August Surrak Dragonclaw 1 of 2

Idea here was to build a green ramp deck that exploited the more powerful but more fragile ramp engines that untap. Examples are Lotus Vale, Krosan Restorer, Somberwald Sage, etc. Surrak was chosen to provide big fatties trample and uncounterability, while also giving me a consistent and solid threat.

It worked ok, but not quite as well as I'd have liked. As with all ramp decks, it runs into the issue of just blowing through too many cards, and I think for the next version I'd like to narrow down its selections to be a little more selective, as well as use some tighter threats.

Breya Morph

So this isn't some super uncommon idea but basically I was thinking about using polymorph and all its related cards when I realized Breya allows you to cheaply create tokens, and then you have inexpensive tokens and lots of redundant polymorph effects to throw down with. After a bit of goofing around I decided I wanted to make it almost sphinx tribal, so there's a bunch of sphinxes in here from esper to go with breya.

End result is a really wonky, silly deck. I played it two nights, polishing it a little, but unfortunately dismantled the second version before I wrote it down. I would say the sphinx legend from HOU would be good, and Enigma Sphinx is just terrible. Also, In the Web of Wars is such a great little trick that people never seem to react to properly. It's twelve points of hasted damage with breya, who can easily stack two sack chains to put players who thought they were still safeish out of the game. And good news everybody, it combos with magister sphinx very unkindly.

I think this was one of my favorite decks for the month. Proteus Staff, as an aside, is really nice for helping out players who have their commander control magiced, just as reweave angers people less while removing key frustrating permanents. I splice reweaved a False Cure into a Havoc Festival, resulting in one player getting their life halved while forcing the table to remove the festival for me.

Nice.

July Week 4 - The Burger King

This deck is so riddled with problems and trouble finding cards it's almost to the point I didn't want to put it up. But then, I'm the only one who reads this, and the deck was fine to play at least.

First and foremost, Dragonlord Dromoka should be in. Also, the other Ulamog and Emrakul and Worldbreaker, then Sanctum of Ugin, plus a bunch of other spells, and probably shadowmoor block filterlands as well. At which point I think I'd call it a 75% deck, even though it is pretty flawed, since it can blow up out of nowhere and slam down a ton of huge monsters.

Even as such, you can still punt out players out of nowhere and that's... Actually more of a problem. A bad deck that takes ten turns to win, that's a thing. A deck that can slam down an Ulamog and a Maelstrom Wanderer and blow a chunk out of a player on turn 6? People remember that.

July week 4 - Return of the Rafiq

I don't think I really like this deck. It's interesting, looking at the dynamic of EDH, how aggro actually works. I've heard aggro is terrible, but really, you can gun for and take out a player pretty early on. But what then? You've got two or more players to punch out.

Rafiq kinda cheats on being aggro by having a commander who needs a little, but not much, support to turn on being an aggro deck. Still, punching people out for 21 commander damage or dropping 20+ angel damage on them is effective... It's just not quite the right type of satisfying.

I'm not really sure where I'd take the deck from here. It feels like it needs another level of polish, but I haven't really gotten enough repetitions in and don't really want to. I got to finest hour into temporal trespass and splatter a table, that's enough.

July Week 3 - Vialsmasher / Kraum

I think the deck numbers are off, again, not sure how. I counted it at 102 cards, but maybe I counted wrong.

Only got one game in with this deck and realized the eventual truth of just about every EDH deck I make: Unless it's an exile effect, it's probably just a bounce spell with different wording. Or even worse. Deck definitely needs exiling counters and access to Bojuka bog/Scavenger Ground and probably Rakdos Charm on top of that. And maybe also a phyrexian furnace.

I get it's a worse relic, but this deck basically never interested in exiling its own yard.

I'd like to build this again at a later date but playing in control in EDH is a skill that doesn't quite work for me just yet. I just wanna put my head down and smash people.

July week 3 - SKK actual

I played SKK twice this month, with the first version being a fair bit weaker than this one. This has a bit of a morph slant and an actual *gasp* infinite combo or two, but is otherwise nothing especially ridiculous.

I think if I was going to build SKK to try to be effective I'd add more mana dorks and more combos. SKK himself is really good at making your mana dorks into threats later on. 3/1s aren't brutal in EDH by any measure, but making 3-4 of them can lead to some really punishing come back turns. Especially with access to Into the web.

I should probably also be running death pits.

Also I'm really glad I bought a genesis. Such a low opportunity cost great grindy card.

July week 2 - SKK prototype

I just sort of threw this together since friends wanted to play a couple games, it's pretty obviously not built correctly and missing stuff, but oddly it worked pretty well. There's some fun little combos and interactions. It should probably be running Warstorm Surge or whatever that card is called, but I failed to find it while digging through my collection piles (which are currently quite a mess)

This isn't very good, but I'm just writing down what I tried. Since I was splitting so many lands over four decks, it's missing a bunch of lands and stuff for even being vaguely optimized.