Spoils of Victory #6: Omnath, Locus of Rage

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

Spoiler season is here again, and with it my "Spoils of Victory" are back. So let's dive right into the two spoilers I brand "most important" to our format so far:

The most exciting card of the spoilers is Omnath, simply because we get yet another possible card to play as a commander! He seems ok as an alternative for Horde of Notions as a elementals general, even though you obviously loose out on cards like Mulldrifter and Shriekmaw. To be honest with you, the more I look at him though, the more he reminds me of an upgraded Version of Titania. I mean, ok, he costs two mana more, but he also gives you access to another color while the tokens are a little bit better, you don't have to play ways to get rid of lands which means you can just play ramp and fatties aswell and as a bonus you get to burn things when your tokens and/or Omnath die. Seems like a pretty good deal if you ask me! So don't be surprised if all those Titania players suddenly go upgrade their decks with red spells and more ramp instead of the wierd "Sacrifice a land..." cards.

Hedron Archive on the other hand might not look so splashy but will certainly have a very big impact on the format. Cards like Ur-Golem's Eye or Mind Stone aren't exactly uncommon and having access the inbred on steroids of the two will certainly make many players very very,... very happy! Especially mono-white&-red decks will be pretty glad to get another good source of card draw. Not to speak of all the artifact based decks that will recur the Archive over and over... *cough* Daretti *cough*. And to be honest, I can even see more decks playing it than just the ones that played mana rocks before, just because the card is too good to be true... Earlygame? No problem, I have this awesome ramp card that will let me skip straight to 6 or 7 mana. Lategame? Meh, I'm running out of gas here. If only I had something to do with all my mana.... wait let me just cash in my Archive and see what I can come up with.

As with all the more generic cards, "building around" Hedron Archive isn't really a thing, especially since it fits into so many existing decks as I already mentioned. That's why I will focus on the possibilites of Omnath 2.0.

Being completely honest, the deck I have in mind is basically a hybrid of existing decks with a touch of something new. There's a) my Broborygmos Enraged deck (List over in "My EDH") which sports a commander with similar casting cost while also revolving around lands and b) the already mentioned Titania shells. Those two combined - with a little Elemental theme thrown into the mix to make further use of Omnath's second ability - are what should be a fun and versatile deck. So let's have a look:

The Elementals that care about lands

Now this is probably the most interessting category of cards to play since it will make use of both parts...

I especially love Fertilid here. He's just good in every portion of the game. Early on he ramps you pretty well into Omnath while later he could be 4GGG (2G to play plus two 1G activations) for two 5/5 tokens plus a Lightning Bolt. Seven mana for 10 power plus 3 points of burn I will take every day of the week. Titania of course is still good in the 99 making a very good second source of tokens. The thought of Omnath in play and then playing Titania returning a fetchland... Value! Value everywhere! 

Since the deck will sport a fair number of ramp, just because Omnath will turn the normally odd Rampant Growths on turn 8 into 1G 5/5s, some other elemental cards would like to have a spot in the deck...

All those cards fit so well into the deck it's unbelievable. Zendikar's Roil give you yet another possibility to create tokens out of ramp and Omnath will make sure that removing any one of them hurts. And if the remove Omnath you can just recast him as mana shouldn't be an issue. Avenger has always been an All-Star in green ramp heavy decks and this deck is no exception. And the Guildmage that seems so innocent with is converted manacost of 2 will make sure all those tokens and other creatures will get some damage through while also providing a good manasink for lategame scenarios where you might be able to pull out some unexpected wins with him providing 12+ power out of nowhere. 

The Landfall/Ramp part

Having a commander that requires a lot of mana while also wanting to trigger landfall makes things very easy. Both basically require the same category of cards:

And while in normal ramp strategies these cards get bad after a while, Omnath always transforms them into creatures and very big ones at that. Essentially the dream is to successfully resolve a Boundless Realms with Omnath in play but I guess I'd take an Explosive Vegetation aswell... let's be "humble". 

So why not use all those ramp cards and play some additional landfall cards just to make things a bit more synergetic.

Sundial for some carddraw, the Expedition to be ready for your first set of tokens as soon as you cast Omnath and another Commander All-Star in Rampaging Baloths to create even more tokens. Now with all this pressure you'll manage to create there're only two things left to do before the decks runs like a well oiled machine...

The finishing touches

We have tons of mana, lots of ways to build a sizeable board and a minimum of dead draws. So far, so excellent! 

Now everything that's left to do is to add generic stuff that help finish the game, reload or give the deck more consistency... namely:

Tutors:

Cardraw:

and...

Finishing spells:

You might've noticed that the deck plays out mainly green. That's very true but playing only few red lands shouldn't be an issue due to the amount of fixing your ramp suite will provide. And having the option to "splash" for some red cards, be it for power or simple utility (e.g.:green has no good removal!), is just awesome. Just don't forget to search for some mountains and you should be fine. Other than that you can and should play more lands than normal (40+) so you can consistently hit every land drop - this will help to keep some ramp spells for after you played Omnath - because drawing lands isn't really that bad in any stage of the game anyway thanks to your commander.

Let's see how the rest of the season pans out, maybe we even get more stuff to play with in this deck. And if not (which is very unlikely if you ask me) it's not that big of an issue since we already have a huge arsenal of cards to choose from.

With this I'm off for today! I wish you an enjoyable spoiler season - getting such a good commander so early in the season definitely got my hopes up - and hope you'll come back for some more content on this blog...

See y'all 'round!

Brainstorming Commanders #7: Lord of Tresserhorn

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

Isn't he a lovely fellow? Full hair, a taste in fashion like noone else,... so thrifty. Only 4 to play him, only 1 to regenerate. Oh, and nevermind about the drawback, it's hardly noticable. He simply seems like the kind of guy you'd want for a long-term relationship.

Jokes aside, I definitely can see him at the helm of a very potent Grixis deck regardless of the direction you take. Let's look through the options available:

Choosing your Archetype

Going with an aggressive route will most probably mean going Voltron(y). It's just there, ready to get built if you take a look at him. Simply giving him double strike will mean he deals 20 commander damage in one swing and finding a way to up his power by one shouldn't be an issue. But that's not all. Not only does he bring a solid body but he's also pretty good at protecting himself with a very cheap regeneration ability.

Then again, opting for a more controlly build can work just as fine, as - without any enhancements - he'll provide a solid clock once you've ground out the game enough. Especially the ability to live through your own sweepers makes him pretty appealing as the general for a control deck.

And as always you can do something in between and even though each category will likely be weaker than when you would've focused on it, giving the deck the option to switch gears as you see fit during the game could make up for that.

Enabling your Commander

Now of course, it's not all love and flowers. Casting Lord of Tresserhorn (LoT) will require some sort of setup, which shouldn't be a problem when you consider it in your deckbuilding process but it's still something not to overlook. So let's see what I can come up with:

So far, so uncreative. The most interessting interaction is probably Nether Traitor since if you decide to go for a voltrony approach he will be a very good "Plan B"-guy for carrying equipments etc. But don't be afraid here's the real value:

Again, the All-Star here is Baleful Strix, being a very good defensive creature, while having to ability to carry equipments aswell. And on top of that returning the Strix with e.g. a Driver of the Dead seems like good value, especially since to get to the graveyard it will either have traded for a creature or died to a removal of some sort.

 

Essentially the only thing I don't like about good ol' crawley is that he requires you to have a zombie subtheme. And while LoT himself is a Zombie, you'll sometimes want to rebuy your Gravecrawler BEFORE you cast your commander meaning you'll need another Zombie.

Don't get me wrong here, a Zombie subtheme is very likely a good choice for Lord of Tresserhorn but I just don't like the idea of giving up all the sweet synergies between Baleful Strix, Mogg Warmarshall, Nether Traitor, etc. - all for one additional good sacrifice target.

Building around the Enablers

Casting 10/4s for 4 is a nice activity every once in a while but sometimes you'll want to do other things. So why not use our existing creature base - optimized towards getting sacrificed for a greater good - and incorporate somewhat of a sacrifice/"when ~ dies"/"enters the battlefield" theme. The best thing is that you'll be able to tune this part of the deck to fit your archetype.

So for example for an aggressive Voltron deck you'll play cards like these:

Just straight to the face, nothing new here.
The control oriented deck on the other hand will opt for something like this:

Skullclamp is a card I'd play in either version. But since the aggressive version of the deck usually will need the creatures to play Lord of Tresserhorn so you can't always clamp them up (most of the good sacrifices have only one toughness) I figured it would be more suited here.

And then we have obvious allstar-type cards (just to mention a few):

Effects like Dictate of Erebos are very much wanted in either version since they'll either clear the board to let Lord of Tresserhorn get through or... well clear the board so you can take control and finish the game... which will include LoT getting through. Card draw is always welcome aswell and the Thoctar is a card I've come to love very dearly due to the ability to either chain gun the board or just beat face with a few counters.

Assembling the Rest of the Gameplan

Volron

Now for the voltrony approach you'll need something to beef up your commander while also making sure he get's through...

Nothing out of the ordinary here I think, besides maybe the Lashwrithe. The reason I would play it is that there's no reason you shouldn't play the old Urbog-Coffers-Map-package and with that in the deck Lashwrithe on its own can easily pump LoT to 21 power.

As I already mentioned having some form of damage doubling mechanic is pretty key in all voltron strategies...

Aggravated Assault may look a little odd since it costs a bunch of mana until it does something but it has two important features: 1) If your LoT has Lighting Greaves (Shroud) attached, you can still grant him an additional combat phase and 2) its CMC is 3... which is relevant because...

Tutoring for your equipment seems like a good idea, aswell as getting some back when it gets destroyed by using your nice sacrifice creatures. Oh and did I mention CMC = 3? Appart from being able to tutor for Warhammer, Sword of X & Y, Fireshrieker and Aggravated Assault you can get Grim Haruspex and several other sweet cards you might want to run in your deck like Dismember, Dissolve, Crosis's Charm etc. etc. so playing the CMC 3 transmute cards is an all around good idea.

Control

Now if you're more of a grinding player things are a little opposite...

While Damnation is definitely very good, I like Blasphemous Act and any other sweeper that doesn't have "They can't be regenerated" on it even more since LoT can regenerate through it and swing the next turn the board might still be empty. And again Attrition is just too good to pass up with the sacrifice theme. 

The deck will draw the game out pretty will I think so you might aswell plan for a long game:

A Black Market + Urbog-Coffers fueled Exsanguinate makes a really good way to finish games if you can't get through with creatures. 

Essentially building control is all about balancing removal to different card types, card draw and ways to win the game and less about the synergies so I feel a few ideas are enough since the real work would be the actual tweaking of the deck when you're building it.

The rest of the deck in both archetypes needs to be filled with general EDH stuff like Primordials, some removal, tutors, etc. which I won't cover here.

To be honest I'm pretty interessted in how a deck like I imagined it above would turn out, so maybe I'll build it some time in the future. Especially the Voltron version seems to have a high potential for syngery and cohesion.

For now, I hope you enjoyed this little brainstorming session and that I'll...

See y'all 'round!

FTB Infinity #10 - Factorization?!

FTB Infinity #9 - New Projects!

The changing Metagame in unchanging Playgroups

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

After a long writing break where I focused more on my FTB Infinity-Series plus my holidays where I didn't produce any content at all, I decided it is time for me to write something Magic related again.
So what's the topic of today's post? Metagaming in EDH!

What I discovered after I had joined a fairly stable playgroup (in terms of the players) that met once every one or two weeks is the following: If the playgroup consists of people that constantly seek to upgrade/update/improve their decks, there will be a constant, very slow but overall noticable shift in the metagame.

Let me give you an example for this:
When I first joined said playgroup, everyone was fairly new to the format and each of us had 1-4 decks. Basically everyone was doing something along the lines of:

The boards got clustered with stuff pretty fast, which led everyone to pack even more sweepers than normal. Now that's completely understandable. Imagine you sitting there looking at a board of 10-15 creatures total without a boardwipe in hand. Of course you'll think "Maaan I should play more sweepers!" so the next time you're at home, tuning your deck, you'll cut some of the spotremoval that looked completely useless to play 2 or 3 more Wrath-Effects.

It got so bad at some point that starting turn 5 or 6 we had rounds where the board got sweeped three times before it was my turn again.

Now obviously the meta shifted again from there, because noone likes loosing all his stuff without getting something out of it. But that's another story...

A different form of metagame shift happened very recently. I have to admit, it's pretty small but I still think it's worth mentioning. With all the Gods from Theros being Indestructible AND most often not a creature, people started to realize that they're a very reliable linchpin for a deck. So more and more God-led decks started to get built. This led to a slight shift in preferred removal options:

 The funny thing is that I didn't really realize it until I played a few games outside of our playgroup and stared at my Deglamer when I wanted to remove a Sword of X and Y while being a mana short to play a threat and asked myself: "Well why did I swap that for Nature's Claim? Oh right, Gods..."

Now this means there can be two different shifts in metagame. They will either affect...

•  How the decks work entirely (e.g. controlly vs. aggressive)

or

• How a certain cardtype works (e.g. cheaper removal that destroys vs. more expensive that exiles/tucks) 

While the cardtype shift is always very detailed and unique to each metagame, the overall shifts should always follow a certain pattern. Of course sometimes the metagame skips certain stages due to... like reasons... but the wheel will be turning nonetheless.

Meta-Rotations

Let's start off with a metagame that consists of 1v1-EDHs that have been tuned a bit to work better in a multiplayer environment. This is also known as "Players new to EDH decide to form a playgroup": (Note that the example rotation will be void of combo decks. I'll get into that later.)

1. At first the metagame will probably be very explosive since the decks are former 1v1-decks. They'll ramp hard, disrupt a bit and try to overwhelm the opponent in some way. This is basically the metagame we had at first at least what I experienced.

As already described the metagame will shift...





2. To counteract getting overwhelmed once you run out of gas, people will now probably incorporate even more sweepers and general disruption into their decks. This means that after a while ramping and speed overall will drop in priority because the sweepers act as speedbumps.

Now things will get interessting...





3. In an increasingly grindy metagame, slow "value"-cards like Mulldrifter begin to truly shine. You'll try to gain something out of your creatures even if they die immediately. In further consequence, blinking and/or reanimating creatures will be a big factor as this will really let you abuse your "Enter the battlefield" creatures.

This means that interaction between players will decrease since everyone is trying to get ahead by gaining "value" little by little. Disrupting that doesn't feel good at all, so in consequence spotremoval and/or counterspells see less play...

      

1. Besides graveyard hate getting a bit more attention because of rising reanimation counts, slow decks that sport some kind of inevitability are on the rise now. If they're left unchecked they have the potential to take over the entire game without much counterplay possible.

Massremoval isn't as necessary anymore as decks have been factoring it in for some time now and adapted accordingly.

      

1. While disrupting these decks can work, straight out killing them as fast as possible is an even better plan. Especially in this "value obsessed" metagame, voltron/aggro decks can be really effective since the opposition isn't necessarily equipped to deal with the pressure while also being fast enough in closing out the game once the aggressive player needs to recover/rebuild.

Now to survive the onslaught of damage put out by these aggressive decks people will opt for more speed again... So we're looping back to 1. which concludes the cycle.

Of course these shifts will never happen like they do in theory, especially since many commander decks are "meant" to be played in one very specific way. But a.) people will always build new decks and those are very likely to attack the meta in a favorable way and b.) decks that are unfavored in the current meta are likely to see less play (you're not going to play your tokens deck when everyone is casting back to back sweepers are you?).

What about Combo?

Well combo is an entire different beast. While basically fitting into the "slow decks with inevitability" section they can also play out very explosive and fast if they so choose in the way they've been built. This means combo decks can always attack the format in a way that is prefferable for them, most importantly because they don't rely on creatures to win games, which means that whenever the format becomes grindy, they're heavily favored.

The thing with combo is though, that many playgroups dislike having them in the games, so wether this is affecting your playgroup or not depends on that. I personally like having a few ones in there just to keep things fair and balanced since some strategies really thrive when they don't have to account for combo decks.

Conclusion

Having an edge in your playgroup and winning aside, shifting metas are also quite refreshing. Once you've cast your fair share of Mulldrifters and Damnations, playing a deck full of creatures that are meant to beat down or ramping really hard into something big could up your enjoyment of games a lot.

So maybe mentally review the last few rounds you played with your playgroup and try to analize the pace of the games. You might be surprised how many patterns you might find and those patterns will give you a good idea on how to attack your meta.

Alright, that's it from me, I hope you liked my little insight into our meta and into metagaming in general...

See y'all 'round!

FTB Infinity #8 - Holiday Uber Length

Part 1

Part 2

I'll be back on 30. August  at the latest with my next Episode! In the mean time, have a nice summer!