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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 |
Legacy | Legal |
Leviathan | Legal |
Limited | Legal |
Modern | Legal |
Oathbreaker | Legal |
Pioneer | Legal |
Planechase | Legal |
Quest Magic | Legal |
Tiny Leaders | Legal |
Unformat | Legal |
Vanguard | Legal |
Vintage | Legal |
Watery Grave
Land — Island Swamp
(: Add or .)
As Watery Grave enters the battlefield, you may pay 2 life. If you don't, it enters the battlefield tapped.
fluffyeel on
Help make deck good
2 months ago
Unfortunately, to up the power level, some of the things I will recommend might be pricey (cost-wise), but I'm already seeing some places to improve.
- Entomb and Buried Alive are good options to get your things into your graveyard that you can later reanimate with Scarab God. Alternately, Filth and Wonder are good things to put into the grave that give you added bonuses. (If you go the Filth route, Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth is super-valuable.)
- For mana rocks, Thran Dynamo, Gilded Lotus, and Chromatic Lantern are all very handy and budget-friendly. If you have them, of course there's also Mana Vault, Mana Crypt, and Chrome Mox, but don't just get them for this deck. (I happen to have opened them, so they move around between decks a lot.)
- The ultimate zombie enabler, to me, is Field of the Dead. You would need to likely swap some basics for snow-covered basics to make it work more, but the condition (7 lands with different names) is incredibly easy to meet. You can also go the route of some fetching (Terramorphic Expanse and Evolving Wilds, Fabled Passage, Polluted Delta, Prismatic Vista...). Watery Grave is also highly advised, along with Contaminated Aquifer, Ice Tunnel, Underground River, and Drowned Catacomb. Port of Karfell might also be worth considering.
- The best mill payoff from your opponents is Rise of the Dark Realms. Alternately, Reanimate, Animate Dead, and Extract from Darkness are great for bonus reanimation. Junji, the Midnight Sky is another possible option. Desertion
and Aethersnatch are also good to take your opponents' things before they knew what hit them.
- More tutoring. Expedition Map will help for lands; Vampiric Tutor, Demonic Tutor, and Diabolic Intent are good in general; Lim-Dul's Vault is, I find, underappreciated and very handy. Fact or Fiction is also handy to get through your deck and get fun things into the graveyard (or make your opponents wonder what's happening).
- The Meathook Massacre, Damnation, and Cyclonic Rift are extremely handy for removal. The first is also a bonus payoff if your zombies die in the process! Yawgmoth, Thran Physician is also super-useful when it comes to removal, turning your zombies into both extra cards and weakening your opponents' creatures.
- High-cost things: Force of Will, Force of Negation, Mana Drain, and Commandeer are useful for control and making sure things don't stick and Memory Jar for filling up graveyards.
legendofa on Card Cost/Land Mana
4 months ago
The pie chart should be reasonably balanced, although a couple of factors can skew it one way or another. If your 1-2 mana cards are heavily dominated by one color, your lands should be weighted toward that color to ensure you can reliable use your low-cost spells when you need them. If a lot of your cards have heavy color weight, you need more lands of that color. If you have a lot of higher-quality lands like shocklands, ABUR duals, or triomes, these can help smooth out color curves and make a perfect balance less necessary.
The tool I use most for adding lands by color is a calculator. My process is a little involved, but has given me very reliable results.
-
Count the number of pips of your first color.
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Count the total number of all colored pips.
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Multiply the number of pips of your first color by the number of land slots in your deck.
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Divide the number you got in step 3 by the total number of colored pips. Round up or down to the nearest whole number.
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Put in that many basic lands of your first color.
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Repeat for your second, third, etc. color.
To put this in algebraic form, Pc/Pt = Lc/Lt, or (Pc x Lt)/Pt = Lc, where Pc is the number of pips of a given color, Pt is the total number of colored pips, Lc is the number of land slots that provide a given color, and Lt is the total number of land slots. As an example, if I have 25 blue pips, 19 black pips, and 16 white pips, and I want to fill 24 land slots in a Modern deck, I multiply 25 (# of blue pips) by 24 (# of land slots in deck) and divide by 60 (total # of pips) to get 10 blue land slots. Repeating for black and white, this formula gives us 8 (rounded up from 7.6) black land slots and 6 (rounded down from 6.4) white land slots. I use 6 Plains, 10 Islands, and 8 Swamps as placeholders.
At this point, check for skew. To continue the example, are most of my 1-2 mana cards black, and most of my white cards higher cost? Cut a Plains and add a Swamp. Do many of my blue cards require ? Cut another Plains and add an Island. Now, we have 4 Plains, 11 Island, and 9 Swamp. This step is part observation, part feel, and part placeholders.
Once you have the color curve set, start adding nonbasic lands. If your nonbasic land provides a color, replace a basic land of that color. If it provides two or more colors, I cut whichever basic land I have the most of, then the second most, then the third most. If I want to add a playset of Raffine's Tower, I see that I now have the most Islands, followed by Swamps, then Plains. I cut two Islands and one of each of the others, leaving me with 9 Islands, 8 Swamps, and 3 Plains. If I then want to add three Watery Graves, I cut two Island and one Swamp, cutting Island first to maintain the chances of starting with black mana available on turn 1 and because more Islands are available. Fetchlands, including Evolving Wilds and similar cards, should be treated as whichever basic lands they're able to find.
Colorless utility lands need more consideration--does it needs a color to use? What colors do I need least? What colors do I need most? Let's say it's an artifact deck leaning heavily on the Alara block. I want to add two Academy Ruins. My current land base is
7x Island 3x Plains 4x Raffine's Tower 7x Swamp 3x Watery Grave
I know that I don't need Plains early in the game, that I do need Swamps early in the game, and that Academy Ruins needs to use. I cut one Plains for the first Academy Ruins and consider cutting a Swamp, but the need for early pushes me to cut an Island for the second Ruins. The land base is now
2x Academy Ruins 6x Island 2x Plains 4x Raffine's Tower 7x Swamp 3x Watery Grave
This would be a good point to pause and playtest. Make sure you hit the colors you need when you need them, you're not overloaded on a color, and everything flows smoothly. Tweak lands as needed test some more, and keep tweaking and testing until everything's locked in.
As a personal preference, I try to leave as many basic lands as needed to pay any colored cost in the deck. If I have Mechanized Production, but none of my cards need more than one black or white pip, then I will leave a minimum of two basic Islands and one each basic Plains and Swamps. Every format has some form of nonbasic land destruction (and I include Blood Moon in this), and basic lands are reliable and harder to negate or remove.
DemonDragonJ on
‘Tis But A Scratch
5 months ago
"A scratch? Your arm is off!"
Seriously, however, this is a great deck, and it is nice to see that March of the Machines gave such great support to knights as a tribe.
I personally would recommend the shocklands (i.e., Hallowed Fountain, Godless Shrine, and Watery Grave) over the "bond lands" (i.e., Sea of Clouds, Morphic Pool, and Vault of Champions), since the shock lands are far more reliable than are the bond lands, and any deck that contains both black and white should easily be able afford to pay 2 life per land, in order for it to enter the battlefield untapped.
Chasmolinker on
Mono Black Control 2022
10 months ago
Sideboard is Interesting... Have you tried Vivid Marsh, Gemstone Mine or Forbidden Orchard over the shock lands? You would probably want to go up to 3 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth. At the very least I would cut Watery Grave since you only have requirements.
Delphen7 on Manabase: Urzatron and Filter Lands …
11 months ago
As wallisface said I think the Tron package is the more efficient of the two. I feel Lotus Field takes too much support to properly set up, and at that point Lotus Combo becomes better.
Coming to Caerwyn objection to negative lands usage, what if you tried the lands that tap for any color, instead of the filter lands? (ie City of Brass, Mana Confluence, Gemstone Mine). You save on that few manas while still having access to every color.
My personal thoughts for a deck with big mana and access to all colors is Cabal Coffers and Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth with fetches. This would give you all the colors naturally (Godless Shrine, Overgrown Tomb, Blood Crypt, Watery Grave), while thinning your deck due to fetches, AND you have all the colors in a feasible way. Triomes give you access to even more colors.
Alesamuel on
Jodah Big Spell
11 months ago
I would recommend some of the Eldrazi titans, such as Kozilek, Butcher of Truth, Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger as some big top end bombs. Some ramp creatures wouldn't go amiss either, such as Birds of Paradise, and Dryad of the Ilysian Grove.
In terms of Instants, Sorceries, and Enchantments, getting some more of the Ultimatum cycle (Brilliant Ultimatum, Cruel Ultimatum, Emergent Ultimatum) might be a good idea, and Sunbird's Invocation would be a good idea too if you are casting such big CMC cards.
Another recommended addition would be Nicol Bolas, God-Pharaoh as it is just a straight up good card for the colour and big mana theme.
I'd recommend replacing the tapped tri-lands (Arcane Sanctum, Crumbling Necropolis, Frontier Bivouac, Jungle Shrine, Mystic Monastery, Nomad Outpost, Opulent Palace, Sandsteppe Citadel, Savage Lands, and Seaside Citadel) with the shock land cycle (Blood Crypt, Breeding Pool, Godless Shrine, Hallowed Fountain, Overgrown Tomb, Sacred Foundry, Steam Vents, Stomping Ground, Temple Garden, and Watery Grave) as they are easier to fetch for or find with ramp spells.
Final notes: Give the deck a little more of a creature focus, having as few as you have right now you'll find there is very little to hit with your reanimation, but other then that, good job on the first draft! looking forward to see how it plays out!
Jupiter_Ascendancy on
Assassins Guild
11 months ago
This is a good deck so far, but I think there are a couple of things you can do to improve it by a good margin.
1- Mana base: Your mana base is 100% fine for a casual deck, but in competitive Legacy, it's very slow. In Legacy, you do NOT want to have access to less mana in a turn than you potentially could. 24 lands is also probably too much given your mana curve, you probably won't need more than 4 lands in a game and extras will just clog up your hand. I would run 4x each of Hallowed Fountain, Watery Grave, Godless Shrine, Marsh Flats and Flooded Strand, and 1x Polluted Delta.
2- You'll want some more control elements to make sure you can measure up to other Legacy decks, Swords to Plowshares and Spell Pierce would improve the deck a lot. It's tempting to just let creatures do that work, but this is Legacy, and your creatures might not make it past their summoning sickness turn if you don't do something to either protect them or force your opponents to focus more on their board.
3- Play into some of the assassin themes a bit, some good cards you should probably consider are Combat Research, Scarblade Elite and Nekrataal.
4- Build a sideboard. If you're looking to make your deck viable in a competitive environment, it needs to have some level of variability. Some cards I would recommend for it are Hydroblast, Massacre Girl , Narset, Parter of Veils, Void Rend and Tormod's Crypt.
This looks like a good casual deck, but since you mention you're looking to make it work as a competitive Legacy deck, I think you'll need to bring up the deck's power a bit.
Necramus on
Queza, the Queefer
1 year ago
Okay. So, I think you should really lean into the control/combo shell. This deck could use combos like Sanguine Bond and Exquisite Blood, with some added redundancy in the forms of Vito, Thorn of the Dusk Rose and Marauding Blight-Priest, or Mikaeus, the Unhallowed and Triskelion to close out the game. In order to accomplish this, I think you should cut a ton of the creatures and really lean into board wipes, control spells, and resource denial.
Things like:
You could also do cute stuff like Phyrexian Unlife + Solemnity, giving yourself time to wipe the board again or go for the win with Peer into the Abyss. You should also consider taking a look at your mana base.
I'd suggest going for some fetches, checks, and shocks like:
You also have way too many plains right now. Even before you get the lands I just named, you should cut 6 Plains for 4 Swamp and 2 Island.
I know I've given you a lot of suggestions. I think if you tried putting a list together with all the cards I named, plus some of the bangers from your current list and you'd have a badass deck! Don't worry about trying to do all that right now, though. See which look most appealing/are in your price range and add those first. A lot of these should be long term goals!
Don't tell Rett I gave you so many suggestions XD
-Blake
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