In the tradition of the last two years, I am bringing Magic decks with me to Australia. And to continue the trend, this year the number ups by 60 once again to an impressive 600 cards!
The theme this year is Commander (aka. ‘EDH’), a special ‘casual’ MTG format based around 100 card singleton (only one of each card) decks. Each card contains and is defined by a ‘General’, which must be a legendary creature card. The colours permitted in the deck are restricted to those used to cast the general, and the basic idea is to build decks based around the abilities of the General. Players start with 40 life, and the games tend to be longer both because of and to enable the inclusion of high CMC cards. In other words, the games are varied, flashy, and fun 🙂
Here are the six decks in no particular order. For each deck I show the General and one of the “I win” cards that players would hope to cast…
Infinite Soldiers
A monowhite deck based exclusively around generating large (in some cases *vast*) amounts of soldier tokens and pumping them up to be monsters. There’s a lot of nice cards in here that combo well with each other. Mana is barely an issue, and the deck has some nice removal as well. While it is (theoretically) vulnerable to some weenie-killing effects in the other decks, my (2-v-2) playtests have shown me that this one wins more often than it loses. Lots of fun to play!
Bigger Than Big
This single-minded deck doesn’t really care what the opponents are doing, it just focuses on getting some really, really big monsters out as quickly as possible. Who cares about ridiculous mana costs when you have Mayael in play? And if all else fails, reset the board. This is the gambler’s deck – finicky and mana-sensitive (it’s the only tricolour I made) and slow – but almost impossible to beat when it gets one or more of the truly, truly massive beasties on the board. I expect some laughs when this one goes off 🙂
I Think Not
I’ve barely played any Commander, but I know enough that one basic rule is ‘keep a low profile’. We may be playing 4 player games in Australia (Me, BS, AW, PB), and if any 3 gang up on the 4th they’ll die very quickly. So a strategy is to seem to be not much of a threat, and bide your time. Good luck doing that with this deck, which is designed to stop the opponents from doing anything. Grand Arbiter Augustin IV (the General) has a massive target drawn right on his face from the word go, so you better bet this deck has some strong defenses to stay alive once it makes life difficult for all it’s opponents. A cold, calculating and controlling deck. Intellectual and evil. I love it!
Vampires
Look at that – two Innistrad cards! I saw them and loved them both and just wanted to use each so built a deck using Olivia as the Commander. Think ‘Vampires & direct damage’ and it’s not much more complex than that. Testing has shown that Olivia is a maddeningly frustrating card to play against, so I think this deck will be a favourite target of all opponents. Good thing it’s got a few tricks up it’s sleeve…
Token Apocalypse
Almost every card in this deck allows the player to put one or more tokens into play. The idea is to get a bunch of stuff out, and use Kamahl’s second ability to overwhelm the opponent. What raises the deck to the next (or perhaps even next-squared) level is Doubling Season, which has the honor of being the most expensive MTG card I ever bought. With the help of Doubling Season and another card, during one test play this deck put 44 tokens into play in one turn and each of them was a 55/55 creature! Of course the chance of having Doubling Season and Parallel Lives out at the same time is tiny, but we can all dream to be playing the deck when it happens 🙂
What’s Yours Is Mine
Does it even matter what’s in your own deck when you have the opponents cards to play with? Wrexial thinks not, and when he mills fifty of your cards and then casts your own supercreature then you’ll see the meaning of traumatize. Another not-so-high concept deck that works best when it stops the opponent from working, which suffers from the drawback that it seems very strong in 2-v-2 but possibly much weaker in multiplayer. We shall see…
On and off, these decks have been a few months in the making. I can’t wait to try them out against each other.
“What’s Yours Is Mine” is mine! Milling is my all-time fave strategy. Must be because it’s passive-aggressive – haha. I’ve even played it in a tournament (mono-blue “Super Counter” variant). Which for some unknown reason reminds me of a 2HG tourney where AG and I had identical U/W control decks and called ourselves the “Merfolk Of The Pearl Necklace”.
I love milling. The ‘professionals’ dismiss it as weak since they say it’s like doing 60 points of damage versus twenty, where the sources don’t do 3 times as much as direct damage.
Bah! Milling is *fun*, and many players know this which is why WoTC keeps printing good mill cards 🙂
And let’s not forget that the first “M:TG” Pro Tour – New York, February 1996 – was won by a millstone deck.
Correction: JH was my Two-Headed Giant partner. AG teamed with RS2, playing ultra-defensive mono-W. The tournament was run by PG and RG. Like anyone but me cares 🙂
Extensive testing suggested the mono green Kamahl deck was underpowered, so I tweaked it. I actually switched to a new (2 color) general, and turned it into a still token and doubling-season based deck but with a twist.
Followup testing showed that it has massively increased in power.
I wonder if anyone will even see this comment?