Showing posts with label tokens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tokens. Show all posts

Monday, November 18, 2013

Commander 2013: a set review, part 5

We now arrive at our fifth and final review, 


This is the Jund (black-red-green) deck, and is my personal favorite of the five. In my opinion, it is the strongest of the decks as is out of the box. It is an attrition-based deck that uses creatures as a resource. The creatures aren't usually as big as the ones in Nature of the Beast, or as flexible as the ones in Evasive Maneuvers, but there are more of them. Lots more. And quantity is a quality all its own.

The deck employs lots of token makers to produce enormous armies, and atypically, the deck doesn't tend to use them in the swarming version of token decks that might play things like Beastmaster Ascension, though by all means you can alter the deck towards this sort of thing if you'd like. Rather, it uses them as a resource by sacrificing them, and there is a lot of different ways to get value out of this.

The deck uses creatures to fuel even-the-odds removal with cards like Shattergang Brothers, Stronghold Assassin, Elvish Skysweeper and Quagmire Druid. The idea being that you're prepared to feed more creatrues to these effects than your opponent has, and you'll be fine doing so since your deck has so many ways of recouping the losses. And you are. Thanks to cards like Prossh, Endrek Sahr, Tempt with Vengeance and Sprouting Thrinax, you will almost always have more creatures than everyone else at the table. 

Not only will you have more, but you'll have more things to do with them. You can convert them into kill spells as mentioned above; into damage from Blood Rites, Goblin Bombardment, Goblin Sharpshooter and Stalking Vengeance; into card draw off of Carnage Altar, Jar of Eyeballs, Fecundity and Foster. And even when they're dead they're still useful thanks to things like Hua Tuo, Charnelhoard Wurm and Night Soil.

The deck is resilient. It has the greatest capacity to rebuild after a board wipe thanks to various cards that make multiple creatures, and thanks to the myriad of sacrifice outlets your opponents will have a hard time really gaining value by killing your creatures since its a thing you want to do anyway. Most changes I would make to the deck depend on which direction you want to take it, and that is highly motivated by your choice in commander since Jund has a lot of good choices.

PROSSH, SKYRAIDER OF KHER

Prossh. Let me tell you about Prossh. He's beast mode. He is an incredibly powerful flexible creature and commander that I never felt bad about casting. He provides blockers, fodder for your sac outlets, an army for your anthem effects, and when the opportunity presents itself, can general damage your opponents to death out of nowhere. I really don't have anything bad to say about the guy. At six mana, he's at the top end of what I usually like to pay for in a commander, but in a deck built to maximize his qualities, that's a non issue. Prossh is where it's at.

The most memorable play I saw with him was during a four way game. I had cast a particularly large Earthquake, wiping the board of creatures and bringing everyone's life totals to a tantalizingly low range. The Prossh player, untapped drew his card and cast Endrek Sahr, then Prossh, then fed his now enormous army to the Goblin Bomardment he had played earlier killing me in one hit. I never saw it coming, and neither will your opponents.

SHATTERGANG BROTHERS

The Shattergang Brothers represent an interesting option for Jund players. They're not hard-hitting like Prossh or Karrthus or Kresh, and they're not resilient like Sek'Kuar. They are flexible, allowing you to turn things previously not a resource into a resource. They force your opponents to play fairly by making them manage their resources. They allow you to play with fire by giving you a way out of permanents with dangerous downsides like Baleful Force or Phyrexian Arena.

They incentive you to build a flexible reactive deck that attacks from different angles (by playing enough enchantments and artifacts to enable their abilities) and reward you for doing so by blowing up your opponents scary enchantments and artifacts. Any reasonable board state you have that includes the brothers is one that is more capable of dealing of breaking your opponent's board states into nothing.

They're also goblins if you've always felt like building goblin tribal but felt that current options were too weak or boring for EDH. There's so many ways you could take a deck in that direction. No matter how you take it, I would include cards that are fine in any normal deck but really shine with the Gang. Mycosynth Wellspring and Spine of Ish Sah both appeal to me, and Hammer of Purphoros manages to be the only card in Magic that currently produces Enchantment Artifact Creatures, feeding all three abilities.

There are certain strategies that the Shattergang Brothers do very well against; any Voltron deck is pretty much doomed against your ability to force them to sacrifice their heavy hitter since you'll have more creatures than they can afford to feed to the effect, but there are also strategies that will be difficult for the Brothers. Any deck that specializes primarily in enchantments or artifacts is bound to have more than you, who had to diversify, to sacrifice, and likewise creature swarm strategies. But at the end of the day, you have a deck that can carefully react to most any battlefield-based strategies, and sometimes that in and of itself will be enough.


For you collectors out there, the following cards in Power Hungry have new art:
Goblin Sharpshooter

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Microbrews; Trostani's Judgement

Hello folks, I-

Hey, wait.
Come back! Here me out, I know what you're all thinking "Trostani's Judgement is limited bulk."

But what if it weren't.
Lets look at what it does: For 6 mana you get to exile a creature, the most effective way of making something dead, and as a bonus, you might get a bonus.
Let's look at it the other way around.
Creatures that enter the battlefield and do a thing are good yeah? They're a fixture of Magic these days. What's better than a creature that gets rid of one of theirs? What if it was a 5/5 that exiles one of their creatures?
Seems fair for 6 mana.

Let's break this sucker in half.

Six mana is expensive. Especially for a card that needs a good sequence of plays to work properly. We're going to need some dorks.
4 Arbor Elf
4 Avacyn's Pilgrim

This deck is going to be white, naturally. But it also wants to be green. the promise of 5/5s is the only thing that makes Judgement even remotely worth looking at. These both tap for either color.

We also need to consider the biggest tokens available in standard.
At any reasonable rate, those are the 5/5 wurms pumped out by Advent of the Wurm and Armada Wurm.
4 Advent of the Wurm
2 Armada Wurm

Advent is a given, especially if we can power it out on t3. Our 6 drop spot is choked because of Judgement, so I probably don't want to run the full 4 Armadas. I figure a 2/2 split between the two effects, maybe some of either in the board.

If we can't have 5/5s, what's the next best thing?
The next biggest tokens in these colors I can see that look even remotely appealing are the Angelic Accord tokens. I love that card. It's just itching for someone to break it in half, but it wants a bunch of life gain to make it work, and I'm not sure this deck needs to be any jankier to accomodate.
Next biggest tokens are the 3/3s. Lots of ways to make those; Garruk, Thragtusk, Call of the Conclave. Seems simple enough.
I figure this deck can use some rounding out, so here's what I think I'd run

4 Temple Garden
4 Sunpetal Grove
4 Grove of the Guardian
7 Forest
5 Plains

4 Arbor Elf
4 Avacyn's Pilgrim
4 Call of the Conclave
4 Farseek
4 Oblivion Ring
3 Centaur Healer
1 Growing Ranks
4 Advent of the Wurm
2 Garruk, Primal Hunter
2 Thragtusk
2 Armada Wurm
2 Trostani's Judgement

Grove gives us something even bigger to populate.
Farseek combined with the dorks gives us a resounding 12 things that enable a t3 advent.

I don't know how good this deck is (not very, in all likelihood), but that doesn't matter because WURM TOKENS.

Let me know what you think.

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Microbrews; Young Pyromancer Aristocrats

Evening folks.

I don't write enough. And when I do, it tends to be on the spot. This stuff that you're reading right now? Wrote it in one pass. No editing. Eyep.

That's not doing the webspace my blog occupies any favors, so I figured I should try to do something to encourage more frequent updates.

Why not dinky little home brews?

YES! In what I hope to become a regular occurrence, I'm going to latch onto a card in standard (because the smaller card pool keeps me from dying from choice paralysis) and build a working deck around it.

This week's lucky winner; Young Pyromancer.

There's a lot I like about this card. It's effect is very straight forward, but can push you into any number of avenues of play. Aggressive burn deck? Tokens matter? Some weird combo deck thing?
THE SKY'S THE LIMIT.
Plus look at that art.

Look at that smarmy little twit. He's got such an obnoxiously punchable face.
Makes me angry just looking at it.
So think of what it will do to the other guy!

My first thought with this guy was very straight forward; lots of burn spells. Meh. Boring.
It did occur to me that if you cast Krenko's Command, you would get three tokens out of the deal.
Same deal with Gather the Townsfolk.
Same with Lingering Souls.
Hmmm....

And that's where this came from;



USE ALL THE TOKENS.

Young Pyromancer makes tokens when you cast an instant or sorcery. So do most of the instants and sorceries in the deck. From there, there's lots of things you can do.
Blood Artist them to death with sac outlets. Dome them repeatedly with your hard to block aristocrats. Make your dudes enormous off of Intangible Virtues.

My main concern is the manabase.
24 lands

I've not actually figured this out yet because I haven't actually built or tested it yet. Stream of consciousness, yo. But I figure that it works something akin to counting the mana symbols when you build your limited deck (I was taught to, when building sealed or draft decks and figuring out the mana base, count up the number of colored mana symbols in your card's mana costs and have a similar ratio of those colored basic lands).

So, that's my first Microbrews.
Love to hear your thoughts on the deck and the article idea.
Thanks for reading!