Stream-Announcement! - Pokemon Anniversary

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!


Just a quick heads up:
I'll be streaming my Speedrun of Pokemon Ruby over on http://www.twitch.tv/sibirianpns!
The stream will start around 18:30-19:00 and will run until around 1:00 in the morning (CET)

Alternatively you can watch it here (if the embed works):
SibirianPns

I hope you enjoy the stream and if you don't find the time to watch, I'll still...

See y'all 'round!

Deckspotlight #4: Gisela, Blade of Goldnight

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

So far all my deckspotlights have dealt with very exceptional Gentlemen. Momir Vig, Norin, Borborygmos,... well maybe the last one isn't every girl's dreamprince.
How about a strong and emancipated lady this time around? Sounds good? Because that's what you'll get wether you like it or not...

BUT: This isn't your standard Gisela-"I'll beat you down with Angels and Equipment" kind of deck. It's something really special...

Intro - What is he doin'?!

If we would sit down at a 4-player table, me being a complete stranger, this is how your thought process will probably look like...

I put Gisela in the command zone: "Ah ok, Gisela, gotta watch out for his beaters."
After I play the first few lands: "Alright, the beaters will start coming, I should prepare."
I continue to play lands and play the occasional utility permanent: "... I guess he had a bad draw or is flooded or something..."
Everyone else is doing crazy thing but I sit there playing draw-go: "What the hell is he doin'?!"

And just when it seems that I'll just die to a random attack the next turn without having done anything the whole game this happens:

I play "End of Turn" Gisela using Scout's Warning, untap draw, cast Overmaster, Price of Progress and Reverberate it, dealing enough damage to kill everyone but me thanks to Gisela. And all you're thinking is: "Ahem, what?"

Chapter 1 - The Political Core

A while ago I actually wrote a primer about the archetype that is called "politics/groupslug/grouphug", whatever you may call it, and basically this deck is how I got introduced into the kind of strategy described in there.

Some of these cards I've already mentioned in said primer since they're just the prime examples of what a political card should do: 1) make opponents attack each other and not you and 2) strengthen weaker players so they can attack again (which hopefully makes them even more inclined to not attack you).

Rite of the Raging Storm getting printed in Commander2015 got us yet another really strong card for decks like these. There's just no reason not to attack with your free elemental and - let's be honest - there will always be at least one player who can't block the Elemental profitably.

Chapter 2 - The actual gameplan

With all these cards to provide me a weird form of safety from random attacks, I can focus on the real gameplan: Punishing people for doing broken things. And with punishing I mean hopefully killing them with whatever they wanted to pull off.

Each of these cards will kill - coupled with Gisela - if anyone goes "extrem" in any shape or form. Ramping hard with Boundless Realms? Acidic Soil it up. Getting one-shot by a commander? Reflect damage does only redirect so the opponent kills himself with commander damage. Avenger of Zendikar? Incite Rebellion... You get the idea.

This is exactly why this deck tries to be political about the early stages of the game: The more damage from Solemn Simulacrums etc. they take, the more likely I am able to kill them when they try to win the game with something busted.

Sadly, since I've dropped black from the deck, I'm missing out on some sweet punisher cards, but all in all I still believe playing Gisela is worth missing some of them in exchange for the damage boost.

Chapter 3 - Preparing for later

The hardest part of the deck is probably knowing when I'm supposed to start keeping up "kill spells" (referring to spells that will hopefully kill my opponents). This gets easier the more mana I've got available when the time comes around so I always focus on hitting as many landdrops as possible the first turns. If the first landdrop I'm missing is on turn 10, I almost always have a good shot at winning the game. So: Preparation is key!
(Also interesting to note is that ramping makes you seem more dangerous than just having a landdrop each turn... Even if you'll end up with the same amount of mana in the long run.)

Boy oh boy, do I love every single card here. They provide fixing and/or card advantage (with the exception of Tormenting Voice that is just there to filter your draw) while looking so incredibly innocent that noone will even look twice and simply shrug them off. But trust me when I say: Without these cards this deck would suck, but since they exist this deck is awesome!
The thing is that red and white both don't offer great choice when it comes to card draw but even if they did, in an actual game I would use them to find landdrops 90% of the time. So why not simply find lands instead, because that IS something artifacts and white cards can provide.

Chapter 4 - Some Removal won't hurt

I have explained all the tools I'm using to win the game now, from staying out of harms way, to game-winning cards and the cards to set me up for them, so let's focus on controlling the pace of the game now...

If you've read my "Politics"-Primer you might remember why I love Inferno or Molten Disaster... While I play them to clear the board most of the time, the fact that it reduces the collective lifetotal makes it easier for me to finish them off later while not making me a target because the cards "happen to have this weird 'each player'-clause..." so if someone is to blame it's WotC for adding that. Of course I don't tell anyone that I wouldn't play them if they didn't have it.

Sadly "If you don't like it, torch it!" can't be applied to every card.  For those cases I made sure to also pack some general-purpose removal... you know, just in case.

Chapter 5 - Enabling your win

Of course an EDH game is no "magical Christmasland" and sometimes opponents are just too healthy to kill them with burnspells on their own. On step in counteracting that was switching to Gisela as a commander rather than any random Mardu-General (in my case Zurgo).
Also people usually try not to die to my burnspells so they might try to disrupt me occasinally...

Who would've thought that Red can counter spells? Yes they're somewhat situational but so far I've never regreted running them. Especially Mages' Contest might look a bit wonky at first, but since usually people can't afford to pay huge amounts of life due to the nature of my deck it more often than not counters the spells like I want it to.
Scout's Warning also acts as a form of protection since playing Gisela "end of turn" right before you untap again makes her less vulnerable to (mass)removal and also adds a nice little element of surprise to the deck.

These cards are basically the icing on the cake for the deck. They turn each burnspell into a huge fireball of doom. End of Turn Dictate of the Twin Gods, untap, play Hostility and cast Inferno... the amounts of damage you can produce with only one of these is just monstrous, but if you draw two of them... no words man, no words.
They are also the reason why sometimes the deck is so mana hungry: I often need the mana to cast a doubler/tripler PLUS my burnspell to get there.

Outro

And that's it! That's my Gisela deck. If I had to choose a single deck out of my 30 that will fit into any powerlevel I would definitely choose this one since the more broken the decks get, the more damage this deck can dish out. This also makes it always fun to play since you'll neither stomp nor get stomped.

Of course I have just listed the cornerstones of the deck here. The full decklist is provided here!

Well, I hope you enjoyed this deckspotlight, because there are quite a lot more to come. Or not. Either way I'd love to get some feedback! Until then I'll...

See y'all 'round

Infinity Evolved #11 - Boy oh boy

Deckspotlight #3: Borborygmos Enraged

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

As promised I'll be writing a lot of these Deckspotlights in the next weeks, so here goes the first one. Some of my decks are a lot more refined than others and many of them are still changing a lot so it only makes sense for me to start with one of my older and more tuned decks: Borborygmos Enraged aka 51-Lands Combo.

Back in the day when I had just recently quit Legacy - where I exclusively played combo - I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to build a combo deck that DIDN'T play blue and/or black. And that is exactly what I did with this deck.

Intro - That one "Pre-Ban" Game

My first draft of the deck featured a copy of Burgeoning. And even though some people in my playgroup will deny it, the first version of this deck was responsible for Burgeoning getting banned ("houseruled out") in our playgroup... after the first game I played my shiny new Borb-Deck.

Let me illustrate how this game went with some advanced Paint-Graphics:
 

At this point I was hellbent but had a ton of lands in play, more than my opponents combined, so I untapped turn 3, drawing a land and cast Borborygmos. Somehow he lived for me to untap with him and my draw for the turn was what won me the game... again let me illustrate this:
  

... aaaaaand at this point it was gg. I had 10 mana left after casting Keen Sense on Borborygmos and I kept hitting people in the face via discarding lands, drawing some additional lands from the trigger and occasionally dredging Life from the Loam to get back more fuel. I'm not entirely sure what happened exactly but at the end of my turn I'd drawn 90% of my deck, my graveyard was filled with lands and my opponents were dead.
Now I'll be honest, this draw was basically picture perfect and you're not going to get many of these games. But what it illustrates is how fast and "out of nowhere" you can win with this deck even at later stages of the game. If you don't hit that Turn 3 Borborygmos, no harm done! The deck can go slow and steady, where you really set up your combo and win, win through "traditional means" aka beatdown or like described above go for a fast and ruthless "kill everyone without playing magic".

Chapter 1 - The big Players

Let me start with the key cards of the deck, the cards that you want to look for while ramping the first few turns as they'll let you do the insanely unfair things this deck is capable of:

Whenever you're looking to combo-off you need two cards + your commander: Either Keen Sense or Snake Umbra plus whatever card you can find out of category #2.
Obviously the best card to get is Abundance. It let's you filter each draw you get from your enchantments basically letting me choose to get more lands to throw at my opponents - which is sometimes enough to win the game since they might've already taken some amount of damage - or to get non-land cards that could let me net more lands in the long run - which I will need in order to actually win the game since lifetotals are still too high.

But other cards can work aswell depending on your mana. Creeping Renaissance will let me return all the lands I've thrown once I've eventually hit too many non-lands, same goes for Knollspine Dragon. Scouting Trek let's me stack my deck, working as a substitute for Abundance in some games. Storm Cauldron is somewhat of a backup strategy, essentially making me go all-in, bouncing my lands to throw out which hopefully draws me into some sort of way to win the game.

Life from the Loam is a completely different monster: not only will it help immensely in  comboing-off with a sufficient amount of mana available, but it will also help me find important pieces of my combo when combined with other recursion cards while also supplying me with a never ending stream of landdrops.

Chapter 2 - Protection and Reloading 

Of course people will try and stop you from winning... because that prevents them from winning. And of course I try to stop people from stopping me...




The first row is the "protection"-part. When I first built the deck I threw in Autumn's Veil just to test it and I've never looked back: That card is one of the MVPs of the deck for me. A nice set of boots is pretty standard in EDH so I won't talk about those two and Savage Summoning let's me play around counterspells and sorcery speed removal with my Borborygmos. It basically gives haste, buffs him so that Soul's Majesty and Hunter's Insight draw even more cards and protects from counterspells... pretty good card for one green mana.

The second row is the "reload" category. Skullwinder and Eternal Witness let me return destroyed combo-pieces from previous, failed attempts OR - combined with Life from the Loam - let me find them in the first place. Soul's Majesty and Hunter's Insight are, as I already mentioned, the big drawspells a deck such as this needs. As long as you have a fatty in play those two are good to go.

Chapter 3 - Ramping

Now this wouldn't be a RG Deck sporting 51 lands without a proper amount of ramp. Especially since the commander costs 4RRGG. Simply hitting landdrops just won't do it.

While I usually play cards like Explosive Vegetation when looking for ramp in green, this deck is a little different. The problem I have with cards like these is that later in the game, drawing them won't do anything. That's why I only play Boundless Realms in the "put onto the battlefield" section and favor Cultivate and Nissa's Pilgrimage: They at least put a land into your hand aswell, and lands in hand can provide more than just mana.
So cards that will cards into my hand will be more favorable once I'm done ramping... and to turn them into ramp"ish" cards early game, I'm playing cards like Azusa and Oracle of Mul Daya.
Letting you put additional lands into play is already very good since the average starting hand will feature at least 4 lands and the first three draws will also yield one to two lands on average. Throw in a Seek the Horizon and Ill be going very fast while not having as many dead draws when comboing - it's even quite the opposite since Seek the Horizon, for example, represents 6 damage + 3 draws... not bad for 4 mana.

Chapter 4 - Plan B

Ever played a game of magic? Then you've probably experienced the "this didn't go as planned" scenario. The deck can cast big ol' Borborygmos two to three times, no problem, but sometimes you just won't be able to combo. You know what that means: Plan B!

  
Well, I ramp hard, so the obvious answer to what Plan B might be is: Fatties! Upon closer look they even feature Landfall a lot of the time, synergizing with all those ramp spells and additonal landdrops even after they're in play. 
Wildfire and Destrucive Force are kind of a plan on their own aswell: I can choose to try and take over the game early since for my opponents those cards will be an Armageddon while I'm able to recover very easy and win the game from there - additionally they'll clear the board so that noone can pull ahead with their Brago or any other creature that provides too much value. Same goes for later in the game where they will still hurt your opponents while clearing the board... just not as gamebreaking as when you cast them early.

Sadly I only own a single copy of Kozilek which I currently play in my colorless Eldrazi EDH but if I ever get my hands on a second one I'll put it into this deck for sure because 12/12s with Annihilator 4 that draw four cards upon cast usually make for a nice Plan B if you ask me... 

Chapter 5 - Gameplay

Last but not least let me explain how I try to shape my games.

Starting hands: One of the easiest decks to mulligan I own. 

1. At least 2 Lands + at least one Rampspell? Keep, since you'll draw 1-2 lands in your first drawsteps for sure. 
2. At least 3 Lands + a combo piece? A keep aswell, since ramp and lands are way easier to draw than those.
3. At least 4 Lands + a drawspell? Keep it! Drawing lands and ramp is easy and if you ever get that drawspell to resolve you'll be in a very, very good position.
4. At least 4 Lands + a fatty? A bit wonky but if you're confident that the game will be slow and grindy you can probably get away with it.

Early-game: Ramp, ramp, ramp! Try to keep one or two lands in your hand for when Borborygmos comes down, but other than that just slam those landdrops and ramp spells and try hitting 8 mana as fast as possible. There might be an opportunity for a game-winning Wildfire/Destructive Force though, so watch out for that... 
  Mid- to Late-game: This is when things get spicy. Depending on the types of decks my opponents play I'll be playing very ballsy with my combo or very cautious. While it's true that most of the games re-casting Borborygmos isn't too hard to achieve it isn't something that you will want to do, so try and protect him. Timing is very important in order to get the combo through so I try to keep track of my opponents ressources as best as possible: How many removal spells has Player X played this game, how much mana does he have available right now, etc etc.
In many games, a window will open up for me to cast Borborygmos, protect him and ride him to victory provided I didn't waste my ressources earlier. 

Outro

As always I hope you enjoyed the read on my Anrgy-Borb deck and maybe one or two out there are even considering building a deck similar to mine because of this spotlight. If you've got any questions on other cards in the deck (the full list is linked above) or the deck in general feel free to message me. 

See y'all 'round!

Infinity Evolved #10 - Thaumcraft

I did it! The Twenty-Seven are complete!

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

These past few days I've been "working" my a** off in order to complete something I've looked forward to in a long time: The completion of "The 27"!

For those of you who don't know: "The 27" are the term used for 27 (you don't say) decks for each legally playable color-combination in EDH - so the 5 colors on their own, all 10 Ravnica-Guilds, the 5 Alara-Shards, the 5 Tarkir-Wedges, Colorless and Five-Color (5+10+5+5+2 = 27).

The road here was quite a long one. I had ideas for certain decks, dismissed them after putting in quite some effort in developing it, even built some decks to only break them up again a week later. Budget was another concern since even though I have quite an extensive collection due to the long time I've played and collected, an amount of decks this big still put a very big strain on it and I had to buy a lot of cards in the process of course.

But I stayed strong in my resolution to NEVER have two decks of the same color-combination before I've built all the other ones. Oh boy, sometimes this was annoying... For example I have my Borborygmos Enraged Deck for a very long time now and there was no way in hell that I'd build some other deck for Gruul-colors... but Rosheen Meanderer sometimes looked so interesting to build that I kind of cursed myself for bringing this "only one deck per combination"-rule upon me.

You might think to yourself "Well good for you dude, what's that have to do with me?!". First of all, I plan to revive "Brainstorming Commanders" since I now have brain-ressources again to actually brainstorm commanders that I'm not planning to build. So if you've liked those posts you might be happy to hear that they'll be coming back.
Second and even more important, since I've now somewhat "locked in" my decks for each color-combination, I want to write a "Deckspotlight"-post for EVERY SINGLE DECK. This means, if you subtract the two I've already written, there are 25 deckspotlights to be written. Even more since I'll probably throw in some spotlights on my four-color decks aswell.

TL;DR: I now have a playable deck for each color-combination - yay me - which means I'll write a lot of deckspotlights in the future. So a lot of EDH-content is in the works.

Alright, I'll stop with the rambling now and start writing those spotlights because I want to release one per week at the minimum...

See y'all 'round!

Spaghetti alla Carbonara

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

Admittedly it's been a while since my last recipe. To be honest I've somewhat had problems creating content I am satisfied with in the last few weeks and writing these recipes is a bit hard for me. Not that I don't have enough recipes to share but me not being a native english speaker makes them sound awkward because I'm not sure if I'm always using the correct words.

But enough of that... I'm here and I will post a recipe... that's what counts right?!

Spaghetti alla Carbonara

Ingredients (for 2 servings):

• Pasta for the two of you (~250g)
• 100g smoked Tofu
• 1 Onion
• 200ml Soy-Cuisine
• Salt&Pepper
• ~3 Tsp. Oliveoil

Well, cook the pasta until "al dente". That's pretty easy. Meanwhile cut the onions into very small pieces... I can't stress this enough that they should be small since if they're too big you'll have those big chunks of onion in your pasta. Same with the tofu, the smaller the cubes the better.

The onions in this picture are a little bit too big...

The rest is actually pretty simple (well cubing onions and tofu isn't hard either). You start by frying the tofu with some oliveoil, then add the onions. Fry until the onion's translucent then add the cuisine and turn down the heat. Let that cook for like 1-2 minutes then add the pasta and stir until everything is mixed properly. Season with salt and pepper.

... and that's it. It's so simple and yet so tasty. And of course vegan!

As always I'd love to get feedback from people who actually cooked this after my recipe!

See y'all 'round!

Vorosh and his "area of operation"

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

A few days ago I read a post on reddit, asking if there was something wrong with Vorosh because noone plays him. The replies to that question can be summarized as follows:
"He's fun and all but every other Sultai-Commanders is better, because xy."
("xy" stands for a reasoning ranging from "too slow" to "too fragile" and so on and so forth. You get the idea.)
My point is, while the people replying definitely aren't wrong, I've only had good experiences with Vorosh, the Durd and would like to share them with you, along with my theory on why he seems to work better than expected... because on paper, let's be real, he looks awful.

My experiences with Vorosh

It all started (yes we're sitting by a campfire now...) when I decided I wanted to build this awesome BUG Superfriends deck - back when Sultai wasn't a thing - but didn't have a Damia, Sage of Stone at home. Looking through my rares-binder I found the gem that was Vorosh and there began my journey.

Since I built the deck to be focused on the Planeswalkers I didn't need any real synergy from my commander so I didn't worry too much...

Then I played the first games with the deck. I enjoyed it, simply because I love playing with Planeswalkers and since the colors blue, black and green are probably the best combination for some plain ol' control with a little ramp, I didn't "miss" a commander all that much. I say "miss" because in these games I never cast my commander even once... I just had better things to do.

But since there's a first time for everything... I eventually had to cast Vorosh out of the command zone one day...

Just imagine your standard three-hour-grind-fest aka a normal game of EDH where everyone plays threats, they get removed, someone tries to take over the game, gets disrupted in some sort of way, etc etc. Then the inevitable happens and players start to drop because they run out of gas and you're hopefully not one of them, but even if you're not out of gas completely, ressources still are tight. All you need to draw is a somewhat useable creature to deal those last bits of damage... waaaiit a second, did someone call for Vorosh?!

Yes, this is exactly the time to shine for a big durd like him. Afterall he's reasonably big coming down, he has evasion, provides a scary clock if left unchecked and most important of all, if you play him as your commander, he's able to come back a few times after getting removed. This is especially useful in the described scenario where your opponents might have one or two pieces of removal left, but that late in the game even 10 mana shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Needless to say Vorosh single-handedly won me the game back then, two-hitting the first opponent and one-hitting the last one. So tell me, can your fancy Tasigur close out games that quick on his own?

My theory on Vorosh

So here is why I think people underestimate the impact of Vorosh as a commander: They're used to playing their commander earlier because of synergies they built into the deck because of said commander.

So when they play with Vorosh they're still in that same mindset and cast him as early as turn 5 or 6 if they don't have something better to do. This leads to Vorosh dying without having too much of an impact because, as soon as he connects, his 12/12 body will pose enough of a threat to draw a removal spell from somebody... And you've effectively invested 9 mana that, netting a misely 6 damage. As the game goes on and people start doing more powerful stuff, the worse it feels to cast a 6/6 Flying for 8 mana out of your command zone.

What you should do instead is build a nice little controlly/grindy deck. Sultai is probably one of the best combinations for that since between blue and black you get card draw, (mass)removal and counterspells while green let's you keep up with your mana, grants access to answers for noncreature-permanents and all three colors are full of creatures that will provide tons of value without need for synergy.

So basically you'll have this awesome pile of 99 cards than can hold their own in a multiplayer match and everyone will even pity you for "having to run such a bad commander". And once lategame hits and you've successfully ground them down, Vorosh will come down and do what he does best: SMASH FACE! ... and your opponents won't have the ressources to prevent him from doing so.

My Conclusion

If you've got a Vorosh durdling around in your rares-binder maybe give him a shot?! He's better than he looks like if you keep him save and cozy in the command zone until his time to shine arises. Obviously every other general in Sultai is more synergistic, cost efficient, has more immediate impact, etc. etc. but when it comes to closing out the game on tight ressources noone's better than Vorosh.

The same theory can of course be applied to Darigaaz, Rith or Tariel in that they might not be as good if you straight out slam them to the board as soon as possible but the later the game they'll rise in value just because they deal a significant amount of damage along with the ability to come back once or twice due to being your commander.

So let's give the Voroshs of this world a chance to show their potential and maybe, just maybe, one or two of them get to stay in the command zone of a deck forever...

See y'all 'round!