Sacred Guide
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Legality

Format Legality
1v1 Commander Legal
Archenemy Legal
Canadian Highlander Legal
Casual Legal
Commander / EDH Legal
Commander: Rule 0 Legal
Custom Legal
Duel Commander Legal
Highlander Legal
Legacy Legal
Leviathan Legal
Limited Legal
Oathbreaker Legal
Planechase Legal
Premodern Legal
Quest Magic Legal
Tiny Leaders Legal
Vanguard Legal
Vintage Legal

Sacred Guide

Creature — Human Cleric

(1)(White), Sacrifice Sacred Guide: Reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal a white card. Put that card into your hand and remove all other cards revealed this way from the game.

king-saproling on Lul Forests

2 years ago

Thoughts on these? Abundant Harvest , Enlightened Tutor , Sterling Grove , Plea for Guidance , Abundance , Genesis Storm , Sacred Guide , Temple Garden

dingusdingo on Petition To Ban Flash Here

4 years ago

dbpunk

"Tbh I dont play cedh much"

Yeah dog we know. If you did, you'd be onboard with one of these cards getting banned

"However, I also think that banning a card just because it combos well with another card or two isnt really good enough reason for a banning"

There are plenty of 2 card combos that directly lead to winning that nobody is requesting a ban on. The specific problem with Flash Hulk is that it is easy to assemble, extremely cheap to use, and hard to interact with outside of counterspells or very specific stax pieces like Cursed Totem or Linvala, Keeper of Silence. The flash hulk player can sandbag their combo until getting either a counterspell or a Chain of Vapor effect to handle counterspells/stax pieces. The combo sits neatly in hand until it fires, meaning you don't get the chance to remove a piece to stop it from executing correctly. After the Hulk trigger resolves, the Flash Hulk player selects a handful of creatures that specifically allow them to hold priority until all their needed triggers to win are stacked, meaning you must attack abilities on the stack in order to stop the combo at this point. This combo can fire entirely at instant speed, meaning you can wait until a counter-war breaks out on the stack to slip your own combo on top, or simply try to win in response to someone else winning. Its a very powerful combo and currently nothing is close to it in consistency or difficulty to handle for the competitive scene.

Combos are fine. Combos that are extremely hard to interact with outside of playing blue and always holding a counterspell are not fine. Compare to a combo like Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker + Village Bell-Ringer. You can remove one of the two pieces in response to the other being cast, that alone means every color can handle the combo. You can play any number of stop combat effects like Fog. You can even get blowouts with a card like Rakdos Charm. Any combat inhibitors like Solitary Confinement or Ghostly Prison also cause grief for this combo. Now compare to Flash Hulk. You need blue and you need counterspells or Stifle. Really narrows down deckbuilding choices about how to handle the combo.

Raging_Squiggle Iona, Shield of Emeria is banned because Painter's Servant was unbanned, not due to griefing casuals. It also did see play in competitive decks prior to its banning, especially in midrange decks that had both white and black, and it was a common reanimation target because it completely hoses out blue players or can lock a player if they're on a mono color combo like Godo or Sidisi. Swinging for 7 is non-trivial, even in combo heavy cEDH. If the board is locked or heavily slowed, especially if you have other hatebears, bleeding out the fastest combo deck or the Ad Nauseam/Necropotence player wins games.

Scytec While its arguable that Thassa's Oracle pushed Hulk past the tipping point, Hulk was already the deck to beat in cEDH. Just the fact there were 3 different hulk lists with the same commander for doing literally the exact same thing speaks to how stale the meta became due to Hulk's unbanning. Whoopdeedoo so the hulk mechanism is Sacred Guide instead of Nomads + Cephalid, really revolutionary design. All that this printing has done is show that any new creature printed with an alternate wincon or ability to mill the library is exacerbated by the existing problem of Flash Hulk. The deck was boring to play against or pilot before Oracle, and it is still boring afterwards. Once again, the problem is Hulk's ability to pull jank ass 4 card combos from your deck from a single card. Flash speeds it up and handles the dying aspect of the Hulk trigger, but the problem is 100% totally Protean Hulk's 6 CMC of tutoring power off a single card.

Flash Hulk definitely isn't 40% of the meta, but it is an ever-present threat and restricts deckbuilding because you have to account for that combo. I highly doubt the RC is waiting because they are collecting data, they have made it very well known how they ban cards and how they prioritize casual players over competitive players. Sheldon wasn't even aware of Dramatic Scepter combo until about 2 years ago, and the RC is almost entirely casual players with a chip on their shoulder about efficiency in their format. Them pushing rule 0 so heavily makes it even more absurd they don't ban from the top-down like literally every other single format. If a casual playgroup didn't like a ban, they could ignore it, meanwhile anyone who plays in tournaments or at their LGS is 100% bound to the RC's whimsical nonsensical bans.

dingusdingo on Fish, Kess, and Consultation [Competitive]

4 years ago

With the recent addition of everybody's/nobody's favorite fish Thassa's Oracle, the competitive scene has been in a tizzy trying to figure out how to adapt and react. Most brewers have been fixated on adapting two lists to fish, specifically TnT Flash Hulk and Najeela Consultation Hulk, which are arguably tier 0 deck builds and are head and shoulders ahead of other tier 1 competitive decks because of the printing of Oracle. I think most people have missed a third well known commander who benefits massively from the printing.

Kess, Dissident Mage is very promising in this new meta, and I would like to present the argument that Kess is a tier 0 build in par with TnT Fish Hulk and Layered Najeela.

For those unaware of how the combo works, here we go.

DO NOTE: We must have no duplicates of basic lands in our mana base to use Tainted Pact. While competitive pact players may know this, it is worth restating for the purposes of education and discussion in the thread.

If we are holding Oracle + Pact in hand, we don't need Kess to reuse. We can simply Oracle, then in response to ETB use the pact.

This combo has gained a lot of resiliency over previous Laboratory Maniac or Jace, Wielder of Mysteries lines.

  • Thassa's Oracle is cheaper to cast by .
  • We do not need to run a draw spell with Oracle in order to win, while we do with Labman. This most likely saves us another mana, and it definitely saves us being required to hold another card to cantrip to win.
  • The combo is safer to resolve if we face interaction. We resolve Oracle first, the trigger goes on the stack. A trigger is much harder to counter than a spell. Once the trigger is stacked, anything that happens to Oracle we don't really care about, since we can win with 0 devotion assuming 0 cards in library. Previously, a Laboratory Maniac could be removed in response to whatever draw would cause you to win, meaning you would lose instead.
  • Fish Consultation allows you to attempt another win if stopped. Lets say we are on Labman + Pact. If our Tainted Pact resolves, but our labman is countered, we are most likely going to lose. While using Oracle + Pact, if our Pact is countered, we still have our library and can attempt another win. Similarly, because we resolve the Oracle first to get the ETB trigger stacked, we aren't in danger of Oracle getting countered and then us using Pact and being left with no library.
  • If you have Kess in play, you can execute the entire combo for 4 mana. If you already have both pieces, you can execute the entire combo for 3 mana and ignore graveyard hate.

So how is this any different than Fish Hulk? Simple. Kess, Dissident Mage can turn a single tutor into a winning line. The ability to use Demonic Consultation or Tainted Pact allows us to assemble and execute the entire combo from a single tutor, as the component that exiles for us also tutors the second card needed for the combo. This means that Kess + Forbidden Tutor is a winning line, similar to how Najeela has a few different one card combos with the commander for winning. Before the Oracle printing, a Kess deck would also have to stock up on cheap "draw a card" spells to supplement the Consultation strategy. Now that need is gone, and the overall strategy can be executed much faster due to the lower mana cost requirements and also card requirements. This means that you have more ability to simply race other decks if that is the best gameplan. The value nature of Kess allows you to go longer in grindier games or match ups. Most decks are pigeonholed into all-in combo or grindier control, but the speed and resilience of the combo paired with being able to reuse our GY really gives Kess the best of both worlds.

I would also argue that new printings have added resilience and more consistency to the build as well. Spellseeker is another way to find the 1 card wincon. Dark Petition is certainly more fringe but could very well see play, especially in lists that skew Ad Nauseam for Bonus Round. Scheming Symmetry is another new topdeck tutor, and the symmetry can be broken on it by cantripping, then immediately starting the winning line. The deck will continue to benefit from any new usable tutors, removal, or card draw that is printed, and these new prints won't invalidate lines or cause grief when making changes for them.

The final piece of the puzzle is the large amount of flex slots in a Kess deck. If you want an additional combo, you can slot it pretty easy and there are good choices. If you want more hate pieces because you see Fish Hulk every pod, you can grab things like Cursed Totem very easily. Lots of green dorks or creature heavy boards you can get Pyroclasm and friends. Kess is blue, and already slots a good amount of counterspells and interaction. On top of protecting the combo, you can also choose to play a more midrange game and stop win attempts early, and grind value before comboing out later. Alternatively, you can just jam the combo if you have the tutors and mana to make it work. While Flash is easier to cast, Flash Hulk does require two pieces in hand to get the combo rolling, making it easier to see coming and harder to assemble.

Of course, Fish has other applications. Hermit Druid spiked in price for a reason, as did Sacred Guide. A card like Hermit Druid also requires haste enablers to make it go, which lowers your overall card quality and puts the pilot into awkward binds of either jamming the Druid and passing a rotation, or holding Druid in hand and trying to assemble Greaves + Druid or Banditland + Druid. Sacred Guide similarly hurts deckbuilding, mostly by requiring that a color in the identity be completely ignored for the sake of the combo. They are also basically worthless outside of the combo. Tainted Pact is an enabler and a tutor at instant speed, as is Demonic Consultation. You can always use them to fetch Pact of Negation or Force of Will in a pinch, should you have no other options to stop an opponent from winning. While it is unlikely you are going to win after exiling 0-99 cards in order to find whatever you name, you are being improved from "losing" to "most likely losing". The most important part of it is though that the forbidden tutors are actually tutoring while exiling, serving a dual purpose in the deck and improving slot efficiency. This even has a leg up over other Consultation builds, where the forbidden tutors are seen mostly as dead-draws for A + B for winning.

TL;DR Consultation Kess is also arguably a tier 0 build and was a big winner from the Fish printing.

landcaster on Unconventional Science

8 years ago

Thank you, an I agree highschool doesn't like people playing magic. Essentially what it is is a race to 5-6 mana depending on the cards in your hand, then you combo off on that turn hopefully armed with enough counter magic to protect the maniac. Paradigm Shift is another way to exile your library, once this is done you cast lab maniac and draw a card, same old song and dance. Divining Witch and Sacred Guide are also different ways to achieve the same effect. Also Sacred guide has to be the only white card in the deck because of its ability to dig for another white spell. I'm also not feeling Gloom Surgeon, but it is very useful at creating a dilemma for agro decks. In short, the thought process when playing the deck is: how do I make it so my library isn't there... then you win the game

kengiczar on Enemy-Colored Commands

8 years ago

@ DemonDragonJ - Understandable about not having Aurelia's Command resemble Boros Charm too much. Still I think the 1st and 4th abilities as below are perfect. This one is pretty tricky but here's some info to help you decide. (I promise there aren't wall of texts hiding under the spoilers!)

Abilities: Show

Abilities Show


Most Unique effects Show


Aurelia's Command, All Unique abilities Show


Aurelia's Command, 2 Unique + 1 Shared + 1 Combined Show


Aurelia's Command, 2 Unique + 2 Shared Show

You do have the opportunity here to sort of combine spells like Act on Impulse or Outpost Siege with Endless Horizons. If not for this Command keep it in mind for your future endeavors.