Durdley Commander Decks | EDHRECast 231

[Music] hello and welcome to the edh rec cast my name is joey schultz and i'm joined as always by my fantastic co-hosts up first when he wins an award he doesn't just thank the academy he thanks the talarian academy it's matt morgan so joey there was one time i went on a first date and i invited this nice young woman to uh to meet me at the gym and she didn't show up and it kind of was weird but um i knew things weren't going to work out oh no now matt okay there's a lot of layers to that joke i get it you just pick it up and put it right back down uh okay i see what you did see people feel like i i'm fake when i laugh at your dad jokes but i think all of those folks out there who think that i'm just like being insincere with my laughter your dad jokes are missing the point what this is is clearly stockholm syndrome i can't escape from your dad jokes so i might as well enjoy myself i think it's more like a chuckling scoff than actual laughter it's either that or i break my nose from face palming too hard every week yes that too oh goodness all right up next he just saw the commander designs for the new warhammer decks and he's wondering what in the brawl is going on over there it's dana roach um i went to a wedding last weekend it was uh actually pretty beautiful um even the cake was in tears dang it all right so yep uh because there's you gotta grin and bear it that's just the way it is otherwise i will i'll face bomb too too much i love you guys thank you thank you dana thank you for that glad to help i appreciate it anyway this is the edh recast let's just get on with ourselves there it is idiot truck is the best deck building resource on the web for the commander format compiling data from deck lists all over the internet to provide helpful recommendations for new commander decks and here on the podcast we love to give that data a little more context matt do you mind telling us what it is that we are talking about in this week's episode well this week we're going to talk about decks that like to dirtl maybe a little too much and have problems just from a deck building perspective when it comes to closing out games yeah yeah decks that that dudley commander decks is uh kind of an interesting thing maybe this is a conflict that we have in our own deck building maybe it's a thing that we've played a lot uh and it yeah it'll be interesting to explore to make sure that your decks are not just spinning their wheels but that they're actually definitely going somewhere so that'll be a whole lot of fun but before we get into that we've got a couple of quick shout outs to do first like to thank chase also known as manic curves for their work editing the show you can find them on twitter at mana curves and you can support the show by liking subscribing these videos on youtube subscribing in your podcast app but also you can do so over at patreon.com edh recast where we have patron tears of all levels whether you want to see all of our historic challenges stats picks you want to see the episodes a day early there's all that and more including the very special patron shout out which you can get just by going to patreon.com edhbrecast and this week we're giving a very special thank you to sylvia krauss so thank you so much um it's not sauerkraut which is good because we can like you more for that oh do you not like sauerkraut what oh not at all that's how interesting do you like it it's fine it's we're getting a new host you have to hate that stuff yeah i don't know if i can accept that it's pretty horrifying thank you sylvia for out thank you thank you for outing joey is liking sauerkraut which is absolutely disgusting uh don't at me i'm i'm sauerkraut ambivalent okay i don't i neither love nor hate it but i do love our patrons including you sylvia thank you for the support matt you're so weird okay let's just get right to our main topic because we are we're off to a weird start all right we are talking about dirtly commander dex decks that will probably like take a lot of game actions or they'll do a lot you have to jump through a lot of hoops but they might not actually once you're done with the turn maybe they didn't go necessarily too far or matt i like the way that you said it that maybe these are decks that might struggle to actually close a game out could be another way to look at it as well so how about we just pass this right off to you when we're talking about dirtily commander dex or durdell decks in general i guess what is the thing that comes to mind how do you approach um yeah how do you approach this topic basically well i guess we should probably define dirtly because it's something very specific i would say to to magically gathering and board games in general but when we say dirtily decks we mean decks that kind of sit around they do a lot of things but they're not necessarily trying to win the game in any given step uh brago decks are kind of renowned for this they they accrue a whole bunch of value they get a whole bunch of things going but it doesn't actually help to win the game because there's so many just different game actions that maybe they're getting their own little benefits but they're not actually moving the game state forward in a way that's going to cause it to end anytime soon okay these decks also tend to be good i guess is the point like because there's plenty of bad decks that don't advance the games they either maybe do things we're gonna tend to focus on commanders that are actually effective they generate value they they have the ability to affect the game they just have a difficult time turning that corner and actually closing things out and i think that's an important distinction or maybe they never turn the corner which is my biggest beef with some of these types of decks yeah no that that is definitely a good distinction and i think it's probably really easy for us to contrast against other commanders that like it's really easy to recognize commanders that come out and make like an immediate impact as soon as they hit like maelstrom wanderer for example like that is not going to be in any way a dirtily commander because you get two cascades as soon as you play it the battlefield looks different as soon as you cast that card and it definitely is pushing things forward as soon as you cast that card and they're a little bit more brazen a little more out there whereas some of the dirtly decks like the value you'll get a lot of value but matt a refrain that i know you've said a couple of times on the podcast before is that value isn't victory so these might be commanders that accrue a lot of value but is that value actually helping you win anytime soon not necessarily so you have to put a lot of extra thought into okay how's this deck actually gonna close things down yeah it's there's a lot of decks out there we're going to cover a few of them but it's not really even necessarily attached to a certain command or strategy because obviously you can build decks whatever you want but just what we see on edhrec what the typical deck looks like that's kind of what we're going to focus on i mean we mentioned brago and actually dana i know that you have some of the most experience playing with and against brago that's a very famous blink commander do you have thoughts about that one being sort of a dirty commander yeah because my friend max who who pilots the deck will be the first person to admit it's it's a struggle trying to figure out how to close out games with that deck other than just hoping you can continuously smack someone in the face with that mole drifter that you're casting just so you can blink it and draw a couple cards because because bravo is basically a creature that when you connect with braga when you deal combat damage you can temporarily exile a permanent you control and then bring it back into play so basically you're gonna run a bunch of things with enter the battlefield abilities and try to trigger them by hitting somebody with braggo um the problem is they like tend to not attach useful enter the battle abilities and the battlefield abilities onto like you know six six flyers or something that are efficiently costed so you're going to eventually probably chip away at people's life total with those creatures but like that can take forever in in that style of deck so you need to find other ways to win and the way that deck tends to be constructed makes it difficult to combine those two things combine the value you want to generate with com with a way to actually close off the game right well and i think the most egregious part about brago king eternal is like you said dana it exiles things but it's not just eight target permanents it's any number of non-land permanents that you control yeah so brago players are able to blink their entire board which not only creates a whole bunch of triggers but it just takes forever for these decks to resolve uh if you have an aether channel or one of those new cards from dominar united you have three options of what you can do when that card is battlefield if you have og exquisite blade all sudden you're scrying a bunch you're probably drawing some cards you have all sorts of things going on and these decks are very very good at getting a lot of value but it's it's finding ways to convert that value into meaningful game actions that are gonna help you win the game yeah honestly i would probably say that like blink decks generally sort of struggle with this i think a lot of the things that you want to repeat over and over again are those mole drifters are those cloud blazers where you can draw a bunch of cards as they repeatedly enter leave enter leave and that is really good like you'll have more options it's going to help you stay in the game but they are you know if you're just chipping away in the air that's not necessarily realistic like another one that comes to excuse me not realistic as a way to like close the game out in a proper amount of time we're not giving your opponents extra turns that they might be able to catch you out and actually like overcome uh your your commanding lead at that point uh but another example that comes to my mind here especially would be like ran our the ever watchful which is another azorius commander that cares about blink and foretell and it makes you a bunch of tokens as a result of that and that's a really cool effect but again it's just a bunch of one one flying tokens and you would need to make a lot of those before you have what i would call a reasonable win condition in play and i think as a result of that something that we see especially in blink decks is that a lot of players seem to default to like infinite combos as a way to finally close things down like brago is famous for having an infinite combo with strianic resonator where you can repeatedly do those effects over and over again and that is in fact going to make you like infinite creatures on board so that you do have a lethal next turn um and infinite combos are sometimes a bit of a touchy point amongst commander players but i mean i guess i'll say that i would prefer like a combo like that happens to make the game close down as opposed to the game takes you know another hour for the deck to finally win so that's where i'm at i mean that it definitely beats dying to a mulder for over the course of 20 turns yes yeah well and that's 20 turns per person too so you're right yes you have the the mall drifter but you have three other players you have to take out and so yeah it's a lot of times you're just able to find your combos super quick so it kind of becomes the the meta for a lot of these decks where you're able to get so much value and draw so many cards and a lot of these decks you just find your combo every fairly reliable every single game so that just becomes the easiest way to actually close it out because you have so much value engine built into the rest of the deck and one thing that i think we will notice as we talk about the different decks that tend to do this is they all tend to have to devote a significant amount of their deck building resources to doing whatever that strategy is and those resources then don't necessarily lend themselves to a win condition so you have to run a bunch of creatures that that blink that have etb in your brago deck and you probably want to have other things that facilitate that way to protect that whole thing that doesn't necessarily leave you a ton of room for putting in ways to win games because those require separate cards right sometimes you're lucky enough that your deck doesn't necessarily require separate cards to win i i you know brago's an assorius deck i have an azurious sphinx tribal deck that does kind of play a little bit of control not dissimilar to a braggo deck it just so happens that i have 20 creatures in that deck that are all evasive six six beaters that also generate me you know card draw similar to a bravo deck so like in that situation i don't need to necessarily worry about dirtling because i am fortunate enough at the way that deck is constructed i have a win condition baked into every one of those bodies kind of in a way that a bragwl deck doesn't it's much easier to kill somebody with a handful of sphinxes that i can maybe give double strike to than it is to giving a mul drift for double strike yeah absolutely i think especially the fact that like there are a lot of players probably more experienced players who will be used to seeing some of these commanders and know that they tend to default to something like an infinite combo so there might be players who sit down against your blink deck who are expecting you to combo and if that's that's just the thing that you ought to be prepared for that's a thing that you ought to be aware of is that like sometimes that's why that perception will be there even if that wasn't a thing that you were planning to do but this definitely requires a lot of extra thought to be put into okay what are definitely the win conditions of this deck going to be um blink decks i think are probably one of the strongest examples that we'll have of a very obviously dirty commander but there are plenty more like another one that comes to my mind would be like gavin nest warden for example that's the jess guy cycling commander and it's really fun to do a bunch of cycling stuff but that is a lot of drawing and discarding and a lot of drawing and discarding and then a lot of trying to get your second draw step every turn and a lot of afar got to the police and a whole bunch of other strange interactions with cycling cards just so that you can make a 2-2 cat creature token yeah gabby nest warden is kind of like the angie falconrath type of deck where you go so hard on one theme whether it's cycling or madness or whatever that the rest of the deck ends up being air because you're so focused on trying to do that one thing which is why you know the angie falconrath decks end up having that famous world gorger animate dead combo in there because you're just so concentrated you have to have something that's going to be able to win because madness cards call me crazy aren't really great at being able to win games for you right in both of those cases you have to shoot you have to be very very careful about the things that you were selecting for what your win conditions will be like for me for example in both of the the decks we just named gavi and any wrath i would say excuse me uh miss ang that's the official pronunciation uh it's like psychosis crawlers one of the first things that jumps to my mind i'd be so excited to play something like that or uh brawling sky shark writer for both of those decks would also be awesome because as you discard a bunch of cards you're dealing more damage but like they those win conditions kind of run out pretty fast you have to like hope that you find those soon so that the rest of the deck can actually like okay this will pull off into victory you have to find a way to like make those things lethal and the obvious ones might be obvious but there also might be fewer of them than you initially think so maybe you have to branch out a little bit more and and see what else is going to be out there for you to actually find the realistic win conditions that are dense enough to be to see them in the games in a timely fashion that's really what it comes down to is like finding a way to to have not just one but like multiple win conditions in these decks and find space for them while the deck is also while you still have enough cars to do what you're trying to make the deck do as well now dana as you mentioned earlier like we've mentioned examples of like brago which we know is good and gavi is certainly very popular too but like you mentioned that these aren't just like oh you know it's doing a lot not going very far because the commander is bad not at all like and i think our next example will be like a a the peak example of this but like i would wager that muldrotha qualifies as potentially a very dirtily commander and that is clearly also one of the more busto commanders we've seen it like that that one's really really good and also very popular like i feel like that also qualifies as dirtl probably depending on how it's built or it has a risk of being built to be dirty unless you're being attentive to it does does that does that track with you do you think it it tracks and it also i guess this is a good is the time i need to mention one component of this as well is these things all tend to be a little bit time consuming so not only do they not necessarily have an easy way to generate that win for you they take up actually like physical time for you to do all the things you're doing you're playing your mo your multirother deck okay i can cast multiple things from the graveyard of this turn which of those things do i want to cast how can i sequence them what am i going to sacrifice to get back in the graveyard so i can do a next turn how can i protect that graveyard from the duke bug effect or something like there's a lot of things going on that you have to position and maintain that don't necessarily bring you closer to winning the game yeah what joey or not joey dana joked about you know the the mole drifter beats it's going to take 20 turns to do that glenna lender archmage is the same thing it's also a 2-2 you're going to get so much value or ravenous chupacabra they're great cards but they're not necessarily proactive cards they're just they're they're reactive they're they're adjusting but also they take a lot of time to resolve dana's absolutely right these can be very time consuming on the watch decks i feel like also a characteristic of some of these dirtily decks is that they're very good at not losing which is different than being very good at winning like muldrotha and marin of clandell tolth although i think i'm not sure that i would qualify marin as being dirtly necessarily but both of those commanders are famous for spore frog recursion like you're constantly returning to the field this thing that you can sacrifice to make sure that you don't take combat damage and that is going to or glacial chasm like mulder can also get back that land that prevents you from taking damage it is hard to break through those especially when any attempt to destroy those things means that maldot is just going to get him right back the very next turn those are hard to break through but they're also like definitely not winning the game at all but it's hard to kill as well like these are resilient decks it's like a characteristic of dirty decks i think oh yeah very much so um in in you know it's probably not a coincidence that a handful of the ones we've talked about are also playing blue so now not only are they resilient and not only do they generate plenty of resources in a lot of cases they have counter magic to back up all the things they're doing as well so sure it's it's one extra thing that you have to fight through to stop this slow deck that's accumulating resources without actually necessarily winning the game um yeah no that's a good point and honestly another uh example that i had put down when we were uh putting this this show topic idea together was another commander that also includes blue which is shorikai the genesis engine i mean that that one's also like amazing that's the vehicle commander that doesn't necessarily need to be built with a bunch of vehicles if you don't want to but it taps to draw you two cards discarded card and it makes a pilot token and a lot of that deck i think it really is focused on like here's a lot of like game actions over and over again where you're like untapping it re-tapping it to draw cards discard untapping it with a whole bunch of other effects unbender tines and other things like that uh and that's a lot of game actions and you're going to end up with probably a couple of one ones which is really good and really helpful but again that's a deck that like might be difficult to pull together a win condition which is why i think a lot of players have defaulted to finding combos that work with tapping and untapping it over and over again and making a whole bunch of creature tokens like that but i feel like a lot of shortcut players have kind of found themselves in that niche because just relying on one ones and vehicles is not always a reliable win condition whereas a combo will actually get you there but again yeah it's a commander that contains blue and is therefore very resilient especially because it's making you blockers and drawing you a lot of cards well joey you you mentioned specific commander so far we've done this um i'm going to throw a whole category a whole strategy i guess really under the bus here super friends decks definitely fall into this category of dirtily decks that they take a lot of game actions they do a lot of stuff they get a lot of value but they sometimes can struggle to actually close games out um if you want to talk about a very just time-consuming strategy you have to be very very skilled with a super friend's deck to really know how to play that and not just kind of drag it out it ends up being solitaire a lot of times just because there are so many game actions not only are you casting all your spells like a normal deck would be doing but also you also have these planeswalkers on the battlefield that have their own decision trees to play through and and resolve um if you have a jace the mind sculptor and you're brainstorming every turn that's that's a whole long spell to resolve that you're doing every single turn on your js if you have any given planeswalker there's just so much to be going on there any of the lilianas there's just a lot of things you have to consider when you're resolving literally any of those abilities and man it's they can be very time consuming there's a lot going on but then when you talk about okay well how does all this value win a lot of times these super friends decks that takes a while for them to actually snowball to a win even when they alter planeswalker too like even if you get the doubling season instantly ulta planeswalker i mean planeswalker ultimates are designed not to automatically win the game you still have to put together a little bit of extra but like there are planeswalkers out there that prevent damage to you as their ultimate or that stop people from playing non-creature spells or that counter the first spell that an opponent plays each turn or one i think there's a new johnny that just gains you 100 life and like those are great when you ult them and it's going to be again really hard to kill you but yeah ulting a planeswalker is not the end of the game by any means so even when you achieve the thing your deck wants to do you still have a little bit more to go so what is your win condition past that point yeah that's a great example of a category and if you want to talk about maybe not winning but also finding ways to not lose gaining a hundred life is a really really good way to not lose a game well like we play a game or two pretty much every week on twitch.tv such a dhrec cast and there's a reason i think once ever i've played my geria with eyes open super friends deck on stream because it is dirtily and and while i admit it's dirtily i've actually taken a look over the years at like maybe converting that to a different style super friends decks i still like to have one and i'm of course assumed mono white is probably the worst way to do it but every time i look to do that i then look back at my deck and realize well almost all of my planeswalkers in that deck make tokens and i'm in mono white so i have access to things like cather's crusade and divine visitation and like ways to actually make those tokens kill people i actually do have wind conditions in that decade whenever i look to like make it into a different color combination i feel like there's actually kind of less ways to because most other colors planeswalkers don't necessarily make tokens oh wow so it is as dirtily as that deck is it's still probably less dirtily than most superfriend stacks oddly enough considering that it's mono white interesting that's very interesting and hey i'm glad that we found a non-blue example of a dirtly deck let's let's find more of those there we go another few that we had written down here would be uh fantas the war weaver like i i tried building a fantastic that's the jun spider that makes all of your opponent's creatures attack each turn but if they attack you fantus gets plus one counters it took so much to try and make that deck do its thing and at the end of the day the thing that i was trying to do was make my opponents attack and hopefully not me and that's very hard to do because it's not it's not goad it's an effect they just have to attack they can point it at you do i have enough defenses you have to set up defenses and you also have to make sure that your opponents have enough creatures in play that like will be good once you finally get them to attack with each other is that good for you or were they going to attack with those creatures anyway are you actually causing them an issue or disrupting their game plan when you finally get your commander to do the thing you wanted it to do so that's another example that strikes me and not blue well joy you say it's another non-blue dirtled deck i'm going to go back to blue because i want to throw blue just as many hate balls as i can oh man so so lind cheerful tormentor is one that also kind of comes to mind uh lynch tearful torment is that grix's colored curse tribal deck which it's a very very cool idea we don't often get enchantment matters type of stuff in grix's colors but here we are but also when you look at the typical curse deck and just what those curse cards are those those enchantment auras that go on players a lot of times they're getting meaningful not really meaningful but like minimal effect but you're getting it recursively so you're getting very very small things like whenever you have the curse card so curse of verbosity whenever somebody attacks the enchanted player you and that player draw a card occurs to surveillance where at the beginning of everybody they enchanted players upkeep any number of target players other than that player draw cards equal the number of curses attached to that player so you're getting a lot of really cool little effects but they're not actually doing a whole lot of damage or finding ways for players to lose it's just more and more value there are a few that do pretty well when it comes to actually you know making people lose the game but they're kind of few and far between especially in grix's colors yeah no i feel that and especially i feel like there are a lot of curses that don't necessarily like cooperate with each other as well like some curses are very attack focused and then there are plenty of other curses that care about milling your opponents and it's just like those that's you know that's that's chocolate and bacon those don't necessarily work together so you also have to like curate probably an already limited number of curses to even fit in that deck and even lin's own ability actually would probably classify here where like you're going through a lot of steps to give away a curse to another person detach it from yourself and give it to someone else so that you can draw two cards and like there's a lot of stuff that's involved in all of that like you have to usually use stuff like claws of gix and things so like try and sacrifice curses that might end up attached to you and you're putting a bunch of other stuff into your deck to try and mitigate the curses that might fall on onto you so that you can buy yourself time to give them away all so you can do the thing of drawing two cards and it's that took a lot of effort just for a divination effect is all well and while those that that particular deck might not be time consuming in terms of like casting those curses you've created this board state now where everyone has to remember what cards that don't belong to them are now attached to them or their opponents too it's like you're creating kind of this this mental tax you're putting on everybody else too which is control the game down for sure oh dude mental tax i feel like that actually leads us to another category of decks that would also definitely i probably should have led with this one but like dungeon decks i feel like this is actually a reason that a lot of players don't want to bring the initiative into the game like there are a lot of people who will put monarch cards into their decks because they want to put the monarch into the game because it's pretty straightforward whoever has the monarchy will draw an extra card at the end of the turn but have not seen quite as much attention for initiative getting into regular commander games unless the deck is fully 100 percent a dungeons deck like cephus for example because if a card says you take the initiative on it and that's like one of your only things suddenly the initiative on on everyone's board it's a lot to keep track of that not everyone's always in the mood for you probably want a higher density of initiative stuff to actually care about putting that into a deck rather than the one-off cards like you might see with monarchs but even then dedicated dungeon decks it takes a lot of going through the dungeon to accumulate a lethal board state as well that is a lot of stuff you gotta do and you're compounding that by the fact that like right you're going through the dungeon one step at a time and no one remembers what the dungeons individual rooms are so like that's adding a mental tax and then in that deck what you tend to be doing is they're doing a lot of blink things or a lot of clone things there's a lot of like additionally dirtily things they're doing so they can generate multiple initiative and dungeon triggers per turn to kind of work their way around the the kind of baked in speed bump there to keep you from from doing that so the deck is just encouraging you to do all kinds of dirty things to maximize finding any way to actually win yeah i i think as much as i like monarch and the initiative as mechanics initiative kind of misses for me because you're asking people to bring game pieces they wouldn't otherwise have anything to do with or need to know at all but if you have initiative somebody can take that from you and then they also have it so you're kind of asking people to play your deck on a little bit of a scale there and it most people if they want to play your deck they're going to play theft decks they're going to steal your things instead of stealing the mechanics in your cards which sometimes can be a major miss for some people yeah if you're playing initiative cards you should be bringing four copies of the initiative thing so that you can give them to everyone but like make sure that you've brought tokens that they will need i feel the same way about grismold players that's another deck that gives a lot of tokens to other people make sure that you've brought us a substantial number of plant tokens for the entire table to make sure that they're good there but but like on the subject i think the dungeon decks especially cephas stands out here as an example of like people have had to get kind of creative with what are the win conditions of that deck going to be cephas whenever you complete a dungeon you get a creature back from your graveyard onto the battlefield and in the data on edhrec a lot of the creatures that we tend to see as sort of top ends for that ability tend to be kind of brutal like ellis schnorns and tox reals because of how dirty the rest of the deck is like you've got some standout cards in that deck like radiant solar will take you through a dungeon like three times in a single turn that card's amazing but going through the dungeon three times in a single turn does not a game win for you so something like annelish noren will actually potentially close things out and that can be kind of jarring as an opponent when you see oh i didn't expect that that would be the final boss at the end of the dungeon that's pretty different than what i expected the rest of the deck to do but i mean that deck is looking for a way to close things out and just going through the dungeon barring an infinite combo is not going to do it and sometimes you need something that is a little bit more brutal at the top end to try and finally close the game down yeah i would say in the last year or so the the the earliest decks i've run into have been dungeon decks for sure and probably in particular cetera stacks yeah yeah no i can i can totally feel it and i don't think that like we probably should have mentioned this before this isn't bad like we've each said that we also have decks that durdle like it's not a bad thing it's just a thing to be aware of about your own deck so it's probably a thing we should have qualified earlier but it's good to qualify it now better late than never right now absolutely yeah totally late than never i've never owned a mold roth a deck ever here except that i have i like i had a multi-deck and yes that was one of the big reasons that as soon as i had a chance to change the commander i did because it just it turned into a case of i felt like i was taking up more of the player's time than i felt okay with as far as the other three people at the pod and that was just an experience that i didn't enjoy for myself or putting other players through um so i changed up that was just something that i just i did not like i have said many many times on the podcast i like proactive decks i like moving things forward i like turning things sideways and just mulderotho was not that deck for me so instead i that's when i made my ukim and kazar deck and i've had a blast ever since and boy does that one move the game forward because you can't even block okemah and then even if you get rid of it it still deals like 10 damage to me and that's a conservative estimate because of how much you buff that thing up not that i'm you know not trying to get deals 10 damage to you but it kills sheldon mannery whenever he comes on our stream at twitch.tvhrecast so that's that's what really matters let's be real it doesn't just deal 10 damage to me because when you attack me with your unblockable leukemia dana like gives it plus 10 or infect or a bunch of other circuit or something for sure exactly okay yeah this is this is very interesting but before you guys have the chance to steal my segue from me i am going to manually move us now into challenge the stats that we can take a break from the dirtling and we can talk about some cards that are either over or underplayed on eda track so let's take a break and talk about that this week challenge of stats is brought to you by expressvpn my day job is actually internet security and when i say day job i use that term very loosely i'm up a lot of nights dealing with problems very often and more often than not those problems are caused by online security issues the point is this is something i take pretty seriously and that's why even when i'm at home i never go online without using expressvpn expressvpn is an app that reroutes your internet connection through their secure servers so your isp can't see the sites you visit expressvpn also keeps your information secure by encrypting 100 of your data with the most powerful encryption available it runs seamlessly in the background so i don't even notice when it's on literally all you have to do is tap a button and boom you're secure an expressvpn is available on all your devices phone computer even smart tv so protect your online activity today with the vpn rated number one by business insider if you visit our exclusive link expressvpn.com edh you can get an extra three months free on a one year package that's e-x-p-r-e-s-s-vpn.com edh expressvpn.com edh to learn more and now back to the show well i can hop right in here with my challenges stats then from way back in urza's gears set um the famous urges gears there's a saga you mean yeah sure you know both both names are it has two official names uh matt urza saga is a land enchantment there we go come on matt joey that's not even almost as bad as your sauerkraut stand [Laughter] one way to make cabbage better is to put it out in the sun um thran turbine um is a one mana artifact from from back in ursus gears um it says during your upkeep you may add up to two colorless mana to your mana pool and this mana can't be spent to play spells it's in 2000 x an 88 rx so it's a terrible soul ring um except if your commander has an activated ability that requires mana to use um you know i ran this a few years back when i had temporarily built a kenrift that returned king deck because kendrick has a bunch of abilities and you generally don't care about when you use those abilities it's a pretty nice free source of mana during your upkeep and there's a ton of commanders out there that have activated abilities that it's a very efficient way to pay for those um you know zanzia sleeper agent for example just lets you spend your thread animal mana and one additional land to shock someone in drawcar there's grenzo dungeon dungeon warden putting cards on the bottom of your library there's a ton of things you can do during that upkeep and it's a really efficient way to do that so if you are playing a commander that has an activated ability that requires mana and the timing is kind of irrelevant take a look at the rand turbine it's really efficient and it's a very cheap card that doesn't see almost any play and it should see a little bit more i am way into that that's clever i really like it especially for zancha like oh that's such a i just like that commander in general too but yeah dana that's a cool pick i love it uh i'll move now to our listener submitted challenge this week if that's okay matt i want to make sure that it's allowed i'm not making you sour about the situation make it happen what about kimchi like do you like kimchi kimchi's amazing like is that okay it's spiced at least though we're never gonna okay so our listener submit a challenge this episode comes to us from maxwell nichols uh maxwell actually sent us an email years ago and i think maxwell was really on top of something because i've seen a lot of people talking about this online um a little bit more recently as well um wanted to challenge the card aetherworks marvel in treasure decks specifically so aetherworks marvel is the four mana kaladesh legendary artifact whenever a permanent you control is put into a graveyard you get an energy and then you can tap and pay six energy to look at the top six cards of your library and you may cast a card from among them without paying its mana cost and you put the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order currently only showing up in 3 700 decks right now and it is not showing up in a lot of treasure decks but maxwell this is a great pick for treasure decks because those treasures technically hit the graveyard and then vanish but that will give you a bunch of energy so you can go through tons upon tons upon tons of energy and then just get free stuff with an aetherworks marvel like you will have so much fuel for this card to just give you free spells every turn and there just aren't a lot of treasure decks that are currently playing it jan jansen currently only about six percent of those decks are playing this card um only about nine percent of jolene the plunder queen decks are playing aetherworks marvel so yeah this was an email to us from years ago but maxwell you were definitely on top of it and this is definitely a very relevant card right now sorry that it took us so long to get to your challenge but aetherworks marvel is indeed a marvel and i think would be great for those treasure players so good shout all right matt now it's on to you well my challenge this week is for one of the new commanders which actually i'm kind of surprised that it's been as popular as it has so far um but it's tor wilkie the younger which dana and i got to talk about a little bit uh man it is very very interesting i'm excited to see what people are doing with it um so tor wow key the younger is three and rakdos colors so a black and a red for a three three with reach and lifelink when and whenever another source you control would deal non-combat damage to a permanent or a player it deals that much damage plus one to that permit or player instead and then also whenever you cast an instant or sorcery spell torwalki deals two damage to any target so there's a lot going on here there's two really cool abilities you can focus in on and i'm a big fan of these ping style decks where you're able to cast a spell and burn people out and you get all sorts of cast triggers the spellcraft or the magecraft abilities whenever you cast an sorcery you get an ability so one of the cards that i just i have always wanted to find a home for and i think this really could be the place is sir cara the bold so sir care of the bold is three red red for a 3-3 human knight it says whatever sir care of the bold or an instant or sorcery spell you control deals damage to a player you exile the top card of your library and you may play that card this turn and then you can tap sir cara to deal one damage to any target so if you're playing one of those more burn focused strategies in these tour wow key decks this is an amazing card advantage engine for you because you're able to cast a spell you're going to get a lot of whenever you cast these instance or sorcery abilities but also sir care of the bold becomes a card advantage engine one of the big reasons that burn decks in general don't translate very well to commanders because the cards and the mana required to actually burn your opponents out as compared to 20 life formats is absolutely huge the the the amount of life you have to deal in damage pales in comparison so every single card so dealing three damage with a lightning bolt isn't near as impactful as it would be in a modern deck or a legacy deck sir care of the bold helps shore up one of the biggest weaknesses that those burn decks would have in commander which is where you're going to run out of cards extremely fast for every lightning bolt or lightning strike that you cast targeting your opponents you're going to get another card available to you that turn that's going to help you crank through your decks and you're going to be able to cast a lot more spells but also this combines with a lot of those ping type of cards you're going to have your firebrand archers your gutter stripes so not only are you fueling all the burn spells to the face but you're enabling the rest of the deck to really churn through and you're going to get so much card advantage it is a little bit of a deck building challenge finding the balance between the payoffs and the setup cards that's one thing we talk about a lot on this podcast but sir care of the bold is such a powerful engine in some of these decks but i think it should be showing up in so many more decks than it is currently it's only an 18 percent of torwaukee the younger decks and if you're playing the burn focused version that some people are you absolutely want this card in your deck well said that's a very very fun one i am into it and i am scared of it which is perfect that's a that's a good good line to write i think for a lot of commander gameplay that's especially fun for burn so yeah i love it matt well thank you i i you say you're into it but are you here for it that is the i am a question i am here for it i am i'm i'm even there for it all right let's move back into our into our main topic so i have a a question that i come to throw out here as we get into like you know this latter half of the podcast i suppose about where do we how do i phrase this where do we draw the line between a deck that might be dirtily and a deck that's just bad um maybe i've not phrased that that well necessarily but like for example i used to try to make an as mirror deck uh as mirror holy avenger which would get plus one counter is equal to the number of stuff that died under your control that turn and i kept trying and trying and trying until eventually i was just like okay i'm gonna give up on this because this celestia aristocrats is the odds are not in my favor here um so there have been times where i'm like i i think that i might just have to accept that this card i ran out of patience for it um so like dana for you where do you draw the line on like this deck is doodling too much and not you know it's just spinning wheels not going far enough versus this is not even worth my time anymore how does how do you do that analysis in your brain um that's a good question um i guess it comes down to whether or not i can see potential paths to victory even if i don't hit them consistently enough and i at least have some reason to assume i can make that better so to to to come back to my most early deck which would be my zero with eyes open super friends deck well i i will probably continue to get white planeswalkers that make token creatures um and so that that's an improvement just in terms of like being able to swing bodies at people and one of the things white tends to do is have enchantments that buff up creatures well i'm making tokens so like you know i i will get something else you know we got divine visitation a few years back i mentioned cather's crusade um dictator heliod gives everything plus two plus two there's a handful of those planeswalkers in white that also tend to buff creatures so like there are things in that deck that that make me feel like even if it's a little bit dirtily right now it's less dirty than it was two years ago and it will in theory be left early two years from now so in the case of that deck in the interim i'm cautious with where i play it and with who i play with because i know i can tend to be slow but i also haven't taken it apart because i feel like slowly but surely either via me tweaking things i'm making it less early and i feel like over the course of you know the the foreseeable future i will probably get more tools that will make it less sturdily as well or give me more ways to win games okay yeah i i can see that path lighting up in front i can see you finding those and so matt what about you is it sort of similar or do you have a different idea on it in order for me to consider a commander or a deck bad i would say the commander is trying to do two things either it's too narrow or doesn't have enough support for what it's trying to do i think redane god of the worthy is a really good example something that's just too narrow to be good where the the big ability is snow lands your opponent's control into battlefield tapped and then non-creature spells your opponents that the cast with uh cmc 4 or greater cost two more to cast so it's just it's a little narrow to be in the command zone hitting snow lands not enough people are really playing snow lands or snow matters cards so i i think it just kind of falls short the tax is fine but it's not impactful enough or the other thing that might factor into a commander being bad is it strike to do too many things at once um maybe the commander's unfocused or it's doing one thing but then it's kind of trying to do a different thing with another ability and so there's no real direction to that and maybe sometimes the abilities might even be at odds with each other too um we've mentioned several commanders in the past that what it's trying to do on one axis combats itself what it's trying to do on the other axis so those are two big things that i would consider personally when it comes to a value like is this commander or the deck you're trying to build just bad maybe not dirtily but just it's fighting against itself or just not doing enough and you're just going to want to look at something else for your commander yeah i can think a lot of a lot of those like there are sometimes commanders to like try and find examples of what you were just talking about like rigo's uh streetwise mentor came out a little while ago and that is a it's one of the commanders from new capana that draws you cards if you attack with creatures that have power one or less and that is a command like that effect is cool but it is literally restricting what your deck is trying to do so that would be like i mean i'm sure i could find a lot of cool stuff to do with this deck like attack with a mirror entity and then you know buff up everything after blocks have been not declared or or whatever like to reward that so that i get the commander's effect and also can still do lethal but the commander is putting a restriction down there and i don't think that's necessarily a bad commander i think that the payoffs can be worth it there compared to like uh other examples of like they are too narrow they don't have enough support like uh gorion wisementor is another i think also bont commander that cares a lot about adventures that came out in the balder's gate set and there just aren't a lot of adventures in those colors to really flesh that deck out necessarily and so yeah that could be easily a thing that you run out of patience for and i would be hesitant to call them bad maybe still like waiting no is that like they're they have potential but the potential hasn't been unlocked they're not the one neo like i don't know does that does any of that make sense i i think i think waiting is a good way to put it though because just because i mean when we first saw in zendikar rising we saw all the party matters stuff a lot of those commanders they didn't really have enough either payoffs for command or for a full party you only had one set worth of cards that carried about a party but also some of the colors were pretty restricted i mean if you're playing the orzov it's you're pretty narrow with the amount of wizards that you can have in your party deck so it's just they hadn't really flushed out the ideas yet if they made an energy commander hint into watsi then it pro you really only have maybe a set and a half because you have the original kaladesh block so you have a set and a half worth of cards to pull from and there's not enough support there either i think that definitely is a factor in how long they're waiting for proper support to be because landfall commanders every set is a landfall commander supporting set that's that's absolutely true and you're absolutely right there are certain like admiral beckett brass did not used to have enough pirates she has enough pirates now dungeons decks did not have enough dungeon stuff but then the initiative came out and now cephus is actually like pretty supercharged still dirtily but has a lot more that it can do so yeah those are decks that we're just like waiting for their potential to unlock so what do you guys do if you find yourself with a deck that you do feel like is in a position where it is too dirtily is there any like thing you fall back on do you like i'm just going to put a combo in what is it you do um because i can give you an example here um probably my other dirtily deck is is my gliss of the trader deck um it just how it's built and how it plays i just don't have a bunch of good ways or or many good ways at all to win the win the game once upon a time when i first built it you know eight years ago the way commander worked because i could rely on having a 4-4 in play when someone was out for life but like that's that was a win condition at one point in time that's not really how commander works anymore um so that's the one deck where i'm running over runs where i'm running overwhelming stampede and and overrun and things like that because i'm playing green so like i can you can default to that if you're playing a green creature deck um so i have there that's the only deck where i really run those effects but is there any kind of go-to's you do or anything you guys do when you're looking to try to find a way to turn a corner with one of these decks i would say for me i just tend to scrap the deck if i've tried to tinker and play around here and there i often will just scrap the deck and either convert it salvage the pieces or just find a new commander and just take it apart and come back to that color combination later my gliss the trader deck you know dana you and i used to talk about how we would compare our list back and forth but mine i never really got to pan out i it felt like it was trying to do too many things i couldn't get the balance right which you've done a much better job than i ever did and so when i got described to my glissadec i would tinker with it a little bit and ultimately i just gave up i scrapped it i took it apart there are other decks that i've done that with where i i still will find like 10 cards together like oh yeah that used to be in a deck together and now they're just 10 cards lying in a box somewhere this is this is tough because i i think for me i have certainly built decks before where i noticed that like i was feeling like okay i need to find a win condition that actually like sets things up but i tend to not want to do combos for example like an infinite combo as the way that i'm going to win the game and i feel like i i want to also like clarify right there that there is not judgement from me for people who do use infinite combos to close the keyboard because again i would prefer for the game to end in a timely fashion as opposed to being pecked by a mulder to a bite not a bulge a mole drifter uh you know 20 turns something like that like i i appreciate that and i feel like there are some commanders out there where like realistically i'm not going to expect that monoblue wizards deck to deal a bunch of combat damage to win the game you know i'm probably going to expect some type of infinite combo but it's not the thing that i want it to default to so what i tend to do is probably like just increase the density of wind conditions that i have in the deck even if i think those win conditions are a little questionable like the the biggest the biggest example of this i think comes to me uh like when i was helping my younger brother build a kadena deck for instance like that kadena deck the pre-con came with like two cards that were good win conditions or or honestly just two cards that were like win conditions at all there was an overwhelming stampede in there and there was a biomass mutation to make all of your creatures that are two-two morphs or when they flip over one-one creatures most of the time like they're not very big they don't do a lot of damage they have crazy cool effects but there's not a whole lot of them um and we were very tempted like we looked at the biomass mutation we were just like just probably yank that out there it's not a good card right oh wait no that's one of the only ways that this deck is actually winning the game we're not huge fans of it but we'd better keep it and we'd better find more like that even if we're not totally crazy about them so we went for some of the big ones like a beastmaster ascension and stuff like that but like we'll probably in that deck we would even just play like a regular overrun so that the deck has some actual punch even if we're not you know we compare overrun versus overwhelming stampede we're not in love with one of those compared to the other but it's better than only having two total win condition cards in the deck at all so for me i think it becomes a density issue it's a long way to answer that question but that's i think where i've landed so did we answer your question today i guess is our our wrap-up or did we just ramble or how would or how would you answer the question of an answer yeah turn it around on you dana how do you answer your own question well so so i i do think this is the kind of thing where it isn't always necessarily readily apparent what that solution is um because you know these days i tend to brew decks and i tend to have a win condition in mind or multiple win conditions in mind when i brew them sure i didn't always do that but just because you didn't do it doesn't mean you can't kind of find it i'd like i mentioned with my gerudek i i was not intending on winning via token token damage in that deck i just wanted to play modern white planeswalkers because i thought it was funny um and after i played the deck i then kind of came to realize oh well a bunch of these make tokens you know every else beth does a couple of the gideons do so like what okay i can i can actually lean into that then and like there are things in white that care about the small creatures and i can buff those small creatures and care about combat damage so like that was something i discovered over the course of playing that dirtily attack and now i've made it somewhat less dirtily um so that is something you can do just because your deck is dirtily right now doesn't mean you can't find those answers just through playing it and um you just have to be observant and kind of keep your eye open for those things i love that that's a really really good lesson it's like letting yourself discover the deck makes a lot of sense because because yeah i identify with you they're like i tend to have the destination like how is this deck going to win tends to be one of the impetuses for me to build the deck in the first place like it's no mystery how conrad is going to end a game it's no mystery how the mimioplasm is going to end the game it's kind of like right there on on the card and as much as i you know it's not about the the destination it's about the journey that matters and the friends we made along the way i when i board a plane i like to know where that plane is going i like to know that the plane is going to land like that's kind of my philosophy about deck building as well um so i tend not to run into run into that issue too much but it is good to take a step back and do that approach too where you're allowing yourself to explore because that is a limitation on my deck building sometimes where i since i already know where i'm going i don't always give myself time to wander and to enjoy the the sights that a deck might surprise me with is this something that you've ever stumbled into matt where like you've built that deck and as you've been playing you're like oh this this is how it wins even though i didn't realize that i i would say i have two decks that have done that my alila artful provocator deck and my real the otherwise deck both of those both of which could potentially be dirty if if left to their own devices absolutely so my first realization i had to have was these are control decks they're not aggressive decks they're not trying to move the game forward just because there was a theme that i was trying to center around but also i needed to figure out when i needed shift gears and that was the biggest thing so i really had to be patient with just the theme that i took into that deck net real obviously a lot of discarding to trigger her ability but finding something to do and make sure that all the the dirtling and all the value accruing that i was doing with all the sagas in my alila deck figuring out when it was time to go and really move things forward that was a balance i had to kind of juggle around a little bit uh i was very happy when my alila deck finally like took shape because before it was kind of a good stuff you know just playing some artifacts enchantments was very standard so giving an identity that was one thing that i think i had to flesh out to find enjoyment in the deck but then also when i realized like what the deck was actually trying to do versus what i was trying to make it do um a lot of times those are two very very different things when it comes to playing a deck i had one idea in mind but the the cards that i put in there were actually pushing in a different direction yeah matt well well said again it's like allowing the cards to reveal the stuff to you or like allowing yourself to understand what it is that the the cards are trying to tell you but now i sound like a psychic now i sound like i'm doing like mumbo jumbo that's not what i mean did any of it make sense am i just being silly now i might just be being suddenly now no i i get what you're saying completely i i appreciate it dana um and you know what as one final note that i think we probably have to put into this episode we might need to apologize to all of the arculos players that are out there um because we were talking about turtle and not turtle and it might be that might have been a thing that we probably also should have said at the beginning of the episode like sorry me and during tower shell but this episode was not about you the durdle turtle is the true offender of this because it's literally just taking its time right yeah literally as much as possible all right yeah this is interesting i think there's a lot of stuff to explore here and to allow yourself to explore here and to learn here to like matt as you like to say it's always comes down to the intentionality and these are decks that are you know it's definitely extra important to be very intentional about the cards that you put into decks like the ones that we discussed today and there are certainly plenty of other options so listeners we would love to know what are the dirtly decks in your experience what are the dirtiest decks that you've played and what were the solutions for that experience in your case we'd love to hear from you but with that fellas let's call this episode to a close if our listeners want to get in touch with us where is it that they can find us all not so you can find me on the twitters mathmas55 that's m-a-t-h-i-m-us55 and don't forget wednesday evenings we're streaming over at twitch.tv edh recast we have guests on every single week it's always super fun i guess like it's just so much fun being able to meet all these awesome people in the community get to play some games with them so just make sure you tune in um there's just so much so much going on there um can't say enough about it indeed and dana you can find me on twitter at dana roach you can hear me on the other podcast cmdr central i'm writing articles for dhrec and commanders herald and you can find all of us together at patreon.comtrackcast and i'm joey schultz you can find me at joseph m schultz on twitter and you can find the cast at edhrecast on facebook and on twitter plus if you've got a question for us you can contact us at edhrecast gmail.com all right thanks go out once again to chase for assisting me with the post production of the show you can find them online at mana curves and listeners will be back at you next week with more data and insights but until then remember edh wreck your deck before you wreck your deck [Music] you

Channel: EDHRECast

Views: 39,044

Keywords: magic the gathering, commander, edh, edhrec, mtg

Id: XsZqcoLPAMk

Length: 55min 27sec (3327 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 23 2022