Lightning Axe in EDH?
Commander (EDH) forum
Posted on March 18, 2013, 12:52 a.m. by OblongSym
id just like a few opinions on the card Lightning Axe for edh format. Anything helps, thanks.
Epochalyptik says... #3
Burn spells are pretty bad in EDH. There are only a few playable ones - Chain Reaction and Comet Storm are examples.
March 18, 2013 1 a.m.
those are nice, i like Comet Storm in particular. i was hoping to benefit more from control as axe doesn't target a player and also on its possible usefulness with recur of flashback spells. As for Thunderous Wrath, im just not as big a fan of miracle costs as they are by they're own nature inconsistent and rarely allow for proper planning.
March 18, 2013 1:14 a.m.
But Thunderous Wrath is just better than Lightning Axe in EDH anyways, since utility is often more important than a potentially lower mana cost (and in a Red deck in EDH, the very last thing you want to do is discard your hand).
And Thunderous Wrath can hit players.
March 18, 2013 2:38 a.m.
I would agree with Epoch that burn spells are USUALLY bad in EDH. But I have a mono red control deck with burn as the win con, it hasn't lost yet! lol its great fun too. Take a look Mono Red Control!!!
March 18, 2013 6:50 a.m.
I use Molten Disaster in my Norin the Wary deck and it's been pretty effective, so far. Sure, it hits the caster, too, but the purpose of my deck is mutual destruction, anyway.
March 18, 2013 3:09 p.m.
I really enjoy using Blasphemous Act in my Kresh the Bloodbraided. But why are you looking for this burn spell in the first place? Are you going for creature removal or life total hits? Do you regularly play with multiple players? What sort of a deck are you looking to put this card in? All necessary to my understanding of whether this card would be good or bad for your use.
March 18, 2013 6:35 p.m.
I briefly ran Lightning Axe in a Grixis reanimator deck where I wanted to discard big creatures but didn't allot enough deck space for discarding from my hand. My friends looked at it and laughed. It was effective in stopping early threats. However, when the "standard" size of a threatening creature in this format is 6/6 you might regret the card choice in the later stages of the game. I remember holding Lightning Axe in my hand and lamenting that my fliers were eliminated and I was facing a large dragon.
I rarely use red burn as creature removal for this very reason - it has a fixed size that it can eliminate. A creature removal spell with a limitation on creature size has to have some other important ability, bonus, or alternate cost like Dismember .
April 6, 2013 10:49 a.m.
The card seems a bit too situational for me to want to run it. About the only times I would be willing to pay it's discard option is when I have something in hand i want discarded and there are better options for doing that. I guess I might be willing to pay the discard cost if I was really desperate to kill early commanders but at that point I would probably just run cards like Lightning Bolt since I can just hit a player with it later just to put them out of their misery. There are much better options for later game cards if you are willing to pay 6 to deal 5 damage to a creature at instant speed. If you also have white in your deck you have options like Aurelia's Fury to replace it with or use one of the targeted creature removal spells. It is playable if you already have the better options in your deck, don't want to replace an instant with a sorcery card, or you regularly get stuff like Fire Servant /Gisela, Blade of Goldnight on the field.
lDruid says... #2
Why not just play Thunderous Wrath?
March 18, 2013 1 a.m.