny Leaders Legal
Vanguard Legal
Vintage Legal

Caves of Koilos

Land

: Add .

: Add or . This deals 1 damage to you.

kamarupa on Magnificence

2 months ago

You have a lot of singletons for the Modern format. I suggest you add "Casual" and "Budget" to the Hubs.

You're already at 70 spells. That, combined with the number of singletons, might make this brew better suited for Commander/EDH than Modern. It would also open up even more spells.

Alternatively, if you want to keep it modern, even with a casual and budget focus, you can get more power and consistency out of it by tightening up your focus. A good deck doesn't need to do everything, just a few things well. You seem to have a lot of Vampires, Angels, and Humans. You might try to pick one of those creature types, and focus on that tribe - cut all the other creatures and increase the best of your chosen tribe to a full set, keeping in mind you want most of your creatures to cost 1-3MV.

When it comes to non-creature, non-land spells, I find the most success with the following catagories: removal/disruption, card advantage, protection. I try to include 4-8 removal/disruption spells, 2-4 card advantage spells (draw 2 or more cards from 1 spell), and 1-4 protection spells (deny opponent's removal). Anything that doesn't fall into those 3 categories usually isn't helping a deck succeed. Of course, every deck is different and there are lots of ways of achieving essentially the same results - like Harmonize and Collected Company are different in approach, but essentially both card advantage.

Sign in Blood is about as good as it gets for card advantage. Path to Exile isn't that expensive anymore, but black has so many good removal spells - I won't list them here. Discard can function as removal, so if that's your preference, it's fine, too, but keep in mind removal spells are cheaper to cast to target creatures and don't require as much timing to use effectively. White is great for protection spells - Faith's Shield is great, but Ephemerate can be just as good in decks with lots of ETB triggers.

Artifact/Enchantment removal is usually reserved for the sideboard.

Pump and lifegain are usually peripheral mechanics.

A dual color deck needs dual lands. It looks like you're going for a budget deck here, so I suggest adding more budget dual lands. While it's generally preferred to avoid lands that enter tapped, if you're brewing a budget deck, I think it's better to include such lands than to rely on luck to get the basics you need to cast spells of both colors. Concealed Courtyard would be great. Caves of Koilos would be ok, too, especially with a tribes like Angels or Vampires that have lots of creatures with lifegain mechanics. If resorting to lands that always enter tapped, I think the Scry lands provide the most value - you could do worse than Temple of Silence. I love managathering.com as a land resource - https://managathering.com/duallands/orzhov.html

I recommend 8-12 dual lands, 1-3 utility lands and the rest basics.

I usually include Bojuka Bog in decks that use black mana, as there's so much graveyard recursion in my play group.

To sum it up: if not brewing EDH, reduce to 60 spells. Cut your enchantments, tighten your creatures, focus your utilities. Remember: you don't have to annihilate opponents to win - focus on making a fast, reliable kill, not an elaborate one.

Balaam__ on Tripwire

3 months ago

An easy path to improvement in speed and consistency would be to add some form of dual land. While you don’t currently have this tagged as ‘Budget’, I’m guessing from the overall price estimate and the fact there are no costly cards here that you’d like to keep it as low as possible (which is perfectly understandable).

In lieu of the obvious go-to selections like Marsh Flats and Godless Shrinefoil which can be quite expensive, there are some decent alternatives. Try looking at Concealed Courtyard and Caves of Koilos or even Isolated Chapel and Shineshadow Snarl.

You’ll want to avoid anything that has an ‘this card enters the battlefield tapped’ anchor chained to it as that will only slow you down, but otherwise it’ll only be a strict improvement if you can acquire some inexpensive lands that provide both and .

kamarupa on Tripwire

4 months ago

While I think this deck has a lot of places that can be improved on, one thing you've done well is keep most of your spells to 3 or less mana to cast. Your mana curve looks pretty good - well done!

Now, on to some broad stroke places for possible improvements:

I think you should add "Budget" and "Casual" to your listed hubs.

I'm not sure what your reason for so many singletons is - are you constrained by what you have in paper? Or basing this off a Commander build? I'd strongly recommend reducing your singletons as much as possible by focusing on 3-5 creatures that are your strongest, most synergized. This will improve the deck's consistency and that makes it win faster and more often. It can also help allow for a more effective sideboard. You seem to have the most Vampires, so perhaps going for a Vampire tribal build? If you do go for Vampires, you might consider dropping white altogether. That would make your mana-base a lot cheaper to make consistent and help you cast the spells that require two or more black mana.

I notice you also have 67 spells here. I suggest reducing the deck by 7 to hit the minimum, as this, like narrowing which creatures you include, will drastically improve consistency.

Finally, if you keep the deck b/w, I'd suggest trying to improve your land base by incorporating some dual lands. While it's never great to slow down a deck with lands that enter tapped, it's even worse to not have the right color mana to cast spells. I lean toward the scry lands (Temple of Silence) as being the most valuable trade off for entering tapped, though you might prefer the life gain lands (Scoured Barrens) to fit your lifegain theme. Or conversely, if you gain enough life, a pain land might fit well (Caves of Koilos). If you can swing the money, the path lands are pretty nice (Brightclimb Pathway  Flip) or fast lands (Concealed Courtyard). I don't like the check lands (Isolated Chapel) or reveal lands (Shineshadow Snarl) because they work best with the always expensive shock lands (Godless Shrinefoil) and I don't have the kind of money.

I hope that helps!

multimedia on Liesa but Angels

5 months ago

Hey, good WIP for Angels, nice Avacyn and Tithe.

When you break it down to the very basics of what you need for Angels it's three things: Angels, ramp and draw. Angels because you want to cast/attack with Angels, ramp because you want to be able to consistently cast your higher mana cost (4+ CMC) Angels and repeatable draw because you want to keep having Angels in your hand to cast. The better Angels you want to attack with, including Liesa, have a high mana cost, without more ramp you'll have a more difficult time casting them. Consider more lower mana cost (1-3 CMC) ramp and more repeatable draw sources?

In my opinion, a good rule for casual Commander deck building is having at least 10 sources of draw and at least 10 sources of ramp, allocate deck room for these. These are the most important two effects to have for smoother gameplay. Better overall gameplay makes playing Commander more fun since you'll get less frustrated with how your deck is running. Consider cutting a few of the lesser power cards compared to other cards here for more ramp and draw?

Add:

Cut:

Some land upgrades to consider that are within the budget for the manabase: Caves of Koilos, Fetid Heath, Shineshadow Snarl, Great Hall of Starnheim, Tyrite Sanctum, Vault of the Archangel, Soulstone Sanctuary, Path of Ancestry

I hope this advice is helpful and I offer more if you're interested, about the potential adds/cuts I've suggested.

Monomanamaniac on Here we go A-Ghen (Arcanum Weaver)

1 year ago

So I'm not absolutely sure what you were looking for, or what your budget is, so I just grabbed as many decently affordable cards that I could find and brought them for you to check out. I mostly picked out things that might help you close the game with life loss or give you value from in looping. It's too bad Thousand-Year Elixir isn't more affordable Agent of Erebos Ajani's Chosen Archon of Sun's Grace Ashiok's Reaper Boros Garrison Carmen, Cruel Skymarcher Caves of Koilos Cemetery Tampering Clifftop Retreat Curse of Opulence Darksteel Mutation Debtors' Knell Doomwake Giant Dragonskull Summit Exotic Orchard Fellwar Stone Grim Guardian Hopeless Nightmare Isolated Chapel Mesa Enchantress Myriad Landscape Open the Vaults Orzhov Basilica Rakdos Carnarium Resurgent Belief Ruinous Ultimatum Smoldering Marsh Spirited Companion Starfield Mystic Talisman of Conviction Talisman of Hierarchy Talisman of Indulgence Underworld Coinsmith Wicked Visitor

wallisface on Modern Vampire/lifelink

1 year ago

Specifically building around Sorin, I would suggest something like the following:

wallisface on Modern Vampire/lifelink

1 year ago

MotelWifi the big problem with your revised list is that your mana curve is still waay too high - decks often can’t justify more than 3-4 cards costing 4-or-more mana, and you’ve got 15. Your revised list also still has almost no 1-mana cards, which means you’ll often be starting a full turn behind your opponent.

And finally, 63 cards might not seem like much over 60, but every card over that 60 number is weakening the deck & making it less consistent.

A good tip for new players for deckbuilding is to pick 9 cards and run 4-of each of those (for 36 cards) alongside 24 lands. The mana costs of those 9 cards should look something like 1,1,1,2,2,2,3,3,4.

For an example deck and/or inspiration, if I were building a White-Black vampire deck, and trying to keep to your budget, it’d look something like this:

Now, this list is by no means perfect, and could still do with more thought, but it covers some important points:

  • the mana curve is efficient/low
  • most cards are run as playsets (4-ofs) to keep the deck consistent
  • the deck is just 60 cards
  • there’s a good selection of turn-1 plays
  • the cards work well with one-another
  • the lands enter untapped, so you don’t lose tempo
  • the deck has ways to both pressure the opponent while also disrupting them

DreadKhan on Ur-Dragon (Recs. Needed)

1 year ago

I'll give you a few tips from my limited experience with 5 Colour decks and how they achieve their mana requirements.

My first point is that combining the Bounce Guild lands with numerous ETB tapped lands will feel incredibly bad, I would definitely throw in more untapped lands if you're going to use that many Bounce lands. I love the Bounce lands, but they should be played mostly with other lands that ETB untapped, like Basic lands, bouncing an ETB tapped land is not fun in my experience.

I would encourage you to lean into Green ramp, there is lots of it that's very good, including options that find dual lands that have Basic types (or even Triomes if your budget permits, but there are budget fetchable duals out there). To make that Green ramp work you probably would want more Forests because a Forest and ramp spell can fix your mana for you.

Another thing I noticed that helps 5 Colour decks is the fact that you can use budget fetchlands of all sorts. The worst of my favourite 3 is Myriad Landscape, followed by Blighted Woodland and Krosan Verge. Krosan Verge can technically find all 5 colours by itself if you use Triomes, because it can find non-Basics, but there is also Murmuring Bosk to help. In addition to these types of fetchlands, you might find some use for the old Panorama cycle from Alara, Esper Panorama, Jund Panorama, Bant Panorama, Grixis Panorama, and Naya Panorama. None of those are truly great cards, but in a pinch they both enter untapped while eventually offering good fixing. A nice perk to using more Basics is that you are better at enduring non-Basic hate, not sure if people use stuff like that in your area.

Their is the odd good land worth looking at if you want budget mana fixing, the pain lands Sulfurous Springs or Adarkar Wastes are very strong fixing options that are relatively cheap, people use these in budget cEDH builds, they're perfect if you want good non-Basics for a low price, the Enemy pair from that cycle (Shivan Reef and Caves of Koilos are generally quite cheap, the Ally pairs are pricy). There is also the odd land like Exotic Orchard that can fix pretty well, but most 5 colour lands that enter untapped are pricey.

My final suggestion is that I found it helpful to run more ramp than usual in my 5 Colour decks, as well as more lands total. My 5 Colour Sisay deck has 39 lands and iirc over 20 ramp spells/effects (some work as combo pieces), and my Reaper King deck has 38 lands and around 15 ramp sources. It's a big hassle to get 5 colours consistently, but if you straight up run extra lands and ramp it becomes much easier.

A few more general pointers, I noticed you don't have Crux of Fate in here, it's usually pretty good in a Dragon deck. You also might like Stinging Study as a big draw spell. It's usually not as good as Stinging Study, but Imposing Grandeur also exists. Bring to Light and Wargate are two pretty strong tutors, perfect if you want to power your deck up a bit.

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