Lotus Petal

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Legality

Format Legality
1v1 Commander Legal
Archenemy Legal
Arena Legal
Big Apple Highlander Legal
Block Constructed Legal
Canadian Highlander Legal
Casual Legal
Commander / EDH Legal
Commander: Rule 0 Legal
Custom Legal
Freeform Legal
Gladiator Legal
Highlander Legal
Historic Legal
Historic Brawl Legal
Legacy Legal
Leviathan Legal
Limited Legal
Oathbreaker Legal
Pauper Legal
Pauper Duel Commander Legal
Pauper EDH Legal
Planar Constructed Legal
Planechase Legal
PreDH Legal
Premodern Legal
Quest Magic Legal
Tiny Leaders Legal
Vanguard Legal
Vintage Legal

Lotus Petal

Artifact

, Sacrifice this: Add one mana of any colour.

SaberTech on Dissident Storm

2 weeks ago

Hi. I saw your post asking for some feedback. I have a few suggestions I could offer but I was hoping to start with a question first.

Do you want this to specifically be an optimized storm deck, or an optimized Kess deck for bracket 4?

I think that the list is currently stuck trying to decide what it wants to be. You have a bunch of potential Storm finishers in the deck but you don't have much in the way of mana generation engines and wheel effects to refill your hand and keep the spellcasting train going. Cost reducing effects are less useful to storm than being able to generate a bunch of colored mana is.

The deck's strongest win condition is the Brain Freeze + Underworld Breach + Lotus Petal combo that lets you mill your deck and then cast Thassa's Oracle from the graveyard for the win, but you are missing Demonic Consultation to also pair with the Oracle and you're lacking a bunch of tutors to help you find your combo pieces quickly. If you go in on focusing on the combo aspect of the deck, then you won't really need the Storm stuff to help you win. You can just run a bunch of control cards and tutors.

So, which direction would you be happiest to see the deck go?

legendofa on Does a format with just …

1 month ago

Close to optimized deck, same combo as the last one. Buried In Silver II

Also, do online-only sets count? In particular, Lotus Petal is the only uncommon print.

DreadKhan on Meren Sacrifice Shenanigans

2 months ago

I see that you are taking a pretty different angle than I did here, but there might be a few cards that I can suggest from my own Meren and the Golgari Queens. Would Savra, Queen of the Golgari make sense in your list? It's a slightly different Grave Pact, but at 4 mana and easy to cast she can come out earlier, the life gain is a lot less important other than offsetting the payment for the effect.

I think they're about as fun as an untreatable toothache, but Grave Pact effects in my experience like you to run several of the Merciless Executioner type creatures that exist, Accursed Marauder is a great start, but I think Plaguecrafter and Demon's Disciple might fit. I don't know exactly how many you'd 'want', but I'd run 3-5 creatures that exist almost purely to make everyone sacrifice a creature. IMHO if you only run one or the other the Executioners are probably the better include since you can get them out sooner, they stand alone (Grave Pact does nothing if you don't have a creature), and you can recur them with your Commander, but both are INCREDIBLY nasty when combined. In the decks I have that use edicts you really want to reach 'critical mass', so that you both have access to an Edict when it's necessary, but also have enough to continuously pare back the opponent's board.

This is a personal preference more than anything, but when I play Meren my fondest hope is usually to have a creature that ramps me that also kills itself; Sakura Tribe Elder is the 'gold standard' of the effect, but I think you could benefit from Diligent Farmhand and Dawntreader Elk, and maybe Yavimaya Granger. I even run Fertilid and Burnished Hart, but I don't think I'd recommend them to anyone else at this point! Anyways, the idea is you juggle one of these to both gain XP for Meren while ramping yourself, and when you draw something better to reanimate just reanimate that. The ramp is usually very useful to cast either Protean Hulk or Razaketh.

Speaking of Razaketh, I found it VERY useful to have mass untap effect to go with Life/Death, once Life/Death makes all your lands into weenies you can untap them with something like Vitalize or Benefactor's Draught. I also threw in a Songs of the Damned and Dark Ritual to help generate mana when I'm short. Lotus Petal is also a very good Razaketh card if you don't want to spring for Lion's Eye Diamond.

Just a little tip I stumbled upon, most Meren decks have very high Black devotion, but they rely heavily on early Green ramp; I really wanted to shave lands for creatures in my list, but since I can find Swamps with Forests via ramp, I ended up running WAY less Black sources than Green. I used 7 Basic Swamps and 2 Swamp/Forest duals, and I find I have very few fixing issues, even with a very low land count, since I almost never need more than 2 lands early on, and I found the deck absolutely hated drawing into them (Meren is a deck where I feel like you're supposed to run all the creature ramp you can, because Meren cares so much about Creatures and so little about non-creature spells, lands are dead draws).

I guess that brings me to the last point, I feel like you should really try to get more creatures into this list; your Commander does absolutely nothing if you don't have creatures in the graveyard. I have 57 in the 99 atm, I feel like having less than 40 in a Meren deck is too few. The nice thing about creatures is that Golgari has a LOT of creature synergies, I love using Lurking Predators or Heartwood Storyteller.

If you want more specific help feel free to ask!

legendofa on “A White Pebble”

4 months ago

To cut the cost, my first thought is to just add more Lotus Petals. Move it from Vintage to Legacy, and change the Moxen and Lotus to more Petals and maybe Birds of Paradise. The other big outlier is the Savannah, and my switch there would be Razorverge Thicket.

Further cost cutting would be the tutors. Eladamri's Call is probably okay, and Altar of Bone can step in for one of the more expensive options.

After that, it gets tough, and the core of the deck would start changing. Anyway, that's where I would look if you want to make this more accessible.

Icbrgr on Budget Cycle Storm

5 months ago

Whenever I see Fluctuator it makes me happy; It is my Premodern deck and I ran Gavi, Nest Warden in EDH!

That being said I highly suggest that cards without cycling get reduced to 4 at the most; including basic lands and payoff cards like Songs of the Damned get reduced to just 1 copy because as you cycle with Fluctuator you'll end up drawing cards that don't cycle (like your other copies of fluctuator) and end up fizzling out. Some budget sauce is a single copy of Dromar's Cavern or any land of that cycle (pun indented) is very helpful and can feel like Lotus Petal in this deck.... and Drain Life is another card to consider at a single copy!

P.S. watch out for the Stabilizer Mafia!

shadowjules on Budget Cycle Storm

5 months ago

Hey QuantumGeckoGuy! Very cool deck man, I tinkered with something like this for a while as well.

I tinkered with a similar concept for ages. Instead of looking to scale with Drannith Stinger and Marauding Mako, mine had a combo win with Lotleth Giant, and a secondary beatdown plan with Hollow One and Chitin Gravestalker. The deck DESPERATELY needs to cut down as much as humanly possible on any card without cycling. I think running Dark Ritual is a mistake, as you can get similar results with 4 copies of Lotus Petal - when churning through your deck, you can combo off so much earlier with you effectively know you can consistently find free bursts of 1 mana to cast Songs of the Damned. The difference between your bursts of mana costing (1) and costing (0) is huge. Running Lotus Petal is extra good when accompanied by a suite of (1) cost cyclers. Drannith Stinger is a good start, but I would run every creature with a (1) mana cycling ability ever printed - it just adds a crazy amount of consistency. I've found that 38 to 40 creatures with cycling in the deck is ideal for a 1 turn combo kill.

Finding lands is extra easy with cards like Troll of Khazad-dum and Oliphaunt. With the amount of cards that cycling lets you see, you really don't want to mulligan. These landcycling cards are huge because they often allow you a turn 1 tutor of a land in the early game (Troll of Khazad-dum gets you Fetid Pools and Oliphaunt gets you Canyon Slough). You can tutor for a land turn one either with an untapped Ash Barrens or the strict upgrade in Capital City that also filters your mana, or again with a turn 1 Lotus Petal. Later in the game, the land cyclers are never dead draws, because they tutor for a dual land, that also ends up cycling away, letting you see more cards and remove more lands from your deck as you combo off.

Crucially for the combo win, Lotleth Giant only cares about creatures in your graveyard, so do keep that in mind when comboing off. I tend to split my graveyard into two piles - 1 with creatures and 1 with noncreature spells (cycled lands, lotus petals, and so on). The combo turn needs to resolve a Songs of the Damned to cast Lotleth Giant usually, but thats not always super hard. A sideboard tech of Miscalculation really helps protect this here. Also 2 Shadow of the Grave is usually enough to stop your deck from running out of steam, especially since you run out of steam after seeing like around 30-40 cards in your deck. Again, Lotus Petal is so useful here.

Finally, I've found that you CAN run 3 fluctuators and not 4 if you're able to have a split of cycling cards with a low enough curve. This deck really wants to minimize the turns it spends not spending mana, so again, Ash Barrens and Capital City not entering tapped is really important, same for your Lotus Petal. These untapped mana sources, along with 1 mana landcyclers and 1 mana cycling creatures gets this deck to be much more consistent and much faster.

Built like this, the Hollow Ones / Chitin Gravestalker Beatdown plan is more of a trick to trip up your opponent rather than a primary win condition. When your opponent plans to counter your big combo turn, dumping 2 4/4s and a 5/4 onto the battlefield really early can be backbreaking. THese are the matchups where something like Drannith Stinger is just a lot less useful as a pinger, and I would think of Marauding Mako and Drannith Stinger as plank cards with cycling rather than win conditions.

This deck has trouble against certain kinds of graveyard hate. It never targets anything in the graveyard, and never looks to play things directly out of your graveyard, so cards like Grafdigger's Cage and Soulless Jailer don't do anything. But cards that exile our whole graveyard or stop cards from getting to the graveyard (Rest in Piece / Leyline of the Void / Soul-Guide Lantern) make the Lolteth gameplan obsolete. Sideboarding in Ominous Seas still turns out cycling card draw into massive beaters, and this can still let us combo into two or three 8/8s to threaten a short clock.

The deck has some potential and honestly is a ton of fun to tinker with. I've been iterating on it for ages myself. Here's my list if you're at all curious (Ignore the silly name and out-of-date descriptions, its a little messy and I started it 5 years ago in high school). Deck: deck-large:cycling-coombo-deck

SaberTech on Mad World Rising

6 months ago

Thanks for the questions greyninja!

Grazilaxx is a remnant from an older, pre-banning of Dockside cEDH build for the deck. At that time in cEDH people were running Animar as more of a midrange deck because it wasn't fast enough for a turbo build to work well in the meta. I've kept it now that I run the deck as more of a Bracket 4 build and have to face off against more board wipes in the casual meta. It's mostly in the deck as another way of drawing cards to help recover but if an opponent would rather have me bounce back my creatures so that I can put more counters on Animar and get more ETB effects instead of drawing a card, then who am I to argue?

I've generally been pretty happy with Elvish Spirit Guide and Simian Spirit Guide. Like you pointed out, they help to increase the chances of a turn 2 Animar. There have also been times where I was digging through my deck with the help of something like Glimpse of Nature but have completely tapped out to do it. In those cases, having cards like the Guides, Lotus Petal, and Chrome Mox help to give free coloured mana that I might need to help close out the game. In cEDH the guides are a little more useful because they can pay for cards like Red Elemental Blast and Veil of Summer on their own but even in this build they can help to pay for a Wild Cantor or a Talisman so that I have blue mana up for counters to protect Walking Ballista. At 3 mana, the Guides can also be Neoformed into Ancestral Statue.

The 27 lands may not seem like a lot but some of the cEDH builds have even less. Animar doesn't really need many lands to go off considering the various cheap mana dorks and other ramp the deck provides. It is a bit tricky to go that low in lands and can require some aggressive mulligans to get a decent starting hand. While playing though, I've sometimes found that even just 27 lands can result in some mana flooding when I would really rather be drawing spells. The land count is something that you just have to experiment with for your own build to see where that sweet spot is for your own play style.

As for Utopia Sprawl, there are times where it has been a dead draw but it's not that often. Between the Dual Lands, Shock Lands, and Fetch lands in the deck it's not normally that difficult to get access to a land that counts as a forest on turn 1. Using Utopia Sprawl and Wild Growth as ramp synergizes well with Arbor Elf and can also net extra mana with the help of cards like Snap, Deceiver Exarch, and Peregrine Drake.

Kjacobson6800 on Kaalia, Queen of the Vast

6 months ago

Cool Build. I have a pretty mean Kaalia myself but its rather competitive. Yours looks fun to play I just tested it a few times. Love the Sneak Attack as a backup. Feel free to take a look at mine if you'd like. My only real suggestions after seeing your maybe list is to tune the creatures a bit more and sell that Alpha/Beta D-Tutor ... buy a Chrome Mox. Would leave you with a few $$ to really deck this thing out. Id also be running all 3 Talismans. A revised Demonic tutor is Rather affordable. I run Gamble Demonic Tutor, Enlightened Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, Grim Tutor, And Imperial Seal. More tutors and maybe Steelshaper's Gift to get the Greaves out fast. Diabolic Tutor works just fine to go get an Avacyn or something and get the whole table salty Lotus Petal is clutch too and chronically slept on IMO, especially when it comes to Kaalia... Im pretty sure Jeweled Lotus is banned in EDH now so maybe let that one go too. Necropotence is stupid good in a Kaalia deck, especially if you can get a Reliquary Tower out. As soon as i focused more on tutors, mana rocks, and a few board-wipes Wrath of God Day of Judgment Damn She started going off quick and dirty.Sensei's Divining Top is super helpful too. I wouldn't sleep on Dark Ritual if you're short a Jeska's Will. I slip a Dark Rit in mine from time to time depending on where I'm playing. I also run Armageddon and Catastrophe. Sometimes Winter Orb ...locks everyone down once I have Her out. I Cant tell you how many times Steel Hellkite has won the game for me. Blows up all dorks and keeps opponents rocks at bay. Plus you can grab him with Enlightened tutor. Dragon Mage could work in this to help load up youre Kaalia drops without needing a Wheel of Fortune Solid build!! Ive been tuning mine for years now.

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