Cranial Plating

Artifact — Equipment

Equipped creature gets +1/+0 for each artifact you control.

: Attach Cranial Plating to target creature you control.

Equip (: : Attach to target creature you control. Equip only as a sorcery.)

Discussion (50)

GoblinElectromancer on Mechanized Revolution (RW Affinity)

6 days ago

I used to play a decent budget affinity deck kinda like this. First off: I wouldn't play 4 copies of Welding Jar maybe one or two. second: take out the set of Paradise Mantle and put in four Springleaf Drum third: Steel Overseer is only $2 and it's really powerful. I would play it. Vault Skirgeis great with Cranial Plating and gains a ton of life. You should try it. With the banning of Mox Opal trying to play three drops with sixteen land looks difficult. I don't know though because my list is different. I would cut Taste for Mayhem. Nice deck and good luck!

CharonSquared on Mechanized Revolution (RW Affinity)

1 week ago

Please cut the Mishra's Baubles for Cranial Plating or something ... all the Baubles do is slow you down.

Spell_Slam on Suffering and Smiling: Grixis PDH

2 weeks ago

PDH needs a good grixis control deck.

I like a lot of the elements in your deck; mass discard, ETB creatures, board wipes and some of the most effective card draw and removal in Pauper.

Now, being in Blue and Black, I wonder about some of your card draw choices. You seem to play a lot of the rummaging spells like Cathartic Reunion when you could just be playing better Divination effects. Artificer's Epiphany seenms like a solid choice since you have a good number of artifacts. Compulsive Research is excellent for raw card draw. If you're going to rummage, you might as well be looting... for free. Frantic Search is great. I am not sure you run enough islands for it, but Gush is a busted card to have if you can pull it off. You could also run Hypothesizzle which does a lot of what you want to be doing. This deck in particular might be a good home for Krovikan Sorcerer. Also, no Mulldrifter? It seems perfect for this deck! I've been Probed a few more times then I'd like and I think your opponents would feel the same way. Tragic Lesson has a pretty soft drawback that you can actually take advantage of. Rhystic Study should be in your maindeck!

There's tons of good card draw out there, so it would be pretty easy to replace Cathartic Reunion, Wild Guess, Scarscale Ritual Tormenting Voice, Thrill of Possibility and Funeral Rites with basically strict upgrades.

So your main win condition is to kill the opponent with Commander damage on an empty board? You're scraping the bottom of the barrel for equipment to get there. Cranial Plating would be an excellent option for you. Copper Carapace is just as good as Vulshok Morninstar since you probably won't do much blocking and it can also be fetched with Trinket Mage. Giant's Skewer seems like it could be good with your first-striking commander. Neurok Stealthsuit is pretty much an auto-include in my deck as soon as I play Blue. Lastly Vorrac Battlehorns is great on a first-strike Creature and prevents you from being gang-blocked or chump-blocked, which is often equal to (or better than) a Bonesplitter effect.

DrakeTheDuelist on Enchanting Provocateur

3 weeks ago

If you really want to power up your faeries, take a look at anthem enchantments. Glorious Anthem is a good start, but there are many others (most of which have fairly useful side-quirks) like Radiant Destiny, Force of Virtue, Gravitational Shift, Favorable Winds and Etchings of the Chosen. Cathars' Crusade isn't technically an anthem, but it can be no less hilarious if you can set up a turn of enchantment / artifact storming. If you have the budget for it, and you aren't too opposed to artifacts, The Immortal Sun is a pricey piece, but it has a lot going on, especially if you don't run any of your own planeswalkers. A fair bit of warning on this anthem route: Skullclamp absolutely will not work the way you want if you play anything that offers toughness bonuses to your tokens unless you have some kind of sacrifice outlet. Some seem to consider that alone as reason to not anthem your faeries into the stratosphere, even if it's very possible on even tight budgets. Others tend to avoid anthem spamming because it makes you look far more dangerous than you're likely prepared to be, and impromptu archenemy is no fun to be on the wrong side of.

For space, I'd take out Ancestral Blade, as I've never been a big fan of that card when you can get far faster, cheaper, and overall more robust power-ups from anthem sources. (It's more of a knight tribal / white weenie card.) Also you may want to tone down your sizable nonland permanent hate. Oblivion Ring type effects are fine in the short term, ideally if you're ready to swing for lethal if not for that pesky Ghostly Prison in the way, but eventually you could get your enchantment answered and be right back where you started. For long-term answers, you're better off with Swords to Plowshares and Mortify (or arguably even better, Counterspell) effects that can straight up remove the problem for good, especially if exiling is involved. No sense tying someone's arm behind their back when you can just shoot them in the head.

If you wanted to win on commander damage, Cranial Plating is a fairly-priced budget piece that can play well into smashing face with Alela, especially if you can spare the mana to attach at instant speed. Shadowspear is a fairly expensive piece, as you would expect from something that not only confers trample (a bit hard to come by in Esper colors), but can strip hexproof and indestructible.

You don't have a lot of ramp sources. Ramp can be tricky to come by outside of Green, so you probably want a good 8-12 artifacts, probably closer to 12. You already have the big two (Arcane Signet and Sol Ring), Heraldic Banner, and most of the Talismans. You can also look into Signets (Azorius, Dimir, Orzhov), Diamonds (Sky, Marble, Charcoal) and Myrs (Silver, Gold, Leaden). Mind Stone and Worn Powerstone aren't terribly expensive for colorless artifacts, and Everflowing Chalice, Thran Dynamo and Gilded Lotus aren't much more expensive than that. And last but not least, particularly if you're leaning more heavily into enchantments, the newcomer Nyx Lotus from TBD is a fantastic choice if you plan to have a lot of colored non-token permanents on board. Alternatively, you could lean massively into artifacts given how much Alela likes them anyway, though it's worth pointing out that (1) artifacts have some of the widest ranges of cheap and commonly played answers and (2) the vast majority of them do zilch for your color devotion.

It might seem counter-intuitive to include board wipes in a deck designed to go wide with faeries. My take is that eventually you're going to be on the wrong end of a wipe at some point, so you want to have some wipes of your own ready to go just in case someone rebuilds quickly or you start getting jumped on by the rest of the table. This is especially important as Alela decks' bodies mostly come in the form of tokens that get wrecked outright by the ever-popular Cyclonic Rift. Speaking of which, it's worth pointing out that Cyclonic Rift has a cousin card in white, Winds of Abandon. Less good admittedly, but it's a lot more budget friendly, and even overloads for less mana. Speaking of budget, Time Wipe and Kaya's Wrath are other classic wallet-friendly wipes, while the flat out best one (after Cyc Rift) seems to be Toxic Deluge. Another reason to have wipes in Esper: they have some of the strongest ones in the game.

MorKSD on Resurrecting Affinity - take n. 9999999 UB

1 month ago

Thank you for your suggestions!

I was trying to build a sort of midrange deck with a lot of card-draw and the ability to win by equipping Cranial Plating at instant speed or by attacking and pumping with Master of Etherium and a big board of robots.

Given that without Opal it's very difficult to "win quickly" I decided not to include Pests and Skirges.

One of the biggest problems of Affinity is that it runs out of gas very quickly and, trying to go for the long run, the deck really needed a lot of card draw. In order to do so I decided to put Rebuke and Remand to buy some time while digging for useful cards.

I really like the idea to ditch Ensoul Artifact: the enchantment has proven not very useful (if not an outright useless 2 for 1).

multimedia on Alela Faerie Tribal Budget

1 month ago

Hey, nice start and budget version of Alela.

Bident of Thassa is a very good budget card with lots of flying tokens. Bident with attacking Faeries can get you far ahead in a game with card draw and gives you resiliency to come back from board wipes. Diabolic Tutor is a budget tutor that can tutor for Bident. Oona's Blackguard is a two drop Faerie who has a good combat damage ability since there's many other Rogue Faeries in your deck. Rootborn Defenses protects all your creatures from a board wipe that destroys and you get free Faerie token.

For voltron Cranial Plating is a reason to go more artifacts than enchantments with Alela. Plating can be a busted card for voltron because you can keep equipping it to your Faeries. Seat of the Synod, Vault of Whispers and Darksteel Citadel are budget artifact lands that count for Plating. Two drop mana rocks are good with Alela such as Orzhov Signet, Azorius Signet, Dimir Signet, Mind Stone, Prismatic Lens, etc. Two drop mana rocks help to cast Alela turn three and the faster you can get Alela onto the battlefield the better your Faerie army will be. Paradoxical Outcome and Rebuild are budget mass bounce effects for artifacts and Outcome includes enchantments as well as draws you a card for each permanent you bounce. Bounce artifacts and cast them again to create more tokens.

Exotic Orchard, Arcane Sanctum, Esper Panorama, Ash Barrens, Caves of Koilos, Opal Palace are budget lands to consider adding.

Good luck with your deck.

Simerix on Faerie Constellations

2 months ago

I would cut out one or more of the following as an emphasis: artifacts, enchantments, faeries, or tokens. Personally, I think artifacts is the weakest theme as of right now. Cards like Cranial Plating, Trading Post, Efficient Construction, and Witching Well don't do a whole lot (possibly Thopter Spy Network too). As a result of taking artifacts largely out, Emry, Luker of the Loch becomes pretty useless.

Your planeswalkers are interesting. They all play into the token theme very well.

Some cards I find are underwhelming: Daxos's Torment, Faerie Trickery, Whitewater Naiads, Harvestguard Alseids, Grim Guardian, Doomwake Giant, Agent of Erebos (I can see why you might play him), and Windfall.

There are some cards that are really good but could be easily cut such as Anointed Procession if you wanted to bring the price down.

enpc on Is Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon ...

4 months ago

Tymna the Weaver and Tana, the Bloodsower are also a strong aggro deck, specifically when run as blood pod (which is a Stax build).

Skittles isn't a bad commander, however he's more Voltron than aggro. And while he's a strong infect card, there aren't many others in mono black. So that means that while he only has to do 10 damage per player, if you do say 8 infect damage and then get starved out of being able to play him, it's much harder for the rest of your deck to follow up on the work done. Not to mention he is very telegraphing of your strategy.

But if you were going to play him, cheap equipment (like Cranial Plating or Runechanter's Pike ) would be the go.