On to the next: Damia, Sage of Stone

OK so having built Garza Zol – a deck I had no idea about what I wanted to do – I’m moving on to something I’ve been thinking about for a while – Damia. Lets have a look at her:

This one is going to be reasonably straightforward; assuming I can keep her in play, I want to dump my hand every turn and refill, and simply overwhelm the board with card advantange. To that end this deck is going to revolve around a few core concepts:

• Mana acceleration. To be able to cast multiple cards per turn, I’m going to need a lot of mana. On the plus side (and not exactly a side effect, but another bonus) Damia costs 7, so I’d need some anyway
• Spells with alternate mana costs – in particular “pitch” spells like Commandeer, Sickening Shoal, and Allosaurus Rider, but also “you may play this for free” spells like Massacre. Other things which fall broadly into this category are Suspend spells like Errant Ephemeron and Pfthisis and Retrace spells like Spitting Image or Worm Harvest (giving me something to do with the extra lands I’ll no doubt end up with). Dream Halls is a no-brainer – although it gives the ability to all your opponents as well, which isn’t so good.
• Cards or abilities which let you “store” cards for later. This is a much harder ability to pin down, but the King of all these cards is Ice Cauldron. Go ahead, read the card. For bonus points, read the actual card text, then the oracle text, then all the explanations of the oracle text, then read the card again :D. The cliff notes version of Ice Caudron is this:
               Tap: Exile a card from your hand. You may play that card as long as it’s exiled.
  The rest of the abilities (and explanations) pretty much deal with adding mana to, or removing mana from the Ice Cauldron. The really important bit is you can still cast the spells from exile, even if Ice Cauldron is destroyed. The tricky thing is that you can only exile one card every two turns without help, since you need to get rid of the charge counter on Ice Cauldron before you can activate it again. But I digress… There are some other cards which let you store cards for later – you could argue the Suspend mechanic does it – but something that sorta fits is Bottled Cloister. It means you have no hand for all of your opponent’s turns – which is a pretty major disadvantage – but if it survives until your next upkeep and your stack the triggers properly, you draw 7 off Damia, then get your hand back and draw an extra card.
• There are a few more bits and pieces I’ll be throwing in too (hint: Spellshapers) but I’ll get to them when I type out the list
• Something I haven’t been able to think of a way to abuse is the “skip your draw step” ability – is there anything I can cram in there?

So I have heaps of ideas for this one – except I have hardly any of the cards (apparently I own zero Pfthisisisisesesisises) so the first build will be interesting…

Thoughts?

 

My First EDH Deck: Mayael the Anima

I was introduced to EDH by some friends of mine about 2 years ago. At the time I wasn’t playing a lot of Magic, I had pretty much no interest in playing Magic competitively (and still don’t, really). About the only decks I had made up were EDH-like anyway; I had (and still have) a Singleton Sliver deck (one of every Sliver, and enough land to make it work some of the time), and a Highlander deck which was Black/Green/White.

“You should play EDH!” they exclaimed.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it’s awesome!” they cried.

“Whatevs.” I was unimpressed.*

However after reading a bit about that format, and how casual it was, and what sorts of cards you could run, and the flavour behind it, I discovered that it was in fact awesome, and ticked all my Johnny/Timmy boxes (If you don’t know who Johnny and Timmy are, read this article by Mark Rosewater.)

Like a lot of people, my first EDH deck involved lots of big stompy creatures. Like a lot of those people, I chose Mayael the Anima as my general, as dumping Akroma into play at the EOT or as a suprise blocker has to be some good, right?

The deck has evolved slightly from there, but at it’s heart it still wants to drop Atomic Bombs every turn after turn 5. Here’s a link to the decklist: Linky and also to the analysis of same: Linky2.

This deck is a BLAST to play, and does crazy things if left alone. I’ve attacked for well over 100 with this bad boy, and have (with the help of someone else’s Dream Halls and my own Greater Good) drawn near my whole deck and killed the table with Stalking Vengeance triggers. Fun times!

I highly recommend a deck like this one if you like attacking with Big Dumb Creatures (some of whom aren’t so Dumb, truth be told).

*I never actually said “Whatevs.” As if…