tips for person looking to get into EDH
Commander (EDH) forum
Posted on July 3, 2013, 9:42 a.m. by foowaffle
hey i'm new to magic and i was after information on EDH mode like tips and pointersthings you think people should know but may overlook in reading rules
and CMC different between this and other modes
as for tips and pointers, i would recommend against running a counter heavy deck, it just tends to slow everything down :P, and build your deck so its fun to play against/play with, fun seems to be the main point of edh in my experience rather than just going for the win :P any info in particular you were looking for?
July 3, 2013 10:04 a.m.
well i was thinking of building a deck based around "creatures of the living dead" if that helps :)
really do love my zombies and demons
July 3, 2013 10:28 a.m.
Tips will be subjective to your group and playstyle always, but to have a good foundation to stand on, I recommend:
Search card database for EDH/Commander legal Legendary creatures and whittle away at your selection until you find 1 that you really want to build around. (Note: even though some other legendary creatures are fun and exciting, if they are the same colors as your general includes, you can play them as a creature in the deck instead)
Search your cards for things that will compliment your strategy. The reason for using your own cards first is that you can playtest your deck without spending $80 bucks on the Judge promo Vindicate to find out you want to be mono black. Plus you will be able to pickout what strategies work for your deck. (i.e. needing heavy card draw, stuff in your graveyard to target, state altering artifacts, etc.) MEGA-TIP: If you need a sacrifice engine, search Type: Creatures and rules text: sacrifice, this will show you all the options with sacrificing, etc.
As your play the deck you will lose and have the opportunity to ask for assistance in what would be stronger to add-in or subtract-out. From those suggestions you can get more efficient and better cards. Ultimately building over and over and over.
This will be a long drawn out process, make smart choices and test with weaker or cheaper cards first and always! Some cards cannot be replaced as they aren't going to be outclassed Sensei's Divining Top
Good luck and take your time to develop it properly.
July 3, 2013 10:35 a.m.
my mate runs a mono black zombie tribal deck that is fun and doesn't just fall over and lose either, it can be pretty competitive. He is lacking on funds though so it could be better, absence of a Karn Liberated hurts the fact that black can't deal with artifacts or enchantments very well. But there are plenty of colourless ways to do so
July 3, 2013 10:35 a.m.
you like zombies and dragons?, why cant we have both? Bladewing the Risen
July 3, 2013 10:48 a.m.
well i was thinking blue and black with Mirko Vosk, Mind Drinker as the gerenal
July 3, 2013 10:50 a.m.
running mills and bringing back creatures from my graveyard
July 3, 2013 10:52 a.m.
ohh that could be nice, sticking Wrexial, the Risen Deep in the deck could be worth it as well :)
July 3, 2013 10:56 a.m.
The usual go-to "mill and reanimate" general is The Mimeoplasm
, just so you're aware of the creature.
However, the beauty of EDH is that you don't have to mix-max your deck to have fun, so you have a lot of leeway with your card choices.
July 3, 2013 11:18 a.m.
speaking of non-basic lands, Helldozer is a lot of fun in EDH
July 3, 2013 11:55 a.m.
haha playing that in my playgroup makes you a big target :P, we like our precious lands :P
July 3, 2013 11:58 a.m.
I'd start by borrowing a friend's deck, playtesting decks online, and seeing how the games in your playgroup actually tend to go.
From this, hopefully you will find out what kind of decks you enjoy playing (I think EDH is more of an invested style of play than standard so that if you make a deck there is a good chance and hope you will keep it around for a long time and be able to come back to it long term: so it is a good idea to use a deck that you enjoy).
Another thing that you will hopefully learn is that just because a card is "good" in standard or worth a lot of money, it may not necessarily be as good in EDH for some reason. Vice-versa, some cards that have no value and would never get played in standard are awesome in the slower EDH multiplayer format (but sometimes 1v1 is a little different and more like standard - a little - especially under French style rules).
Hopefully you will see what the meta you are going to be playing in is like. Do they hate and politically reject certain deck types or strategies (even up to and including finding ways to not let them even play with you during LGS events)? Are there things that happen often (like I learned for example to always build my decks around the assumption that at least one boardwipe gets played each round). EDH has so many possible strategies and keywords that it is impossible to rely on the cards that exist alone to incorporate answers to threats into your decks. It really helps a lot to have some idea about what you will be up against somehow. Playtesting netdecks gives you an idea about what could be out there (for example, one hugely common strategy is Voltron), but it varies so extremely much based on who is playing and what deck they use.
I started out here, taking a long, long time sorting out what I wanted to play from among so many options. I had a lot of my own ideas, too - because there are just so many different things that you can do (although, chances are, if you think of something someone else also thought of it somewhere and you can find their deck to help you with your own ideas because there are only so many Legendaries to choose from). Even so, with each card being only a one-of, it is very likely that you would come up with something slightly different based on what you find fun because there are so many different cards that do slightly similar things but have a slightly different emphasis.
Some of the things I just "tried out" to see, turned out to be my favorites like Mommy Said So. In other cases, I thought I would love a certain deck / strategy but really didn't (One of the first decks I tried to make was centered on Oona, Queen of the Fae , but in spite of how much I like that card - I didn't like the decks I found and came up with that go with it). By trying things out, I at least got an idea about what kinds of decks I even really liked in EDH (which is very likely to be different than standard). But now I am going through and re-vamping all the decks I made after deciding simply "What do I even like for a deck?". I'd say the first refinement on a deck will involve some major shifts, but the second one may only involve working in the latest expansion into a few decks that it is relevant to - which won't involve nearly as much restructuring. But some restructuring is inevitable.
July 3, 2013 12:31 p.m.
atreyujames says... #16
There is only a few tips I can give you and most are just things I learned NOT to do.
If your playing blue, expect to be targeted sometimes no matter what the situation is. For some odd reason, people like to play things, and kind of get annoyed when they can't. (meta dependant)
If you win with an infinite combo, your in a worse spot than playing blue, dependant on your meta of course. Often at casual edh tables, infinite combo's are spurred because they cause a lack of interaction and the immediate end of what could have been a long fun game.
Mass land destruction. not fun. ever..... It is understandable to randomly stumble upon putting a Sylvan Primordial under a Mimic Vat and then having no choice but to wreck peoples mana bases. It's also understandable to run the aforementioned Helldozer or Acidic Slime to deal with the real problem lands like Maze of Ith , Cabal Coffers , or Gaea's Cradle , but the moment you run Armageddon or Ruination I can bet people will hate you a little inside XD.
This one is just a little tip, but aggro usually is not the best strategy in edh. Its all right to attack with a Goblin Guide 1st turn for 2 in standard because hey, that's a 1/10th of their life gone. but when you have to do that 20 times (times about 3 opponents) as well as get past the usually large creatures thrown in front of you... its not gonna work so well. That's not to say aggro doesn't work, it just is not the best choice.
Finally I suggest just having fun. If you see a card like Scrambleverse that you wanna throw in your deck for shits-and-giggles then do it! If you want to build a pillow fort behind your many Propaganda copies then fine! If you want to amass a hoard of the undead with Grave Titan then sacrafice them all all to a Carrion Feeder equppied with a Whispersilk Cloak while you have a Diregraf Captain draining everyone on the field then by all means get er' done!
July 3, 2013 2:57 p.m.
other "fun" cards include Timesifter , Hive Mind +Eye of the Storm , and good ol' Dovescape .
July 3, 2013 5:22 p.m.
my standard deck runs Acidic Slime and Progenitor Mimic mixed with Infinite Reflection against control and Thragtusk and the later two cards for aggro
Devonin says... #2
It depends entirely on your meta and your intentions.
There are placed where EDH is exclusively 4/5-turn combo wins, and places where the first hour of play is just establishing board position so silly Timmy 6-10 drops can come out.
One universal truth of EDH (unless you're building your deck explicitly around this) is non-basic land. Get all of it. For EDH, the best thing I ever did was buy a bunch of revised dual lands, and then trade a bunch of them for a massive pile of fetches, shocks, and other utility lands.
July 3, 2013 10:02 a.m.