TheOfficialCreator, that's pretty sick on its own, but absolutely vile with something like Renata on the board.

Yskr'Trill, Detritus Tactician

Legendary Creature - Insect Soldier

Flying, Vigilance

Whenever a card leaves your graveyard, put a +1/+1 counter on target creature

, , Exile your graveyard: Untap each other creature you control. After this phase, there's an additional combat phase, followed by an additional Main phase.

3/3

Repeat!!!!!

First, I really abhor the spelling of the word "compleat." As well as I understand it, this was begat from internet memes, and found its way into MtG on the card Kaldra Compleat. And it was really funny. At the time.

Now, it's like a toddler who gets a laugh from saying something, and then keeps repeating that same thing over and over because they think that they're going to continue to get the same response. If you've ever been an adult in that situation, in the room with that toddler, then you understand how annoyed I am that they've adopted that spelling as Canon. It was only funny the first time.

Kiora of Oil and Water

Legendary Planeswalker - Phyrexian Kiora

Completed (Imagine that the symbol in ~'s mana cost is split Phyrexian mana. That mana can be paid with Green, Blue, or 2 life. If life was paid, this planeswalker enters with two fewer loyalty counters.)

+2 Tap target creature you don't control. Draw a card.

+1 Non-blue creatures get -1/-1 until your next turn

-X Create an X/X blue Kraken creature token, then Populate X times

4

Make a nonlegendary Planeswalker.

It gave me 111. I think I'll buy a lottery ticket today.

Keskit, Defiler of Life

Legendary Creature - Human Artifacer

, Mill 3 cards: Until your next turn, Artifact Creature cards in your graveyard have Dredge 2

Partner

1/3

Repeat.

Lamplight Genju

Enchantment Creature - Elemental Spirit Illusion

Flying, Vigilance

Whenever a triggered ability of a Shrine you control triggers, put a +1/+1 counter on ~

1/3

Today is national cheese lovers day! Make a card that represents your favorite cheese.

Devilish Crossroads

Enchantment

All creatures have Haste and Deathtouch

Whenever a creature attacks, Devil's Crossroads deals 2 damage to it

And in case that wasn't specific enough

Educational Reform

Enchantment

Creatures with toughness 2 or less have Training (Whenever a creature with Training attacks with another creature with greater power, put a +1/+1 counter on that creature)

Make a nonlegendary creature with Mutate.

Given two and a half pages worth of comments on this thread, I don't think I could add anything new. However, I do want to put in my vote that proxies are perfectly acceptable, on multiple levels.

At the moment, I don't proxy. If I want to build a deck, I first design it on this website as a prototype, playtest it using the tool on the site, promote it (through deck cycling and feature tokens) with the hope of getting suggestions, then decide A) if it's good and/or fun enough to build irl, and B) if I will be able to afford to do so. Then, I shuffle through my collection to find out how many cards I already have, make a price list of whatever I don't, and create a weekly budget for ordering the cards I still need a little at a time. That process probably sounds familiar to a lot of you. I've had decks that took me over a year to finally gather all the pieces for (no pun intended).

In short, I spend a long time and a lot of money to have real cards in all of my decks, and I take pride in doing so. HOWEVER, I also have been playing the game for a reeeeally long time, and have been fortunate enough to have been able to amass a sizeable collection over all of those years. AND, I share a collection with my cousin, who has the same passion for the game as I do, and so our collective buying power has given us both an advantage over all of those decades of buying cards and building decks.

If I was a new player just getting into the game, I'd probably look at the money needed just to maximize the effectiveness of one deck, and run screaming.

I own two decks that would each cost over two grand to build from scratch, and neither of them would likely be competitive in a cEDH meta. I own a few other decks that are worth between $500-$800 that are simply fun, and rarely win even in a casual setting. I saw a T-shirt once with an MtG logo on it with text that read "should've gotten into heroin instead." This game is damn expensive.

Furthermore, the playtesting tool on this site and others like it only do so much in the way of determining how good a deck is. The only real way to know for certain that a deck is good is to play it irl. It's at that point when you know if you need more ramp, or more draw, or if those board wipes are entirely necessary, or if that $50 card will fizzle when facing actual competition. Inevitably, you end up making adjustments to the deck after seeing it in action. And trust me, in the many, many years of playing this game, I can't begin to fathom the amount of times that I've tried over and over again to make a deck work the way I envisioned it, only to eventually give up on it because no amount of revision makes it perform in the way that was originally intended.

So there are a few legitimate arguments here for using proxies. First, for the sake of playtesting a deck before spending the money on it. Second, because you just started playing the game and want to win every now and then. Third, because you are just too poor to keep up with other people. Fourth, because you do own all of those cards, but don't want to continuously shift cards from one deck to another to another. Fifth, because the deck really just needs that Mana Crypt, and that's the only thing it needs, and yes you will at some point use your Christmas bonus or tax refund to get an actual copy of it, but dropping $200 on one piece of cardboard isn't something you can just do all the time, and it's not like it automatically makes you win every game anyway. And also for all of the other reasons people have already named on this thread.

Have you ever bought a ticket to a concert or sporting event for a friend who couldn't afford it, just because you didn't want to go alone, and you knew that they'd love it? How is that different than letting friends use proxies even though you yourself spend money to build your collection? The game is a game, and exists to have fun playing it. That doesn't work if nobody else can afford to play.

Okay, I went on much longer than I intended.

zapyourtumor et al,

The question wasn't whether or not Prismatic Vista was a better card - obviously it is. The question was if this deck needed the ramp that badly. The answer I received was yes, so that's that. I was just thinking that the curve wasn't terribly high, and there was already a lot of self inflicted life loss with the 6 other fetch lands and 4 shock lands, and that possibly the Vistas were only there for landfall triggers.

Is Predator Ooze too slow for the deck? I think it would fit nicely if not. Sorry if that's already been addressed, there's a gagillion pages worth of comments on this deck, hahaha.

TheOfficialCreator Thanks for all that!

This was actually one of the early prototypes I drew up when I first started playing Commander. At that point, I had been playing a 60-card Amass deck for a bit, and loved it. The Gleaming Overseer + Silent Arbiter combo was the key to that deck. And, like you, I struggled to find the right commander to use.

I think that I should update this list now, which will change a great deal of it. Your suggestions are good, and I'll include some of them. However, Yarok and others won't really work, because there are only 5 cards with Amass as ETB triggers. All of the rest of the Amass cards are instants and sorceries, except for Angrath, Captain of Chaos that has an activated ability, and Dreadhorde Invasion that has an upkeep trigger.

If you think of anything else while building your own Amass deck, please share.

Nothing to say about your custom commander that hasn't been said, but thought I'd share this with you. It's a prototype that I made a couple years ago, and could certainly use some revision considering the sets that have come out since then:

Amass With Kenrith

Commander / EDH* Epicurus

SCORE: 18 | 8 COMMENTS | 1218 VIEWS | IN 2 FOLDERS

Thank you, Made_Compleat.

For a lot of things, but amongst them, giving Archelos some love.

May I break this thread by ranting a little bit about Power Creep?

Headline: It Isn't a Bad Thing.

I've been playing since I was 13 years old, in 1994. You know what was the first thing that pissed me off about the game? When Dark Banishing was released in Ice Age, in 1995. You know why? Because, at that point, not a whole lot of shit had been printed that made any of my decks better.

And there was Dark Banishing. A shell of its predecessor, Terror. A card that basically did the exact same thing, but cost one more. Yeah, it killed artifact creatures, but what the hell good did that do anybody back then. And nothing else added to it that made it even close to as good. And, in my mind, I thought, "is anything ever going to make my decks better?" Or are they just going to keep making worse versions of existing cards?

I quit playing the game. Stopped buying packs. Kept my cards, because I never thought they'd be worth anything. Occasionally I would find someone who played, would bring out my old what then began to be called "Legacy" decks, and inevitably trounced them. And, do you know what made me want to start buying cards again? At some point, I started to lose games.

Ok, so I first started buying cards again for the Urza block, because of the fast green creatures with Echo, and because I thought Squirrels were cool. Then, I bought a lot of Mirrodin years later, because I liked both the Affinity mechanic and Equipment subtype therein. I was utterly disappointed with 5th Dawn, but there I was. And I bought a lot of Kamigawa block after that, solely for the flavor. But I quit again after that, because I still owned those decks from long before that were my best, and nothing had made them any better.

I stopped buying cards for many years after that, and then Lorwyn was released in 2007, and I started losing games. Power Creep had set in.

I honestly don't know what it was. Nobody I played with used planeswalkers, so their introduction couldn't have been it. Maybe I had just missed too much in all those years, and new archetypes had emerged. Whatever it was, suddenly my Legacy decks, that hadn't changed much in more than a decade, weren't competing. I had to start buying cards, lest my stance that "new cards will never compete with the old ones" was proven obsolete.

And the hits kept hitting, for years thereafter. I was elated. FINALLY! The cards that were being printed could create decks that could compete with decks that had existed more than a decade ago. And no, I'm not talking about Power 9 decks, but even they could be improved by newly printed cards! There was something better out there, possible and new, to give me a reason to want to continue playing the game!

And by "playing the game," I mean continuing to give my money to WotC. And/or my LGS, TCGplayer, or whomever (way back then, there was a website called Blacborder.com, where I bought all of my singles, but I don't think they exist anymore). Finally, WotC was printing cards that competed with existing cards! Finally, there was a reason to expand my collection! Finally, WotC wasn't just trying to push Standard format for the sake of getting new players to feel like they could keep up, and instead was making old players - like me - feel excited about buying packs again!

And then there was commander. Some of you might not know or remember, but EDH stands for "Elder Dragon Highlander." "Elder Dragon," because in the beginning your commander had to be one, and "Highlander" because that was already the existing name for singleton format ("There can be only one!"). True story: 100 card singleton format existed in 1996. It was called "Highlander" back then. There was no commander. There was no command zone. Just a 100 card singleton deck that forced you to use all those less powerful reprints like Dark Banishing, because the deck was 100 cards and you could only have one Terror. And sometimes, in my experience, your starting life total was still just 20. The wild fuckin west, brah.

And with Commander came a revitalization of a lot of previously overlooked cards. For instance, those 8 copies of Rhystic Study that I had pulled from packs many years prior were suddenly worth a shit. Hard to believe now, but they hadn't been before. Just bulk rares. So at that point, not only were there more and better cards being released frequently, but my old cards that even I had dismissed were becoming relevant. It was like Christmas times 1000!!

So please, don't complain about new cards being too powerful. You don't have any idea what it was like when all that bullshit was being printed in the late 90's. Be grateful that WotC keeps you on your toes. It's a lot more of a beneficial strategy to us players than the creation of the Standard format, where they basically said "we're not ever going to improve on existing cards, so you aren't allowed to use them anymore. Here's a load of less powerful garbage. Please keep buying cards." It keeps us interested in what's being released. It keeps us from taking years-long hiatuses, like I did many times in the past. It keeps new releases relevant, for more than just flavor or shiny new mechanics.

Now we have to grow our collections in order to compete. We have to buy those new cards to keep up. We can't just keep playing that graveyard deck that we built in 1994 and expect to win against these kids that just started playing. We have to adapt, and that keeps the game interesting. Even if it's only changing a card or two in the deck every year. And yeah, if a card comes along every now and then like Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines, that completely wrecks all of the decks that you spent so much time and money building, so be it! That just means that the game is improving, diversifying. It means that there's an avenue for what you already own to get better.

It is a good thing. Get over it.