Continuing on from last month, in today’s blog post we take a look at what the three of us have been up to in the world of Magic the Gathering.
Tom
After a pretty crazy month of upgrading my Miirym deck, I have had a bit more of a relaxing time trying out my decks and figuring out how to tweak them. It was amazing fun bring my newly upgraded Miirym deck against Stu’s Sheoldred deck and they definitely have a lot of spice.
I played a game with my Trelasarra deck. The main premise being that I was to gain lots of increments of life so that Trelasarra, Moon Dancer gets as many +1/+1 counters as possible. Whilst playing the deck I discovered a subtle but fun infinite combo that I had no idea was even in my deck.
Playing Cleric Class (upgraded to level 2) and having Spike Feeder on the battlefield allows me to gain infinite life! I remove a counter from Spike Feeder to gain 2 life, which triggers Cleric Class and I put a counter back onto Spike Feeder, then I remove another counter from Spike Feeder and so on. Interestingly when Trelasarra is out she also gains counters and scries, so I can essentially scry infinite times and give her infinite counters. It was a fun little combo that I didn’t intentionally put in the deck and it was a pleasant surprise when Stu and I discovered it.
Other than that, I have been toying around with adding more enrage to my Vrondiss deck. I have always struggled to really find this deck’s aim and have lent towards the infinite Vrondiss, Rage of Ancients trigger combo (see my blog post on that here). However it can be really hard to pull off and the deck will just end up doing the same thing if left unchecked. I decided to take out some cards to add in some enrage dinos so that I can ping them for their triggers instead of always going down the Vrondiss combo route. They are still in the post and will hopefully arrive soon 🤞.
Next month, I think it might be time to give my Knight tribal deck a bit of love.
Stu
Haven’t played as many games this month but had a couple high powered games with my tuned up Sheoldred deck and also been messing around with my Sefris, dungeon deck. My dungeon deck is just so much fun to play and has lots of interesting mechanics around the dungeon, reanimating and flicker effects. It’s mana base is a bit questionable and, as I enjoy playing it so much, I wanted to make it a bit more consistent. I love the art on the various ‘diamond’ cards but the coming in tapped effect is just too slow. Plus my deck wants to have lots of monsters to mill (as milling creatures triggers my commanders ability) and it always feels so bad milling an artifact!
The cards I added were:
Ornithopter of Paradise which is a creature and a mana rock which adds to the decks synergy and consistency. Arcane Signet and Commander Sphere – commander staples which help me fix my colour base better and don’t come in tapped! Bye bye alternate art diamonds – at least you’ll look cool in my binder!
Next on the cards is some deck building around a cool card I opened a while back – Gandalf the White! I don’t play a lot of white decks and I don’t have a mono-white one so this looks like a chance to explore it more. I think it will be an artifact heavy deck and looking at putting together a list to try out. Here are some of the ETB artifacts I’m considering sticking in alongside Gandalf. Excited to use the Eye of Vecna as a big D&D fan. Hoping to add ways of recurring artifacts too so they get multiple ETB effects. Probably not going to run too many legendary creatures in this deck, as the focus will be artifacts, but these seem to be too good to pass on for now!
Jamie
It’s been a bit of a manic month for me lifewise and, having overhauled my Shrine deck last month, I was keen to just play with my existing decks for a bit rather than tinker too heavily.
That said I did add a couple of new enchantments to my shrine deck, namely Copy Enchantment and Bitter Chill. Bitter Chill should help with making sure I have a bit of counter play – lacking any instants or sorceries means I have to get a bit creative! Copy Enchantment just seemed a fun add so I could do some more shrine based shenanigans – getting extra triggers with the Sanctum of All or copying Sanctum of Fruitful Harvest to ensure I generate loads of mana!
I played some games with my Kamiz, Obscura Oculus precon over the last month. As this deck involves a fair bit of card theft it is hard to play online and so, when Tom and I met up in person it seemed right to get this out. It performed surprisingly well, with some key pieces able to really benefit from being made unblockable. I do not want to upgrade it too much, but with a few extra cards I think it will be quite strong.
To my delight I pulled an Ur-Dragon from a booster, so clearly at some point I am going to have to create a deck for it! For the time being though it will have to sit in my cool cards binder.
Finally, I pulled Heartflame Duelist recently. Whilst it is a fairly innocuous card in itself, it sparked something in me and I want to put together an instant/sorcery deck – especially given most of my other decks are very creature focused. I figured I should add some blue too just to give myself access to some funky noncreature spells. So I’ve started looking for possible commanders, with either Gandalf of the Secret Fire or Kykar, Wind’s Fury as the current front runners. Let me know if you have an ideas!
All images are taken from the Magic the Gathering card database – can be accessed at https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Default.aspx
Mutant Snake Eyes 