Impulse

Instant

Look at the top four cards of your library. Put one of them into your hand and the rest on the bottom of your library in any order.

Legality

Format	Legality
1v1 Commander	Legal
Alchemy	Legal
Archenemy	Legal
Arena	Legal
Block Constructed	Legal
Brawl	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
Pre-release	Legal
Premodern	Legal
Quest Magic	Legal
Standard	Legal
Tiny Leaders	Legal
Vanguard	Legal
Vintage	Legal

Discussion (48)

Azoth2099 on Green/Black toxic/proliferate need recommendations

4 months ago

Balvron Thanks, man! Happy to help, really.

So the core of the {G}/{B} presence in the deck should be devoted to Dorks, Ramp and Tutors so that you can quickly get the deck engine up and running. Getting your commander on the field and geared up as quickly as possible is everything in this new context. Some cheaper options for Tutors are Diabolic Tutor, Profane Tutor, Mastermind's Acquisition and Increasing Ambition. I'd really recommend just biting the bullet and slotting in the more efficient ones like Demonic Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, Diabolic Intent & Wishclaw Talisman though. Cheaper card draw options like Phyrexian Arena & Dark Tutelage are also pretty solid. Necropotence, Black Market Connections & Dark Confidant are up there, but worth it.

The only thing you need {U} for is for card draw and interaction, with a few key Proliferate pieces that you'll be able to Tutor for when the time is right. Spells like Brainstorm, Ponder, Tolarian Winds, Impulse, Preordain & Serum Visions provide decent gas for cheap. Classics like Counterspell, Delay, Negate, & Dispel protect your game plan. Flux Channeler & Tekuthal, Inquiry Dominus are probably the only Proliferate pieces you'll need, but I'd Throw a Serum Snare in there too. Mystical Tutor, Rhystic Study & Mystic Remora are always nice to have as well.

The few things you'll need {W} for here is to Tutor up gear for your Commander with cards like Enlightened Tutor, Idyllic Tutor, Steelshaper's Gift & Open the Armory, and occasionally control the board with Swords to Plowshares or Path to Exile. I'd also recommend some Stax pieces like Silence, Grand Abolisher, Smothering Tithe, Esper Sentinel, Archivist of Oghma & Drannith Magistrate for good measure, & some more Commander protection with Mother of Runes & Giver of Runes.

Some good pieces of gear to retrieve slap on could be Swiftfoot Boots, Mask of Memory, Conqueror's Flail, Bone Sabres & Mask of the Schemer, for example.

Yesterday on Does stacking multiple convert triggers …

5 months ago

In a 4-player game, I control a Soundwave, Sonic Spy  ^Flip and three 2/2 Boar creature tokens. I attack each opponent with a Boar and they all connect.

Each Boar triggers Soundwave and each opponent has an Impulse in their respective graveyards.

Pretending for a moment that Soundwave, Superior Captain has no text, if two of the original triggers resolve, will Soundwave convert to its back face and then convert again to its front face? I assume not since there is a rule in place to prevent that from happening with classic transform cards, but I figured I'd double check first.

Now, assuming that it works the same as transform: if Sonic Spy triggers three times, and the first trigger converts it into Superior Captain, then the second trigger causes Superior Caption to convert back into Sonic Spy (because of Superior Captain's own triggered ability), will the third original trigger cause Sonic Spy to convert into Superior Captain yet again?

I don't know if the transforming rules prevent a ‘dangling’ transform trigger to fail if the permanent has transformed in the meantime at all, or only if it prevents the permanent from transforming if the permanent is sitting on its other face from when the trigger was initially put on the stack.

WhatInTheWhoNow on Cut-CO knives are ehxpensive!

6 months ago

wallisface,

I agree about Thoughtcast. It definitely seems though that digging will be important since the deck needs a decent variety of each kind of card, so I went with Impulse instead of Consider.

Tyrant-Thanatos on Your Cheap Obscure Overperformers?

8 months ago

Stave Off - This card just does everything. It's so easy to miss that this can target creatures other than just the ones you control, and it makes a world of difference. Prevent buffs, debuffs, swing the tide of combat, the shear number of options this affords me feels nuts. I have a very hard time saying no to this in any deck with white.

Supreme Will - Choose between Mana Leak or Impulse for just 1 more. When I'm holding up untapped Islands in blue, there are two options I want: Interaction, or Card Advantage. This gives me both in a single card.

Priest of the Blood Rite - Setting aside my love of the way the mechanics and flavor tie together in this card; this thing is really easy to abuse. Sac and reanimate, flicker or blink, you can lay down a lot of 5/5 flyers with this faster than people expect.

Unravel the Aether/Deglamer - Shuffling things back into my opponents deck is often worse for them than destroying. By now there are a fair handful of "better than Naturalize" cards, but these two are my favorites, and are often met with sighs from opponents that would rather have been Krosan Grip'd than this.

Dead_Blue_ on Magic: The Countering

8 months ago

Counterspell is now legal

Impulse or Consider over Think Twice

Tarmogoyf is like 10$ if you ever felt like adding some or perhaps Murktide Regent

Curstdragon on Colossal Conscription

8 months ago

Dead_Blue_ 100%. Impulse is the best I can think of. If you think of anything more appropriate I'd be grateful to hear it. Thank you for the input, it was very helpful.

otttism on

9 months ago

Love the deck idea, a few things I noticed.

Most decks I’ve seen that play 3 or more colors only run 1-2 “triome” lands. They are great, but having 4 of Xander's Lounge could slow you down late game when you don’t wanna draw a tapped land.

Heartless Act is great removal but having turn one Fatal Push is key against the low to the ground decks.

I have been trying to make Search for Azcanta  ^Flip work since I started playing pioneer and the consensus I’ve reached is the same. It feels too slow.

Strategic Planning is a good card for graveyard strategies so maybe look at Impulse to replace it if you are looking for card selection. It digs one card deeper and it can be done at instant speed.

I’ve seen Memory Deluge used in most UW control decks and it has worked out great for them when it comes to card selection.

Lastly, Collective Brutality may seem rough but its flexibility is what makes it a great sideboard card. Maybe reducing the number of them and placing it in the sideboard will help show their potential.

Hope this helps out! Love the deck idea and hope to see other control decks get some traction.

legendofa on Dominaria United Draft 1

11 months ago

Welcome to the club, DianeB!

My first question is, which format or formats are you most interested in? Since you say you're still new, I'll give a quick rundown of the biggest ones; feel free to skip over any you already know about. More general deckbuilding tips are at the end.

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To start close to where you are now, Standard format uses only cards from the last several sets. Right now, the Standard-legal sets are Dominaria United, Streets of New Capenna, Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, Innistrad: Crimson Vow, and Innistrad: Midnight Hunt. Every year, the oldest sets leave Standard and new sets are introduced, so the decks change regularly. Deck construction is minimum 60 cards, with no more than 4 copies of any card (other than the basic lands Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain, and Forest.) There's also a 15-card sideboard you can use to modify your deck for a better matchup between games in a best-of-3 match. Entry costs for a tournament-level Standard deck are usually a few hundred dollars.

Commander, also known as EDH, is possibly the most popular official format right now, so it's easy to find a game. In Commander, the deck is exactly 100 cards. One of those cards is a Legendary Creature that's the "commander" of the deck, and has several special rules associated with it. You can't include any cards with a mana symbol that doesn't appear in the commander's mana cost or text box. For example, if you choose Tori D'Avenant, Fury Rider as your commander, you can't use any cards with {U}, {B}, or {G} symbols. You also can't use more than one copy of any card other than basic lands; they all need to have different names. Commander has a lot of freedom in deckbuilding, can be done on any budget, and is very open to customizing and self-expression. It's typically a multiplayer format, played in four-person matches, but most people tend to be willing to go one-on-one as well.

I'm going to group Pioneer, Modern, Legacy, and Vintage together, as they're a little harder to get into. They use the same 60-card minimum, 4-copy maximum, 15-card sideboard deckbuilding rules as Standard, but they all have much larger card pools than Standard. These formats are "eternal," which means that they don't gain and lose sets like Standard. Pioneer allows every set released since Return to Ravnica (in 2012), Modern has every set from 8th Edition forward (released in 2003), and Legacy and Vintage both allow almost every card in the game. Tournament-level deck costs range from several hundred dollars in Pioneer to tens of thousands of dollars on Vintage.

Finally, there's Casual. Play with what you have, and have fun doing it. No tournaments, no big-money decks, just a group of players at a table trying to outmatch each other.

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On to the general deckbuilding tips. First, try to keep your deck as consistent as possible. This is done by sticking to the minimum number of cards allowed in your deck, usually 60, and including as many copies of your key cards as you can. As an example, if you're building a {U}{R} deck with a focus on instants and sorceries, you might want to include four copies each of Haughty Djinn, Fires of Victory, and Impulse. This will give you the best chance to draw the cards you need.

Second is the idea of the "mana curve," which you can see as a bar graph on this page. There's a lot of math that goes into the mana curve, but the general idea is to maximize your ability to play appropriate cards at every point in the game. Very fast, aggressive decks have a very tight mana curve, and might not include any cards that cost more than two mana. More defensive decks that want to control a longer game usually go higher. Broadly speaking, decks with a tighter mana curve are strongest in the early game and try to win quickly, while decks with a wider mana curve try to prevent fast wins and play a longer game.

Related to the above is land count and balancing. Many new players don't include enough lands, thinking that they aren't really interesting and don't do the "fun stuff" of the deck. This is kind of like leaving dead batteries in a flashlight because it's not the "useful" part. Lands and mana are what make the deck go, and skimping on them results in an unreliable deck, where you can't do the "fun" stuff because you can't pay for it. In this deck, 25 lands seems about right. The faster, tight-mana-curve decks can get away with fewer lands. Most decks want around 40% to be mana sources like lands.

There are some more points, especially about choosing color and strategy, but this response has gone on long enough. This forum is usually pretty welcoming of questions and is very knowledgeable, so please ask. And above all, have fun!