So I got a Mayael deck referral from nayamtg:

findmeaviolin: i really really want to make a naya colored edh and am looking at using mayael as my general.any suggestions? people tell me shes too slow but i dont think so with green running ramp. *smiles*

I love this commander and these kind of decks. *Cracks knuckles* Let’s get to it.

The first thing I would do is look up Alara block cards. Naya’s whole theme was “power 5 or greater,” which I love, but can understand why players don’t find it as cool as getting a keyword, a la exalted, devour, and unnearth. Doing this search gives you creatures with power 5 or greater and also permanents that have that theme: stuff like the near-Mayael-auto-includes Spearbreaker and Spellbreaker Behemoths, Mayael’s Aria, and Drumhunter.

In any deck you want good card draw, so look to Garruk’s Packleader, Soul of the Harvest, the aforementioned Drumhunter, and Garruck, Primal Hunter. Momentous Fall is a good option too, as is Greater Good. Triumph of Ferocity might even be a good idea.

Look for removal that are also big creatures so Mayael can grab them. I’m talking Terrastodon and, if you can afford it, Woodfall Primus. If you don’t mind random effects, there are Tyrant of Discord and Capricious Street, the latter of which really needs Darksteel Plate, Darksteel Ingot, and Stuffy Doll to be worth it, but those are decent cards anyway, and Stuffy Doll works with some Red removal I will be suggesting later. Other removal possibilities are dragons like Bogarden Hellkite, Flameblast Dragon, and Steel Hellkite. Novablast Wurm is fantastic. You might consider Guild Feud for its risky removal and pseudo-Mayael effect (and it works with another card I will suggest shortly).

Protection for your pricey creatures is good. The best choices are Spearbreaker Behemoth and Avacyn if you can afford her. Also consider Rune-Tail, Loxodon Hierarch, Dauntless Escort, Asceticism, Privileged Position, Ghostway, and Aegis Angel. If you don’t mind losing creatures and run enough recursion, Eldrazi Monument protects and grants evasion. A great one to run, and the card that works great with Guild Feud, is Vigor. You get a bigger creature and remove an opponent’s almost guaranteed. If you do add Vigor, and depending on the amount of other protections for your guys, you might lean more of your removal to the fight keyword, such as with Ulvenwald Tracker and Prey Upon.

Don’t shy from the smaller guys though, as they will still trigger Soul of the Harvest and any other creatures-matters cards too, so look to small land searchers such as Farhaven Elf and removal (e.g., Acidic Slime) too. I would say you want 20 creatures of power 5 or greater and another 20 with less, as Mayael decks are creature hungry.

You can run Mayael’s affect as a gamble, which is exciting, or you can set it up with the likes of Sensei’s Diving Top, Crystal Ball, and my favorite, Cream of the Crop.

Once you have 5-10 cards for card draw, ramp, and removal, you can fill out the rest with recursion a la Genesis or Emeria, pump a la Titanic Ultimatum, more power-5-or-greater cards like Warstorm Surge and its cousin Where Ancients Tread (which I highly recommend), or pet cards such as Hamletback Goliath, Tooth and Nail, and Genesis Wave. If you do run Vigor, I suggest the red mass removal spells Blasphemous Act and Disaster Radius, and perhaps Pyrohemia, Starstorm, Savage Twister, and Chain Reaction (you probably don’t need all of those, so just pick the ones you like the most). All work great with Stuffy Doll too. If you don’t run Vigor then you’re better off running White’s removal, such as Planar Cleansing, Austere Command, and Akroma’s Vengeance.

I wasn’t exactly sure if I was going to have a final post today, but I’ve found myself with plenty of free time, so I’m writing this ahead of time. See, as of this week (that being the week this post is published), classes start for me again, and I’m going to be really busy. In fact, too busy to be able to continue with this blog. I put it on hiatus for the school year last year, but I think this time the blog will shut down for good. I originally was going to just post a farewell message (It’s disappointing to me when blogs I follow and like just sort of fade off without saying anything to their followers, so I didn’t want to do that myself), but then I found a bit of down-time. I finished a rough draft of my master’s thesis, and since classes haven’t started (as of me writing this ahead of time), until my adviser sends me the draft back with her edits, I have time to add to my final post.

If you’ve ever read some of my This Old Deck posts before, some of my decks have changed a lot since then, so I thought I could cover the changes. Not all of the changes, but the ones that really shook up the decks. I guess I should note that not all of the decks are for Commander (three are, and they’re labeled) and not all are for multiplayer, but all are casual.

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“The Golgari provide a necessary service in Ravnica: they dispose of the carcasses civilization leaves behind, and mysteriously they also provide sustenance for the forgotten and the needy.” [Source]

“Mysteriously”? I don’t think so. I’ve seen scavenge - I know what you’re up to, Green/Black guild.

Soylent Green is carcasses!

I’d like to do something a little different this time when it comes to looking at decks. Earlier this summer, Commandercast talked about the different types of commander-deck-relationships; basically there’s, in a Likert-type scale of descending order of commander importance, 1. “the deck needs the commander to do anything,” 2. “there is huge synergy between my commander (e.g., mechanics, subtypes, etc.) and the rest of the deck, ” 3. “there is some synergy between my commander and the rest of the deck,” 4. “there is little synergy between my commander and the rest of the deck,” and 5. “my commander is only there for the colors.”

Most of my decks fit in at #2 or #3, although Kaalia is probably at 1.5. So how about this “Riku and Friends” deck? Well, that depends on what the deck wants to do. It has a “What’s Yours is Mine” theme - use spells that take your opponent’s resources to help you win. What’s great about this type of deck is that it’s power level scales with the power level of the decks you’re playing against and it will certainly play differently every time. Riku then doesn’t fit the deck as well as some other options I can think of. In the end, I chose Riku for this build because I preferred the on-theme effects that became possible with these colors. But, since several commanders with completely different color identities would work for a What’s Yours is Mine / Aikido deck, I though I showthe pros and cons of each. And, for this Riku build, I will show that you can have a deck that really works with the commander but doesn’t rely on it; and you can have a Riku deck without it being a degenerate extra-turn deck.

I’ll admit: I chose Riku for the colors. But as you’ll find out, he’s synergistic with the deck. Not as much as Glissa, the Traitor is in a deck with 50% artifacts, or Kaalia of the Vast in a deck with 20+ angels / demons / dragons, but synergistic nonetheless. As such, he’ll actually get cast, and not just to have a blocker or extra creature to pick up equipment after a Wrath.

Here’s the list:

[Source]

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addictedtoedh:

Child of alara - 5 colour legends. I’m packing all my unused legendary creatures into this deck along with ant cards that go with them (time of need much?). Its just meant to be a fun way of playing all the legends I haven’t got decks for.

Rune-Tail, Kitsune Ascendant - life gain +…

I’d like to see “Control Hug” Zedruu builds; rather than helping out everyone, they’re focused on helping out the players that specifically need it, say with Hunted creatures, Redirect effects. If that’s not your thing, I understand, but it fits so well with Zedruu’s own abilities it’s thematically very cool. I have a build here, but I haven’t played it in the real.

As for Nin, the Pain Artist, the obvious ones are Stuffy Doll and Mogg Maniac. Coalhauler Swine is good too. And what goes great with those three? Blasphemous Act, Chain Reaction, and Pyrohemia. Darksteel Plate and other darksteel creatures are also obviously good with Nin, as is Magebane Armor. Statecraft too, if you don’t want to attack with your own creatures or kill things in combat.

At heart I’m a Timmy. But I have a lot of Johnny tendencies as well. I just tend to like janky combos rather than the more powerful ones Spike leans towards. Here I would like to share some combos you may or may not be aware of. Feel free to suggest more fun and powerful combinations these cards work well in. Johnnies unite! This time around, let’s combine…

Vigor is just a fun card for Timmies, even if you have no Johnny tendencies. Preventing all damage to your guys so you don’t mind getting into the Red Zone and can chump block all day, while making your dudes bigger? That’s not bad. But what if we tap into our Johnny tendencies and make this card work for us more? We get some huge creatures (read: a ton of fun) faster and more reliably!

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“Star” actually refers to two different but extremely similar formats. For both exactly five players are required and it is somewhat of a team variant. The players immediately to each player’s left and right are their allies and the other two players are their opponents. You can attack anyone but spells which affect opponents do not affect the players immediately to your left and right, as they are not opponents by the rules of this format. The format is like the color pie, shown on the back of all Magic cards, or this image here:

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Each of the colors, and even colorless, in Magic have their own strengths, weaknesses, tribes, and other perks to choose them over another color. Unfortunately, sometimes a color just isn’t that powerful, or is too powerful. Blue and White are often considered too powerful, Green for a while was considered weak in non-multiplayer formats (although there are still some people out there that have themselves convinced Green is bad at Commander… hilariously wrong), and Red actually does tend to do worse in multiplayer.

Now, I don’t consider Red to be as bad as a lot of people seem to think. I used to, until I saw a very good and fun mono-Red Commander deck played at my last local card shop. And then there’s the popular Ib Hallfheart deck begun on Commandercast.

Well, despite those decks, some people still think (whether correctly or not, I can’t say) Red is bad in multiplayer. Earlier this summer this became a huge topic of questions and answers posted by Mark Rosewater on his tumblr. MaRo demonstrated then one of the great things about Wizards of the Coast when he admitted that R&D agrees it can be a problem and that they’re working on it, and then asked players what they’d suggest to fix it. There were a lot of suggestions that don’t really fit Red, some which I think do but MaRo disagreed (namely recursion, as I believe Red should get more effects like Charmbreaker Devils). Among those was that cards could fit the flavor of love, which MaRo has admitted fits under Red since it’s intense emotion. Love fits multiplayer more since you can love one player while attacking another, but it’s hard to have effects flavored to love another player make sense in one-on-one since that’s the only player you’re fighting.

I thought this was a great idea, but wasn’t sure how it’d be implemented (MaRo didn’t seem sure either, but I sure hope R&D went to the drawing board to crack the question themselves for the next set they still have time to design cards for). So to see how R&D might do it, I tried my own hand at designing some cards. Along with a few previous Commander-specific cards I’ve designed previously, what follows are possible ways to make Red stronger in the formats it’s weakest in.

Read across the jump if you’re interested!

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#6. You’ve ever completely misunderstood a card that was quite clear.

Before I go on, let me clarify what I mean by a Magic scrub. Magic: The Gathering is a hard game, no doubt about that. Mistakes will be made, even by the best of players. Some of these mistakes are bound to even be ones we know we shouldn’t have made. If you read this and say “Yeah, I’ve done that once or twice,” then you’re probably fine. You just might be a Magic scrub if you often make these kinds of mistakes. But it’s okay, because a lot of us are Magic scrubs. Some people might take offense to being called that, but I don’t. That’s why in each of these posts, the example of these marker mistakes (as they are markers of possible scrubness if you do them often enough) will always be a personal one.

“Hi, I’m sarroth, and I’m a Magic scrub.” (“Hi, sarroth.”) Here’s why this time…

I’ve done this a few times, almost always in front of other players during games and look really dumb when they have to explain to me that I’m trying to play one of my own cards wrong, and it’s clearly in the text. For example, I once plainscycled Eternal Dragon and then tried bringing it back to my hand with its ability to plainscycle again (I had nothing else to do with my mana at the time). One of my opponents pointed out that the text clearly said “only during your upkeep.” Let’s back that up and pass the turn, shall we?

The worst instance of this, however, was involving Cloudstone Curio. My Kaalia of the Vast Commander deck has a ton of creatures with enters the battlefield triggers and a creatures-matters subtheme to it, so I decided having Cloudstone Curio to reuse cards like Nekrataal or Solemn Simulacrum would be fun. I reminded myself when I added the card to the deck that it can’t be used to bounce opponent’s permanents. Then, the first game I drew and cast the card, I said “Oh, wait, I could target opponent’s stuff…” I’m pretty sure the same person that corrected me on the Eternal Dragon fail corrected me on this one. This is definitely the worst mistake I’ve made in playing a card because I knew about it before and completely forgot in the excitement of actually casting it.

I definitely think I’m a Magic scrub, but these mistakes make me look even worse in the eyes of everyone else. And good thing people called me out on it, as people I play with tend to take your word on what a card does a lot, so if no one had I might have been allowed to play the card wrong those games. Completely misreading a card… I call that a scrub move.

lorstarcutter:

These are all really incredible artists! Are you a fan of Svetlin Velinov at all?

I admit that I had to look up the name, but I definitely am a fan. Specifically, I find  Thundermaw Hellkite’s art to be as amazing as it would be to cast the thing, Door to Nothingness’s art to be jaw-dropping, and I’m grateful for the new art of Anger as I never was a fan of the baby-like thing on the old one.

Magic’s art was part of the reason I started playing the game. My friends started trying to introduce me to it, and it’s art was the first thing I noticed about the cards. I think if the art had been of less quality, if most of the cards had cheesier art, I would have been turned off. Instead, the art is incredibly professional, realistic, and often gorgeous, and that lent an additional legitimacy to the game that made me take it more seriously when it came to deciding to get into it. There are so many great Magic artists, it would probably be easier to list which artists I don’t like than list all the ones I do! It was definitely hard to pick just 5 for this.