Spoils of Victory #5: Kothoped, Hoarder of Souls

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

I present you the last three legends that are somewhat useful as a commander:

I'm obviously leaving out this dude, but he's just plain bad (in EDH/everywhere), be it as a general or in the 99. However two of the above shown three cards aren't too exciting either. There's Dwynen, a cost-efficient elflord that also brings some extra blocking power and lifegain. And while that's definitely a card that has the potential of being a pretty good elf commander, building an elf deck is basically always the same thing regardless of the commander.
The parents of Chandra on the other hand, called Pia and Kiran, could be very interesting if it wasn't for their overly expensive ability. Bringing 4 power for 4 mana on the table while offering some additional value is pretty neat ... in standard. But unfortunately in EDH dealing 2 damage to something doesn't really do much, especially if you spent 3 mana doing so.
That leaves us with an italian demon. Let me give you the translation first:

Flying

Whenever a permanent owned by another player is put into the graveyard from the battlefield, you draw one card and lose 1 life.

Not too shaby, since the effect is quite useful and he brings a solid body with evasion to the table aswell. As I've been working on a suicidal Rakdos the Defiler EDH the last couple of weeks, I'm sure to include that card into that, but I'm positive it can function as a general too. So let's see what I can come up with...

The easiest way of triggering him is of course destroying opposing permanents, but being mono-black basically limits our options to creatures:

Symmetric wrath effects would also net us a bunch of cards, but they'd also destroy our general, making him cost 8 the next time we play him. Of course I would play the symmetric ones too but only a few since I would play these cards:

While the outer two are very expensive to cast, their impact should be worth the investment. Deluge on the other hand is kind of dangerous. Obviously you should play it for a maximum of 5 life, so your general doesn't die, but if there are too many creatures on the board, paying 5 life and then drawing 10 cards and loosing another 10 life can bring you down into the danger zone pretty quickly.

Speaking of the danger zone:

Once your deck gets going, you're in for a lot of cards but you'll also loose a lot of life. To prevent dying to your "awesomeness", you should play some cards like these since each of them will net you around 15-30 life each game and that equals to 15-30 cards to be drawn without putting yourself in danger of dying all of a sudden.

Luckily there are even more synergetic cards when it comes to life combined with drawing cards...

I want to highlight the Sword and the Journal here! Managing to connect with a sword after you've drawn a chunk of cards off of a wrath or one of the "combo suicide" cards (that will get mentioned a little bit later), will not only negate all the life loss but probably net you an extra 2-4 life. Same goes for the Journal, which in addition to negating the drawback, also lets you keep all the cards in your hand, so they'll gain you even more life if the Journal keeps triggering.
And the ol' Psychosis Crawler is always there for you, so whenever you draw a card and loose a life, things stay "fair" and each opponent also looses a life. Fair, heh-hehehe-he!

In addition we have some cards that will both trigger Kothophed AND gain life making them the perfect cards for the deck:

At the beginning of my brainstorming session, I said that mono-black can only destroy creatures. That's correct 98% with 98% of the cards, but there are some very unique ones that let you interact with (other) permanents.

I especially like Smallpox here, since you'll loose three cards but draw nine (4 player game) from Kothophed while your opponents also lost three cards each. Undercity Plague and Curse of the Cabal (in suspend mode) are more consistent ways to trigger him that also allow you to manage your life total a bit better but who doesn't like drawing 9 cards and loosing 10 life for two black mana.
Just make sure your Curse of the Cabal only goes off when your life total is above 30 because you're dead quicker than you can pronounce "Phthisis" correctly - suspend is NOT a "may cast"!

And for those who don't think that's enough self-inflicted pain and want even more splashy plays, I have those bad boys in store:

Casting any one of these cards will result in three things eventually:

1. You'll loose all the life
2. You'll draw all the cards
3. You'll loose all the friends

Let's be honest, Smokestack is probably the least "problematic" card here, but in a four player game even at two soot counters you'll have drawn three cards the first time around and 6 cards the second time for a total of nine cards and life. If you now increase it by one more soot counter, you'll loose another 9 life and draw another 9 cards and so on and so forth. It's just nasty, for you and your opponents!

Now some Pox-Math: In the average four player game, if you've cast your commander on time (turn 6) and follow it up with a Pox the next turn, your opponents will have about 6 lands on average + the occasional creature which makes for a total of 4 to 5 permanents (3-4 lands + 1 creature) sacrificed by each player. That equals to you loosing a third of your life and then an additional 12 to 15 while drawing that many cards, so if you were at 40 life you would now be at 14 ( = 40 x 0,66 - 12) or even lower. But you drew 12-15 cards so it's worth! (probably not)
Same applies to Death Cloud, even though I think it's a bit stronger just because your opponents will loose their whole hand while you just reload from the huge amount of triggers you'll get. In the above mentioned pox scenario, if you want them to discard all cards, you'll need to cast a cloud for about X = 5. With that you'll draw an amount of cards somwhere between 18 and 30 cards depending on how many creatures they had. All that will sum up for a lifeloss of 23 to 35 so even at 40 life casting a Deathcloud can be dangerous. But hey, who doesn't like to live dangerous?!

Since Kothophed will also trigger off of lands as we've elaborated, why not make that a little theme:

Combining all the lands that get sacrificed to destroy a land with Crucible of Worlds isn't much of a new tech. But drawing cards from it definitely is, especially since Crucible also serves the purpose of making "symmetric" cards like Pox or Smokestack better as we can replay our sacrificed lands.

All in all I can imagine the deck being a very unique and very interesting lockdown-control type of deck and since it is mono black that's definitely something new since most of the time these decks include Blue, Red or White but Black isn't too common.
With that I think I'm finished for today so let me ask you: Is this something you would build/play?

See y'all 'round!

Spoils of Victory #4: Kytheon aka Gideon

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

With the spoiler season of Magic Origins starting somewhat, we have gotten quite the spoiler a few days ago:

So, how could you build a deck around the newest commanding Planeswalker? Well, I can definitely see a few ways to approach this. While there surely is a way to use both sides of him semi-effectively, I think the most reliable approach would be to focus on one of the two sides. So let's start with his "greek hero" side.

As many people on the internet already mentioned, he kind of feels like Isamaru, being a 2/x for one mana. And even though he lacks the one toughness, he more than makes up for it by bringing a useful ability: You can make him indestructible anytime you have 2W available. And while it certainly makes combat even easier with him, the biggest upside is that it allows you to play more mass-removal than you would usually.

Since we're going with an Isamaru-type build, we will be playing quite a few equipments with ways to search specific ones when needed and other general synergies with equipments. Nothing too interesting... Well, no, there are some interactions worth talking about when it comes to the equipment package:

Obviously, when running large amounts of equipment in our deck, Puresteel Paladin is a pretty good card. But what makes him so neat in a Kytheon deck is that he allows you to flip your commander into Planeswalker Mode while maintaining momentum. As long as you have 3 or more equipments on the battlefield you'll be able to animate Gideon and equip him without having to spend any amount of mana. 

Getting a huge boost in power plus lifelink onto a indestructible creature is also good value, and while Loxodon Warhammer is probably the better option for getting that, having a second copy of an effect like that is sometime very helpful. Especially since lifelink is pretty hard to come by in the equipment section. 

And then there is Scourglass! I already mentioned, that sweepers are what makes Kytheon better than Isamaru in some situations. What's so nice about Scourglass, is that not only does it also kill opposing enchantments that might prevent you from attacking, but it will also a) not destroy your equipments and b) doesn't need as much mana in the same turn as other cards do since it essentially only needs you to have the 2W to make Kytheon indestrcutible. Of course all this comes with the downside of being exposed to removal for a full round before going of, but hey great power comes at a price!

Talking about onesided sweepers...

Another Scourglass effect, a very versatile com... waaaaiiit a second! It destroys EVERYTHING except your equipments, the occasional mana rock and if you spent enough mana Kytheon will also survive. I admit that in order to pull that off you'll need to spend 13 mana, but it will most likely just straight out win you the game, so why not?! Austere Command, being the staple that he is, shines here aswell, allowing you several good modes. And Divine Reckoning is the incarnation of a voltron-sweeper. Sometimes it gets a bit awkward when facing other voltron decks though... Nobody's perfect I guess!

And now something completely different! Let us turn around 180° and focus on building the deck around the planeswalking side of our commander sp let's get a quick reminder of what it can do:

Alright, we can force our opponents to attack Gideon, that might come in handy...

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Make something indestrutible, pretty useful aswell...

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And last but not least, turning him into a beater... We already covered that.

All that while having 3 loyalty when flipping. So far so good...



So how can we abuse those abilites? Aside from doing the obvious, which is trying to generate the most possible value from turning a creature indestructible, how about we force opponents to attack and then punish them for it? Might not be overly competitive but sure as hell sounds like fun!

Unfortunately, since planeswalkers are relatively new, a lot of cards will say something along the lines of "...dealt damage to you..." or "...attacking you..." which doesn't really help since the creatures will be attacking Gideon.

So how about stuff like this?

Pretty straight forward I would say. Let's look a other possible ways to use Gideons +2 ability to our advantage...

Sometimes you can even create what I would call a very durdly engine:

Now, there are several cards like the eight I mentioned so far, but how do we prevent Gideon from dying if we don't have one of the removal spells handy?

Comeuppance even protects him against burn!

Now we might face a problem... As the deck looks for now, we're very well set to use and abuse our Planeswalker, but we're pretty bad at actually getting him to flip. Of course the best way of getting him to flip is playing some amount of token producing cards,... so why not do exactly that? Even later, with Gideon being a Planeswalker we can use those tokens to attack for damage or have them be chump blockers for their general.

With those tokens you can even gain a bunch of life triggering your Patron of the Kitsune or the Righteous Cause. Just make sure that your token producing cards either have scaleability like Secure the Wastes or also offer something else like evasion or some pump.

So how can Gideon help us actually win the game?

Making good use of the +1 ability you can semi-lock the game with Magus of the Disk or go for an Armageddon on an empty board on which you can then finish the game with Gideon becoming a creature. You could even equip Gideon with Worldslayer (since he is indestrcutible), attack to trigger the sword and empty the whole board while you're left with a Planeswalker that can attack for four commander damage each turn. If that's not grindy enough for you, you can also always go for the old...

Lattice-Disk-Forge combo, and since you already play the Magus of the Disk you actually have two Disk effects to go along with Lattice and Forge.

Whatever you choose to go for, the more aggresive greek hero or a more controlly walker among planes, I'm sure the deck will end up interesting and fun, so I'm really looking forward to Magic Origins being printed and sold

That's it for today, I hope you enjoyed reading my take on Kytheon and Gideon.

See y'all 'round!

Sneaky little Muffinses!

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

It's been quite a while since I've posted something one could eat (given he followed my instructions). And since I've been struck with a severe muffin feaver why not post my latest - somewhat experimental - creations?

Green-Banana-Muffins

Pumpkin seed oil - a styrian specialty - is one of the most interesting things to cook with. And despite it being used for salads mostly, I found that its taste matches very well with that of a banana. So why not put that to some good use?

You'll need:

• 200g flour
• 100g sugar
• 200ml water
• 8g backing powder
• 16g vanilla sugar
• 2 bananas (the riper the better)
• 2 tablespoon pumpkin seed oil
• 1 tablespoon vinegar

Mix flour, sugar, water, baking powder and vanilla sugar together. Then squash the bananas in a seperate bowl and add the pumpkin seed oil, stir until you get a mash. Add that mash to your dough,

and stir a bit, then add the vinegar and stir a little longer until your dough gets really smooth.

Now everything left to do is to fill five sixths of your muffin cups with it, and then bake everything at 200°C for about 18 minutes in a pre-heated oven. 

(unfortunately I haven't made a photo of them... they look really cool trust me!)

Apricot-Chocolate-Muffins

While they're a little less experimental, they were still as yummy! And the recipe is as easy as the first one... To be honest they're almost the same: 

• 200g flour
• 100g sugar
• 200ml water
• 80ml plant oil
• 8g backing powder
• 16g vanilla sugar
• 25g cocoa
• 100ml apricot brandy/apricot liqueur (you could use more but I like the muffins to just have a slight aromatic touch)
• 1 tablespoon liquid malt
• 1 tablespoon vinegar

Mix together all the ingredients in a bowl, adding the vinegar after you've already stired a bit (so it doesn't react immediately with the backing powder). Fill five sixths of your muffin cups with the dough, and bake at 200°C for about 18 minutes.

Both of these recipes are incredibly easy to make, don't require hard to get ingredients and therefore should be absolutely fool-proof! :-)

So... muffin away and see y'all 'round!

Spoils of Victory #3: Avaricous Dragon

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

A lot of cards have been spoiled now, but most of them have hardly been relevant for our beloved EDH-format. Especially since the last wave of cards are common and uncommon reprints (or functional reprints).
But still there is one card worth discussing:

yet another 4/4 dragon for 4

While his abilites definitely seem a bit awkward, they have the potential to heavily synergize with certain strategies. So what do you have to look for? Well, first of all, you need a deck that already employs such a strategy, since building around one card really only works when that card is your commander. What strategies am I talking about?

Everything that involves the graveyard of course! Kind of obvious isn't it? Of course not all Daretti decks are that centered on abusing his -2 ability but they'll still be able to use Avaricious Dragon without worrying too much about the "drawback".

Starting with Daretti, I think the most overlooked aspect of the interaction of the two cards is that, you'll be able to see 4 cards every turn at the cost of 0 mana. When looking at it from that direction the "discard your hand at the end of turn" ability doesn't seem so bad all of a sudden since, because we're playing EDH, the games are very slow and at a point where you get to have Dragon+Daretti in play, your mana should've reached a point where you're able to cast both cards in your turn anyway if you want. And if you hit really expensive cards, they should a) be artifacts and b) you should be fine cheating them into play with Daretti anyway. So if you hit them with your first two draws, you can discard them to Daretti to draw two more and if you hit them with your Daretti draws, you'll discard them at the end of turn.
Additionally having a card like Avaricious Dragon in play, helps a lot to ensure your Planeswalker stays in play making it more likely that you'll be able to (ab)use the synergy between the two.

Even though, he synergizes with decks that want certain cards to hit the graveyard you'll still loose cards you would've liked to keep in hand from time to time. That is if you get him into play the "normal" way since you will have to discard your hand first and you'll only get to draw cards from him if he lives until your next turn.

That is where Feldon and Malfegor come in and funny enough both with a very different approach. Let's start with Feldon first: With Feldon you're able to revive your Dragon during upkeep to draw an extra card. Then you can play your turn, even attack with your Dragon and, since most of the Feldon decks I've seen run these types of cards anyway, use...

... a sacrifice outlet to get rid of the dragon before your endstep, netting some additional value AND avoiding the discard trigger (if you so desire). Note that both Bosh and the Trading Post let you sacrifice an artifact and since Feldon reanimates creatures as "an artifact in addition to its other types" you still get to use them.

So how about Malfegor? Why does he synergize so well with the Dragon without having to change up the deck? Pretty straight forward: A Malfegor deck is always full of stuff that let you get cards out of your graveyard, reanimation cards, cards with flashback, etc etc.

And once you've cast Malfegor you have no hand anyway, which means the drawback of Avaricious Dragon is pretty much non-existent the first time around.

Then again, which deck likes cards like these too? Right, Glint-Eye Nephilim! Of course Glint-Eye isn't officially legal in EDH as a commander, but many playgroups still allow for it to be played as one. And, as always, more colors equal more possibilites:

Cards like these are perfectly reasonable with Glint-Eye on their own, with Moonring Mirror being one of my favourites. Now when combined with our Dragon, they'll work just as fine while giving your deck another card to fuel the draw-discard-graveyard-based interactions that will be surely built into it. I want to highlight Moonring Mirror here again, since it allows you to pick up a pretty big chunck of cards in a crucial turn, all made possible by the extra draws from Dragon and/or Nephilim.

All in all, I feel like Avaricious Dragon, while being a card with a heavy drawback, definitely will see play in EDH. Be it in the above mentioned decks where he just naturally fits into, or in decks where the theme synergizes with the Dragon while the commander just provides the colors, EDH is a format where recurrsion and "cheating" things into play are pretty common. And since the Dragon does help fuel such strategies I can't imagine people not playing him.

That's it for now, next time I'll probably review the newly spoiled planeswalkers. With that - and some more questionable interactions with the Dragon - ....

See y'all 'round

Archetyping #4: Ramp

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

Waiting for the spoiler season of Magic Origins to start, I started working on some of my decks, especially the ones I wasn't so happy with. While doing so I noticed that a vast majority of my decks had a ramp portion in them, but "only" 3 (out of my 25 finished decks) had it as a primary plan. And while that might come down to personal preference, I figured it would be a good idea to write about the archetype, since it is often overlooked and branded as something else. You'll see what I mean by that in just a minute.

The Main Plan

First of all: What does a Ramp-Deck do that's different from other decks? The most interessting thing about this question is that it's not easy to answer at all. Especially the so-called "Goodstuff"-Archetype is kind-of overlapping with "Ramp"...while calling some decks "goodstuff" is just fine, the term is generally overused and I feel like 50% or more of these decks should be called "ramp" instead. So what does a ramp-deck do?

1.) It plays some sort of permanent mana acceleration during the early stages of the game. Often they even chain them together, so for example, play a ramp-spell of some sort on turn 2 and then play another - more expensive - ramp spell on the turn after (which is possible due to the extra mana from the turn before). There are several types: Putting lands into play from your library, putting extra lands into play from your hand, artifacts and creatures, all with their own strengths and weaknesses.

For example cards like Azusa need you to have more Lands in hand than usual to function at full efficiency. This will mean that you might not have something to play with all that mana and if you do you could be short one or two mana. Thran Dynamo offers a lot of mana but doesn't provide colored mana which might hurt some decks. And of course, every type of ramp that involves creatures is weak to removal, especially mass-removal.

2.) After establishing a lead in mana the decks will and should try to leverage
their advantage by casting more powerful spells than their opponents have access to at the moment. That can be a really big and/or hard-to-deal-with creature, a very powerful instant/sorcery or even an expensive planeswalker. These types of cards are often referred to as "Bombs":

3.) One of the bigger problems for these decks is card advantage, because you'll "use" cards in order to get to such a large amount of mana as fast as possible. So the last part of executing a successful ramp plan should always be "reloading" (= drawing a chunk of cards) to be able to use your mana advantage for more than one or two turns. Luckily those decks got enough mana to cast some really nice ones at doing so, but of course it doesn't have to be expensive...

Sometimes 2.) & 3.) are executed in reverse order but I guess you get the general idea.

As I see it, your deck doesn't have to do this and only this to be a ramp deck but once the deck is dedicating a good portion of its 100 cards (not only the omnipresent Sol Ring etc.) to accelerate into expensive cards, it should count as a ramp-deck.

How to build "Ramp".dec

There are of course many ways to approach deckbuilding, so the following instructions are by no means absolute. I just want to showcase how I would start building such a deck at the example of one of my own decks.

To start things off, you'll want to choose a commander. To be a useful commander a card should have as many of the following porperties as possible:

• Expensive "Bomb" on its own. This will mean that you can focus deckbuilding on Step 1.) as you'll never have to worry about finding a card to cast with all that mana

• Provide "reload", therefor ramping into your commander is a way to fill your hand again to find bombs, more ramp or assemble a combo.

• Offer a way to ramp, which - again - makes deckbuilding easier since you can play more bombs and/or drawspells because you have a reliable source of ramp.

• Make it difficult for your opponents to catch up. This is often overlooked, but most of the time, your opponents will catch up after a few turns, so if you find a way to delay that, you might be able to close out the game before they can. This is the least important aspect but I thought I should mention it anyway

Once you've settled on a Commander you should ask yourself:

1. What type of ramp would synergize best with your commander? 
2. Is there a certain type of bomb/carddraw I should play because of my commander/ramp-package?

My example general is Maelstrom Wanderer, just because he's the perfect example of a very linear yet interessting deck. He's the perfect hybrid between a bomb and a "reloading" spell, since the deck should be built in a way where you either hit more big creatures or a carddraw spell of some sort. And - if built correctly - even hitting your ramp spells isn't always that bad.

Let's look at question #1 first:
On the surface it wouldn't really matter too much what type of ramp you run in a Maelstrom Wanderer deck, since your only goal is casting him and net a ton of value while also hitting for quite a lot of damage. BUT! The more you think about it, the more you realize that creatures are so much better than anything else. Why? Because he gives all the mana creatures you will occasionally hit when cascading haste, which means if you are "unlucky" and hit two of them you might be able to cast another spell from your hand that turn.

Let's say you hit the Sage and the Elder on your cascades... that means you can cast an Acidic Slime or a Mulldrifter after you've cast a Maelstrom Wanderer and then attack with both. Of course you can do the same with artifacts but the ones that provide multiple mana per activation are colorless most of the time which means you would be short colored mana to cast another spell.

Question #2: Well, certainly you should avoid spells that have X in their mana cost, but other than that you're pretty much ... who am I lying to?! Creatures! That's the answer. Simply because running creature based ramp involves "restricted mana" (Somberwald Sage) which is - most of the time - restricted to either creatures in general or a certain creature type (see Smokebraider). Therefor you should run creatures as your threats, creatures as your drawspells, creatures as your lands... well maybe you should play lands as your lands. But you get the idea. The more creatures you use in the deck, the more things you can play with that restricted mana, the more consistently you can do one of those sick turns where your board explodes while your hand gets bigger.

as for "reloading"...

Now tell me that is not a thing of beauty! Wanderer into Thunderfoot Baloth for example not only creates 18 power with trample out of nowhere, the Baloth also transforms your tiny little mana dorks into creatures that can profitably attack. Another card that is just awesome would be Species Gorger: The turn he comes into play he can attack for six alongside your general, and the next turn you'll get the opportunity to bounce your Wanderer and cast him again... drawback? Not today!

With that I think I'll let your thoughts wander through the endless possibilities one could build a ramp-EDH. I hope I've inspired you to build a new deck, or to change some existing deck of yours. If not maybe you've at least learned something or found my ramblings somewhat entertaining.

See y'all 'round!

Spoils of Victory #2: Hixus

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

I'll be honest with you, the amount of positive feedback I got for my last post (Spoils of Victory #1: Liliana) has increased my motivation to keep up this blog tenfold. Not that I considered turning it down in the near future but seeing that you boys and girls out there like it sure helps.

Sorry, you're here for Hixus I can imagine, so Hixus you will get!

Okay then, as you can see, the power/toughness hasn't been revealed yet, but since that's a pretty low factor for playability in EDH most of the time I still feel like we can get a good sketch on what you'll be able to do with the card.

Hixus, Prison Warden

Let me get to the most important part first: I don't think Hixus will be a great commander. Why? Because he is basically a mix of all the bad parts of the following three cards:

Yes he does exile like the Angel, but you will take the damage first, and while he does punish them for connecting - like Michiko - in the short run, "enters-the-battlefield"-abilites (ETB) are a major player in the format, therefor he's a value-machine for your opponents waiting to get abused like Dissipation Field. Ever played a game where someone had a Dissipation Field out, an opponent attacked him, bouncing his whole team, then playing Wrath of God ? Bad feeling, and the same way it works with Hixus, they won't even have to play their creatures again.

"Can one break Hixus, and if so how?"

The only cards that can make him somewhat playable as a commander still don't make him fantastic. And building a mono-white deck around a commander that needs 3 specific cards to work isn't the thing you'd want to do...

And those card (except the Containment Priest) don't even prevent the "Safe Haven"-into-Wrath-play... Doesn't look promising!

We've ruled out the "getting played as a commander"-part, but how about fitting him into some existing decks?

I was talking about how bad it could end up if you control Hixus, didn't I?! Attack with your team, flash him in after blockers were declared, give control to the player you attacked, et voilá! You'll only need a way to make Hixus leave the battlefield and you will get a bunch of creature entering the battlefield again. Are there good options.....?

All perfectly fine cards in a Zedruu-ETB deck. You can donate your ETB-creatures - which will have done their job once you got their ETB-trigger - to draw cards in your upkeep and then Capsize/Navigator to get them back for more value again. And with Capsize you have a quite funny loop of blinking your whole team with Hixus. Or you just exile him with Oblivion Ring and donate that one after you've got some creature to get exiled by him.

Now to make the mentioned Hixus-play work, you need a way to "donate" Hixus during combat since otherwise he is a potential blocker for your opponent. And while Zedruu is a way to do it, offering so much potential carddraw makes her hard to untap with.

Luckily those are all cards (except maybe Domineering Will) that normally get played in Zedruu-lists for obvious reasons. Confusion in the Ranks is of course the single best option for comboing with Hixus since you'll also get to steal a creature for good.

So what can we say about Hixus summing it all up? He's definitely not a highly exciting or relevant card for the format, and while he could have a place in some Zedruu-decks, I doubt that he will see much play outside of that in EDH, be it 1v1 or Mulitplayer.
Let's just hope the spoiler-season of Magic Origins reverts back to lilianaesque playability when it starts rather than what Hixus brings. And with this I'm going to end this entry...

See y'all 'round!