Thorn of Amethyst

Artifact

Noncreature spells cost {1} more to cast.

Legality

Format	Legality
1v1 Commander	Legal
Archenemy	Legal
Arena	Legal
Block Constructed	Legal
Canadian Highlander	Legal
Casual	Legal
Commander / EDH	Legal
Commander: Rule 0	Legal
Custom	Legal
Duel Commander	Legal
Gladiator	Legal
Highlander	Legal
Historic	Legal
Historic Brawl	Legal
Legacy	Legal
Leviathan	Legal
Limited	Legal
Modern	Legal
Modern Beyond Horizons	Legal
Oathbreaker	Legal
Planar Constructed	Legal
Planechase	Legal
Quest Magic	Legal
Tiny Leaders	Legal
Vanguard	Legal
Vintage	Legal

Discussion (51)

Azoth2099 on Wheeliod - cEDH

9 months ago

This commander is so awesome, man, excellent choice. Consider Braingeyser for sure. This commander also breaks parity on strong stax pieces like Thorn of Amethyst & Thalia, Guardian of Thraben super easily! It's brutal. Cheers!

Azoth2099 on colorless commander

10 months ago

Here's some spice!

So, as with any other commander, if you want it to be efficient you're gonna need 4 things: Synergistic win conditions, card draw, mana ramp & tutors.

Unfortunately achieving any of these 4 things is going to be exceptionally difficult with no colors lol.

I would recommend changing the commander to Karn, Legacy Reforged, as well as adding a good amount of mana rocks like Mind Stone, Thought Vessel, & Thran Dynamo to help get you where you're going. Cards like Horizon Stone, Sword of the Animist & Bitterthorn, Nissa's Animus could also be helpful. Cost reducers like Foundry Inspector, Mycosynth Golem & Cloud Key could be lumped in here as well.

Card draw however is going to be a total pain unless you have a ton of mana, which is why I put ramp first. Cards like The Immortal Sun, Chimil, the Inner Sun & Mind's Eye can provide a lot of value, but if you don't have the mana to power them out it's no bueno. There are cheaper options that will be easier to get out earlier in the game like The One Ring, Scroll Rack & Sensei's Divining Top to consider too.

Tutors and wincons...I am at a loss for. Outside of running some really brutal stax like God-Pharaoh's Statue, Trinisphere, Thorn of Amethyst & Karn, the Great Creator alongside a good ole beatdown strategy, I don't really see how colorless decks can win lol. Luckily there are lots of colorless stax and beaters for you to choose from.

Some additional value pieces to consider before I get out of here: Wandering Archaic  ^Flip, Forsaken Monument, Sword of Fire and Ice, Sword of Feast and Famine, Krark-Clan Ironworks & maybe even Blightsteel Colossus. Peace!

DreadKhan on Need help ruining a combo players day

1 year ago

Thorn of Amethyst, Glowrider, Sphere of Resistance, Vryn Wingmare, and Eidolon of Rhetoric all exist, but I'm guessing they didn't make the cut?

Retribution of the Meek might be a reasonable wipe with so many smaller creatures, ditto Elspeth, Sun's Champion. If a wipe is one sided it's not just resetting the board, not sure how many of these you're willing to run. Elspeth makes a small army, much better at blocking than the Samurai from Wanderer fwiw, but Wanderer is really strong too. Smothering Tithe is great with Stasis out, Brago, King Eternal might be fun too. If people are running obnoxious stuff, you could run Enlightened Tutor to find your Stasis/Tithe cards as needed, Muddle the Mixture can find both Stasis or Brave the Sands, while also being a counterspell. If you like Stasis, you could also try Static Orb, Meekstone, Crackdown or even Winter Orb/Rising Waters, not sure how hostile you want to be but Stasis is harsher than these. How often do you cast Approach of the Second Sun in here? I ask because there are a lot of tax effects, but if it's not trouble have you thought about running some tutors to find it? The best ones I can think of are Mystical Tutor, Personal Tutor, and Solve the Equation, they can also find other cards as needed, handy if you need removal, a wipe or a counter.

As for alternatives that can do similar things, you might look at either Zur the Enchanter or Hinata, Dawn-Crowned as alternatives that offer more offensive punch while still offering a solid route to shutting the table down. Zur can dig out enchantments like Rule of Law, Stasis (and Black Market Connections) and various ways to fairly quickly win the game, all while being able to hold up lots of mana for interaction, be it counters or removal. Hinata is another tax effect, but you get access to Red as well, and Red has some interesting additions to the Stax department, you'd definitely want Grand Arbiter in your Hinata deck, and you'd run most of the same cards, but you also have the option of running a bunch of cards that care about Hinata's discount, Hinata makes interaction better, especially if it has multiple targets, the annoying thing for both is that they're much harder to cast than Grand Arbiter, so you'd have to raise your budget to have the same consistency. The big problem with Zur is protecting him. If there are literally specific players you know are a problem you can run either Baral, Chief of Compliance or Talrand, Sky Summoner, Baral is better at playing 'Counter Everything' but Talrand can be just offensively good vs a specific player since he also is generating evasive bodies while interacting with that player's win attempts. The nice thing about he mono-Blue approach is you can just brutalize a player or two while letting the others play a smaller (but more normal) game.

Oh, if those players run specific colours (and nobody else likes them as much) there are old school colour hosers, cards like Karma can make life extremely hard. They exist for all colours, and they were so staggeringly unpopular that the developer stopped printing cards like it.

Azoth2099 on Narset's Work Out Plan

1 year ago

Bkotz

This version of Narset looks so fun, man!

One thing that I feel is fundamental when remembering Narset, Enlightened Exile's function as a Commander is that her ability gives you Graveyard hate as well as pseudo card draw by giving you access to your opponent's Graveyards as well as your own, meaning that you will always have card advantage as long as you protect your Commander.

That being said, I would definitely find room for Lightning Greaves, Swiftfoot Boots, Mother of Runes, Giver of Runes, & an abundance of Counterspells. Personally, I don't like spending more than 1 Mana for a Counterspell these days. Red Elemental Blast, Pyroblast, Dispel, Swan Song & An Offer You Can't Refuse provide a crazy ceiling of value for a single Mana. If you wanted to roll with 2-drops for budget reasons, though, Delay, Arcane Denial, Dovin's Veto & Negate are all easy to cast, & throw a wide net. Misdirection & Bolt Bend are also options here.

Secondly, Narset, Enlightened Exile can only trigger on your own turn, & you need to ensure that everything is going to go as planned. Grand Abolisher & Conqueror's Flail will lock your opponents out of your turn without giving your opponents the same utility like cards like Teferi, Time Raveler & Defense Grid notoriously do. Silence, Revel in Silence  ^Flip, Abeyance & Orim's Chant can do something similar for 1-2 Mana.

Speaking of Stax, there are a few concise, utilitarian pieces that you may want to consider. Drannith Magistrate, Sanctum Prelate, Archon of Emeria, Lavinia, Azorious Renegade, Boromir, Warden of the Tower, Aven Mindcensor & Containment Priest shut down a LOT of strategies. You'd be surprised how little most decks can do once you take away their ability to cheat stuff in, Tutor and/or cast things for free. Personally, every deck I have is heavily handicapped by all of those pieces. I wouldn't even be able to target them with removal if you played your cards right.

For noncreature Stax, you've got Chalice of the Void, Cursed Totem, Thorn of Amethyst, Deafening Silence, Grafdigger's Cage (which your Commander's ability gets around btw, very strong here), & Rule of Law as a few solid options.

You do need quite a bit more card draw, though. Scroll Rack & Sensei's Divining Top are obviously great, but the level of toolbox utility they actually give you in practice is even better than it seems! Archivist of Oghma, Faerie Mastermind & Ledger Shredder all give you card draw that scales with what your opponents are doing, which is fantastic. Other things like Deep Gnome Terramancer & Wandering Archaic  ^Flip do the same thing, though they technically aren't card draw. Hell, might as well throw Monologue Tax out there too since I'm talking about scaling.

There's also Careful Study, Frantic Search, Tolarian Winds, Faithless Looting, Cathartic Reunion, Burning Inquiry, Thrill of Possibility & Dragon's Rage Channeler, which are great synergy here!

Speaking of synergy, let's get into that! The foremost synergies for Narset, Enlightened Exile imho is Underworld Breach + Lion's Eye Diamond + Brain Freeze & Intuition, and much of the deck should be geared towards maximizing on that. They're all very easy to Tutor up via cards like Enlightened Tutor, Mystical Tutor, Idyllic Tutor, Solve the Equation, Fabricate, Reshape, Transmute Artifact, Reckless Handling, Goblin Engineer & Gamble, in addition to being easy to recur via your Commander's ability. It's actually absurd, truly busted. I wouldn't recommend throwing Wheels like Wheel of Fortune or Windfall into the mix, though. They're very overrated, & you can just run Brain Freeze for the combo instead. No need to give all of your opponents a bunch of cards for free if you don't have to! Queen Kayla bin-Kroog is for sure worth consideration, though, if you choose to run Artifact Stax.

Maximizing on Underworld Breach, however, means running Storm. I'd recommend Birgi, God of Storytelling  ^Flip, Storm-Kiln Artist, Urabrask  ^Flip, Desperate Ritual, Pyretic Ritual & Seething Song to keep your Storm engine from shutting off. I personally don't condone Runaway Steam-Kin, as it's just too freaking slow & conditional compared to other options.

Additional Combat Phases would also be of great use here as opposed to trigger doublers like Strionic Resonator or something. Aggravated Assault, Waves of Aggression, World at War & Seize the Day are the only ones I'd consider running, though. You don't wanna load up on too many synergy effects when you can just Tutor for the best of them when the time's right, ya know?

Since you're running Dockside Extortionist, I'd also consider Cloudstone Curio. With one other Creature (like Spellseeker for example), you can produce infinite Treasures & ETBs with little effort, which is usually more than enough to get you to the finish line.

Your ramp package is looking solid enough, but I'd include 2 more Rocks as well as the rituals I named previously. Fellwar Stone is, functionally, a 5-color Rock for 2 Mana, which is absurd. I tend to not condone 3-drop rocks, with the exception of Chromatic Lantern, which was just reprinted recently and is currently super cheap.

Oh man, now that I think of it Isochron Scepter + Dramatic Reversal gives your whole team infinite power and toughness via your Commander, as well as giving you infinite Mana if you have enough Rocks on the field. Maybe consider it lol.

Monastery Mentor seems to fit like glove here as well, offering some much needed redundancy and a surprising amount of board presence. It's kind of like Deep Gnome Terramancer or Wandering Archaic  ^Flip in the sense that it just provides waaaay more value while playtesting than you thought it was going to!

Also, consider giving yourself Hexproof with stuff like Witchbane Orb to protect your own Graveyard.

To summarize, I really think your best bet with this one is building a system that gets to either an Underworld Breach + Lion's Eye Diamond + Brain Freeze combo win or an Intuition win as quickly as possible, with other combos like Dramatic Reversal + Isochron Scepter being strong potentialities on the way.

Cheers!

SynergyBuild on Ideas to make Krenko Cedh

1 year ago

While I have no issue with the concept of a Mono-Red Najeela style cEDH deck that rather than comboing with combat->mana cards instead turns tokens->untap cards into an auto-win, it's not capable of making goblins competitive on its own, it's more of a Thornbite Staff combo deck at best, with you wanting to run mono-red stax (Magus of the Moon, Trinisphere, Sphere of Resistance, Thorn of Amethyst, and Blood Moon) and using Krenko's Inevitability to take over a long game. Any Altar (Ashnod's or Phyrexian) and any untap for mana effect combos too (Staff of Domination, Sword of the Paruns, and Umbral Mantle) might be functional too, but sadly even though it adds 6ish more 2 card combos, they all cost a lot of mana and aren't easy in mono-red to tutor and fetch.

Godo and Helm might be an easy include as well, since helm and your commander win in a few turns, with the math meaning if you have both your commander from the start of the turn before attaching helm, and have no other goblins, you activate them both after making the new one and get a total of 8 on the first turn, 72 on the following turn, and 1168 goblins on the turn after that, most likely winning the game.

Outside of that a fast mana package to back up your combos and stax, some easy includes such as a couple counterspells like Pyroblast, some cheap removal and a manabase that works well enough since you are mono-colored to not stress about your own land hate backfiring and you have a successful Tier 3ish cEDH deck.

legendofa on Help me torture

1 year ago

Hand = hurting: Black Vise, Ebony Owl Netsuke, Iron Maiden, Misers' Cage, Sword of War and Peace

Bounce: Blood Clock, Crystal Shard, Surgical Skullbomb, Umbilicus

Standard stax/tax effects: Smokestack, Tangle Wire, Winter Orb, Thorn of Amethyst, God-Pharaoh's Statue, Damping Sphere, Trinisphere, Sphere of Resistance, Cursed Totem, Static Orb, Meekstone, Norn's Annex, Mindlock Orb

Artifact creatures with these effects: Viseling, Neurok Replica, Esper Sentinel

Pulled mostly from EDHrec, and I only hit the highlights. https://edhrec.com/themes/stax

Epicurus on Runadi, Behemoth Caller: Beef Chief

1 year ago

First off, I am not a competitive player by any stretch. So take any comments I might make with that in mind. It is very likely that I'm just not a good enough player to understand. And I mean that honestly. In other words, I'm trying to learn something here.

Just going on the statistics, the deck has 34 spells that cost 5 or more (with 16 of those cards split equally between MV7 and 8), while only having 10 cards that cost 2 or less. That's more than a 3-1 ratio, with the larger category comprising slightly more than a third of the deck.

Of your mana ramp spells, 4 are in the MV5 or higher category, while having only 3 in the MV2 or less category. Even the remaining 7 ramp spells, at MV4 and 5, can't be played in the first two rounds unless you happen to get one or more of those 3 early ramp spells in the first 8 cards drawn. An even more lopsided ratio exists for the removal.

Constructed as such, when I playtest the deck, I'm almost always drawing for at least 4 turns before I can play a single spell. Just nothing but MV5+ spells and lands. The percentages don't make sense to me.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I've always thought that the ratio should go the other way around. Heavy on the lower cost ramp, and include a select few power ramp cards for a huge mid-game push. Generally fueled by the obvious Elvish selection (Llanowar Elves and all of it's counterparts). And yes, I do recognize that your land base is pretty stellar.

To answer your question, some of my favorite mono-green removal spells are already on your list. If I were to list a few others, I would include Manglehorn, Broken Bond, Caustic Caterpillar, Song of the Dryads and Lignify. For colorless, Warping Wail, Ratchet Bomb and Powder Keg. I don't know if stuff like Chalice of the Void, Trinisphere or Thorn of Amethyst would do anything for you, but they might put your opponents on a level playing field with you. And yes, if all else fails, you could at least have a Fog or two or three or four in the mix to at least stave off combat damage whilst you spend turns building resources.

I think that I'd have to actually see you play it to appreciate how it works.

thefiresoflurve on Obekkin Up A Storm

1 year ago

Nice brew. Do you struggle with board presence? If so, Hate Mirage, Lagomos, Hand of Hatred, Mishra, Eminent One would all be decent additions. Mishra in particular looks like it might be really fun with all your artifacts.

As far as cuts: I think Thorn of Amethyst could probably be substituted by a stax piece that is more in your favor, like Aura Flux or Smoke.

Chrome Mox might be super inconsistent here since there are so many artifacts.

Hypersonic Dragon offers negative synergy with your commander and Ideas Unbound (since you can't end someone else's turn). Additionally, the dragon only even affects 6 cards.

Ruby Medallion should also be cut since it only even affects 5 other cards. Sapphire Medallion may be able to stay since it affects 15, but IMO that's kind of thin ice.

GL HF!