Can I Play Shaman of the Great Hunt in a EDH Gruul deck?
Asked by Doniumbra 5 years ago
I know his ability has blue in it, but im obviously going to play it with green. So can I not use him because there is "technically blue in the card; or is that only the case in regards to the casting cost?
See I would beileve that He identifys as a RBG card but he cant be destroyed by a simple card like Active Volcano so therefore it shouldnt matter what mana symbols he has in the rule text because its just not true. He's not RBG he's a red card you can't change that. This rule basically says you cant have any color that your commander doesnt have even if you pay the ability corectly unless you use extort. And I dont know why this is a rule but it's actually ridiculous.
October 28, 2018 1:02 p.m.
I understand it, it just limits decks and it's pointless
October 28, 2018 1:04 p.m.
The limitation is not pointless - it is the point. Commander was designed to place significant limits on deckbuilding. This limitation makes your choice of commander critical, as there is an opportunity cost to picking a commander with limited colours.
It’s also important to remember this rule cuts both ways. If the rule said you only looked at the colour of a card, Tasigur, the Golden Fang would be mono-Black, which wouldn’t make sense at all.
October 28, 2018 1:15 p.m.
Ok, but the only reason Tasigur, the Golden Fang works is because he's legendary. If he wasnt he may as well just be another Shaman of the Great Hunt
October 28, 2018 2:14 p.m.
His legendary status is irrelevant - it’s the same rule either way.
Consistency is important - you can’t have one colour rule for the commander, and a different one for the 99. That’s mess - it’s better to have a single rule applying to all aspects of the deck.
As explained, Colour Identity is the only reasonable way to deal with this. Tasigur, Ramos, Dragon Engine, and many more would be hampered or rendered useless if the actual colour was used.
Imagine a split rule - sometimes Tasigur is mono-Black (if he is in the 99), other times he is Black/Green/Blue (if he is your commander). It’s pointlessly confusing.
October 28, 2018 2:30 p.m. Edited.
Basically for the purposes of EDH/Commander deckbuilding, it doesn't matter if you're only going to play a card using a certain color, or only half of a split card, or whatever. If you want to include cards like Far / Away, Archangel Avacyn
Flip, Shaman of the Great Hunt, General Tazri, or Creakwood Liege in a deck, you need to care about its color identity. Each of these cards has a color identity that is a sum of all its parts, not just what is in its casting cost.
Far / Away is UB, so you can't run it in a mono-blue Commander deck just because you aren't planning to ever play Away. Archangel Avacyn
Flip is RW because you count the back side of the card in the color, so it can't go in GW decks. Creakwood Liege is still GB, even though you could cast it with just one of those colors, so it can't go in your Gruul deck. General Tazri is five-color, so you need a five-color deck. And your Shaman of the Great Hunt needs a Temur deck (or more) to work.
Limitations like this make deckbuilding interesting and a challenge. Of course, there are always the people who just find the cheapest five-color commander they can just so they can avoid the color identity problem and end up playing 99-card singleton instead of actual EDH.
Of course, your particular group is always welcome to houserule it so that you could run Shaman of the Great Hunt in your deck.
The reason Extort is exempt from the color identity is because the mana symbol only shows up in reminder text, and reminder text isn't always guaranteed to be printed on the card--see Air Elemental (M19) versus Air Elemental (Ixalan).
October 28, 2018 4:28 p.m.
Rhadamanthus says... #8
Doniumbra: Answers to this question have been up for a while. I chose one to mark as the "Accepted Answer" so that the thread can move out of the Unanswered queue. Please remember to take care of this yourself in the future.
Caerwyn says... Accepted answer #1
Please link your cards using double brackets:
Shaman of the Great Hunt
Commander cares about colour identity, which is distinct from the colour of a card.
A card’s colour is defined by the card’s mana cost, or colour indicator if applicable (a dot next to the card type, like the Blue one on Ancestral Vision).
Colour identity looks the colour indicator and at all the mana symbols on the card - both in casting cost and rules text - except those found in reminder text (such as the mana symbols in Extort’s reminder text).
For the purpose of both colour and colour identity, hybrid mana counts for both colours.
As such, Shaman has Blue in its colour identity, and can only be played alongside a commander with Blue.
October 28, 2018 12:53 p.m.