Most Changed Commanders | EDHRECast 182

[Music] hello and welcome to the edh recast my name is joey schultz and i'm joined as always by my fantastic co-hosts first up whenever he flips a werewolf in midnight hunt he says to himself night time daytime it's matt morgan now i just i want to let all those modern day cattle ropers and wranglers and thieves know that i have a pretty big beef with them all right that's personal but it is a pretty big beef yeah i'm i'm thinking of what you're putting down well done up next he's thinking of building that new grix's curse commander that way he can tell me no listen linda listen listen linda no linda listen that's dana roach um why does sword and markov not have any friends dana i have no idea is it because he's stuck in stone somewhere because he's such a pain in the neck joey oh if you think back about it his relationship with nahiri was pretty rocky um things with avacyn disintegrated very very quickly and you know he's never gonna ruin his own fault because he's incapable of self-reflection dang matt dana's coming for you that was rapid fire that was more than i gave dana credit for so bravo it only took me since commander 2017 to come up with those right i've been working on that little bit for years that was epic anyway this is the edh recast idiotrack 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 what we like to do is give all of that data a little more context matt what is it that we're talking about in this week's episode so we're going to talk about the commanders that have changed the most as far as what cards are in the 99 over the past few years indeed i'm really looking forward to this episode to see which commanders have evolved the most over time how unrecognizable are their decks it should be really really interesting to go over and see which commanders have changed real quick before we get to our main topic let's pause and thank the folks at the command zone they handle the push production work on our podcast making it look as awesome and spiffy as it does and of course we want to thank our sponsors for the show as well yeah the idiht cast is sponsored by card kingdom and a tcg player two online retailers so powerful that they tutor uplands when they come into play and let you cast the top three cards of your library for free just go to idihrec and click on the card in question and to choose the vendor link down below doing so supports both the site and the show and if you'd prefer to support the show directly you can do so over at patreon.com edhredcast we have patron tears of all sorts of levels we have patron exclusive content coming out every single month so make sure you head over to patreon.com edh recast to support the show we even have a very special tier where we shout out just a patron just for joining and supporting us because we definitely appreciate the support so this week we want to give a very special shout out to carolyn peek so carolyn thank you so much for the support it definitely means the world to us thank you so much carolyn okay fellas let's get into our main topic here we are talking about the most changed commanders and the way that we're going to measure this is with our pretty traditional two year cutoff here idiotrack measures all of the data for commanders that have been built or the decks have been updated within the past two years and that is how we want to shape this show as well as much as we would like to go over commander data from all time if we were to try and frame an episode around the all-time data we'd be talking about over a hundred commanders that have changed quite a lot i mean commanders new cards they're we're always updating our decks but this is one that we want to limit to that two year scope so that we can get some more precise and exact data well and with that said we also need to make a disclaimer that we're only going to talk about commanders that are at least two years old you know commanders that have just come out in the past year those are constantly changing and evolving because there are sets that are built to support them that come out a couple months later so those those those decks those commanders they're always changing they're going to be you know at the top of the charts dang near every time we would run this report so instead we're going to focus specifically on commanders that are at least two years old that way they've had time to kind of settle in a little bit we're also not going to discuss commanders with fewer than 200 decks we just need to have a certain amount of decks to really measure the changes a lot of times we do a cut off at 100 decks but it's just not quite enough to get kind of a swing in terms of just seeing how many changes have actually occurred and haven't really kind of stand out and be striking yeah if the commander didn't have a hundred decks two years ago it's hard to really measure that change so that is why we're moving up that cutoff as well dana do you want to get us into it let's start with our number 10 what is our number 10 most changed commander in edh our number 10 most change commander in edh is ten of the harvester um 283 decks there's 68 cards in teneb decks that have remained constant over the years and tenem's a relatively old commander at this point from way back in planar chaos and for those who don't remember it's a six mana dragon in absent colors and whenever it deals combat damage to a player you couldn't spend two in a black and if you do put target creature card from a graveyard onto the battlefield under your control not just yours from just any graveyard this is the kind of thing that joey likes to see it's a reanimator dragon that's really really awesome i really like this commander and dana as you mentioned 68 cards that appeared in its average deck two years ago are still in its average deck today which is a lot i think but that is still i don't know it kind of gives us an idea of how much decks change over the years if this is our number 10. and of course i mean when it comes to some of the cards that you want to be reanimating cards that have stayed around in this deck forever like eternal witness or buried alive or matt one of your favorites reclamation sage i mean there's kind of no reason to change those out so those cards have definitely stayed really really constant for tinneb i mean those are also just extremely powerful cards almost regardless of whatever strategy you're running but they are kind of the the reanimator go to's for a lot of those so it makes sense why those are stick sticking around because they're staying in every animator deck if you're playing some sort of graveyard interaction that you're playing those just no matter what the commander is i think this is a a good example of a commander where it's doing a thing that tends to constantly pop up in sets um you know there are some mechanics or or interactions that we just don't see very often outside of the real specific set where they print that thing um something like say madness for example and i think we'll at some point have a conversation about that but reanimation putting things in your graveyard takes a whole bunch of different forms and comes up very very frequently if not in almost every set even as a one or two off there's just always cards that support the strategy that are showing up um in brand new versions so there's just a lot of fodder for this kind of thing for for you to have potential to make changes mm-hmm and i mean i just think that it shouldn't be justin you know a one or two off in every set i think it should be just in every set for it should be the main theme of every set reanimation is just absolutely the best there's so many great things you can revive like a terrastodon like that's another constant for teneb2 but there have been quite a lot of evolutions that tanev wanted to rid itself of for example two years ago the average to neb deck was still playing stuff like dark steel ingot or one of its reanimation targets was zetalpa which has been reprinted in so many precondects but it is the kind of thing that it seems we've all outgrown and instead nowadays the landscape of a teneb deck looks a little bit different instead we're playing cards like sir conrad which i love to see or eerie ultimatum which came out in nicoria that is a huge boost for taneb and a bunch of tineb decks are now using it and that has given the deck a whole new type of life or unlife undead life i should just stop well in you know pointing out eerie ultimatum brings up another point about this particular commander it has three colors yeah that's just three times as many potential cards to wind up in the deck as if it was a mono color deck there's just more opportunities for more new cards to show up or for you to find old cards that work in this deck versus something that you know had less potential colors well it's funny looking at the cards that have worked their way into the deck that were actually just they're just as old if not you know fairly older but you have cards like sepulchral primordial or ashen writer who aren't quite as old as taneb but they've been around for a long time well outside the window that we're looking at so sometimes just the targets that people tend to look at um maybe they weren't really considering until they kind of learned and explored the deck a little bit more and i think explored the format the primordials are just a super powerful cycle of cards from i believe it was the return to ravnica block and man they're so great but people just didn't realize the the each opponent clause in there was so powerful but i mean cyclonic rift also was undersold when it was first printed too so that that is true i remember the days of three dollar cyclonic rift but yeah no that's that's so true because these cards were around two years ago but teneb decks weren't using them and now those cards have been a lot more popular in recent teneb decks so it's very interesting to see the evolutions don't just occur because of brand new cards but also because our understanding of commander has evolved and we're going back to some old cards that could work really really well on that deck too like the ones you mentioned so yeah that's also very fascinating all right well let's move on to number nine which number nine we actually have a three-way tie um so we're looking at two golgari commanders and a five-color commander so all of these commanders have 67 cards that have kind of stuck around um and the rest have been changed over over the course of time so we're looking at the roles the scar strike which is the the golgari scavenge commander it's 2-2 that has each card in your graveyard has scavenge and the scavenge cost is equal to its mana cost where that's the ability where you can pay the the scavenge cost and exile a creature card from your graveyard and you put a bunch of plus one plus one counters equal to the card's power onto a creature that's already on the battlefield also tied with virals is a pharika god of affliction which is the golgari god from the original theros block um it has the typical god clause of being indestructible and needing devotion of seven um in black or green or black and green i should say in order to become a creature but has the ability to pay a black and a green and you can exile target creature card from a graveyard and its owner gets to put a 1 1 black and green snake enchantment creature token with death touch onto the battlefield and then also tied here and that three-way tie that we have with 67 cards consistently in the deck is corona the false god which was one of the original i want to say uh five color legendary creatures a five five from scourge um i wanna say uh and it has haste and reads at the beginning of each player's upkeep that player untaps corona false god and gains control of it and then whenever corona attacks creatures of the type of your choice get plus three plus three until end of turn and i have ran out of words to say because all three of those are super wordy um so why don't you guys take it from here and looking at what has changed in the deck yeah these are absolutely fascinating starting off with virals i guess like there are certainly cards that virals is going to want to keep around like death shadow for example is a one mana 1313 it has a minus ability when it's in play but if it's just in the graveyard virals is happy to just pay one mana to get 13 plus one counters on something that's totally the type of thing that varels is gonna keep around but it's also going to keep up with the times a little bit as new cards like the ozolith come out so that we can put those counters into a bunch of other places and always maintain them or some new huge creatures like the uh demigoth titan in stricthaven so there have been some new toys for varels that have caused him to keep up with the times and just get even bigger and bigger and scavenge even more delightful creatures yeah you know two cover commander here um so there's still you know choices not a ton but more than a mono color deck um and you're it's a deck that cares about graveyard things in colors that are just constantly adding more graveyard cards um it totally makes sense that this is a commander that sees a lot of turnover for sure well and we also see that one of the cards that varels used to be playing two years ago is whisper silk cloak and i'm really glad that that's no longer in the average deck data because whisper silk cloak would prevent virals from being able to put plus encounters on himself so that's a non-bow that i'm glad is no longer here well and the deck in general just seems to have gotten a little more streamlined they took out some just real lukewarm cards like death cap cultivator which is just kind of a weird awkward mana dork i'm surprised ravaging rift worm got cut but the cards that it's putting in there are just so much better at support cards and really you don't need every single creature in that deck to be getting scavenged for a lot of plus and plus encounters for very minimal investment well and then there is again with that tie there's farika here that we should address too and this has kind of maintained itself as an enchantress deck over the years so it's consistently still playing cards like eidolon of blossoms and doomwake giant to you know it makes enchantment creature tokens technically so you're able to get a couple of those consolation effects more consistently but it has also updated itself too it's no longer tethered to cards like creeping renaissance now it's instead more interested in like citizen champion even more new enchantment cards have come out since theros beyond death that freak has been able to update itself with and there's actually also a bit more poison stuff going on like the new finn the fang bearer since those tokens have death touch there are even new win conditions for this commander so it's kind of nice to see these evolutions now i would say farika feels a little bit more like an outlier to me than the ones we've looked at i i would guess part of the reason this is showing up is like you mentioned joey we had a few things to deal with poison in the last couple years but we also had a theros block that did give us enchantment creatures excuse me a thorough set that gave us enchantment creatures i would bet normally three cadets don't see this much turnover yeah we just happen to be looking at a window where a couple of things happened that that worked well to provide upgrades for freak attacks that makes sense and thankfully we've got a tie so there's even one more commander to talk about here and we probably had a similar thing here with corona false god where corona for a long time tended to serve as people's commander when they wanted to run like a god tribal commander and fairly recently we've gotten another option to to use for that that maybe works a little bit better and as a result we see things like all the theros gods basically being removed from a lot of corona decks so i think this was a case where the entire deck for a lot of people swung to something else because it just became a different deck basically yeah well and people kind of realized that maybe corona wasn't the best for a god tribal deck we've gotten other different uh god tribal support cards call time especially was really good for that so i think a lot of folks shifted over from corona and we're playing some new commanders just for that theme deck so instead we're looking at more of like the impetus cycle and different kind of cards that benefit from corona going to somebody else and dealing a lot of damage but you're also not able to get attacked by corona as corona is being passed around the table so it's kind of turned into like a weird voltronish kind of commander which is very interesting um considering yeah it's something that just goes around the table and is always attacking but it's never attacking you yeah very much that like i think you're referring to esseca dana the new five color commander that would like just cheat a bunch of stuff into play and that is a much more standout home for gods these days and now we've got a bit more like corona is going to come into its own and actually mess with combat a bit more with the vow of cards and also those impetuses and even the new karazhakar card is showing up in corona decks a lot recently so this is a a kind of thing where it feels like corona has been freed of obligation where god triple maybe wasn't the perfect fit but there can be more combat manipulation that it's able to explore which is a pretty funny thing to see i just like noticing these evolutions because sometimes it feels like the commander's finally grown up a little bit despite the fact that it's a commander that's probably older than me yes seeing the evolution of some of these is fairly interesting and i'm wondering if we're not seeing some of that here at at our number eight commander um a tagatog 222 decks with 66 cards remaining constant and a tog is a five color commander where you sacrifice a tags essentially um i mean it's kind of an uncard almost that's not an uncard to a degree and what we had here that made a big shift was caldheim gave us new changelings which are functionally at dogs um as far as a deck is concerned about so it just got an influx of new cards that we generally don't see this one is so weird this was not a thing that i expected to see because it's technically a five-color tribal deck and when it comes to a tribal deck you'd expect things to be pretty consistent but since this one is so obscure you're right those new caldheim changelings have just thrown this deck for a loop so the deck is still containing all of those weird things like lithotog and psychetog but now it's also adding in like realm walker or masked vandal and the new maskwood nexus from caldheim is making a big splash because now all of your creatures are atogs so a tagatog can sacrifice whatever it wants to pump itself up this is really really strange to see i kind of love it though matt are there any cards that stand out to you across all of this new watagatog data well it is playing a card that i absolutely love and i'm glad it's finally catching on in in non-voltron decks but um schander's ignition just one of my favorite win conditions are just ways to blow up so many things um especially if you're not going to lose anything yourself because you're sacrificing it all to a tagatog and enchanted evening that's kind of a weird one to be putting in there but it is nice and it is nice to see too on the cards that are getting removed it's streamlining the mana base it looks like they're losing a lot of the kind of the vivid lands some of them maybe the more budget options and updating to other budget options that have come out recently that are just better than the vivid lands were back in the day the land cycle thing also really jumps out at me i agree they're matt we added the triumph cycle basically over the course this two-year window which are lands that make three of the five colors you need and they're fetchable if you are running fetchlands in this kind of deck so they are really kind of a perfect way to fix the mana in a deck that needs it more so than some of these five color commanders we've got recently where you don't need five colors to cast them you do with the tagatog so like triumphs are just that much more valuable here and we really see these pop up as cards that have swapped out in this deck as well along with the changelings well and matt i really want to jump back to you mentioned it was kind of funky to see cards like chandra's ignition finally getting play for this deck which it probably should have been before but it's really awesome now that this commander can pump itself up so much but the enchanted evening that you mentioned was kind of quirky i think that's actually perfect because there are some of the atogs like the thaumatogen i mentioned earlier that can sacrifice an enchantment to buff itself up and then you can sacrifice the thaumatog to the ataga tog so that then it will get bigger and bigger and bigger so it feels like the deck is going even more all in by turning all of your permanents into enchantments with enchanted evening so that you can buff up buff hugely with some of these things the deck is finding synergies that honestly i just kind of like thought a target talk you know it's whatever it's just kind of a meme deck but like that synergy actually sounds super duper powerful speaking of really really old commanders here what is next on our list here joey up next at number seven we've got a also pretty big beastie this is dakon blackblade the esper commander who costs six mana and has power and toughness equal to the number of lands you control if we've seen cards like blackblade reforged for example which has a similar ability this is the type of thing that it's inspired by there are 65 cards that have been consistently in dak on decks throughout the years but there have been some really interesting updates that have happened in the past couple in the past year or so as well you know we're keeping some of those things that help these colors which aren't usually known for landfall we're keeping around the cards that help us find more lands like core cartographer effects for example or dreamscape artist which a lot of players really really enjoy to find even more lands even in unusual colors but we've also updated this deck with some really really spicy cards too in recent years yeah i mean this is another example of a mechanic that just tends to get revisited a lot in general you know things interacting with lands pops up in in a lot of sets and once again we hit a zen car set during this two-year window where that's a main portion of what zenikar is known for is doing landfall synergy so it's something that just gets revisited plenty although not necessarily in these colors that heavily but then we hit a set where that kind of thing crops up a lot too so just a little bit of a perfect storm for deck on black boy decks in addition to just getting a new deck on black blade um to just kind of be back in the general consciousness and to just get a bunch of new options yes because there's that new deck on shadow slayer the planeswalker from modern horizons too so that definitely would have had a lot to do for reinvigorating interest well and as white especially has started to get more ways to find lands and keep parity at least with a lot of different colors decon black blade has really benefited from that archaeolomancers map is one of the best cards i think in the past year or two that has helped do that stoic farmer isn't too bad either sword of hearth and home all are great ways for white decks to be able to get lands or at least keep up with those so deck on black blade naturally you know benefits from those as well um very nice are there any interesting standouts from the cards that decons no longer running in the deck um i think one that jumps out of me that we can kind of double up on because something similar happened back in the otago tog deck is vindicate is on a cards removed um list and we saw utter end show up similarly up in a tagatog part of the thing there i think is black and white removal has just got a lot of new entries in the last couple years you know whether it's things like generous gift um in in model white or fracture or d spark in in black white there's just been a lot of new things added um in the orzov color pair that make you want to reconsider running vindicator make you want to reconsider running running on other end so i think that's part of the turnover we see with those cards for sure yeah these are kind of interesting just like general upgrades rather than a commander specific upgrade i think we even saw with the tagatog that one of the cards that it's no longer playing in its deck is uh explosive vegetation like we just these are just it feels to me like evidences of power creep that have caused change rather than new specific synergies for the commanders that have caused change which is a nerve-wracking thing to see i think especially for those of us who've been playing edh for a long time and i don't know i feel like sometimes i've even been able to forget about the old days when vindicate was like such a staple but now it doesn't see nearly as much play it's just a very strange experience when you start having those back in my day sort of thoughts in your head dana i'm sure you can commiserate yeah um when people talk about power creep they tend to think of like a questing beast kind of card that just looks ridiculous because it has 112 words in the text box but a lot of times what the form that takes is something being just slightly better than utter end or a new land cycle that's just a little bit better than the vivid lands while also being cheap like a lot of these these cards we're seeing removed aren't necessarily giant bombs they're just those kind of playable cards that are getting edged out by slightly better versions of those playable cards very very much interesting stuff going on here we've talked about some multi-colored commanders and commanders just a whole bunch of colors but now um dana let's flip the script a little bit who's coming in at number six um we have the opposite of a taco talk we have emrakul the promised end um colorless commander in 258 total decks in our list here with only 64 cards constant when we look at what has remained and what has flipped out over the course of the last two years for for constance we're seeing a lot of you know really useful cards in a carlos eldrazi deck things like eldrazi temple things like causality great distortion another eldrazi titan that's an absolute beater a lot of the really super scary colorless creatures you know the oblivion sowers and the avoid winnowers of the world or the the colorless spells of which there aren't very many things like warping whale or scar from existence because you just don't have a lot of colorless options for for removal things of that nature so the things that are constant completely makes sense when you're looking at new cards though you know if you think about it you don't get colorless eldrazi stuff that frequently but we just get artifacts constantly literally in every set and that's mostly what we're seeing here as just good new useful artifacts that are popping up that can be put in your uh emerald deck well you don't really see things that benefit colorless specifically themes either so like forsaken monument is definitely one that i think all colorless decks around the world rejoiced about seeing you also have cards like wandering archaic because that card needed to be printed where you're able to basically just get your own copies of all the spells that your your friends are playing unless they pay the the wandering archaic attacks on there like there's some really powerful colorless spells that have come out that yeah dana like you said like you may not be getting them very often but when you do they're pretty dang powerful it's so interesting to see these i did not think that ember cool it's a colorless deck i would expect it to kind of stay stagnant but no we've gotten even new equipment that embrocol is like yes please cause commanders played that equipment from commander legends that gives your uh equipped creature a protection from each color that isn't in your commander's color identity well you now in a colorless deck that's just protection from all of the colors so there's still really crazy new toys that we've gotten even for a deck that i would expect this lack of color combination to stay pretty stable but instead it's like no i'm evolving with the times i'm an eldrazi you cannot stop me yeah and even old things that hadn't been played previously stuff like not of this world all of a sudden showing up um i'm wondering if that is in a situation where everyone realized how ridiculously strong that that free cycle of things that you can cast for no cost when your commander is out from a few years back made people aware of how amazing that is so we see things like not in this world showing up that probably should have been in the deck all along but i think i wonder if folks didn't just start looking for that kind of thing and realized how good it would be here well and when you look at the cards that are getting taken out of the deck too you're seeing cards that maybe just weren't really that good to begin with and maybe should have been taken out so like metal work colossus yes it's a big colorless beater but like there i don't know how much they were really worrying about the the artifact synergies there and myriad landscape got dropped because well i mean waste don't have a basic land type so when you're pulling those out um miriam landscape isn't really that useful anymore um that's probably because people finally adapted to having waste around as a resource because that's been to introduce in the past few years so being able to swap over to wastes uh in your cutlass deck is is probably a move that a lot of people are doing then finally realized later uh mirror landscape is a non-bill let's let's take this out oh yeah mirror landscape i think was a challenge the stats of yours a couple of episodes back i say a couple there's probably like 50 episodes back because mirrored landscape can crack to go and search for two lands that share a basic land type but wastes don't have a basic land type so it can't actually find wastes for you so it's just a tap to land so that's another non-boat that it's nice to see these decks are updating themselves out of there's a lot of evolution going on here even though it's a colorless deck and frankly i think that's pretty darn cool we've got five more most changed commanders to go but before we get to our top five let's pause and do one of our favorite segments here on the podcast guys let's challenge some stats there's so much data on idiot direct but we don't always agree with it sometimes i think the cards see too much or too little play so we like to challenge those statistics and don't forget the official sponsor of the challenge of stats segment altersleeves.com where you can head over to ultrasleeves.com edh recast and just get all the older sleeves that you want so maybe you want to play around with some different arts on your sleeves on your on your cards i should say um we don't want to have somebody actually drawing on those cards maybe it's something a little more pricey you want to play around with it alter sleeves are just a great way to experiment with that have some some special blinged out art it's just super great you even have edh rick exclusive sleeves so make sure you can head over there and get you know our wonderful faces on your cards um so ultrasleeves.com recast um sponsoring challenges stats very much all right guys i'm actually going to start us off with this challenge this week i'm looking here at ave progenitor ooze the storm commander from modern horizons 2 the 5 mana 2 2 legendary ooze it has storms so when you cast it it copies itself for each other spell that you've cast that turn already it isn't legendary if it's a token so you get to keep all of those copies of itself that it creates on the stack and as it enters the battlefield it gets plus some counters for each other use you control so each one of these gets progressively bigger and bigger this is a very fascinating card to see there's a lot of strange mono green storm stuff that you can do but the important point for me is that ave the token copies keep those three green mana symbols on them which means if you care about your devotion to green then that is going to be very very good such as a card like clothes design it's a six mana sorcery that says creatures you control get plus x plus x until end of turn where x is your devotion to green this is not usually a good card for just any mono green deck but when all of those copies of ave provide three green pips if you've got even just like four total copies of ave on the battlefield this one spell is giving your stuff a minimum of plus 12 plus 12. this is a very strange and in this deck very scary pump effect that i think should be seeing way more play than the currently basically no wave decks that are using it it doesn't appear on ave's eda track page and i think that's a big mistake check this one out if you're playing mono green storm that sounds like something i don't want to deal with joey glad to hear it what's your challenge this week my challenge comes to us from a listener a cure for the common game who you can find on twitter at cure underscore game and the suggestion brought to us is blood artist which is currently showing up in 62 percent of giza glorious resurrector decks a blood artist is a zero one for two mana whenever blood artist or another creature dies target player loses a life and you gain a life which is really fantastic in a lot of aristocrat style decks the problem is the way giza is worded if a creature and opponent controls would dial you exile it instead so functionally you're only getting a quarter of the effect of blood artists running in a geeser deck now maybe if your deck is really built around sacrificing your own stuff in particular and you're going to be rolling a lot of creatures in and out of your graveyard reassembling skeletons or your blood gas or what have you then maybe you don't care if you're losing out on the ability to get triggers from the other three people but i think you should be really sure of that and remember that this isn't a typical aristocrat style commander where you are going to get those triggers off everything because geese is going to shut down three out of four of the players from actually taking damage or or triggering the blood artist right at that point just use the stuff that already only cares about your own stuff dying like the zulaport cutthroats those are still great but the the blood artist there's a weird non-bow there that's happening so that's a clever pick well if you guys want to talk about clever modern horizons 2 was just jam-packed with heaters all around there were tons of just insanely powerful cards and i think there's one that a lot of people are missing out on that i've had good luck with i know joey you've had good luck with and it's it's such a fun card and just potentially wildly powerful card and that card is rise and shine so rise and shine is showing up in under a thousand decks right now which just seems absolutely silly to me so ryzen shine is a blue sorcery for one in a blue and target non-creature artifacts you control becomes a zero-zero artifact creature and then you put four plus one plus one counters on each artifact that became a creature this way that's fine you basically animate an artifact for two mana but there's an overload um alternate cost on this which is absolutely insane so for four in blue blue you can turn all of your non-creature artifacts into artifact creatures with four plus one plus one counters on them and it is wildly powerful i i love it it's so good especially these days you have tokens of all sorts running around you have your food your treasures all your different clues whatever you whatever tokens that you're making those all get animated so you can make an army in a can super quickly just with this one spell you're able to overrun all your opponents so you have stuff like brea who has a lot of utility artifacts you have all sorts of different commanders that just depend on having artifacts on the battlefield well you're able to animate them in mass turn them all sideways and win the game i love this card it's so good i just think so many people are sleeping on this card so check out rise and shine folks it's wonderful well and the beauty of that card is a lot of times in the past those effects like march of the machines or current silver golem animated the artifacts with a power and toughness equal to whatever their cmc was so your treasure tokens were just going to go away or your ever flung chalice was going away in this case everything is going to survive and those you know soul rings are going to be four fours too like it's just a much better version of this effect we've had in the past that was pretty decent and plenty of decks to begin with so yeah this is a great pick matt this card is really strong that is fascinating and especially that new eloise nephalia sleuth the dimir human rogue that investigates for you whenever uh one of your creatures dies that's going to be making so many tokens for you resident shine is a perfect thing for it there although i think also maybe this is a bonus challenge but much of the machines can also be really nasty in an eloise deck too because dana for example your challenge on the blood artist i think that'd be very good for an eloy's deck because if you play march of the machines your clue tokens turn into zero zeros that automatically die and then when a creature dies eloise will investigate and create you a clue token which will automatically die and that's on the mayability it just keeps happening and happening but if you've got that blood artist infinite combo town there you go all right that is awesome let's get back into our main topic now we are talking about the most changed commanders and we're into our top five dana i'm gonna pass it off to you what is our top five most changed commander um our top five most change commander is thorax mundar from way back in the elara block 657 decks with 59 constant cards he's a 66 with haste and whenever he attacks defending player sacrifices a creature and whenever a player sacrifices a creature you might put a plus one counter anthrax and mundar i played a lot of games against the thrax i had a friend who had a thrax zombie deck he is an absolute beast to come tearing in at you and if you happen to want to play zombie tribal in this color combination he's a really solid commander and there's just not a ton of options in these color combinations so we get zombies constantly it's kind of a unique commander in this color repair and it's just a perfect mix for seeing a lot of turnover in the deck's construction yeah this is a commander that i remember from back when i first started playing edh you've got cards like rooftop storm which make all of your zombies free which you love to see in a deck like this and you've got plenty of other things that cause or have synergies with sacrifice like mayhem devil which are sticking around too but the deck has certainly updated it's no longer playing those old cards like crosses charm that used to be all up in the deck instead we've got new stuff like i mean you're making people sacrifice things so tur grid is showing up in thrax among our decks these days or jury master of the review since you're making so many sacrifices happen so this deck has definitely moved into a brand new sacrifice centric focus what i really like just kind of those incremental and small little you know high floor low ceiling type of cards uh like village rights they're just nice little upgrades for the deck like i'm glad that people are looking for those types of upgrades in old threesome threximundar decks as well but it is also nice to see like butcher malik here we're really lukewarm on that card um it's a great budget option but if you're trying to kind of tune up a little bit um butcher malik here just kind of been dated a little bit maybe and it betrays actually that's one i'm surprised people take that out because that's basically just another turgrid type of effect yeah those cards have been removed from threax decks over time i have to assume it's just like the commander's already a lot of mana so these 7 and 12 mana cards aren't able to stick in the deck maybe yeah that would that would make sense i think that's a good theory yeah indeed the number four commander that we're now going to dive into this is a pun folks don't know it yet we're talking about sig river cutthroat so merfolk dive matt are you proud of me the answer is no uh so sig rapper cutthroat it's our number four commander here he's got about 560 550 decks to his name right now this is the uh blue black blue black that hybrid mana merfolk rogue one three at the beginning of each end step if an opponent lost three or more life this turn you may draw a card this is a very curious commander to see that 56 cards that were in the average deck two years ago have stayed in the average deck of today which that number is just getting lower and lower and lower what matt could have possibly happened to change up what sig used to be doing to what he's doing now well i know last fall we got zendikar rising which would feature the party mechanic pretty heavily which means there were a lot of rogues floating around so that definitely was a kind of an injection of new cards into sig decks because rogues tend to be hard to block sig likes creatures that are hard to block so lots of rogues made their way into it uh xerath sand for example a thieving skydiver two really really powerful rogues that fit right into sig river uh sig river cutthroat excuse me type of decks um those were just very welcome additions but then you also had stuff like ghostly pilfer um dothi voidwalker other ones just creatures that are just hard to block in general yeah this has become a over the years it was always like a rogue tribal commander even before zendikar introduced like other rogue tribal commanders like the new anawan for instance but like it still wanted all those brand new rogues when they came out i mean heck opposition agent is a card that this commander also got access to which is a rogue in addition to being a real menace on the battlefield so this deck has certainly updated and it feels like it's just gotten even more cutthroat over time and when you look at the cards removed list here things like the mere cut purse or jesse and thief or scroll thief they're basically cards that someone probably pulled out from their deck to put in these slightly better rogue like this was just cards that were being taken out for upgrades for the most part yeah these are really really fun to see it's it's nice to see that this isn't a commander that lost its identity it just improved its identity in a way that still makes me you know a little bit scared all right matt we're in the top three now so how about you take us to number three what do we got so at number three we have bailin wandering knight as one of the or i should say the number three most changed commander over the past couple years uh 305 decks and there are only 54 cards that have remained consistent uh along the deck's evolution so baylen wandering knight is the cat knight um it's a 3 3 for 2 in white white has first strike and baylen wandering knight has double strike as long as two or more equipment are attached to it and then you can pay one in a white to attach all equipment you control onto baylen um so we used to see well the typical deck it plays very much like an equipment voltron you have the go-to's the standbys you know your your pure steel paladins sagarta's aid just those staple type of cards in this type of deck but since watsi has decided that they really really like the boros equipment themes for all of their sets lately and bailin falling into that color combination naturally bale has gotten a lot of support over the past couple of years four sets like nearly four sets in a row out of this year where like the boros limited equipment draft archetype is here again it's just like boris is always doing equipment they're just they're just honing it like a nice sharp sword i guess but it did start to feel a little bit like that's right the square hole very much when it came to like what's boros's new draft archetype going to be just kind of hit that over and over again but that does mean that commanders like this have gotten a whole bunch of upgrades so now it's not just you know wielding those argentine armors anymore it's also wielding colossus hammers it's also got new sword of hearth and home or sort of sinew in the steel or halvar god of battle so there's a lot of updates that this commander's been able to make yeah a lot of new absolute bomb pieces of equipment put into here too things like shadow spear or colossus hammer cards that are good enough to see play in eternal formats um absolutely are showing up here if a card can see play and win modern tournaments it's probably good enough to show up in your ballen deck and you're seeing things like that or commander's plate that joey talked about under the emerical deck um it's not as good here but it's still going to give you protection from four of the five colors which is pretty okay that seems acceptable i mean i guess it's it seems all right it makes your voltron commander basically impossible to block that that's it's it's all right it's fine it's okay and that's per sentinel hey cause you need to draw cards in white and that's one of the ways yeah well and the cards that people were cutting a couple of them were just like why would why was this in the deck to begin with like is the top up again we talked about that earlier yeah the top is back back again tell a friend um but you also have like angel of condemnation which was kind of also why uh but then like four bears blade like sooner or later you're gonna you're gonna have to start cutting very good equipment in like four bears blade ogres cleaver like those were some that did get cut from bailin even though they're just they're totally fine cards but eventually when you're given so many powerful you know red white equipment um just the mono white decks even they're going to be so crowded they're going to have to start making some difficult cuts when it comes to the equipment they're playing well you know if we're talking about all of these equipments and knives and stuff if you want to talk really about honing anything i think that the best example is probably here in our number two commander which is teferi temporal archmage there are currently 379 decks for to ferry according to edhrec and there are 52 cards that have been consistently into fairy decks across the past two years this is a fascinating thing to see because some of the cards that we've seen remain in a to fairy deck include stuff like stasis which prevents people's stuff from untapping and back to basics which prevents people's stuff from untapping which to ferry as that planeswalker commander with that minus one ability to untap up to four permanents he can just completely evade and that's what his page has basically always been built around because of his interactions to go infinite with the chain veil and a couple of other mana producing artifacts just by untapping all of those things and the chain veil he can repeatedly use his own abilities over and over and over and over again and it becomes this really crazy combo but when we see the cards that have totally shifted through this deck across the years we're seeing that basically anything that came in the original to fairy precon has deleted itself right out of the data no more you know curse of the swine no more sphinx of ooh thunes or sphinx of magosy instead it is all about this being a dedicated combo commander and we're seeing more stuff like jeweled lotus all up in this page we're seeing dedicated combo ish cards but we're also seeing cards here that really leap out as cedh style cards way more than we we see in any of these other decks um chrome mox got a reprint in double masters but like that's still a heavily used cdh card way more than anything else narsa parter avails um fastest oracle like this is just a a commander that that really seems to have been tweaked in the last two years towards playing at the very competitive end of the spectrum oh yeah you might say people really tried to solve the equation which is another new card in the deck but like speed is kind of the name of the game like you said like jeweled lotus and even even cards that you know are dominating 60 card formats like mystic sanctuary oh yeah also finding their way into the teferi deck so yeah the the deck just got very very tuned very lean and just yeah there's there's no more room for those big eight mana sphinxes when like yeah you're casting your jeweled lotuses to combo out as quickly as possible yeah definitely discovered its identity and if you ever play it to fairy deck i'm sure it's going to be a great time yeah yeah i think it's time to move to the next commander okay to dodge any more of those those those puns yeah and they can fix that in post and just put some laughs in there oh rude rude dana that's that's mean but you know what it's also deserved tell us about the number one most changed commander now let's get to it what is the commander that experienced the greatest deck evolution over the past two years the the most evolution we've seen here is from chromat another old five color commander 283 decks and we're only seeing 45 cards remain constant in chromato lists um the the constants are things like chromatic or birds of paradise the really obvious kind of heavily played removal spells like beast within very heavily played ramp spells things like cultivate or the mana rocks like felwer stone so the things that have stayed steady tend to be the cards that are just really good at doing what they're doing in five color decks but we're seeing a lot of really specific new cards added to this list yeah the new cards all seem to be very much on theme and that is they're all mutants or mutate cards so we're seeing gem razor and being able to blow up all those uh artifacts and enchantments your opponents have or or broco and snapdacks all these massive mutate type of targets chromate just gives you all the access to all of them so why not be playing them um and it's also you know you can mutate onto chromats so not only do you have access for it you have a good target built into the command zone um so it seems like a lot of people just latched on to oh there's a big crazy creature that we can mutate onto this is the new theme right here this is so fascinating to see because i remember those days i'm having a lot of back in my days in this episode but i guess i'm gonna have to lean into it i remember the days where chromat was like a de facto choice for i have a five color deck that i just want all of the colors for so i guess i'll use this old commander that is sitting around i don't even really plan on casting it or using its activated abilities to pump itself up and give itself keywords i just want five colors and the landscape of commander has shifted completely in that time and now it feels like this is a commander that really wants to have a specific solid identity and mutants have provided it that i'm just very it's so interesting to see that this commander has had a complete shift from basically good stuff into nah mutants well and it it kind of did the exact opposite thing that teferi just did the number two slot where to ferry got very lean and very uh combo heavy kind of a cdh type of deck where chromat said i'm gonna do the most casual thing imaginable which is all the mutants just pile them in there i don't care if they're eight mana all these three color legendary mutants let's do it yeah these are really interesting to see some of these commanders have honed themselves some of them have upgraded themselves and some of them have changed completely which you know what that actually is kind of perfect as a metaphor for this episode we were talking about evolutions of commanders and mutation is literally an evolution so chromat wins also on the flavor front don't you think matt i i think we'll allow that to happen yeah we'll let it go well and if you ever looked at a chromat card there's almost as many words on the actual chromatic card as there is in the mutate rules as well so it is a logical match-up oh dang that's really really funny so there we have our most changed commanders over the past two years do we have any final thoughts about these evolutions dana is there anything that has struck you over the course of talking about all of these maybe about the number of cards that they retained is it higher than you thought lower than you thought or the types of upgrades that you might expect to see in the future what are your parting thoughts here as we talk about evolutions and mutations and stuff like that what jumped out at me i think is the fact that it's it's relatively easy to understand why the decks change when you looked at the cards that came out in the cards that were added in but that makes sense very much for each individual commander there's just not a lot of overlap like the reason chromat change is very different than a reason to fairy change which is different than the reason that sig changed that i find fascinating like they all have their kind of each individual unique reasons to see so much of a shift and it's not necessarily overlapping between individual commanders that is interesting matt what do you think i mean when we look at the cards that are getting removed there are a lot of cards that like what i got back into playing magic back when the original theros block came out like there are a lot of cards that were kind of considered staples back then that i found myself cutting from decks over the years as i've kind of tuned in and and you know lowered the cmc in the decks that i have done that in but it looks like player bases at large are doing that too like crosses charm was a very cool card back in the day um but it's maybe not as efficient as it was back then um or people are just like they're seeing non-bows that were in the decks and just kind of going along with it like myriad landscape and those emricol decks um so i like that even if these decks are changing and getting updated like some of the cards that people are dropping from lists um it shows that maybe like deck builders all around it like we're finding those inefficiencies and we're kind of improving upon those that is a really good lesson this is also very much a story of us all growing up together and learning to play magic and edh specifically a little bit more tunedly and having a better eye for our own growth and i think that's a really awesome thing to see there's so many other lessons that we could get into but this episode might be running a little bit long so with that i think what we really ought to do is uh probably call it to the close before maybe one of us mutates just because we've been talking about evolutions for so long so fellas if any of our listeners would like to get in touch with us where is it that they can find us all matt so you can find me on the twitters at mathimus55 that's m-a-t-h-i-m-u-s-55 and don't forget actually wednesday evenings we are streaming twitch.tvhrecast so make sure you join in tune in whatever you got to do the guests are always super great we love having our guests on there so make sure you watch and usually watch our guests just beat up on us pretty hard and dana you can find me on twitter at dana roach you can hear me on the other podcast cmdrcentral i am writing articles for edh rec and for commanders herald and you can find all of us together at patreon.comtrekcast and i'm joey schultz you can find me at joseph m schultz on twitter and you can find the cast at edhrecast on both twitter and facebook plus if you've got a question for us you can contact us at edhrekcast gmail.com our thanks go out once again to the whole team at the command zone for handling the post-production work on our podcast and we want to thank our sponsors tcgplayer and cardkingdom.com and you can visit altersleeves.com idiot recast for cool custom edh rex sleeves 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: 21,721

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

Id: eBNG27kF1OQ

Length: 52min 33sec (3153 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021