Shoring Up Your EDH Weaknesses | EDHRECast 207

[Music] hello and welcome to the edh recast my name is joey schultz and i'm joined as always by my fantastic co-hosts up first he doesn't have to be blocked by two or more creatures but i still think he's a menace it's matt morgan so i know it's all fun and games to make fun of gas prices lately but have you seen the price on chimneys lately they are literally through the roof [Laughter] i matt i have no words they get more beautiful every week i was hoping your silence was a good thing so knowing that it is uh that that comforts me i i really can go to bed at night now are are you going to go from you know the usual mtg mantra of buy singles to buy shingles since you're talking about we could do that hopefully you don't get shingles though because that is unfortunate good point now that's a that's a mental image i'm going to get out of my brain so let's move on up next he has hex proof he just doesn't know it because he hasn't been attacked by a wizard trying to point spells at him yet it's dana roach what's a librarian's least favorite sport uh i used to work in a library so i would love to know your take uh i'll guess it's tennis just because of all the racket come on joey did you did you love that joke i i i'm a fan i thought it was i thought it was ace it felt funny when i served it up but i wasn't sure if you were going to be able to evolve it back to me or not i mean i love that joke i thought like i set it up well wow i do we have to talk about magic cards can we just talk about dad jokes for a while because this is the best intro we've had in a while i think we're serving some pretty good gems here yeah i mean they landed inside the baseline for sure yeah it's no joke of what okay now they're now we're getting into names now now i think we're stretching a little too far now i think we do need to talk about some magic cards and i think i also need to finish my intro anyway this is the edh rec cast i i think we're also possibly a a dad joke factory but anyway edhrec is the best deck building resource on the web for the commander format we compile data from deck lists all over the internet to provide helpful recommendations for new commander dex and here on the podcast allegedly what we like to do is give all of that data a little more context dana do you mind telling us what it is that we're talking about in this week's episode we are talking about shoring up your deck's weaknesses that we are not serving up matt i can hear your dad jokes they're at the ready i can hear it but no yeah we want to talk about the different uh things the pitfalls of ardex and the ways that we can kind of cover up those different achilles heels basically it should be a whole bunch of fun real quick before we get into our main topic we want to thank chase aka mana curves for assisting us with the post-production on the show and of course we want to thank our sponsors for the show too the edh redcast is sponsored by card kingdom and tcg player in new kapena terms they are the godfather part 1 and godfather part 2 of card vendors just go to idih's rec and click on the card in question and choose the vendor link down below doing so supports both the site and show and if you would prefer to support the show directly you can do so over at patreon.com edh recast we have patron tears of all sorts of levels and it's just a great way to get yourself a little bit of a bonus in return for supporting the show so whether you want to join the discord community you want to see all of the episodes a day early there's all that and more over at patreon.com edhrutcast and courtesy of the patron we have daryl ing so thank you so much you're getting that coveted shout out spot that we do every single week daryl we appreciate all of the support thank you so much and hopefully you don't find any fault in our tennis jokes oh no is this about to be another electricity fun style episode where we have more puns than magic card references matt are you about to do this to me again i haven't really quartered that idea but i think that might actually be something that we could apply here so we're here talking about weaknesses in our decks and and i think that i actually need to acknowledge upfront that my weakness is pretty clearly dad jokes like this is kryptonite to me matt you are terrific your treasurer i adore you never change i i don't plan on it no i i i'm not gonna throw a tantrum like uh like mcenroe but here i am oh wow what i especially love about this is that it wasn't even your dad joke it was dana's dad joker you've just taken it and run with it that's amazing to me i'm not going to take credit for it no but uh i i will keep it up and run with it oh man okay so let's actually try and force ourselves on topic here we are far too silly so yeah we are talking about our edh weaknesses and ways that we can cover up for some of those weaknesses as well and this is a pretty broad concept we'll probably start by talking about some different types of different deck types that are like literally card type based and then maybe move on to some actual archetypes and different weaknesses for those a little bit later on in the show as well but dana i actually want to start off just by throwing the ball to you here that wasn't supposed to be a tennis reference i know that you didn't throw balls in tennis matt that that was this is a basketball we're switching sports maybe i don't know uh but i want to put the ball in your court i've lost my train of thought here um about the ways that you feel about the uh showing up your weaknesses like is it a difficult thing for you to do in your edh decks or do you think that this is actually pretty easy you just need to find exactly what it is is it a broad thing is it a specific thing what comes to your mind when you think of edh weaknesses well i think the first thing you need to do is you need to figure out what those weaknesses are first it's definitely something i think about in the deck brewing stage when i'm first putting a deck together you know i i start with the kind of the base cards what do i want this deck to do because that's number one how i brew so i have a concept i start with but once i start figuring that out and putting those pieces in then i start looking at okay what do i have to worry about number one what might stop my strategy but number two what might stop this particular deck uh in part based on the colors in the deck some color combinations are vulnerable to some things that other color combinations aren't or some strategies are vulnerable to some things that other strategies are not so relatively early in the process i think about that and when i lose a game like i i think about okay did i lose that game because that's a weakness of my deck so it's something i'm pretty conscious of in the first place um and i think that's kind of the first and foremost thing you have to worry about is you have to before you can address the problem you really have to define the problem and figure out what it is because it's different for you know every color combination for every deck for every play style for every meta there's a lot of variants there and being able to kind of narrow down the problem is absolutely what you need to do to even start addressing it yeah okay i love that point dan about just knowing what the problem is before you try to fix it uh i think a lot of players and i know i'm just as guilty as anyone out there but we start putting in solutions to imaginary problems and then we miss the actual problems that are in the deck whatever it is whatever the deck does doesn't do well or struggles to play against i'm putting in cards that don't even have anything to do with that and i i know i've struggled with that in a few decks before yeah and one of the things for example that you mentioned there dana is that there are certain colors that struggle against certain card types for example it wasn't until recently that we got feed the swarm in black where we can actually finally remove enchantments in this color and that was for a very long time just if you're playing a deck that's dimir or something like that like you just have to confront the fact that this is a thing your deck cannot deal with and those are big obvious ones but then i do still feel as though there are a lot of things matt like you were just saying there that you don't discover what the weakness is until you're actually playing with the deck and sometimes the thing that you think the things that you think will be your weakness are not actually the weakness of the deck at all it turns out you might be able to evade them or you don't care about them in the way that you thought that you would and carrying those misgivings carrying those uh same ideas from one deck to another might not actually translate all that well because it turns out that this deck has a completely different vulnerability that you didn't even realize it did well and some of the solutions too are going to be play group dependent um kind of like i was saying about you you drop solutions to imaginary things say you're a go wide token decks like you have like a token deck like what joey's does uh you go very wide with a bunch of tokens uh and you think man i really struggle against ghostly prison effects so you find all these ways to take care of those types of cards but nobody plays pillow forts in your play group yeah then you find yourself trying to like i said answering these things that don't they're not going to be a problem so if you don't know what the actual problem is like dana pointed out then you don't it doesn't it's not going to help you when you're trying to find those solutions well and part of that too is is figuring out what sacrifices you're maybe willing to make that address to address that problem joe joey mentioned feed the swarm which is a card i'm running in a ton of black decks now particularly ones that don't have access to say green or white um because that that lets me actually deal with a problem enchantment um something that isn't a you know issue really if you're playing golgari or you're playing orzov however the reality is black has had access to some things that deal with enchantments you could run unstable obelisk or you could run um scar from existence the question the question always was is it worth paying that price to deal with the problem myself i never felt like it was i never wanted to have one of those cards soaking up a slot to have to pay that much mana to solve the thing i at some point you're like it's just so costly that i would rather lose the game than give up that much to deal with one problem and the cost on pings maybe gonna lose me the game anyway at that point whereas feed the swarm has has kind of landed in that sweet spot where it's not a great card it's sorcery speed three men is not nothing but it's enough that you're willing to pay it to have the ability to deal with enchantments in black so like figuring out that push and pull and finding out whether a card is worth paying the price to solve the problem is also part of that evaluation yes i struggle with the whole like scour from existence or an unstable obelisk argument applies because i mean that's why people said like iona is not a problem card and we know iona was a very big problem so um i i think feed the swarm is such a huge help for black decks yes you technically did have answers but i don't think they were ever worth running like you kind of pointed out well that's right they weren't so like you've you as person making the evaluation have determined that wasn't worth it but this is right and you're kind of doing a lot of that here you're like because there are answers to a lot of things so the question becomes is the answer worth what it cost to have it in my dac yes and i want to clarify real quick on the iona point there i don't think that it was like an oppressively powerful or even excuse me it wasn't oppressively popular it wasn't like a problem in that sense it's a problem in the sense of like i play this card and then someone at the table doesn't get to have fun for the rest of the game yeah and like that is a social thing that is a lot more like it's not like we had like oh these numbers prove like that's not our attitude here but scour of scour from existence is not a realistic answer to that perceived problem of someone doesn't get to play magic like yeah anyway i just wanted to clarify that point but the scour from existence point is also important to me because it highlights the fact that some commanders can actually pay those costs a lot easier than others we were talking about how black didn't have answers to enchantments but that also is generally true of most grix's colors and if you were playing an isaac's of the is magnus deck well a scour from existence actually is probably right up your alley because it's nearly free for musics to play because all of the experience counters that your deck has amassed will reduce the generic costs of the spells that you cast so scour from existence is like a free spell to cast in that deck basically so even though there are some of these broad categories the answers are going to get more and more nuanced as you get to more and more specific examples and that does a really big thing for us to keep in mind yeah i mean since we're discussing feed the swarm and we're discussing things that hit enchantments i guess i mean that's maybe a logical place to begin talking about this um enchantments are a thing you mentioned in grix's colors can't deal with them that is oh if if i'm building a deck that's rack dose or i'm building a deck that's grixis or mono black or model red i have to go into that that brewing phase or at least or at least leave the brewing phase knowing that okay enchantments are going to be a problem for me not just an enchantress deck that's going to be a huge problem but an enchantment like enchantments in general someone is playing tokens and drop a doubling season that's going to be an issue or they're playing you know planeswalkers drop a dubbing season so do do i have a plan for for solving that i i think about that in in try to bake that into the deck very early on because that's something at some point i'm going to have to deal with in that deck and i think that's kind of why chaos warp is so good in mono red decks in in rakdos decks because not only is it the best answer but oftentimes it's the only answer for a lot of different card types and not even just you have to get rid of every single enchantment out there but i can't remember the last time that i've played a game where at least one enchantment wasn't massively powerful and made a huge impact on the game in every single game so having those types of answers just kind of built in no matter what um that's never really going to be a thing that you sets you back too far because chances are you're going to need it for some situation in in any of every single game well to use chaos warp for the example i've heard people that say oh chaos warp i i i hit something and they flip something worse that's not a chaos war problem that's you choosing the wrong thing to chaos war why did you choose something to hit with a chaos warp when there was something worse that could possibly be flipped like you're just picking poor targets that that's a friend problem for them putting in the avengers entertainment maybe yeah yeah yeah wow dana with the the the scintillating hot takes over here just why are you playing chaos warps that are fried died and laid to the side like what's going on with you mary like that's i'm i'm loving sassy dana here please more of that well and i will say the thing about chaos too and someone made this point on twitter when we were talking about it recently is at the very least it's funny with chaos warp even if it goes badly at least you get a good story out of it so like that's that's all right too chaos warp does lead to a lot of stories yes so since we talked about rakdos and you know enchantments a thing that i frequently have used in my rakdos decks is a card like all as dust or oblivion stone which solve all of the problems at once those are cards that get rid of in the case of olive dust it makes everyone sacrifice each permanent that has a color or in the case of oblivion stone it destroys basically any non-land permanent unless you've put counters on them um specific types of fake counters i think uh but it usually is just like you crack it you get rid of everything and honestly that has kind of become one of my go-to solutions when i'm playing erectos deck where it's like instead of pinpoint getting rid of a couple enchantments here and there i'm just going to try and solve all of those issues all in one go because i know this deck is going to be weak to those things so i better just have you know one whole big answer that's going to address all of it all at once but that has recently kind of become a thing that shoots me in the foot a little bit specifically in my carazocar the italian deck my karazhakar deck has a very weird relationship with board states because i want people to have a lot of creatures in play so that they can attack each other and then karazakar will let me draw cards i want people to have a lot of creatures in play that i can goad to force my opponents to hit each other instead of hitting me like that is part of that deck's entire game plan and then when i look at those usual solutions that i would have to an enchantment like an all is dust well i don't necessarily want to actually play those because they are counter to the fact that i want the board to be big i want a large board that i can cast a mob rule into and gain control of all of the creatures so sometimes the answers that you have kind of also conflict with each other too which is very interesting to me yeah i mean it's it's a very dex that's an example that's very color and deck centric the oblivion stone answer or the nevindra's disc answer is probably not one you ever really consider if you're building say a seleznia deck because you have ways to solve those problems you don't have to kind of use the nuclear option to get out of um a situation where there's like just two or three bad enchantments on board you probably have a scalpel versus a sledgehammer to deal with that um and you know you have to be creative sometimes too if you're playing red well we now have liquid metal torque or something where you can turn that thing into an artifact and then blow it up you know good metal coating isn't quite as versatile because it doesn't have for mana but that's an option that i've read in red decks in the past too where i'm like i can't deal with enchantments i know that this meta sees a lot of them i like ironically metal coating in the past and and i definitely run torque a lot now and i'm very conscious of torque in decks that don't have green and don't have white because that's a jail free card sometimes oh heck i'm playing liquid metal torque index that do have green and do have white because those colors are also good again it's still useful yeah for sure yeah do does this deck contain reclamation stage it can destroy artifacts cool liquid metal torque is going to be one of my my mana rocks it can solve anything now not just artifacts and enchantments i'll turn any creature into alternate planeswalker into an artifact i love that thing and actually i i think i'd be remiss not to mention this sometimes if your deck can't answer enchantments you don't try to play the enchantment you try to play the player who controls that enchantment i was just recently on an episode of the command zone's extra turns with our co-editor chase aka manor curve shout out uh and it was so much fun to play with lady danger and craig blanchette and i'm not gonna spoil anything you should definitely go watch the episode it's fantastic um but i am in colors in in that game that can't do a lot to enchantments so i tried a different angle entirely and that was to try and get into the good graces of the player who controls enchantments so that they might focus their attention elsewhere and maybe that leaves an opening and again i'm not going to spoil anything about whether and how that strategy worked out but the point is that sometimes there are different tactics available to you beyond just your colors you play the player not their board and this is a tactic that could potentially pay off for you if your deck can't do anything against you know enchantments well and really you know artifacts are kind of the twin to this they're they're the they often get lumped in with enchantments as well and it's very similar there a lot of things can't deal with artifacts um it's maybe not as bad as enchantments but that's something i think about as well when i'm when i'm brewing that deck up or after i've lost to an artifact deck i'm like okay is there anything i can do with the situation so next time i'm faced with that i at least have one answer in my deck and in some situations you don't but sometimes you're like i just should have a vandal blast in this deck why am i not running it maybe i need to have i need to have that kind of artifact nuclear option here to to solve that problem or again the the liquid metal torque is going to let you turn something into an artifact if you have answers already it's going to let you then make that answer more versatile so i asked my question then so we've talked about like how if your deck is weak to artifacts what if you're playing that artifact deck and like you have those weaknesses what there's a lot of artifacts hate out there there's vandal blast like nearly every color has somewhere nearly every deck even has ways to take care of artifacts how if you're the ancient or if you're the artifact player how are you guys navigating that situation of okay i know that if any board wipe comes out i'm hosed how do you guys kind of build those into and recover from those weaknesses when they pop up for me in the case of artifacts the answer is the burgeoning amount of recursion we keep getting in sets to set like and i love seeing those there's that new brilliant restoration card for example that helps you bring all of those artifacts and enchantments from your graveyard right back into play it's like seven mana and it costs four white pips so that's a lot but at the same time i'm willing to take that risk because i want the like a single bane of progress is going to ruin my day forever and i will definitely struggle to get back into that game so having an answer that brings everything right back against sledgehammer rather than a scalpel that means a lot to me or scrap mastery is another fantastic example of this so i guess in that case though what my response to it is an acceptance that the thing will destroy the stuff it's not me trying to prevent the things from dying in the first place it's a solution if those things were destroyed and that tends to be my take um that's a good question though matt like now i guess you know letting dana answer the question dana do you also have that like acknowledge that it did happen and then bring it all back or are you more of the prevent it from ever happening in the first place kind of guy it depends on the situation it depends how the deck plays i mean it it's there isn't a hard and fast answer i don't think um you know i have an azarious equipment deck um savin's reclamation is a solid card but it's in that deck in particular because it's an equipment deck and most of my equipment i think in that particular deck of the like 16 or 17 pieces of equipment in it basically everything but batter skull is recurable with simmons reclamation and that's something i've paid attention to and that's one of the reasons i'm running that card in that deck i'm like oh it's going to get past any it's going to get back any artifact i need or any of my my equipment that i need um and i can use it a second time then because it has flashbacks so having that's a card i'm very conscious of as a way to deal with somebody taking out what my main strategy is in that particular deck i'm very conscious of the fact that in that deck to ferry's protection saves my equipment as well as my creatures whereas something like ghostway or eerie interlude that only protects creatures is less useful to dodge things in that deck because it's not a really creature heavy deck whereas there are some decks i have with a ton of creatures where i would you know be willing to protect the creatures with like a blink effect so it's just the kind of thing you have to i think tweak and pay attention to based on just what your deck's strengths and weaknesses are what your colors are there's a lot of push and pull there replenish kind of affects that like you mentioned joy to bring back all your enchantments once upon a time it was replenished now we have multiple different things that maybe aren't as buffed as replenishes but like there are ways they're expensive right there are ways to recur those things without having to pay 75 dollars too so there's a lot more options there now i think for people to to find the solution that best suits their personal play style maybe i i really like that point dana about you know open the vaults or uh what was the other one a resurgent belief the one that we just got back with uh modern horizons again yeah those cards all like okay white doesn't draw cards very well but they do recur things very very well white decks i i think at least have that in their strengths category so i like being able to recur a lot of different types of permits that's one thing at least you know if a board wipe happens or joey i'm i'm drawn to blank right now uh what was the card from crimson valley commander that brings your creatures back that you just absolutely love oh storm of souls stone vessels is amazing there it is yes and that that one yeah so six mana sorcery returns all of your creature cards from your graveyard to the battlefield and each one of them is a one one spirit with flying in addition to its other types and then you get rid of that spell forget that is a one-sided recursion effect this card's amazing my mom plays this in her kange flying tribal deck and like because bringing back all of your stuff and a bunch of those flying creatures pump each other up like oh is my empyrian eagle that i got back and and and my other angels like my chromas are they one ones now it doesn't matter they're each giving each other like plus four plus five i still have a gravitational shift in play like it's beautiful but also like this can totally tie into other things that those decks are already doing because this doesn't bring them back as tokens or anything you can blink them and then they'll be their own regular huge size again yes oh the recursion is beautiful this card people are sleeping on it this card's amazing totally play storm of souls that's a great effect to get you right back in it even the etb effects alone off of this thing will be so good well since we're talking about creatures i guess we can kind of move over to discuss you know creatures both as a problem to deal with and as a weakness of your own deck um i talked about eerie interlude and ghostway those are cards i tend to eyeball very closely if i'm playing white and my deck is reliant on creatures they are a way to solve a problem which is someone else's board wipe coming down or someone else's cyclonic rift coming down because they blink creatures out and there's not a lot of things short of counterspells that get you out from underneath a rift and at least it will keep your creatures around if someone tries to rift away your board i'm a big fan of both of those two cards if i'm playing a creature heavy deck or just the the kind of boros charm-esque effects that give all your stuff indestructible that plenty of times will save you and that's sometimes a pretty big swing when somebody like is relying on a clean board they cast that you know wrath of god style spell and your stuff just blanks it um not only is that kind of a defensive move you're you you've protected your own stuff you're protecting your creatures and your strengths but you force someone else to pay mana and and waste a card and you've thrown their plans entirely to the wind um so i really enjoy those kind of things in a deck and especially i think you point something out there even if yours isn't the specifically creature heavy deck in that particular game like someone else might be drumming up a bunch of attention like matt's board state is going absolutely haywire over there but like it's still worth it for me to play some of those cards that you just mentioned to protect my stuff for when player four decides that she's going to just wipe up the board because matt is so scary and i want to protect my stuff from the fact that someone else is doing an answer to someone else's thing like sometimes the shoring up your own weaknesses means actually shoring up weaknesses that are invited to your deck by dint of the strengths of other people that aren't even the opponent who's causing the thing to happen in the first place is any of this making sense uh no no because first off uh i'm never the problem uh second off i don't even play creatures in my decks uh i hate that card type so you are wrong on both i'm i'm i'm kidding i i love both those and you well well that's a good point though like so the creatures on the other end that's something i do also think about um to to use my azarious equipment deck there's just not a ton of creatures in that deck um the way it's built i it's kind of a voltron strategy i'm planning on killing someone with my one attacker the few creatures i have tend to be support creatures so they're not very good blockers either i'm well aware in that deck that i'm very vulnerable to someone swinging at me with a wide board so that's something i need to take into account the ghostly prison kind of effects your propaganda-esque stuff i'm much more likely to run in that style deck where i can't reliably have blockers to protect me from creatures so that's situation where creatures are a weakness as well and i take that into consideration when i'm brewing how am i going to deal with someone else's swarm in a way that i maybe don't worry about in a deck that has 24 26 creatures in it where i'm going to probably reliably have blockers that that right there is a huge thing for me and i actually want to use this as an opportunity to circle back to something that matt said earlier but yeah like if you are playing a creature heavy deck you don't need to play one of those ghostly prison effects to prevent people from attacking you with a bunch of creatures you have a lot more blockers and yet this is a a thing that we definitely do see players doing from from time to time it's not that ghostly person's a bad guard but it isn't necessarily the number one thing that could be shoring up the actual weaknesses of a deck that contains a lot of creatures your actual weaknesses might not be other people attacking you with a bunch of creatures if you've got a big board especially if they have vigilance or can block multiple creatures or something like that like and if they're big creatures that you've been making your weakness looks different but ghostly prison is so effective in so many other types of strategies that it can be very tempting to play it across all of the decks that you're playing even though those strategies do have different weaknesses to shore up and so kind of circling back around to something that you had brought up earlier matt this is a question that i hope i'm going to word well but there are cards that come to my mind about creature based decks specifically fogs fogs can be one of the absolute biggest weaknesses of any creature-based deck any creature deck that uses combat as its primary win condition if someone is playing a bunch of those cards like an ink shield or teferi's protection to save their own life total or even just outright the card fog to prevent all of the damage like those can be totally devastating to you as an aggro or creature based player because if they have the an infinite supply of fogs for example like a constant mists that they can continually use over and over and over again how does your deck ever win well it turns out there are solutions to that and one of the solutions is a card like grand abolisher or conqueror's flail which prevents your opponents from being able to cast spells on your turn those are super effective at making sure that fogs never come your way but matt a point that you brought up earlier was how did you phrase it it was a uh you're answering problems that aren't actually problems you're making up problems to solve and there could easily be the case that you have grand abolisher or some of those effects in your deck to make sure that no one ever does play a bunch of fogs that could wreck your win condition strategy but what if people aren't actually playing those fogs are in that case are the conquerors flail or grand abolisher effects are those worth playing to you still or is that a case where you would allow yourself to remove those cards from your deck if you see that there aren't a lot of fogs that are scuppering your strategy what do you think dude so i have played different effects like this uh dragon lord dramoca i don't play it just to keep people from acting on my turn but also making them play on the person before me's turn in every single game so many people be like oh okay well at the end of your turn i'm saving all my man up to do all these things so i'm making sure they don't have the man up to activate abilities for example so dramoca does a lot of stuff yes being able to preserve your battlefield is pretty great so i probably would play grand abolisher maybe if it weren't silly expensive and i didn't have one like a dragon lord jamoca that i just opened in a pack once but yeah there's a lot of effects out there that everybody's gonna play a counterspell or two in in most blue decks so just even if you're only getting one or two cards out of there being able to prevent people from acting on your turn i think is a fairly powerful effect so if we're talking about grand abolisher's effects specifically even if nobody's playing a counter-heavy type of play group i still probably think it's worth it because people are doing more than just countering spells on your turn okay yeah i do i it's probably never a wrong call blinking ground abolisher necessarily but it's one of those things i do think again your your deck is a big deciding factor um you know doesn't the falling leaf is not a terribly expensive card and it's the kind of thing that you probably could just slot into any green deck if you're willing to spend the you know seven or eight dollars to pick one up and again you probably wouldn't necessarily be wrong to play it but the only deck where i'm actively running one is is one where number one it draws me a card because it's a legend but number two where i'm relying on killing everyone most of the time in the in one combat step and i don't want any of those people casting fogs so despite the fact that i have a couple other green decks none of the other ones are running it because i can occasionally eat a fog and not worry about it i do not want to eat the fog in that recce deck when i'm just alpha taking an alpha swing on everybody and putting put half of my library on the field it's not a risk i can take in that deck so that deck does run that card so i can prevent that from happening it's a weakness there and i've made an attempt to shore that up yeah there's enough interaction between removal spells counter spells whatever it is that like dana said you're probably not wrong ever running those so yeah even if people don't play a lot of fogs or don't play a lot of control decks there's enough interaction that that these types of cards are probably going to be worth it no matter what yeah i guess i'm just interested philosophically in like you know if if i've planned i've been i'm in the deck building stage and i've planned like oh i want to make sure that you know x bad thing doesn't happen to me to completely ruin my strategy so i'll put answers like some of these examples into my deck to make sure that it doesn't happen to me and yet those things never actually manifest during gameplay well then i'm probably going to want to adjust my deck to you know i don't i clearly haven't needed some of these cards and this is one such example where i totally agree that they're worth it but there are probably other examples where at the beginning of the show like you said you don't need to run all of those things because they're answers to problems that aren't actually occurring and i'm wondering to me where the dividing line is between do i make sure that i keep playing this just in case or do i decide to eventually take some of these answers out because they aren't as necessary as i thought that they would be and i wonder if to me the the actual answer uh the the thing that would make me fall on one side of that line versus the other is how sharp and important how pointed those answers are in this case dana you mentioned the alpha strike that's because like that is the one turn and it kind of can become a thing where like if you don't get to do that thing your deck ain't doing nothing more you know like that is the most important turn you are building up to a very specific point so the more pointed that that uh ru like if that moment got ruined for you the more devastating that moment would be would probably be the thing that makes me lean towards yes i want these answers versus no i don't think i need them if it's sort of a general malaise if it's a smaller weakness if it's more broad if there are other versions of recovery and this isn't the only way to fix it that would probably be a thing that i probably could excuse myself and i could recuse those cards from the deck eventually if i saw that they weren't always uh solving problems that were omnipresent in my games i think it's something that also changes a little bit over time too depending on you know what the card pool is as you've added you know things like say generous gift or counsel's judgment in white things that hit any target maybe you can afford to be a little bit more general too because you have a few answers that hit multiple things and makes it a little bit easier to have more answers versus i remember once upon a time when i first started playing commander what's we're talking about you know return to ravnica ish era um planeswalkers were relatively new at that point in time and very few cards interacted with them so i intentionally ran things like like pithing needle in decks because i didn't always have answers for planeswalkers there were situations where someone would drop a planeswalker and if i didn't have a flying creature out i'm like oh i have no way to punch through and deal damage to that planeswalker and in three turns it might adult on me unless i get really really lucky um today number one there's enough cards that just say planeswalker or we have the jet you know unless you actually hit it once i think hero's downfall was the first big one that we got in therose that that people really ran specifically for that purpose because it killed a creature or a planeswalker but we've gotten the generous gifts and the council's judgments and in addition as a deck builder maybe you just run more flyers and just run more things that can poke through too so as time has changed that's something that uh planeswalkers in particular um i do still think about it as one thing i pay attention to when i build my decks but there's more answers to that particular problem than maybe there once were um that's really that that is really interesting that is an especially good lesson is that you'll never have an answer forever like all of these things will change as the seasons do um so that is also i think a really good lesson for us to live off on for now as we move into another portion of the show because i just realized we've been going a little bit long this is a really fun conversation but guys i do want to get to challenge the stats because it is a really fun thing to do here on this show so let's put the uh answers aside for now and let's challenge those statistics there are so many pieces of data here on eda track but we don't always agree with them sometimes i think that cards see too much or too little play so we love challenging those statistics and matt how about you start us off this week what's your challenge so i would love to launch this into this next segment so i will do that right here so my challenge this week is actually going to be for for one of the most popular enchantress commanders of all time already and that is going to be sithis harvest hand decks so sithis is a green and a white for a legendary enchantment creature it's a one-two and whenever you cast an enchantment spell you gain one life and you draw a card so one note that i've noticed about actually from dana's dex where he plays a lot of wild growth type of effects and all these enchantments that uh you enchant a land and then whenever those lands are tapped you generate extra mana those types of effects are great and if you look at synthesis average lists they're running a fair amount not a ton but they could be certainly playing more but that's why i want to challenge cultivate i'm not going to tell you to play more of it i'm going to tell you to play less of it what am i doing saying cultivate shouldn't be in as many decks well cultivate we talk about how ramps sometimes in the later stages of the game can be dead draws and at least with a lot of the ramp that you want to be playing in sithis decks any of these types of cards that are enchantments that can trip you out with synthesis ability those actually aren't going to be dead draws so abundant growth it turns into a draw spell later so it's never truly dead whereas cultivate is still being played in over 23 percent of decks so far and i think you just want to drop those completely so whether you're playing rampant growth or any of those other ramp spells that are grabbing lands i think you want to be playing these enchantments that are going to enchant your lands and be powering them up as your ramp because they're never truly dead plus that does make arbor elf a very very powerful card though and that's only be pl being played in 20 of sithis dex and if you have lands that are tapping for three or four mana that's just great because arbor elf then makes four mana again too if you're playing sithis decks i'm gonna recommend that you take out cultivate i'm sorry i know this seems like some blasphemous nonsense coming from me saying don't play cultivate but instead this harvest hand decks specifically i do think cultivate and land to ramp spells are gonna be a little overrated when you could be playing cards that are just going to draw you extra cards because again seth is only two mana that's very cheap it's easy to get on the battlefield oh yeah you get that engine online right away and i just think that you want to be switching up your mana ramp it's kind of funny isn't it that a few weeks ago i was telling people you need to be playing less artifacts for your mana ramp and omnath decks and i have another deck now i'm saying don't play that mana ramp play enchantments instead so welcome to 2022 folks no yeah i cultivate is a card that i also think is overplayed in marin of clan neltoth for example like i don't want this effect on a spell i want this effect on a creature that i can manipulate with my aristocrats sacrificy goodness and the same is totally true for an enchantress deck why play a spell that isn't going to draw you any cards when you could play enchantment ramp that will draw you plenty of cards so yeah i'm definitely on board with that challenge matt um i i think that it's an enchanting challenge oh i feel seen right now i feel so safe to go back to the tennis plans i did not net any positive points with matt there i think we just need to move on okay okay i am trying too hard all right i'll move to my challenge here um and my challenge comes to us from one of our listeners this is from listener quirky turtle who has a very fun challenge for the card repudiate and replicate this is a split card with two very interesting sides the first one is a double simic hybrid instant that counters target activated or triggered ability i i love this the effect already i will have a story to tell about it the other half of the card is replicate which is a three mana symmetric sorcery that creates a token that is a copy of target creature you control um specifically this is a card that is very near and dear to me because one rachel weeks commander advisory group extraordinaire has used repudiate against me in a couple of games to stop some of my very fun triggered abilities such as you know stopping me from using a seal of primordium against her for example and this is basically quirky turtle's points here uh point here too is that reputate has a lot more uses than it first looks like for example you can counter the triggered ability of a bajuka bog trying to exile your graveyard or it can even counter a dockside extortionist that would be about to make a bunch of treasures uh it can stop ethos oracle if you're uh running in meta that has problems with those oracle for example there are a lot of different use cases for this card and the other half is also pretty good like let's say you have a commander that has an enters the battlefield ability you can use the replicate half to make a token copy of that commander just to get the ability again or you can use this in a deck like adriks and nev twin casters which will double up the tokens so this is a very versatile card countering triggered abilities is getting more and more important in the games that we play i totally agree with corky turtle's assessment here and i do think that the 25 percent of address and nevdex that are currently playing this card i think they're on the right track and that that number especially could go up but this is a card that a lot more simic decks could be using too so yeah give this one a look quirky turtle i like this pick it's a very quirky pick well done well last but of course not least i'm going to drop my pick on y'all um keep watch is in just 2600 x in edh rec it is a draw spell from back in judgment in 2002 when it was replanted in plane chase in 2009 but we haven't seen a real like released version of it other than i think in one of the anthologies um so i think people just don't know it exists and for two in a blue it's an instant speed draw a card for each attacking creature um yeah in most metas you're gonna very frequently see two creatures swinging through and if two creatures swing through that's a fine value drawing two cards at instant speed but it's that's kind of the floor there's plenty of situations where you're gonna draw you know three or six or eight or ten the card's an absolute beating sometimes in the right deck or the right meta and obviously the best place to run it is in a deck where you yourself are going wide you know millicent restless revenant is a relatively new commander that makes spirit tokens it's in the right colors it's only in currently one percent of millicent decks um it's only in five percent of taloran decks a commander that's built around making tokens uh kykar only three percent of kai card x if your commander is is in blue and it's one that makes tokens it's almost always worth running keep watch it's going to have a really really high floor and the ceiling is crazy on it in those decks not to mention you know occasionally someone else is going to do a wild swing as well and you're still going to draw four or five or six cards let alone what you're going to get on your own i i i'm going to challenge that one very loudly if you are playing a blue commander that makes tokens you should run keep watch it should be in way more than 2 600 x it's it's a it's a monster of a card especially because if you are being alpha striked by a big board of a bunch of tokens maybe keep watch is the thing that helps you find the actual fog that's in your deck that would make you survive especially at three mana if someone's doing a big wide swing at you with like six or seven bodies and you can dig down that far yeah you may well have even have mana after you cast it to to cast your response for sure yeah dana's just proving that you are the king of all these cards that you can cast and they're based off of other people's combat step not your own i'm just kind of used to it at this point maybe grown a little numb but i'm glad that you're still like keeping with these picks because they're always oh yeah that oh yeah that does work oh yeah it's totally true though dana has earned that reputation he's the guy who will beserk the creature that matt is attacking me with or tainted strike the creature that chase is attacking me with so so yeah dana benefiting off of other why do i have the crazy card dana it seems like you should be the one who has the carasa card deck it seems like you like other people attacking each other i always figure if you pay taxes on both sides of the road you should get to use it wow this guy oh my lord there that is there that is all right so moving back into uh talking again about you know weaknesses and shoring things up i i actually specifically want to kind of touch on a big thing for me that might be a weird way of phrasing what your weaknesses are a lot of the stuff that we addressed in the first part of the show was us talking about when your weaknesses are kind of across the table from you for example there are card types that are difficult for you to address but i think it's important for us to note that there are some archetypes out there and i'm going to list landfall as a very big example of this idea there are some archetypes out there where the weakness is more likely found in the deck's construction um specifically one of the things a drum that we've beat a lot in this podcast um i think over the course of several episodes we've said that landfall decks frequently are not playing enough lands and generally i still think that that's true i think one of the biggest weaknesses of a landfall deck is not having enough basics that you can fetch for to trigger all of those landfall cards and especially trying to play too many cards with a landfall ability and therefore you're only like you're running fewer than 40 lanes to try and make that stuff happen so you are running out of gas just because of the way that the deck is constructed so matt you have a landfall deck i guess i want to get your take on this like how do you feel about that type of weakness and shoring things up when it is actually more self-caused in a way well yeah i remember somebody sent me a list not too long ago and they asked me for my feedback okay well here's my landfall deck what do you think and i looked at they were playing 34 lands and i said okay very first thing that i'm gonna tell you is add six lands and the response that i got was but i can't do that because i need this this and this this no you you don't need all of those things find out the things that you want to be doing the most and cut down because you need fuel for all these things if you're playing an aristocrat stick for example you need both your payoffs and your setup cards yeah you need those things that are going to give you lots of things to sacrifice but also you need a sacrifice outlet so if you don't have that right ratio you might be running out of one of those which might be your most basic resource with landfall decks just luckily it's free to run more payoffs because they're just lands you want those in your deck anyways so yeah if if you're if you're playing a landfall deck people don't play 34 lanes um please and thank you and you're welcome matt with his impassioned plea over here and i feel it i totally feel it this is uh and it feels weird but like it again the the way that you described it there is like honing down like find the landfall dex feels to me like a an example of a deck archetype that is playing too many possible win conditions but i don't know if you have a rampaging bailouts in play and an omnathan play and a philathen play those are all beautiful landfall ability options and i don't think you need all of them any one of them is going to generate such a big and vast army that playing all three of them and play at the same time you're just asking for a board wipe and and just like one at a time is totally fine you can just have the omnath and play more lanes and you will make more five fives like just the omnath would do in this case so that is a place where slimming down figuring out how you can find those ratios again i think is really important and this is a tougher thing to to examine i think that these things kind of don't emerge until we play the decks more often and see that oh shoot my you know my land searching cards are finding fewer and fewer lands because i am not playing enough basics because i'm trying to stuff a bunch of cool stuff into the deck but no there's not always room for it and that's okay shoring up your weaknesses often involves a lot of introspection from the deck building process because sometimes your ratios are out of balance and landfall's a really big example of of that exact problem right and lands i think in general also kind of are something that we we think about not just landfall but like dealing with lands as a problem as well i run i tend to run a two to three land removal lands in all of my decks um you know maybe you can get away with less and i am conscious of that if i'm playing green i'm like okay well maybe i can get away with with two because i have beast within as removal spell if i'm in white same thing i have i have generous gift so like that hits the land as well um so maybe i'll worry about a little bit less there but i tend to always run two or three of those because i'm conscious of the fact that someone dropping on cabal coffers is going to win the game if you let them have a kabob coffers for a couple turns even like nick those um can can blow out a game if the person has a good amount of permanence and play let alone something like gaia's cradle um or sarah's sanctum and an enchantress deck um you just need answers for lands and that is something i am very conscious of if i'm playing in colors that don't have ways to deal with that you know black doesn't really have ways to single target removal lands like a beast within or or a vindicate or something so i i am generally conscious of running three of those lands versus in you know a green or white deck i might run one or two well and there actually is a big important point for me since you know if we're talking about a mono black deck playing those lands yes dana totally agree that can stop someone else from having a really big bad land over there but a weakness that i noticed in terms of lands in my mono black deck was playing too many of those uh of those non-basic lands and i wasn't playing enough swamps so then when i was trying to use cabal coffers for myself or cabal stronghold for myself it was producing almost nothing at all because i had a bunch of non-basics that were messing that up so it's a difficult ratio to find yeah yeah watering down decks is is if i'd wager anybody who's been playing this format for any amount of time really has encountered a situation where they they got so fixated on solving problems that they water their deck down to the point where it's not doing what they originally intended and i've i mentioned this on the podcast not too recently or not too long ago i should say my taste of carlob deck i set out to do one thing and i realized you know a couple years later this deck isn't at all what i wanted it to do i found myself putting in so many answers to all these different things that the deck isn't even doing the thing that i set out to do to begin with and yes maybe with your landfall decks you only have room for 34 lands because you want to be doing so many things but hear me out here maybe focus on doing just one of those things and build another landfall deck then you have two landfall nights then you can put yourself in the battle of the landfalls and that just sounds so much more fun and they can each have more than 40 lands so that they can each do the thing that they're trying to do yes i'm i'm all about that and so flipping around here like i think that is an example of a deck archetype that has an issue of potentially very easily accidentally running too many win conditions and it doesn't actually need all that many of them and you can isolate more of them and and focus in on those and that will be more rewarding for you but there are a lot of deck archetypes where this is the exact opposite problem for example i think enchantress can be one of those styles that struggles a bit with finding a good and proper win condition in an effective or timely manner but maybe even blink decks also fall into this as well like a brago king eternal deck for instance like these are decks that i think might have an issue of playing so many value engines but they're having like three win conditions in the deck or so and so actually closing out the games in a timely fashion is difficult for them to do these strike me as archetypes that actually struggle more with having enough win conditions in the deck because the value engines are so strong and you get so addicted to drawing all of those cards and doing all of those blinky things that you forget that oh yeah i actually need to close this thing out how am i going to do that in a timely way so that my opponents don't have enough time to get back in the game and take the victory away from me well the strategy i would probably put into this category too is life game decks how do you weaponize all of this life that you're gaining there's a there's a huge difference between not losing the game and winning the game yeah you find that balance but with life game decks sure you may not win the game or you may not lose the game i should say but how do you turn around and then win the game and it's just it's weird but yes you have eighth or flex reservoir but that's one card and you need to find more than one like yes you don't need you don't need 10 win conditions on the battlefield at any given time but making sure that you're able to get something out there to to actively win the game you don't want to be the person with 40 counter spells in in their mono blue deck but you don't have any any way to win yes you prevent people from doing anything but you don't actually win win yourself i'd put life gain into this category that you were talking about dana or joey whoever you are no that that's yeah that's a good point because you can have just too many answers to the point where where to until your weaknesses to the point where you have made that a weakness to a degree um and i guess the the next thought i would have on this too is maybe knowing when you have to just punt you have to just resign yourself to this being a weakness i can't address we we touched on it early on in the beginning a little bit with the the kind of um unstable obvious car from existence kind of problem um sometimes you just have to say to yourself okay i i can't deal with this thing and rather than run bad solutions i'm just going to occasionally lose games to it and and and make sure i win games when i'm not dealing with that to kind of offset it um that that's also i think a kind of a level up moment to a degree when you understand that and just try to work around your weakness or except it's going to happen on occasion and and and work on moving forward versus trying to solve a problem that might not be really solvable this this is a huge thing for me in the reanimator decks that i play dana i completely agree there that yeah if someone bajuka bogs me dang it but okay i get it maybe i can play that repudiate card to try and stop that but like i'm not gonna just play rep repudiate just to try and stop that because it might be a dead card that is keeping me like if i'm drawing all of these cards that are solutions to things that aren't actually happening well that's preventing me from getting my plan a on online in the first place if i'm too busy thinking of plan b and plan c or even it can affect your debt construction in ways that you maybe don't even uh don't want it to like if i am really afraid of someone having a rest in peace in play that's going to stop me from being able to put stuff in graveyards well sure i can try and load more enchantment removal into my deck but then i might also even be tempted to put more tutors into my deck so that i can make sure that i find those cards in a more timely fashion but that means that i've just put a bunch of tutors into my deck and that will change the way that i play that deck when i draw those tutors and there isn't a rest in piece in play and that's not necessarily something that i'm after removing tutors from my deck is a thing that i've done to try and just embrace the variance that is so common in edh games so like having the weakness that is a form of variance that sometimes it's nice to just like yeah you know what you totally got me if you hadn't i'm pretty sure it would've gotcha but in this case you totally got me and i'm glad that i didn't have to wildly change my deck construction and my attitudes about it so that i might be able to solve a problem this one time sometimes not having a solution is a better solution it's kind of weird though well and sometimes it kind of frees up slots too i have a blue black artifact deck that doesn't run counter spells and it's not because i don't like counter spells it's a situation where i put the deck together and i couldn't figure out how to cut it down to 100 cards from 105 because i wanted all these cards and all these pieces made complete sense to me and i also had five counter spells in the deck and it like as i'm brewing it i just was i just dawned on me okay well maybe i just accept the fact that at some point someone's gonna cast or create a roof behemoth and i'm just not gonna stop it and for every game that happens where i can't respond because i didn't put that counterfeit on my deck there's gonna be you know twice as many games where these additional pieces enabled my deck to to do what it wants to do and that's fine i'm going to enjoy the games where everything works because i have all the pieces i need and once in a while i'm just going to lose one because i don't have counter spells that's just how it works sometimes you just have to come kind of embrace those weaknesses or recognize their part of your deck and work on moving forward yeah it's always that balance of knowing okay if i'd make this change that opens up the door for something else so there's always going to be a give and take right there's nothing that's ever going to be a strictly positive this deck is better to every single aspect because if you take out a removal spell yes you might be getting something more fun or you might get a recursion spell but by not having that interaction with somebody else you might lose to a voltron deck every now and then yep that's just how this is part of the deck building process so accepting that every change is going to make your deck a little bit weaker on some axis maybe not one that's very very obvious but in some way there's going to be something that you struggle a little bit more with because you gave up something in a different category but also if people would just realize that you're in a four-player pod in commander in edh whatever we're calling it you're if you're winning 25 of your games you're doing it right i think that's just one realization that people just if people just had that it might help a lot because yeah you don't need to win every single game this isn't i i'm playing a social format and i'm playing it socially if i win a quarter of the games because there's four people at table that's perfect yeah this is where you this is where you bring up the the math checks out gif on the screen with will ferrell checks out on that there we go there we go well what i actually was going to say that if you played uh 40 games total and you were looking for how many of those that you know per your 25 winning uh ratio there the the the right number matt would you say 10 is the right number to have one out of 40 games i i don't miss or i don't i i don't know what this joke is so i'm gonna let you tennis tennis come on man game set match from joey thank you i i thought i was i was very proud i i'm this is just a bunch of racket going on now i just need it i need to tone down 10 is the loneliest number uh there we go guys this is a very fascinating episode listeners we would love to hear from you about the weaknesses in your deck and which ones you shore up and how you navigate these because it's all really tricky stuff but for now guys let's call this episode to a close and if our listeners want 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 mathemas55 that's m-a-t-h-i-m-u-s-55 and don't forget wednesday evenings we are streaming over twitch.tv slash edh recast where i have guests on every single week and it's always a great time so make sure you tune in for all that nonsense that happens over there and dana you can find me on the twitter birds at dana roach you can hear me on other podcasts cmdr central i'm writing articles for edh reckon commanders harold 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 our thanks go out once again to chase aka manicurves for assisting us with the post-production work on the podcast and we want to thank our sponsors tcgplayer and cardkingdom.com plus 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: 36,764

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

Id: R8PmQtHFF7E

Length: 60min 34sec (3634 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 01 2022