Worn Powerstone

Artifact

Worn Powerstone enters the battlefield tapped.

: Gain .

Discussion (51)

TCK_Green on mono white indestructeble plays

1 week ago

Avacyn out of the Helavault, backed by other angels and with a plan to destroy the world? Sounds like a fun deck! :D you've asked to keep it budget, so most of the suggestions below should cost <$1 each. I've split my advice into sections, hopefully that'll help break it down into more bite-size chunks.

CHOOSE YOUR BATTLEFIELD

It felt like you had lots of fun cards in the deck, but it's not entirely clear how all of them fit in - at the moment it feels like you're trying to do a bit of everything. It might be worth (A) choosing what direction you want to take the deck (e.g. lifegain / big angels / destroy the world), (B) what your win-con and win-con cards are going to be for A, and (C) what cards would feel awesome to draw when you're winning / terrible to draw on an empty board. Hopefully those three questions will help shape what cards you choose to add and remove :) I decided to go human-angel tribal for one of my first decks that I built (Brisela, the confused angel), and whilst it wasn't my best deck (and is definitely in need of an update), you'll notice that there aren't (m)any creatures that aren't humans or angels. (I've also build a 'destroy the world'-style Oathbreaker deck, which does funky things with boardwipes, Dingus Staff/Dingus Egg and Second Sunrise!)

Well, with a slight plan of where you want the deck to go, let's think about some things you might want to consider. I've tried to keep the advice below quite general - if you're struggling to know what to remove, then do let me know and I'm happy to offer specific suggestions.

PROTECT THE GENERAL!

I really like how you've got 'fair' "destroy all" board wipes in there, which become one-sided when Avaycn is around. However, do be careful if someone exiles Avacyn in response to your Armageddon (or similar) - you really don't want to be on the receiving end of your own wipe! Avacyn is great, but she is vulnerable to pesky cards like Swords to Plowshares and Path to Exile that keep appearing in EDH. You might want to add some cards that give Avacyn hexproof or protection - I like the Mirror Shield and Flicker of Fate in the deck, but that's very little Avacyn 'protection' for 99 cards. Some suggestions here are artifacts like Whispersilk Cloak and Swiftfoot Boots. (Lightning Greaves is the best of these, but is a little more expensive - definitely a commander staple, so do pick one up at some point!). Creatures that give protection are also great, and those have the added bonus of providing you some early-game safety, especially those with repeatable protection. I'd suggest adding Devoted Caretaker to the deck, and either Benevolent Bodyguard or Alseid of Life's Bounty (with plans to upgrade to everyone's favourite Mother of Runes - another commander staple! - and Giver of Runes if you're happy to spend a little more).

Now that Avacyn's bodyguards are sorted, let's have a think of how we can get her out as fast as (reasonably) possible.

RISE AND SHINE, ANGELS

Since you have got a lot of high CMC creatures, I'd be tempted to chuck some more mana rocks in there - Worn Powerstone and Hedron Archive are good places to start - as well as card that reduce the cost of your high-end cards - Oketra's Monument is especially great here since it also gives you extra creatures to block with, Pearl Medallion is also good if you can stretch the budget. (I'd personally definitely remove Lotus Petal - it doesn't do a huge amount for you, and it takes up a slot that could be used by a repeatable mana rock.) Rocks/reducers will allow you to get more angels out quicker, meaning that you're more likely to have a board presence in the midgame - and rescue Avacyn from the Helavault as early as possible!

The creatures you have could do with some tweaking - I think it might be worth trimming your choices, but how you want to do that will depend on what 'theme' you want to have.

MAYDAY MAYDAY, WE'RE OUT OF AMMO!

The most important resource in MtG are cards. You use cards to get mana and play creatures that ultimately win you the game - if you don't have any cards then it's very hard to win games. I don't currently see much in the way of card draw in your deck, so I imagine you'd be top-decking quite often with this, hoping to get the card you really need from the top. (There are also a couple more lands than usual - standard EDH decks run 40 lands - meaning that you're a little more likely to have a 'dead draw' than you would otherwise be.)

Unfortunately we're in white so what we have is card advantage instead of card draw, but do have a think about what cards you could add that might help - Mentor of the Meek is a favourite of mine, but you need to have enough low-power creatures to make it work (or cards that create small tokens - like Oketra's Monument!). If you have a bit of budget then an Endless Atlas is a safe staple for EDH mono-colour decks, and Well of Lost Dreams is really nifty in a lifegain deck :) also, cards that fetch to the battlefield effectively count as card draw, so I'll also allow cards like Myriad Landscape, Reya Dawnbringer, and Brought Back (which can even function as a ramp card if you manage to use it on lands like Myriad Landscape).

WATCH THE WORLD BURN

I heard you like board wipes? End Hostilities is cheap, but if you want to go OG then the purest wipe is Wrath of God, though it's younger brother Day of Judgment) is a lot cheaper. Fumigate, Rout, Martial Coup, Phyrexian Rebirth and Nevinyrral's Disk also fit in that slot. Finally, if you can make it fit then I'd perhaps look at adding Worldslayer. It's a lot of mana to equip, but once it's on Avacyn there's no way anyone else is coming back from that!

Do remember that all of the above are just suggestions, let me know if you have any questions, good luck, and remember - once all the dust settles and the other players die, "Only one may stand!"

Joe_Ken_ on Mother of Dragons

1 week ago

Burnished Hart has been a good creature in my Boros decks to get a little bit of ramp.

I’d work on getting Smothering Tithe into the main board as soon as you can since if it’s not answered then it will net you a lot of mana.

I’d swap maybe Gilded Lotus for Worn Powerstone since it can come in a lot earlier and from my experience Lotus is often blown up a lot.

Neheb, the Eternal is a really good creature that can help you get a lot of mana if he sticks around and you are swinging in with your dragons.

Dowsing Dagger  ^Flip may be a nice equipment to slot in since you can often get through with a flying creature to get it to flip.

ThePerilousRealm on Scorpion God, Wither, Infect

2 weeks ago

You should also have some more ramp; good options include: Mind Stone, Fellwar Stone, Arcane Signet, Talisman of Indulgence, Mana Vault, Worn Powerstone, and Thran Dynamo.

SideBae on Yuirko, the Sadist

2 weeks ago

So I have a few suggestions. Feel free to ignore any/all of them.

1. I notice Mindlock Orb is in your MB. I think this effect can be powerful in the right meta, but if you do want to run it I think you should run Ashiok, Dream Render first. Being 3 mana rather than 4 is a big deal.

2. I like that you're running Ponder -- consider running Preordain, too. I realize it's harder to stack your deck for Yuriko triggers with Preordain, but thinking of it as just a 1 mana cantrip should show how good it is. After all, there's a reason it's super-duper banned in modern. Additionally, you can make your Brainstorm a lot better by adding some cheap shuffle effects; currently, if you don't have Yuriko triggers happening, you're likely to get Brainstorm-locked (stuck with two blanks on top of your deck). Traditionally these shuffle effects come from fetchlands like Polluted Delta or Verdant Catacombs, but since these lands are expensive AF, it's worth noting there're other lands that do similar things. Bad River, Flood Plain and Rocky Tar Pit ("Slow Fetches") are good for budget builds, as is Terramorphic Expanse.

3. If you want to speed up your deck, running as few ETB-tapped lands as possible is pretty much essential. I would cut Submerged Boneyard and Dimir Guildgate for Watery Grave, Drowned Catacomb, Sunken Ruins, Underground River, or even just basics.

4. Yuriko presents an interesting dilemma as a general: you want your average CMC very high, in order to keep his triggers powerful, but you also want to be able to cast your spells. In general, people use alternate-casting-cost spells to deal with this. Consider running things like Treasure Cruise, Dig Through Time, Temporal Trespass (which makes me giggle when I see it played), The Magic Mirror, Commandeer, etc.

5. There're other creatures you should consider running, especially if you consider them as recastable after being ninjutsu-ed back to your hand: Baleful Strix, Thalakos Seer, Snapcaster Mage (if you're rich), Cavern Harpy (a personal favorite), Murderous Rider (which strictly better than Murder), Man-o'-War, Rishadan Cutpurse, Spellseeker... Burglar Rat might be funny, though probably not too powerful.

6. There're some ways to stack your deck not included in your deck. Mystical Tutor and Vampiric Tutor (though vampiric is expensive now) are really, really good. Also note that Counterbalance is another way to exploit topdeck manipulation, especially if you have your Sensei's Divining Top out. Don't forget Mystic Sanctuary.

7. Don't discount Windfall and Fact or Fiction. They're really good. Windfall also works well with Narset, Parter of Veils or Notion Thief.

8. Finally, don't forget about artifact ramp. Sol Ring is obviously the all-star here, but I think you should be running 2-mana rocks rather than 3-mana rocks. Consider running Arcane Signet, Talisman of Dominance, Fellwar Stone, Mind Stone, Prismatic Lens, Sky Diamond, Charcoal Diamond or Coldsteel Heart instead of Commander's Sphere, Worn Powerstone and Seer's Lantern.

Right. That's all I got. Good luck!

dingusdingo on How Popular is Chromatic Lantern ...

3 weeks ago

Chromatic Lantern has the unfortunate fate of being too good to be printed as a rock and being not good enough to be printed as a rock worth running. Many people ignore that it costs 3 mana and only produces 1 because it color fixes your mana perfectly, shoring up decks with weak mana bases. However, those same people vastly overestimate how often they are going to see 1 specific card in their 99 card deck. Running Chromatic Lantern to enable your Necropotence isn't a winning move, because statistically you're just not likely to see those cards in the same game. Running super color heavy cards in a 3/4/5 color budget deck and relying on your singleton card from 99 to fix that is just bad deck building, simple as.

I would run any 2 cost rock over Chromatic Lantern, even the enter tapped rocks. Having an extra mana turn 3 is more important to 98% of decks than having perfect colored mana on turn 4. Paying mana to only receive 1 extra mana doesn't cut it for me, especially when options like Worn Powerstone exist if I really want a rock in the 3 CMC spot (I don't)

Once you begin to acquire better lands, the need for Chromatic Lantern disappears. You don't even need to have ABU Duals + Fetches, although they certainly help. You can get a healthy splashing of rainbowlands for pretty cheap, and you can also acquire shocks + painlands + filterlands + fastlands + battlebondlands in 3/4/5 color decks and have bountiful colored mana. Even more budget friendly options exist like the ravnica bouncelands, the scrylands, or even just plain old enter tapped dual color lands. Especially when you combine these with the 2 cost signets and talismans for your colors, you really shouldn't need Chromatic Lantern. At $10 a pop, that could be spent acquiring cards that will earn a permanent home in your deck. I have serious qualms about buying cards I know I will replace later, so take that $10 and buy some filterlands or shocks, or acquire the full cycle of signets and talismans for your decks.

DespairFaction on Aurelia - Weapons of War

3 weeks ago

Yes those are absolutely good replacements for the more expensive mana rocks. However I will say that I am really a big fan of multi producing mana rocks like Worn Powerstone, Hedron Archive and Thran Dynamo. I also wouldnt say no to a Gilded Lotus or a Burnished Hart for the colored mana but they can be a touch slow, but still great for the late game. The rocks you mentioned are also good if you are running a budget mana base and need to make sure you have access to all the colors you need.

I havent tried Coveted Jewel. Test it out, see how it goes. Seems interesting.

Destructive Urge is a very interesting card. Ive tried messing around with it in Sylvia and Khorvath never really got it to come down turn 4 like I had planned. However, trimming back a few lands from your opponents will go a long way in keeping them from the big turn where they go off. They wont be happy with you, but it seems like it would be pretty effective.

Sadly Anya just isnt very effective, great art though. Unless theres multiple aggro decks everyone stays above 20 for a pretty good chunk of the game. If you want something indestructible Tajic, Blade of the Legion will be a better bet.

Heavenly Blademaster is very solid. Ive used it in several decks. Its great post board wipe when you need someone to pick up all the equipments. It doesnt have haste naturally so you'll want to make sure you have some ways to get it haste. Hanweir Battlements and Flamekin Village plus a pair of boots do a nice job at this.

Double strike is incredibly important. Double strike plus Aurelia makes people dead. I like to have 3-4 sources. True Conviction is the very obvious one that I am missing and that was just for mana curve consideration. If you expect the game to go at least 8 turns I would add it. Silverblade Paladin also used to be in the deck but ive been testing some of the more hatebear style stuff like THalia and Hushbringer, but its legit.

Haste is a little less important in this deck compared to other aggro decks because Aurelia has haste naturally. I personally use the 2 lands mentioned above, plus a pair of boots and I find that to be good enough typically. However, my podcast cohost Kristen is a huge fan of Urabrask the Hidden but Odric, Lunarch Marshal is also pretty cool with Aurelia.

DrakeTheDuelist on Enchanting Provocateur

4 weeks ago

If you really want to power up your faeries, take a look at anthem enchantments. Glorious Anthem is a good start, but there are many others (most of which have fairly useful side-quirks) like Radiant Destiny, Force of Virtue, Gravitational Shift, Favorable Winds and Etchings of the Chosen. Cathars' Crusade isn't technically an anthem, but it can be no less hilarious if you can set up a turn of enchantment / artifact storming. If you have the budget for it, and you aren't too opposed to artifacts, The Immortal Sun is a pricey piece, but it has a lot going on, especially if you don't run any of your own planeswalkers. A fair bit of warning on this anthem route: Skullclamp absolutely will not work the way you want if you play anything that offers toughness bonuses to your tokens unless you have some kind of sacrifice outlet. Some seem to consider that alone as reason to not anthem your faeries into the stratosphere, even if it's very possible on even tight budgets. Others tend to avoid anthem spamming because it makes you look far more dangerous than you're likely prepared to be, and impromptu archenemy is no fun to be on the wrong side of.

For space, I'd take out Ancestral Blade, as I've never been a big fan of that card when you can get far faster, cheaper, and overall more robust power-ups from anthem sources. (It's more of a knight tribal / white weenie card.) Also you may want to tone down your sizable nonland permanent hate. Oblivion Ring type effects are fine in the short term, ideally if you're ready to swing for lethal if not for that pesky Ghostly Prison in the way, but eventually you could get your enchantment answered and be right back where you started. For long-term answers, you're better off with Swords to Plowshares and Mortify (or arguably even better, Counterspell) effects that can straight up remove the problem for good, especially if exiling is involved. No sense tying someone's arm behind their back when you can just shoot them in the head.

If you wanted to win on commander damage, Cranial Plating is a fairly-priced budget piece that can play well into smashing face with Alela, especially if you can spare the mana to attach at instant speed. Shadowspear is a fairly expensive piece, as you would expect from something that not only confers trample (a bit hard to come by in Esper colors), but can strip hexproof and indestructible.

You don't have a lot of ramp sources. Ramp can be tricky to come by outside of Green, so you probably want a good 8-12 artifacts, probably closer to 12. You already have the big two (Arcane Signet and Sol Ring), Heraldic Banner, and most of the Talismans. You can also look into Signets (Azorius, Dimir, Orzhov), Diamonds (Sky, Marble, Charcoal) and Myrs (Silver, Gold, Leaden). Mind Stone and Worn Powerstone aren't terribly expensive for colorless artifacts, and Everflowing Chalice, Thran Dynamo and Gilded Lotus aren't much more expensive than that. And last but not least, particularly if you're leaning more heavily into enchantments, the newcomer Nyx Lotus from TBD is a fantastic choice if you plan to have a lot of colored non-token permanents on board. Alternatively, you could lean massively into artifacts given how much Alela likes them anyway, though it's worth pointing out that (1) artifacts have some of the widest ranges of cheap and commonly played answers and (2) the vast majority of them do zilch for your color devotion.

It might seem counter-intuitive to include board wipes in a deck designed to go wide with faeries. My take is that eventually you're going to be on the wrong end of a wipe at some point, so you want to have some wipes of your own ready to go just in case someone rebuilds quickly or you start getting jumped on by the rest of the table. This is especially important as Alela decks' bodies mostly come in the form of tokens that get wrecked outright by the ever-popular Cyclonic Rift. Speaking of which, it's worth pointing out that Cyclonic Rift has a cousin card in white, Winds of Abandon. Less good admittedly, but it's a lot more budget friendly, and even overloads for less mana. Speaking of budget, Time Wipe and Kaya's Wrath are other classic wallet-friendly wipes, while the flat out best one (after Cyc Rift) seems to be Toxic Deluge. Another reason to have wipes in Esper: they have some of the strongest ones in the game.

MGlBlaze on Through the Fire and Flames: Surrak's Dragonforce

1 month ago

You might get more value from Dragon's Hoard than from Hedron Archive - it only taps for one mana of any colour, but costs 3 instead of 4 and you can use it to draw cards repeatedly when you don't need the mana. Thran Dynamo might also be worth considering instead if it's the mana you feel like you'd want more often, costing 4 as well but tapping for instead. Or Worn Powerstone as Lhurgyof suggested.