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.

July Week 1 - TnK

The idea behind this deck was to push the fairest version of Kydele without going infinite or getting too abusive. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a pair of rather important cards and also found that you definitely need access to some redundancy in hexproof or shroud.

I think largely this deck is simply bad, as is. It's missing Attunement and Refocus, and should really have Cerulean Wisps as well to allow for more explosive goes. I'm going to rebuild it using red instead of black, which loses some tutors, but gains access to Jeskai Ascendancy, more haste, and some wheel effects.

Still, at the very least, it was fun to tool around with.

July Week 1 - Rafiq 1 of 2

The idea behind this deck was to combine a bant control deck with a commander who could stomp out a player very quickly if allowed to score a hit or two. I'm not certain the idea is bad, but the deck as is ended up with some severe synergy problems, though it still felt relatively powerful.

I'm thinking I want to add Serenity and more disruptive creatures to the deck, so the next version will probably go more that direction and less control into voltron. Whether or not any of this works, well, it's something of a learning experience.

June round up - Karlov

Karlov was super exciting when I first saw him spoiled, and I wasn't even playing commander back then!

The actual result of this token / lifegain deck was pretty strange. For one thing, it needs to lean a lot less on its white side and have access to way more black removal. For another, Karlov just can't be cast early. People are way too "onto him" and even when someone is playing far more powerful stuff they freak out and kill him.

But whatever. He's very powerful, at the least, and I'll probably play him again eventually, or at least put him into another deck.

June Round up - Mazirek

The moment I saw Mazirek and thought of all the combos that could go with him (her?) I was certain I wanted to build a deck around it. I tried a bunch of different revisions, but the end result was a deck that came off as a one trick pony. Get your commander, get 3-4 other creatures, set off a huge sacrifice chain and just punch a bunch of people out. I don't expect to use Mazirek again, but then, whatever. I did get to swing with eighty points of beef the one game, so that's fine.

June round up - Mizzix

I don't know overly too much about playing storm combo in commander, so this was more or less an attempt at doing so. I played many different revisions of the deck, but largely felt like it was always a card or two behind what it needed to go off.

Generally speaking the deck was pretty insane if people didn't know what was going on, but if they focused on it, it obviously fell apart pretty quick. I think the next time I make Mizzie I'm not going to use him (her?) as a commander and instead try to build the deck around partner commanders that allow me to run two other experience counter legends, use them to stock up counters, then plop down mizzix and go off the next turn. Not so sure who, though.