Tag: magic

everything i know about love and life i learned from baleful strix

With Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty releasing in paper somewhat imminently, I decided to take one last look over the full set to take stock of the things I would need to get my grubby little paws on to properly tinker with my Commander decks. As I went through, card by card, it began to dawn on me just how many great individual tools there are in this set to bolster a tremendous amount of different decks and strategies. As I was furiously taking notes on where different cards might fit, I got to thinking™. I really wanted to take a step back and take a serious look at the ways my favorite cards from this set appealed to my Magic sensibilities — using these new cards from Kamigawa, perhaps I could better evaluate the types of cards in the abstract that I tend to gravitate towards, and achieve a greater understanding my own deck building processes. Prone as I am to rabbit holes of self-reflection, particularly in terms of my relationship with Commander, I wanted to see if I could find the language to discuss not so much the qualities of decks I want to build, but what defines the individual cards I want to be building with. A brand new set on the precipice of release just seemed like a great time to take this dive.

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dereks clerics

I am constantly building Commander decks at home. Every preview season, if there is any newly unveiled legendary creature that I think is cool, I immediately start pulling piles and piles and cards from my collection to sit around until those new toys are officially released and I can assemble the decks I’ve envisioned for weeks. And then I play them all once and take them apart because something just doesn’t jibe the way that I expected. It is a vicious cycle. Rarely does anything stay together for more than a week or so, and the routine of collating, unsleeving and resleeving cards takes up very real time and headspace. It gets so easy to feel burnt out on the format, and also to buy into the idea that there isn’t a deck out there that’s just right for you. In a format built on self-expression, that can be a pretty alienating feeling!

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modern commander dot deck

On Twitter (web site to the stars) the other day, Commander maven Shivam “ghirapurigears” Bhatt assigned some homework to the class. In what is seemingly the first in an ongoing series of deck building prompts/stipulations, we are to build a deck for Commander utilizing Modern-legal cards, excluding those designed with Commander or Brawl in mind. This is a good idea! Teach needed my report on his desk ASAP, so once I processed the request, I was off to the races.

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fangren marauder: stay out of his swamp!

I feel like there isn’t enough discourse encouraging people to play Fangren Marauder. This card is absolute gas in the current Commander ecosystem and I feel like whether you actually build your own deck to maximize it or not, this strapping young lad will provide many happy returns. He’s just the perfect Shrek for this specific moment in Commander history.

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venture in to the fun dungeon (fungeon)

I know it’s a pretty underwhelming mechanic, but I absolutely love venturing into the dungeon, whatever form that may take. It’s exactly the sort of nickle-and-dimey, incremental and ultimately small-ball thing that I love doing, but in this case turned up to eleven in the fact that there are three dungeons with so many different paths to take. Now, I understand that there is a whole pre-constructed deck built around doing this along with some other graveyard stuff. It is a cool deck! The thing is, though, that I want to make this mechanic work outside of a face Commander that was specifically designed to make the mechanic shine. Let’s see what is in the core set and mine it for everything it has to offer! I’ve built three different dungeon decks at the moment, each with a different focus, and hopefully by exploring those ideas a little bit we can all be inspired to take things a little further.

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