plakjekaas Deckling -

• Edit User
• Edit Profile
• Enable styles
• Disable styles
• Unblock user
• Block user
• Disable chat
• Enable chat
• Remove friend
• Add as friend
• Gift Tokens
• Settings

Etched Oracle could do great things in a deck like this

Nessian Boar ?

Chandra's Incinerator might not fit the deck you're trying to make, but it's a possible 1 mana 6/6, thought I should suggest it.

Caerwyn "As for absolute order creating peace... one just has to look at the totality of history to know that is a silly assertion. Throughout all eras of history, the imposition of absolute order never becomes absolute. Tyranny of a certain philosophy never results in a true hegemony in belief--there is always conflict, and those seeking to impose their world view through force must continue to use force to maintain order. That simply is not peace; it's subjugation."

Of course this is true, because in the totality of history, there has never been a mono white society established. Even though they're a representative tribe for white, Humans come in all colors and there's too many conflicting worldviews, especially in real life Humans. So the imposition of worldviews of order may have been totalitarian, but if your subjects don't share the same focus on order, then absolute order, and therefore peace, hasn't been and can't be established, just as we saw happen in history.

Caerwyn I quoted my source, and that source quotes this article from the head designer of MtG, so you might think my view is flawed, but at least it's consistent with the way magic cards are created, which is probably relevant in this discussion.

On top of that, I'm not sure if you can distinguish order from peace, if you enforce order in the proportions of your evil white example. When all citizens obey and uphold the law, after it has been violently implemented, there's no room left for conflict, especially no violent conflict, as that would violate the established order. If you crack down hard on violations of order, you're doing it in the name of peace, of ending conflict.

You can fight for peace like the Avengers, or fight for peace like Thanos or Ultron. It's possible I refused to see the flavor text's portrayed conflict as a white vs white one, because the masses who rise up to an emperor, would do so to improve the situation for the many, even at the cost of their own safety. The good of the many outweighing the needs of the individual is a textbook example of white, a lot more so than an oppressive emperor.

Alright then, my second objection to Mcat1999 's suggested flavor text: quenching an uprising feels a lot more like an example of Mandate of Peace , than a Stifle . The masses rising from the slums, raising swords feels like a depiction of the combat step, way more than the activated ability of a creature or planeswalker.

Mcat1999 except that a corrupt emperor who oppresses the masses for its own benefits is not white in philosophy. Selfishness at the expense of others is as black as it gets. Masses of commonfolk rebelling to uphold the laws broken by a corrupt government, those are the white party in the conflict.

The emperor perfoming a ritual to obtain omnipotence, and the valiantly defying masses rising up against him to Cancel the conjured magic, and restore law & order back to the world, that's the flavor of a white Stifle . That's why white has so many weenies with rule-imposing static effects, the little guy upholding the law and ensuring the silly blue, black, red and green Mages obey. That's why they're supposed to be symmetrical effects like on Leonin Arbiter , Tocatli Honor Guard and Thalia, Guardian of Thraben , because nobody is above the law, especially not yourself. That's why I think your flavor text would fit a colorshifted - Stifle , and not really a one.

What you're doing is translating your own interpretation of game mechanics, as they are, into color philosophy, by what you think the intended purpose was behind a card like Armageddon ; Instead it should be the other way around, letting established color philosophy guide the design process of the (flavor of the) card.

From the article on Colors found at MTG Wiki:

White

White puts value in the group, the community, and its civilization as a whole. White believes that suffering is a by-product of individuals not prioritizing the good of the group. White's ultimate goal is peace—a world where there is no unnecessary suffering, a world where life is as good as it can be for each individual, a world where everyone gets along and no one seeks to disturb the bonds of unity that White had worked so long to forge. To govern and protect its community, White makes use of and puts value in a number of broad concepts; morality (ethics, grace, truth), order (law, discipline, duty), uniformity (conformity, religion), and structure (government, planning, reason). White is a color commonly associated with good and justice, but if left unchecked or if everyone is not working toward the same unified goal, White can become authoritarian, inflexible, and capable of sacrificing a small group for the sake of a larger one. Everything necessary to preserve the laws, rules, and governance that White created.

I really cannot rhyme these described motivations with a corrupt Emperor oppressing its nation's people, that's why I don't agree with this being the flavor text for a white card as is, no matter how politically relevant the metaphor.

I don't fully agree with the flavor text, but the card is probably fine to see fringe play in commander at .

Almost all counterspells in white are colorshifted versions of blue spells: ( Mana Tithe -> white Force Spike , Rebuff the Wicked and Dawn Charm -> white variations of Turn Aside , Lapse of Certainty -> expensive white version of Memory Lapse ), originating from Conflux and Planar Chaos, which are exempt from following the rules of the color pie because of lore reasons. The one exception being Illumination , being specifically limited to the same targets as Disenchant , but answering them on the stack instead of in play, combined with a similar downside as Swords to Plowshares .

So in the next set where color functionality gets scrambled? Sure, print another white counterspell, maybe we can get a white Stifle , or maybe a white Spell Swindle this time, to fall in line with Smothering Tithe .

But my internal reasoning says: to counter a spell, you'd need a lot of knowledge about magic, be a wizard that has seen and done enough magic to recognize on the fly what spell is used against him, and prepare an according response before it's too late. That doesn't feel white at all, white is all about setting up and enforcing rules to prevent bad stuff from happening before it actually happens. And if that fails, White's way of preventing the bad stuff is by Gods Willing or a battalion of soldiers' Unbreakable Formation , just defending what you have, unable to offensively mess with your opponent's magic. Which Stifle very much does.

I'd say white can already counter plenty of triggered abilities though, mainly through Hushbringer , Tocatli Honor Guard and Hushwing Gryff . Again, enforcing rules before the bad stuff happens, instead of fighting it just before it's too late.

I'm disappointed the Boros command is not a valid target for Sunforger .

Jace, Telepath Unbound 's -3 is actually better than a Snapcaster Mage trigger at sorcery speed, on behalf of not using the actual keyword Flashback to recast your spell. You can pay alternative costs like Overload on a Cyclonic Rift when you target it with Jace, which Snapcaster can't, because the Flashback cost is an alternative cost itself.

Academy Ruins , Castle Ardenvale and the whole Eldraine cycle, Maze of Ith , The World Tree ... If you look around there's plenty of lands with cool abilities, on top of that, it counts all lands on the battlefield so if you're out of ideas, just play it to see what your opponents are using. It's more of a utility piece that also fixes your colors, than an actual combo piece you aim to win the game with. But a very fun card nonetheless.

Don't forget Karn, the Great Creator :P

Mycosynth Lattice , Sen Triplets and Hedonist's Trove , for the price of an Expropriate , which also usually wins the game as soon as it resolves. Yeah, it's a little over the top '^^

She's fine in the 99, as an effect that's powerful when you get it, but not present in every game you play. Just like Sen Triplets or Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger , you're asking to be dealt with, to be arch enemy, when you put Tergrid, God of Fright  ^Flip in the command zone.

I'm including her in my Rankle, Master of Pranks deck in the 99. The synergy is amazing when you combine them, and by itself, Rankle seems a lot more fair than Tergrid, looming from the command zone.

Do you mean the shelf life to the public, in general? How long a commander will trend on EDHREC? Because those numbers are not at all the same as how long I play the decks I made for specific commanders.

It doesn't help that every set is flooded with potential commanders these days. Kaldheim alone added more than 30 legendary creatures to the roster.

I'm playing Commander for almost 5 years now, and my oldest deck has been led by the same commander for 3,5 years now. My deck with the shortest lifespan was defused in about 4 weeks, because I hardly had fun playing it five times in a row.

It all depends on the commander, the archetype of the deck, if that archetype has many alternative commanders, new commanders adding a color to the deck you already have, and I don't think it's a predictable variable at all. Your local gamestore would love for you to build a new deck every months, so you're in constant need of new cards to play. Lots of players love the non-rotating nature of EDH though, the fact that you don't need to buy new cards to be able to keep playing is a huge appeal to the less invested.

So yeah, a Commander's shelf life is as long as you're able to have fun with it. The general public trends are explained by RNR_Gaming pretty well.

Use Sidisi, Undead Vizier in the command zone to make sure you can easily find her

ShiltonCDXX I think Tibalt's Trickery was a risky attempt, but casting spells for free has always been problematic. They could have fixed it with a simple "counter target spell you don't control" and all would be peachy and degenerate-combo-proof. Some very flashy synergy with Roiling Vortex even. But that ship has sailed with the printing as is.

But really? You make no distinction between playable and format legal? Arcane Signet and Command Tower are Standard legal due to the Eldraine Brawl decks, you consider those actually playable in the format? Is Nyxborn Courser a legacy playable card? Following that, it's impossible to shoehorn in non-standard cards with new sets, because by definition, those cards being in the set makes them Standard cards. How can a card dilute the Standard cardpool if that card by definition contributes to the Standard cardpool? It makes this discussion kind of impossible '^^

ShiltonCDXX The Standard card pool has never been all Standard playable cards. Competitive magic has historically only used a fraction of all available cards in the format, because most cards just aren't good enough. If the Standard card pool wasn't "diluted" with cards like Esika, God of the Tree  ^Flip, it would be "diluted" with cards like Archangel's Light . Just as mythic, even less playable, back in the "good old days" of Standard focusing on Standard.

WotC didn't want EDH to take over, the players did. WotC tried to jump that hype train with Brawl, and when that didn't really took off, they announced 2020 to be the 'Year of Commander' because we like it that much. They're just offering supply to the demand we're showing.

Commander doesn't lend itself for organised play, it is by definition the casual format where fun overrules results and standings. When you organise an EDH tournament, you're rewarding breaking the format with degenerate, unfun and fast win conditions, and it will get stale real fast if cEDH is the main promoted way of playing Commander for the general public. Plus you'll price out new players really fast that way, chasing them out of LGSs. CommandFest areas at MagicFest tournaments was a genius move to attract more players to the big happening of Grand Prix tournaments, but making it the main event would probably be the worst possible decision, offending competitive players with a casual format as headline, while the casual crowd doesn't care at all about who's the best.

And I'm sorry, RambIe but only including the powerful cards as buy-a-box promo's and discontinuing the commander products would actually be insane. Having to buy a full box of a new Standard set, just for a chance of a limited supply promo card that you need for the biggest and most popular format in the world is almost extortion, that would drive up the price on the secondary market through the roof, the controversy would be equal to or greater than the Walking Dead Secret Lair.

The Commander precons are widely regarded as the best product line WotC releases each year. They're an excellent way for new players to step into the game, while offering plenty for experienced players to still get excited about. To stop printing them is like McDonald's to stop selling fries, because "they're just a burger restaurant right?"

And what did Collector Boosters do wrong? There's no new cards in there, only reprints that look nicer, or at least different from the regular cards in the set. That's not a "fix" for any problem, that's offering your players variety, without adding any cards to any format. Literally, a way to make sure everyone gets what they want, without any format suffering more than just releasing the main set would cause.

EDH was created by judges, who after long days of running big tournaments, wanted to play some magic, but not the magic they had been observing and correcting all day. So they made some 3-color singleton (Highlander) decks, commanded by one of the original Shard-colored legendary Dragons from Legends: Arcades Sabboth , Chromium , Nicol Bolas , Palladia-Mors or Vaevictis Asmadi . 5 Elder Dragons, all 7 power. If you got hit 3 times by one of these, you'd lose the game, regardless of your life total. Elder Dragon Highlander, 21 commander damage is lethal.

This resulted in a casual, fun-oriented, table kitchen style of playing magic. Wizards does know that only a very tiny percentage of their player base is actually playing in sanctioned tournaments in established formats. By far the most Magic players are casual kitchen table players that play the game to have fun, beating their friends, not the world. EDH as a format will speak more to those players than to the PTQ- and pro tour-grinding players. Believe me, the top16 GP players at my LGS usually cower in fear when someone suggests to play a game of EDH.

Wizards knows all this and has been printing cards for specifically that casual multiplayer format for the past 10 years now. The first Commander (Wizards' legally safe name for exactly the same format as EDH is) Set came out in 2011 and gave us mainstay generals like Animar, Soul of Elements , Ghave, Guru of Spores , Kaalia of the Vast , Zedruu the Greathearted and The Mimeoplasm .

What has changed, is that more and more people use EDH as their main way of playing magic. Wizards is a company, to keep existing, they need to make money. So when Commander took over from Standard and Modern as the most popular to spend your Friday Night Magic, Wizards found a way to accommodate their finances accordingly. By including cards that work better for multiplayer than for competitive constructed formats in every single set, they ensure every set will be a financial success.

So the whole hipster "I liked commander before every set had specific cards for it"-attitude is understandable, but not at all useful in the world we live in. We made this format the most massively enjoyed format around the world. By making it that successful, we changed how the company makes its money. As long as those cards sell, we will get more splashy multiplayer nonsense, Arcane Signet s, Jeweled Lotus , etc. And that is why green is the kingpin of colors in multiplayer/EDH right now. Green is famously the color of ramp. The term "ramp" even originates from the green Rampant Growth . Green is also the color of big monsters. Green is the color of nature, of harmony, the color that lets you do everything you want, while generally not hurting other players' cards.

I'm going to talk in stereotypes for a bit. People think of black and see Murder , Damnation , not a friendly environment for your own stuff. Red will Vandalblast , Blasphemous Act , Jokulhaups your stuff away. White will Wrath of God , Rest in Peace , Swords to Plowshares , while Thalia, Guardian of Thraben makes it harder for you to play your game. Blue will Counterspell and Cyclonic Rift everyone out of the game. Green will just play a bigger beast ( Worldspine Wurm , Craterhoof Behemoth ). Of course I know of all the Beast Within and Krosan Grip removal green has, but you generally will think of green as the least board-controlling color of them all. It will execute its game plan without meddling with yours. Green will let everyone do broken stuff, but will be doing the most stuff itself because of its Abundance of mana and resources. That's the most friendly way to let everyone at the table have the most amount of fun without adjusting your strategy to group hug. No wonder people like playing with and against that.

When people like green, Wizards is inclined to print better green cards, which makes people want to play green more. This is a positive feedback loop that spirals out of control of you're not careful. It's also not specifically a green problem. I think people call it Power Creep. It's part of keeping a dynamic game like Magic interesting. I think a hypothetical future Standard set without any Commander playable cards in it will cause much more of an uproar in the Magic community than Kaldheim ever could. Hate it or love it, but EDH is ingrained in the fabric of magic itself now, and as long as we enjoy EDH, that will not change. I plan to have the most amount of fun with available cards, regardless of color or intended format. Your mileage may vary.

If, with the enormous card pool of the EDH format, you can't construct a deck of the colors of your liking, without feeling the need to include (or or to a lesser extent), you might be blinded by power and lost track of the philosophy of the format.

Here's a link, for those who might be interested

Not being able to enjoy a deck without letting the splashy new "must-includes" dictate you how to build it, sounds more like a personal problem than a defect in the format to me.

Suspence89 Green has been the go-to for big splashy silly things WAY before EDH was rising up as the biggest format of them all. You can't rejoice about the old days of Prophet of Kruphix and Primeval Titan and then shake your self-proclaimed boomer head at green in its current role in EDH in the same post. If you don't like to have to include green in your deck, then don't. I'm sure there's over 15000 cards still to choose from. Hell, I've built a mono +1/+1 counter deck just to see if I could, and it turned out crazy fun. The beauty of this great game we all love is in your absolute freedom to express yourself through the cards you put in your deck. I currently have 13 decks built, not even half of them play Sol Ring . I only own 2 Arcane Signet . I have as many decks that are green (2 mono , 1 , 1 and 1 five color) as I have decks within Boros colors (2 mono, 2 mono, 1 ). There's no reason to include green in any deck you don't want to, and if you want to play green in every deck, you appear to be a green mage. Why wouldn't you feel appreciated if your color is today's special?

With the enormous amount of complaining of getting nothing and getting everything, I'm sure the paradigm will shift someday to complaining why instead of green, we need to include [insert color here] not too far in the future. Either that or we'll continue trends shown on Command Zone and EDHREC podcasts that show people already shying back from overloading their decks with green. is the 4th most represented monocolor and a shared 2nd with in two-color decks, according to EDHREC stats.

In the end, the best advice I can give is: try have more fun with the cards than with the trends, the cards will last, the trends will pass.

Small correction: you seem to have not read Jace, the Living Guildpact exactly right. The +1 doesn't do the same thing as Teferi, Temporal Archmage at all. Teferi looks at the top 2, puts 1 in your hand and one on the bottom of the library. Jace, however, looks at the top 2, and puts one in the graveyard. Nothing to hand, just self mill. Which seems way worse to me.