Combos Browse all Suggest
Legality
| Format | Legality |
| Archenemy | Legal |
| Casual | Legal |
| Commander: Rule 0 | Legal |
| Custom | Legal |
| Duel Commander | Legal |
| Highlander | Legal |
| Leviathan | Legal |
| Limited | Legal |
| Oathbreaker | Legal |
| Planechase | Legal |
| Premodern | Legal |
| Quest Magic | Legal |
| Vanguard | Legal |
Tempest Efreet
Creature — Efreet
Remove Tempest Efreet from your deck before playing if you're not playing for ante.
Tap, Sacrifice Tempest Efreet: Target opponent may pay 10 life. If that player doesn't, he or she reveals a card at random from his or her hand. Exchange ownership of the revealed card and Tempest Efreet. Put the revealed card into your hand and Tempest Efreet from anywhere into that player's graveyard.
Caerwyn on Cube idea, good or bad? …
11 months ago
Only from analysis, but I feel fairly confident in that analysis. Consider:
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The average ante card is likely to hit a land 42.5% of the time (17/40 - a fairly standard land base in Limited). Of those, you’re very likely to hit a basic land - which you could have gotten out of the basic box anyway.
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Even in a colourless heavy meta, your odds of hitting a colourless are going to be pretty low. The odds you hit a colourless card which also improves your strategy or also debilitates your opponent’s deck are pretty low (and the odds of debilitating your opponents deck being worthwhile for you - meaning you hit the card in game one or two - are even lower).
The odds just are not on the side of Ante being fun, and that’s before we look at the cards themselves:
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Amulet of Quoz either turns the game into a literal coin flip or is just exiling a single card from the top of an opponent’s library. Either it is a troll card if it resolves which can cause issues with folks twiddling their thumbs waiting for rounds to end or it is a mediocre mill card someone spent 6 mana for.
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Bronze Tablet - maybe playable. Maybe. It is a ten mana theft piece that allows your opponents to take something back from you. That means for it to be playable, you must be in the position where you can play a 6-mana artifact, and activate it (either that turn or by surviving a turn), have something on your opponent’s side worth taking, have nothing on your side better than what you would take, and be in a position where your opponent won’t just take back what you stole. There’s a lot of things that must go right to make the card playable.
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Contract from Below - Arguably the most powerful card ever printed in the entire game, this has no place in your cube. It’s just too good, especially in 40 card decks. Every time it is played, it is likely to be the game decider all by itself.
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Darkpact - interacts badly with the math above. Odds are nothing will be worth claiming from ante, making this a three mana card just sitting about doing nothing in your hand.
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Demonic Attorney - Really bad card with the above math. You’re spending 3 mana to very likely get something completely useless to you into ante.
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Jeweled Bird - One mana for something that can only recover a card you likely can afford to lose. It would feel great if you got unlucky with what you ante, but otherwise it is almost always going to be a dead card.
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Rebirth - Awful, awful card for limited. This stretches out games and can interfere with the timing of rounds.
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Tempest Efreet - Again, the math is bad for this card, particularly since you’re going into an unknown zone and your opponent goes into the choice with perfect knowledge of their risk.
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Timmerian Fiends - In an artifacts matters cube where there is heavy artifact recursion, this might be playable. Still, it requires a very specific set of circumstances for someone to draft into and make it worthwhile.
I should probably add the caveat that some players might find it fun, even if the math makes it very, very clear that the Ante cards are all traps (excepting Contract, which, again, is just too darn good).
Caerwyn on None
4 years ago
I am on my phone, and did not feel like formatting a card response via mobile, so I’ll respond to your question here.
The “remove if not playing for ante” cards fall into two categories. The first involves the ante zone, which is as you described - the winner keeps all the cards in that zone. The second is ownership changing effects - there are two cards, Tempest Efreet and Timmerian Fiends that allow you to become the owner of another’s card. Ante was removed from the game pretty quickly as it runs afoul of many gambling laws - we only ever had the Ante Nine printed.
Notably, the single most powerful card draw spell, by an order of magnitude, ever printed is an ante card - Contract from Below .
Wanderlust814 on
Mocking Jay (Tribute) ....is painless
4 years ago
Was able to field test this deck last Thursday May 23rd 2019. It was as much fun to play as I had hoped. The group I played it against has made a few suggestions. Vexing Devil and Risk Factor . I would like Vexing Devil more if it had flying, or another activated ability. I think I will try it just to add some pressure. Risk Factor, I like it because it gives me another Browbeat but with Flashback (Discard and pay).
I believe I will pull Tempest Efreet as it just doesn't seem like I ever use it, and maybe 1 or 2 Lava Blister s, to see if I can make more use of the Dwarven Driller s. Not as flashy as the blister, but once they hit the field look out.
Caerwyn on How does this Act of …
5 years ago
Dimir-Acolyte - As this has been open for a couple days, I've marked Boza's post as the accepted answer to this thread. In the future, if you could please hit the "Mark as Answer" button that shows up on responses once you're question has been resolved, that would be appreciated. It helps keep the Rules Q&A section organised and serves as allows future users who stumble across the same question to easily locate the answer.
"Ownership refers to who's card that deck came from."
This is a good general way to understand ownership, but is not 100% accurate--there exist two exceptions:
Ownership also includes cards that are brought in from outside of the game--such as with Glittering Wish. This seems pretty obvious, but, technically, these cards do not have a "deck they came from" so do not neatly fit in your definition.
There also exist four cards that allow ownership to change, regardless of whose deck the card started in--Bronze Tablet, Darkpact. Tempest Efreet, and Timmerian Fiends. Granted, all of these cards are banned in every format, not welcome at kitchen table, and possibly in violation of local gambling laws, but they're still worth mentioning as a historical curiosity.
Neotrup on Does Desecrated Tomb trigger when …
5 years ago
Gisa and Geralf is a better example of moving to the stack, as Snapcaster Mage has a tough time moving creature cards there. Not an example of ante, but for another zone Tempest Efreet can trigger Desecrated Tomb by moving itself from your graveyard into your opponent's graveyard.
Rhadamanthus on When taking control of other …
6 years ago
Yes, you can gain control of those creatures with Homeward Path.
A player "owns" all cards that started the game in their deck, command zone, and sideboard, and all tokens that were first created under their control. Effects that put a card from the graveyard/library/etc. onto the battlefield under a different player's control don't change the ownership of a card. The only way to change ownership of a card during a game is by using a small handful of weird old cards that are only allowed if you started the game with the "Ante" rules option (Tempest Efreet, Jeweled Bird, etc.), which hasn't been a part of the official Magic rules for a very long time.
c0dy821 on
A Game of 21
6 years ago
Where do I even start?
Your first mistake: You didn't run any Blue. Every Magic Player knows Blue and Black are the superior colors, which means you had a 2 outta 5 chance on picking either of them, but you did even worse, because you chose two colors, and neither of them are Black or Blue. You went from a 40% chance the first pick, to a 50% chance the second pick, and you still messed up. Absolute trash. Now we are working in sweatshop conditions and you chose to take the low road on these jank colors, so let's see if we can fix this subpar deck.
The Commander
Let's see what you got here, Tajic, Blade of the Legion... In a game of magical creatures and dragons... DRAGONS. You chose a human? To lead 99 other cards into victory? How has this made it passed the threshold of your brain? Are there any checks or balances in place? How did this leave the drawing board? And the guy is a 2/2! A 2/2 FOR FOUR MANA?! Absolute Trash. You know how much utility is usually in a Commander deck? 99 cards worth of utility. This guys indestrubability is that of a Steam Roller to an Aluminum Can. And his ability to lead the entire deck is Battalion. Have the ranks gone mad? Who put this guy in charge? That is the weakest Commander Ability I have ever seen. You know what's stronger? Isamaru, Hound of Konda and he is a vanilla 2/2, that costs 1 MANA.
Deck Construction
Consistency
The problem with Commander is that there is no consistency. I honestly think you should consider making it more consistent. You need to run Relentless Rats or Shadowborn Apostles to drive home the consistency, but we are stuck in these inferior colors, so this is really difficult.
Mana Curve
The Mana Curve is pretty decent, but when I looked at the cards in the low end, I went full tilt. None of these spells put a dent in anything, and the spells aren't impactful. You need something that makes a difference when it hits the table, maybe try Scrambleverse or Worldfire at the high end slots, and at the low end slots you might want to consider Mox Ruby, Mox Pearl, and Black Lotus for some speed. You can also run City of Traitors, Rishadan Port, Karakas, or The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale in the land slots, that would help with speed and control. That is just a few suggestions for the low end though.
Utility
I am seeing a lack of utility in some very specific areas. You have a great weakness in the coin-flip control area. This seriously is a problem because you can't win in situations that require coin flips. For instance if the opponent forces you to discard your hand, then casts Worldfire with the mana floating to cast Show and Tell and puts their Chance Encounter into play, then uses Donate to throw it to you, you aren't gonna be able to do nothing but sit and hope you win the game after that point. Where if you had Krark's Thumb or a Goblin Bookie in your deck you could have Goblin Tutored the Thumb, held the two mana for after the Worldfire then casted the Thumb, and you would have had a significantly better chance at winning that game. I'd really recommend Krark's Thumb or Goblin Bookie. Just some food for thought.
As for more utility, you have no pancake potential. You can't flip anything. Which means all morph creatures are going to take a toll on your brain, because you are sitting there wondering if killing the face-down creature is gonna bust you up after you touch it. Well fear no more, Break Open exists, and it is in your inferior colors. This one is a card you can't pass up, it is always useful.
You also can't play any of the opponents cards, which is a huge disadvantage in your case, as the opponent has a high chance of playing Blue and Black if they actually joined the game to win. Just in case I'd put in Shaman's Trance so you can play the opponent's flashback spells(on the off chance they have any) as they are significantly better than your entire deck. Also in the same playing field as Shaman's Trance, you should be running Tempest Efreet just so you can get better cards. We are literally scraping for whatever we can get at this point. Grinning Totem is also highly desirable.
Which Direction The Deck Should Go
I honestly think you should consider playing North Star if you are gonna continue running these colors, that way you can at least pretend you are casting better spells in the superior colors of Magic.
Conclusion
Alright so in summary, after taking into consideration all of my suggestions, you really should just scrap this trash and make something in Black or Blue. I'd also recommend trying to play a real format, as this is basically just rolling dice and counting the higher numbers as winners.
ErebusX on Gatewatch format
7 years ago
1.) In this casual, multiplayer format, you start with a life total of 30 (rather than the usual 20) and choose a Planeswalker (or legendary creature that transforms into a planeswalker) to serve as your General. You then choose cards to match your Generals color identity to build your deck. A card's color identity is any mana symbol appearing on that card.
2.) The Gatewatch deck contains 65 cards: 1 General and 64 others. Your deck may contain only one of any individual card, with the exception of basic lands.
3.) The General enters play in the general zone. You may cast your General from the general zone for its normal costs, plus an additional one mana for each previous time it's been cast from the general zone this game. If your General is ever headed to the graveyard or exiled, you may return it to its general zone instead.
4.) All cards, including your General, must have a Converted Mana Cost (CMC) of 6 or less. In the case of cards with X in their mana cost, X = 0 for the purpose of calculating CMC for construction purposes.
5.) In addition to the normal Magic win conditions, you can win in this format by raising your General's Loyalty to 30 or higher. If recast from the general zone, your General's loyalty always resets to its base value.
Banned List:
Advantageous Proclamation, Amulet of Quoz, Ancestral Recall, Backup Plan, Balance, Black Lotus, Brago's Favor, Bronze Tablet, Channel, Chaos Orb, Contract from Below, Darkpact, Demonic Attorney, Double Stroke, Doubling Season, Erayo, Soratami Ascendant, Falling Star, Fastbond, Gideon, Champion of Justice, Gifts Ungiven, Immediate Action, Imprisoned in the Moon. Iterative Analysis, Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Jeweled Bird, Library of Alexandria, Limited Resources, Mox Emerald, Mox Jet, Mox Pearl, Mox Ruby, Mox Sapphire, Muzzio's Preparations, Painter's Servant, Panoptic Mirror, Pithing Needle, Power Play, Primeval Titan, Prophet of Kruphix, Rebirth, Recurring Nightmare, Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary, Secret Summoning, Secrets of Paradise, Sentinel Dispatch, Serra Ascendant, Shahrazad, Song of the Dryads, Tempest Efreet, Thief of Blood, Time Vault, Time Walk, Timmerian Fiends, Tinker, Tolarian Academy, Trade Secrets, Unexpected Potential, Upheaval, Vampire Hexmage, Worldknit, and Yawgmoth's Bargain
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