Decks We Took Apart | EDHRECast 288
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- Опубликовано: 18 окт 2024
- For one reason or another, these decks had to go. Let's talk about the commanders we couldn't keep playing, and why they wound up in our EDH graveyards.
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In order to preserve the memories of all the decks/commanders that I have given up on, I built Jodah the Unifier and put all my former commanders there.
That sounds like a fun idea and a good deck, but the most Jodah decks would be good if you just slap generally good commanders in it.
@@benrichardson5662also if you just slap objectively terrible commanders in it.
I’ve been trying to rotate through my 22 decks collection. A lot of them are upgraded precons(or inspired by) but none of them are optimized. I’m committed to jank. I’m prioritizing flavour over functionality. Most of them include themed interactions and subpar mana base. I still brew decks with "boogeyman" commander with "scary" in the most vanilla way. I love playing "archenemy" with a handicap.
Lol this week on "Dana's Curious Pronunciation Choices"
Dana's Bizarre Pronunciation Adventure
Damn.. didn't expect to get relationship lessons in my MTG. Powerful words from @ 37:40, Dana!
That segway was great, nice one Joey! :)
As a former subsitute teacher, I saw the name puns coming, and I'm here for it! And Matt, we are geniuses, don't let Joey tell you otherwise 😂
A theme suggestion for an episode, "decks that reassemble after a while", because I had an experience revisiting some commanders after 2, 3 years, and with the new cards, some commanders became more interesting.
This is my story too. Gyruda, Krav and Regna, Unesh have all taken time off and have come back to be my favorite decks
I have a MAXIMUM of 10 decks at once; I've found properly maintaining any more than that is just too much to handle properly.
How I decide what to break up when I build something else varies. It's more of a 'feel' thing - I cut the deck I've been playing the least/is closest to the new deck strategy I want to build (maybe just to scavenge cards!) I've also built and broken decks to balance my colours better between decks, which I guess is a bit arbitrary, but it lets me utilise my collection more efficiently.
Good video as always, thanks!
Took apart Yarok my beloved, it was a huge learning experience for me as to what cards I enjoyed playing, how much I could keep track of, and my enjoyable complexity of a given turn. All my decks now just have different rewards for turning sideways and I've never had more fun
Joey, I had a completely different experience with Shorikai so i had to to it the back of the barn.
I accidentally did the "It's not that deck" thing with it but they couldnt deal with the reanimation targets so i tried bringing the badget down to 100 bucks and still!
The win % was a lot more than I wanted even when using weaker cards that I ended up just making it to a Cedh list and doing something else for a casual list.
I recently built a mill/theft Lazav deck and I immediately noticed "oh crap, too much to do for a pretty inconsistent outcome" BUT! It was really fun to copy other players' commanders with Lazav himself! So I transformed it in a "copy" deck: a lot of clone creatures that allow me to play other people decks, with a little of a mill subtheme. It's still pretty inconsistent but man it's FUN to copy other players' best creatures and strategies, so refreshing at every game. For a better dimir mill/theft I recommend Tasha
I have 36 decks and I rotate between all of them eventually. I just accept some decks I want to play more often than others. I take six decks with me when I go to the game store. Some decks I have solved some I am constantly tinkering with. And depending on how I am feeling I will play with different decks.
I have a Ganax//Iron throne deck I have solved but am trying to make more efficent.
I have Edgar and Yuriko who are solved and I haven't touched (though I probably will alter edgar just a bit with the new set)
I also have a Garth, One Eye pet cards. Where its literally just my favorite cards, no plan just see what happens. That one I am constantly changing as I discover cards I really love.
I have an play Edgar because I dont have that mental hang up and it was literally the first commander deck I ever had and it has a special place in my heart and I will never take it apart
I’m actually preparing to purge all of my decks in the coming weeks. Strip everything down to the bedrock, organize and evaluate the collection, then return and start building again.
Challenge the stats suggestion: hibernation's end.
4G enchantment
Cumulative upkeep 1
Whenever you pay the cumulative upkeep cost, you may search your library for a creature with cmc equal to the number of age counters, and put it into the battlefield.
This card is mostly played in bear and snow decks (art), and that feels wrong. You get green sun's zenith each turn, especially if you can manipulate the counters or lower the cost. And that has to be worth more than 1,500 decks.
it's been interesting learning mtg during the pandemic. my friend got me hooked and we built decks out of a big box of cards. for the first year or two i never cracked a pack or played with anyone but my friend so mtg was a 1v1 game. once i started playing 4p edh online i realized how differently i had to approach my decks when i have 3 opponents but i learned that a large portion of people fundamentally can't comprehend the casual spirit of the format. when you're playing 1v1 locking your opponent out is an excellent strategy. when you expect three people to sit through a game they can't play, i'm going to start throwing insults at you before scooping. if you don't want me to play i won't.
I had a counterspell tribal deck (Jalira, Master Polymorphist into Guile [the only non-legendary in the deck]). It was a fun deckbuilding excercise, and I really enjoyed digging through my LGS's bulk for all the semi-usable counterspells I could find. But it absolutely made me the archenemy, and slowed games down significantly. By the time someone told me "please don't play that deck again" I had already disassembled it. I feel such things are a rite of passage.
I used to tear decks apart left and right trying to figure out what mechanics and colors I find interesting. Last year I took apart some decks out of love because I wanted to downsize on number of decks I play and upkeep. I have the mental bandwidth for only a small handful of decks.
In past videos Joey has been critical of the 'Mimeoplasm as ooze commander' and I'm one of those people who tried that when I was just getting into EDH and found out it wasn't very good at all.
Personally Joey, Spiking is what led me to the "challenging myself creatively" side.
It wasn't just my decks, but by being a try hard I just became a better player than most at the table. So to handicap myself, I much prefer skating the line of jank, makes the win feel much nore deseved when you are playing against a newer player with an upgraded precon. Card for card their deck is often more powerful, but the thrill is piloting my pile to perfection.
I now play a lot of limited so I really like tryna make a deck out of a signpost uncommon from a set I had fun with.
I appreciate all of you dissecting these decks. Thank you for the video.
I'm with Joey and Dana in the sense that I love tinkering with a deck and updating it frequently. Every set I'm looking for new toys for my favorite deck and also looking at what issues I'm experiencing when playing it and seeing what's already out that could shore up loose ends that still fit the requirements for the deck
I too had a Feather deck I took apart, for many of the same reasons. I was also bored with the play pattern of my Brago deck and was wondering how I could spice up the blink archetype. One thing led to another, and now I have a Feather blink deck that's less repetitive and more dynamic than either deck I was playing before.
I've also been messing around with a feather blink deck that's been pretty fun to play, do you have a list you could share?
Whenever I want to build a new deck, I force myself to dismantle another one. It puts me through a justification process of sorts.
How bad do I want to build it? Are any of my decks worth that sacrifice?
I do too. I've only 4 now and I haven't been happier
Two decks I took apart, for similar reasons, were Krark Sakashima and Gyruda Clone Tribal. While Gyruda was a bit more high rolley both decks took very long non-deterministic turns which often resulted in me either accomplishing nothing on my turn or accomplishing so much it started to feel like a Yu-Gi-Oh combo in the worst ways. I ended up building Illuna Mutate after taking Gyruda apart because it was also doing a sort of top deck hope for the best strategy but I ended up enjoying that one a lot more because it was very rare that that deck took a turn that accomplished nothing and also rare that the turn I take be an immediate "I win" 20 minute combo
I don't really take apart decks, just shelve them, but one deck I've put in long-term storage is tinybones. Was fun on paper and while testing it out, but in an actual pod, I quickly learned that Tinybones makes fun zero-sum. If I'm doing my thing, nobody else is doing theirs. It felt like the stax decks I hate, except instead of countering or locking cards in hand, nobody else got hands at all. There was a bit of how easy it was to do, too, like how this episode mentioned how many enchantress effects there are, now. There's so many 2 mana creatures that make everyone but you discard on etb.
What happened to the days of magic players enjoying the challenge of defeating strong decks / commanders??? The days of "I don't want to build around the strengths of your commander so you just need to deconstruct it" is an absolute tragedy ... RIP your Meren deck Joey. It'd be nice if your opponents found joy out of winning rather than being gifted wins.
I have some topic worthy questions I think.
How many games does a deck have to see before it feels too linear or becomes boring? How many jank cards do you have to play to make groan worthy cards not so boring to play against?Does redundancy and consistency pieces make a deck too linear? Should you reduce redundancy for variety sake? Should non land tutors see less play in casual is there an argument for land searches as well? Is maintaining multiple decks with limited time to play a reason for not keeping decks long term or more of one to keep them as long as you can? With the surge of new commanders as a brewer how do you worry about stagnation and keeping up with all the new when building? How many games with a deck before you know if it’s a stinker and just bad a forever keeper good or a short term fling for fun to test?
I've fortunately only torn apart two decks so far, and fortunately, i found commanders in the colors to reuse the mana base. I tore apart an Adun Oakenshield deck that was a pile of ramp and removal and used tooth and nail to kiki jiki combo. It got very stale. The second deck was a Kroxa stax deck. Everyone hated playing against it.
I used to have a Varina, Lich Queen deck when I first started playing and it was fun, but my table (including myself) found it to be really repetitive. I just wheeled and ate stuff from my grave yard through reanimation or exiling. It's still been around, the concept of a zombie deck, but Varina did teach me my love for tokens. Now the Zombie deck is Mono-Blue with Geralf, Visionary Stitcher and I love it so
My three most notable decks that I took apart, along with the reasons:
Ghave, Guru of Spores, which I made as a very fresh MTG player, upgrading from a Slimefoot token deck - piloting it really just made my brain overheat.
Alesha, Who Smiles at Death, which I just cannot seem to get to the place I want it to be.
Zevlor, Elturel Exile, which either truly inflicts a heavy amount of grief on my opponents (if I get to big mana) or does absolutely nothing, because people learned to knock me out before I cause trouble. In both cases someone was just not having fun.
Lol I've 100% cut one deck to make two more. Though personally a lot of the decks I keep assembled and stored. Like little time capsules. Though recently I've been pulling out old friends and updating them to my new standard. I have a Kresh the Bloodbraided that's been getting some sauce.
I've taken apart one deck, because I had two decks that slowly grew into Naya deal-a-lot-of-damage-to-everything decks, and one had to go. I'm actually thinking I picked the wrong one to take apart.l, though, and might swap them out at some point. I have like 30 something decks, and I play a game or two a week and love that I never have to play a deck that I've played in the past several months.
15:01 I did the Shorikai thing also but in Boros. Still playing that one because I like the creatures in it. The reanimation is a lot more clunky so I guess I emphasised the quality of the creatures and that's still working for me so far
Almost every deck that I’ve taken apart over my decade long edh career has been because I was trying to make jank function at a higher level. I’ve learned to appreciate that some ideas and strategies can’t be elevated the way I want to and that it’s not a weakness, but a feature. Currently working on making as many Gruff Tripplets as I can.
feather is like a RDW strat, so its best for Commander Duels if you want a fast aggro style 🪶💯 still habe mine after all these years, always ready for 1v1 showdown!!
I made an Ephara, God of the Polis deck that I was excited for, the idea was to have it as a Flash/tempo commander, I could hold up mana for instant speed removal and counterspells, and if I didn’t need to do that, flash in creatures on my opponents turns to draw up to 4 cards a cycle.
The first playtest was the most miserable game I’ve ever played. Part of it was due to how I piloted it, because I could counter things fairly freely I did, and because of that (and me always having open mana) it had a chilling effect on the other players who were reluctant to play anything into probable counterspells. The game dragged to a crawl, and because my deck was mostly small flash creatures and interaction, it took a long time for me to assemble a wincon
I guess the upside was it did lead to one of the best post-game conversations I’ve ever had, and taught me a lot about how I want to approach interaction in my games going forward
a deck I took apart was an Athreos, god of passage hate bears deck, where I would use cheap ETB or dies trigger creatures in a classic aristocrats strategy. the problem I ran into was that at first the novelty was cool, use cheap creatures that may not seem to be worth paying 3 life to keep off the table, but over the course of a game my opponents would get obviously more exasperated when I ask "do you want to pay 3 or does it go to my hand". the deck actually won one of the two games I played with it but it was just so clearly not fun to play against so it didn't last long.
I totally get the taking apart a deck because it’s a “fun is zero sum and I’d like all of it” deck. My rule is if I give a group the 60 card format, blue white control experience I take it apart
Ghirapur Aether grid is a house in my Toggo/ Ich-Tekik deck. So many rocks... 17:11
My biggest win last year was seeing someone play the Prosper precon, loving how fun it looked, building an optimized version, & immediately realizing it was the bane of the LGS experience at the time. From that, I made a Vhal & Tavern Brawler deck for the exile value aspect, and a Dargo & Keskit deck for the Rakdos sac aspect. They're 2 of my 3 favorite decks now, and feel unique to my style, with tons of interesting variance.
I love this approach! I shy away from a lot of Commanders I really enjoy in theory for fear of it being too strong for my playgroup- maybe breaking them up into the parts that make them up is the way to go.
I took apart my Myrkul lord of bones deck which was really difficult because I love the concept of the commander and abzan is my favorite color combo too but the deck did nothing but be annoying to remove and slowly I realized it can quickly become something that just slows the opponents down until I had out-resourced them through attrition. It’s bones live in Meren and Willowdusk now pun intended
My first commander deck : Chulane (that's the end of the explanation).
Going off of Dana's enchantment deck, I had a similar issue 2ith enchantress decks that for the longest time I couldn't build it at all until abdel adrian got printed and enchantress flicker was the perfect solution that I needed. There's enough other pieces that it never quite gets old and I can use a lot of enchantments that aren't typically seen in them
I took my Meren deck apart for the same reasons as Joey. Not only did I have it stacked with Fleshbag Marauders, I had a ton of Grave Pact effects from Pact, Dictate of Erebos, and Butcher of Malakir. I buillt it mostly as an intellectual exercise, and had a ton of fun working out all the synergies I wanted. But in play it was just oppressive. I have considered rebuilding it without the Grave Pacts and see how that changes the experience.
I recently also took apart my Feather deck. I wanted slightly different game play with Wyleth. However, I have been looking into other boros strategies such as Quintorius.
General Ferrous Rokiric, baybeeeeeee!
I too had an edgar markov deck, it was one of my first decks, and it is no longer there
I discoverd that I actually just put if full of boardwhipes, interaction and enchantments,
So then I dissassembled it and became a control player
I also built Leovold and only played it 2 times and very quickly realized how busted it was. I chose not to play it again but kept it until it got banned. It sat on my shelf as the nuclear option in the event that someone else built an equally busted deck, or stacks.
Callaphe devotion voltron is a WILD deck, Dana. I have one myself, and no one is expecting to get hit by an unblockable one shot commander and get mad at themselves for not caring too much about all the auras you've put on your other opponents' creatures...
Decks I have taken apart;
Tergrid-Too oppressive
^then it became-->Yawgmoth-same combo every game. Is now Braids.
Kenrith-Wasn't focused on one or two things but five or six things.
Djeru and Hazoret-Built as a Winota-light, but never took off...Might turn into a Dihada legendaries deck.
Myrkul-The same game every game, too many hoops to jump through for a sub-par game.
Yorvo-Was a nice entry edh deck, but grew out of it. -->Is not MonoG Omnath.
Killian-Thought I was getting somewhere with it, but Orzhov voltron is slow. -->Is now Sigarda, Host of Herons
Orvar-The same combo and game every game. --> Is now Unesh, Chriosphinx Sovereign
Prosper-The same game every game, wasn't focused on anything except combo.--> Is nowOb Nixilis.
The decks I took apart were Shirei, Shizous Caretaker and Satsuki.
There were a bunch of problems on top of this, but the crux of the matter was how these decks accumulated value in way too small increments. Especially with Satsuki, it's gotten so bad that I was annoyed with resolving my very own triggers.
I built a Prime Speaker Vannifar deck and someone at the table suggested we swap decks around. It was miserable, partly because nearly every creature in the deck untaps Vannifar to keep the chain rolling and partly because the player piloting didn’t know all of the intricate wheels of my infernal machine (like reito lantern/soldevi digger).
I took the deck apart immediately, didn’t even play it once myself.
I find this episode really interesting as I’ve only ever torn down 1of the 30+ decks I’ve built, and that was the first one, a Dakkon Blackblade pile of good Esper stuff.
Congrats to Joey for getting the REAL segue to Challenge the Stats.
I'd love to see that Kardur list! I tried to make work something like that, but without much success…
Mayael was fun. Had it unbuilt for a couple years, rebuilt it. Last win was with a 95/95 trampler😊
I was building a Vazi deck but I looked at the price of Dockside Exortionist and it was Exortionate, so I made a "its not that deck" Beamtown Bullies instead. I have just built a Jeskai, The Ninth Doctor Enchantress, still in progress but when I am not using arua's white enchantress doesn't draw that well.
I have a Bladewing, Deathless Tyrant deck that is on the chopping block. It's an interesting concept, and Ienjoyed the deckbuilding challenge of trying to find as many effects that I wanted on creatures, but 7 mana is just toooo slow these days.
I have two notable decks worth mentioning of being taken apart in edh.
I had an atraxa clockwork deck I made. When I played in the 60 card format, I had a fun clockwork deck, and thought it would be fun in edh, so I built it with atraxa to help with my clockwork. But because my friends know me to have a reputation of using out of nowhere combos, they see atraxa in the zone and immediately go to kill me before I even cast her.
The deck was not THAT atraxa deck, and was a really low powerlevel. Because I was trying to make these clockworks good, which are really bad, it was a bad deck, and with atraxa at the helm, it made my opponents overestimate its power, and as a result, it never worked in any cardshop.
My second deck that is worth mentioning was a toski squirrel deck. I built it to be a squirrel tribal, with a subtheme of voltron. It was a mod power deck, but then chatterfang came out right after, and I took it apart for the chatterfang deck, which is now one of my most powerful decks. But I never put anything back for toski. I would actually like to go back and make it a monogreen voltron commander, but I haven't given it any attention since.
Somewhat recently I took apart a Marath deck. I didn't have a +1/+1 counter deck and I wanted to redeem a horrible Marath deck I played with almost 10 years ago.
It lasted 3 game nights and combo'd out in 5 of 8 games I played with it.
No I didn't took it apart because it was too strong or that I dislike combos.
The problem was it didn't match my fantasy of a +1/+1 counter deck. It was supposed to be a timmy deck with a lot of cool interactions and turning counter into value.
But all those synergy pieces also happened to be combo pieces with the commander. Marath has a ton of 3+ card combos. The games didn't end the same, it had token swarms, burn, voltron kills, drawing my deck and just vomiting everything on the field. It was fun at the moment.
But at the end of the night it always felt like the deck didn't actually do what I wanted it to.
I'm experimenting with some Yoshimaru combinations with very restrictive additional rules atm and hope to have more fun this way.
I played my Guff deck this past Friday and I ended up oopsing into a win, all I was doing was proliferating and I won. That honestly felt like an easy win, but what made it feel less fun for my opponents was the fact that the amount of protection you need to make sure walkers stay alive just turned it into a game of solitaire. Solitaire is good now and then, but not every game. So I'm looking forward to tearing Guff down for the new energy commander
I recently took apart my bant enchantress deck. I didn't really like the flavour I think. I did like the carddraw aspect so I have tried to rebuild it as a golgari deck now. And first match with it was way more exciting.
The main deck I took apart was muldrotha. Mostly because one game I sat down and all 3 opponents went for me from the actual start of the game and it didn't matter at all. I truly felt like thanos at the end of infinity war when he puts the hulk into a wall, one taps captain America, and turns back time to get the mind stone. At one point they made me sac my commander, and when I got her back they killed her again, them turned her into a land, and then killed her again, and it still didn't matter in the slightest. One of them was even playing a literal gods deck with the world tree and it was all irrelevant I'm the face of muldrotha.
I also recently took my Feather deck apart for the same reasons others have given.
Many years ago I played an Azami, Lady of Scrolls deck. It went 3-0 & bored the other players to tears.
I have almost taken none of my commander decks apart.. the numbers just keep growing, but Edgar... I 100% agree. Not only were you sort of encouraged to play the boring vampires, but when using cards like cathar's crusade and the token generation it just because a huge headache to track with all the tokens and counters that it makes your head hurt when you finally start swinging out.
The big problem with Edgar is, even if you actively avoid the boring vampires, he’s still really powerful and you are still the target
I play Gishath a lot, and I have the Tarrasque. You are right that those other dinos are better, but those are already in the deck as well. You want a lot of dinos for that Gishath trigger, and when you have that many creatures you have all the best ones, and then have to take some weaker ones. As far as 'bad' dinos go a 10/10 that damages when it attacks is actually fairly solid.
I JUST built a lazav deck, I'm 2 for 4 so far 😅 glad to see him right in the thumbnail
I'm building my own take on Edgar Markov as vampires are my favorite creature type in Magic. My stipulation for the deck was nothing higher than 4 CMC, making use of lesser played cards and custom vampire tokens.
It's about the same way i built my own when he was legal in duel commander. The only exception was Malakir Bloodwitch. I try to have the lowest possible manacurve. Ideally i would like to have 4 CMC(or MV now xd) but there are cards that are to strong to ditch at 4+ CMC(Yaugzebul for example).
I love grixis decks but I like nonlinear decks and ive just landed on sakashima and vial smasher alternate cost deck. It's always different and the randomly damaging a person is fun.
I still have my Alibou deck, it's a tapped artifact tribal deck, I run smothering tithe as well, its probably my most fun deck ever
Hearing Matt talk about Alibou being meh, then remembering Chase wombo combo murdering the whole table with their Alibou on a Game Knights...
I was thinking the exact same thing
Nice transition into Challenge the Stats Joey.
we also got the new craft mechanic which would be something entering from exile so would also I believe would trigger extraordinary journey as long as it transforms into a creature which exactly 9 do, not sure if any of them are at all playable but just in case
I'm definitely considering taking my Purphoros deck apart. It was my first seriously built deck way back when Purphoros was only $4. The deck's value has spiked from like $60 to almost $400, and the nostalgia is definitely real. But it's definitely an archenemy commander and it does tend to run rather samey. It's pretty consistent and definitely strong, but it's something im still reluctant to pull out since I don't like being archenemy before anyone even draws their first cards.
I would suggest to Dana trying to build Tianna, ship's caretaker as a control-based auras deck, and i will tell you: even with white , you don't really always have the engine there.
Dactyl comes from a Greek word meaning "finger"; thus, pterodactyls get their name not for their wings but for their long finger-like talons.
Dactyl is also important in poetry (I'm an English professor, if it weren't obvious from my love of obscure bullshit): while not as widely known as iambic pentameter, dactylic hexameter is the meter used in Greek and Roman epic poetry. A dactyl is stressed, unstressed, unstressed so, when you use scansion, a scanned dactyl looks like a finger.
Also, Dana, if you want a less spam-y enchantress deck, try Gylwain. The only enchantress pieces that work well with him are ones that trigger on etb as opposed to on cast. Sythis and friends are out; Tanglespan Lookout and friends are in. Ivy also works best when you focus on etb enchantress effects. I know, I know: Ivy is a popular commander, but she's super fun, plus you get to run lots of otherwise unplayable cards, plus you get to confuse everyone (including yourself) with mutate cards.
I just tinkered with my Henzie deck and I took the cost DOWN with upgrades to $48. So when I think of tinkering with a deck I don't think of it in a power level way. I think of it in a "did I shore up any weaknesses while still keeping a budget power level".
I love my Edgar deck, it is based upon the wedding of Olivia and Edgar so it is very very thematic and i love it so much ... and it is still goood :) so yay
I keep tearing apart and reassembling variations of Krark and Sakashima. It’s hard to make a list with those commanders that is fun for everyone but not too powerful
It's generally not a fun time for people when everyone has to sit there watching you flip coins waiting for you to end your turn. It's not a good casual deck. Cedh, sure. But you're getting knocked out first in my pod.
@@cid7707 Yeah I found that out that hard way. I think it could work as a casual deck only if it gets watered down HEAVILY (i.e. cutting back on rituals, efficient interaction, creature copy spells, and adding big splashy sorceries)
Decks I took apart: Horobi because no one liked it (also it wasn't very good) also: O.G. Narset. I just wanted to play big dumb spells like Stormherd but everyone hated her.
Decks I rebuilt: Grothama. It is incredibly linear but there's a certain joy in sitting down to a game with a giant wurm instead of just another mono-green omnath deck.
I built a Neheb, the Eternal deck which I feel like was pretty optimized but became very un-fun. I began to experiment with red chaos cards instead of the Comet Storms and such because I had so much mana to spend, so it was a perfect deck to try 5+ mana red chaos cards and it eventually got taken apart and became a chaos deck instead.
Man, this game has such a razors edge sweetspot 🤣
I took apart Sharuum for power level reasons, which I think is related to linearity. It was fun in the playgroup it was designed for, which was very competitive and optimized. Outside that group, though, I may as well have been playing solitaire. Now I have a Malestrom Wanderer deck using dragon tribal that can be powerful, but that's up to the heart of the cards cuz I don't do any deck manipulation nonsense. I also have a Daxos (WB) that I try to optimize cuz enchantments suck lol
I have a max amount of 9 decks at a time, and if i wanna build a new deck i gotta take old ones apart. So i take apart decks alot, but i have something special that i do. So i like to encase all my commanders in resin as a display piece, so when i take a deck apart i take the resin card and add it to a display i made so i have a showcase of all the decks i've played over the years
I don't like to lean on cards like smothering tithe I feel the only way to not use powerful cards is to run more synergy that doesn't always help against decks running those cards. They are strong for a reason. So I believe adopting the mindset of just having fun over winning is the best path.
I once had a Yuriko and Chulane deck and eventually took them apart once I realized I wasn’t having fun with them AND I was seen as an archenemy from the get go. If I am seen as an archenemy, I want to have fun while I do it. Those decks eventually fed into me building Sythis and Satoru.
Thats exactly the thought i have when i built my muldrotha deck, everyone in my pod hates it because of the way its supposed to be played (destruction and recursion) so i'm kinda forced to build it another way or change the commander. Its kinda ironic since i feel like Muldrotha has been "crept out" and she's reeeaallly slow... so i've managed to change the commander, but it left a tear on my eye...
A deck i'm thinking about taking apart is my jetmir
Ever since SNC I built two decks from that set, jetmir and lord xander. Lord xander was a grixis tergrid deck and jetmir is just mana dorks and tokens and big lethal swings.
Jetmir gets so many groans at the table that I don't enjoy the deck because I don't enjoy listening to people complain
I took apart my feather deck for much the same reason, its the same reason why I personally don't enjoy playing commanders that tutor; they end up doing the same thing every game
I generally rebuild rather than take apart, but there are decks that I don't play terribly often (one because I'm down to only 1 spare sleeve lol). Most of them do something specific, so it's a mood thing, what do I feel like at a given time, and it does turn out that certain types of deck are a lot more fun than others, or that I feel like playing more often.
I have built decks around some pretty weak Commanders (compared to stuff like Prosper or Korvold), I found that if your Commander isn't going to do a lot of heavy lifting the 99 need to be very carefully chosen, and you can't make as many mistakes. I didn't think Alibou was a weak card fwiw, but better stuff has since been printed.
Mercadia's Downfall is a cool card, I used to use Rite of Initiation, you do need a few cards in hand to make it worth it, but it's very little mana technically.
I have the over 35 decks and never take them apart except from 2 :
- Brago
- Sythis
Both were heavy value decks that had trouble to close out games and were actually boring and tedious to play and to be against
Every few years I go back and try to make Szadeck work. Each time I'm left a bit disappointed as it's the one deck puzzle that I've never managed to make functional.
3 color decks do have hope eventually...
...changing a (several years old) combat damage trigger Shu Yun deck into an Akroma (Vision of Ixidor)//Kraum (Ludevic's Opus) keyword soup overhaul, changing a (even older) Shattergang Brothers aristocrats tokens into the Gilanra (Caller of Wirewood)//Vial Smasher the Fierce battlecruiser group slug, and finally solving the commander-finding mystery necessary to successfully build the rest of the 3 color combinations (wedges and shards) I had been missing for years.
One of these color combinations still suffers, namely Bant... ...and I'm hoping Wizards prints more white and green faeries, because my Rubinia Soulsinger deck is on enBantress life support... ... enBantress dialysis more like. I get the possible premonition the Final Fantasy set may very well hold the answers I seek, even if it means changing the deck into something vastly different.
I’ve taken apart plenty of decks I actually liked a lot, I just wanted to use the cards elsewhere. Arcades, Brudiclad, Jetmir, Jan Jansen, Chun Li, Atla Palani, I loved them all but I only have so many lands and stuff to go around. Kinnan was the big one for me, that was both too strong and I needed the mana dorks and free counterspells for other decks. My goblin deck has been the most intact and long lived of all the decks cause I rarely feel a need to divest from it, but I have been lately. Jeska’s Will is expensive!
This is something I have to get better at doing, that and selling the cards from it to make a new deck, I find that I take decks apart and keep the cards, only to make a very similar deck with a new commander
First time i ever saw nebuchadnezzar i wanted to build him. Not because i wanted to force discard but the joy of guessing whats in my opponets hand and that little mini game we could play but after playing it twice i realized paying that much mana in dimir just felt bad. At times i even felt weird because i was spending mana to play my little mini game when i could cast spells that could actually progress the board.
Krenko, Mob Boss. It wasn't fun just being targeted and basically not playing. So I built Ovika and put Krenko in the 99. Building and playtesting made me realise the deck didn't want too many creatures. So there's only 14 now, But most still goblins for flavour. Super thinky deck and often ends up in a ten min turn drawing into a win con. But super fun! And once I get a win I shelve it for a month or so.
I need to tear apart a few decks. I have an Inalla deck that I just don't enjoy. I want a blink/panharmonicon deck in red, with win conditions like Purphoros and impact tremors, but Inalla is too strong and combo based.
I took apart a Rafiq of the Many equipment deck, too slow and required the commander and a bunch of equipments to do something meaningful, I turned it into a Geist of Saint Traft Voltron deck.
Also I had a Sakashima the Impostor clone deck but it drew too much hate and in the current synergy meta cloning you opponent creatures doesn't really do much. I turned it into a Thada Adel artifact and steal deck, and it turns out it's even worse when it comes of being the archenemy the whole game, people get salty when you cast their Sol Ring.
YOU MADE IT HAPPEN JOEY!!!
As a red blue enchantress player it’s a lot of fun
I used ovika from the phyrexia set
Child of Alara is in a retirement-home now. I only use it still, wenn opponents have a much higher budget than me. Turned out, it isn't much fun to opponents, when you wipe the board like half a dozen times each game at instant speed. Win rate was (in our 1-Euro-per-card-budget-group) very close to 100 percent. :-/
Wow was super surprised to hear that feather was taken apart, but as someone who enjoys playing syr carrah, I get it lool