I agree that even as a 75% commander focusing on reanimation, he's going to end up the archenemy simply because of the public information problem - what I like to call the Elesh Norn effect. Any time he's in the command zone and his triggers have the potential to disrupt a players' plans, all remova...

He seems oppressive in a very soft way. In a "if nobody had a removal spell lined up within two turns of him coming out the whole table is going to have a bad day" kind of soft way. Not nearly as oppressive as past oppressive commanders because commander tax-ing him out before he gets more...

RE borderposts and land: The thing is, when you're relying on the commander to draw your cards, you're going to eventually miss your land drops no matter what you do. Borderposts aren't all that bad in those situations; as long as you have an etb untapped land the posts don't cost anything to get in...

I had a similar idea to yours when I built my Niv-Mizzet Reborn deck. A few things that helped me: borderposts and basic landcycling cards really helped me ensure I kept hitting my land drops. In my particular build I'm getting almost all my card advantage from my commander, and I need to be able to...

A long time a go, I used to have similar feelings toward Genesis Wave , though I haven't seen it in a while these days. They all what I like to call non-incremental win conditions. Either you meet the conditions to use the card to win the game, or you wait until you do meet the requirements. I'm not...

Highcliff Felidar looks more like a fixed luminate primordial to me. I ended up taking mine out of most of my recursion-heavy decks because he just gives everybody so much life, pushing the endgame further away every time he comes back. All the other cards look really fun and will definitely find th...

Like I mentioned before, big hasty guys are a great way to finish games with Questing Beast because of how much he messes up most defensive strategies. There are two ways you can go about this: Run a number of Craterhoof effects: Craterhoof behemoth decimator of the provinces End-raze forerunners Ga...

From my experience playing 2hg in cube: Extra turns and wheel effects are very strong as you would expect. memory jar is the gold standard; you can pop it on-curve and get a bunch of value while denying the value to your opponents. Cards that can help your teammate if you need it to are also really ...

Voltron seems like a good subtheme, the haste and unpreventable damage deal with common foils commander-damage decks face (removal setting you back two turns and maze effects stopping you until you can get land destruction). The vigilance works well with flying, focus on that as your evasion-grantin...

A few others that came to mind recently: Minamo, School at Water's Edge - Legendaries with Tap Abilities (and also Vigilance to legendaries that could really benefit from it). Geier Reach Sanitarium or Desolate Lighthouse - Five-color Madness/things in my graveyard deck. Each one has different pros/...

I see people run a gates + dragon maze a lot. Decent win con that works. Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of playstyles that revolve around building your own board in a vacuum in order to win, and every time I thought about going nonbasic-broad with Golos by flickering, copying, etc, I ran into the same is...

So I've been lowkey enamoured with Golos, Tireless Pilgrim ever since I first laid eyes on him. The only issue is I haven't been able to think of a proper way to utilize him. The various ways to utilize him have been rolling around in my head but it wasn't until recently that it really hit me: Golos...

I think the area where "political tutor effects" (and I guess this is going to be a thing now?) really shine is in problem solving, something that tutors already excel at. Think of it this way: Player A just equipped his Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre with swiftfoot boots fairly early and is th...

Monetary cost is also a consideration: in order to make a two or three color Emeria strategy work, you're going to want a lot of fetches. Ideally a full single-fetchable set, though even splitting the difference and focusing on dual-fetchable fetches still puts a considerable cost tax to getting Eme...

For those with Karador or Muldrotha lists, it's looking like the adventure mechanic plays well with them, allowing you to cast adventure cards from your graveyard. Nothing particularly stands out for me so far but I'm sure there's going to be at least one super value adventure out there before it's ...

balancing act and natural balance are the first two that come to mind. Natural balance is also kind of fun as a strong ramp card if you get stuck on like three lands and a rock. Keldon firebombers is kind of on the edge, it mitigates a lot of the top deck hell many MLD effects result in, but it sti...

So I've been revising my mono-white Akroma deck for the first time in years, and I realize there is now a really nice selection of mono-W cards that can fill your hand with plains (especially with Lotus Field shenanigans). Neat, less reliance on Enlightened Tutor --> land tax is always welcome. On t...

I'm a little disappointed that Wizards didn't take this opportunity to nuke some overpriced staple prices do the ground (even something like Akroma's Memorial would have been a welcome reprint). I know people say that if they put too much reprint value in the decks it limits their availability, but ...

I kind of feel this breaks the cardinal rule of Emperor: Don't build decks tuned for Emperor. Emperor is kind of balanced around the idea that everybody's bringing generic multiplayer decks to the table, there's lots of inefficient cards and strategies for both the generals and emperor. Things start...

Some thoughts on my own Akroma deck: I run it as a big-mana control deck that basically tries to start killing people once I have like 16 mana on lands. Since she has haste and I have so much mana, I don't mind re-casting her if she gets spot-removed, meanwhile people have a very limited slice of ca...

I like how they're not playing with the command zone this time around (eminence, "total casting cost" effects). They're fun and strong effects, but they kind of crowd out all other commanders since they never really worry about being taxed out of effectiveness. All throughout Dominaria 'ti...

You seem to be completely ignoring my man point: Counterspells are both super narrow answers that are only useful in very specific game plans, AND the most effective, efficient ways to stop players from winning the game... depending on the meta . Table 1: Everybody's deck is trying to race toward an...

I'd say the vast majority of my bad experiences come from pick-up groups. Everyone agrees they're not playing cEDH, the game goes for a while, people have fun, then someone in the pod says something like "the game has to end sometime", and combos off. Or "I have to do something about ...

You're assuming that, because a deck has good answers to high-powered offensive strategies, that it itself must have a high-powered offensive strategy. As someone whose favorite deck is built around that not being true, I take umbrage. Just because you want to be able to handle powerful strategies,...

The presence or absence of counterspells in a deck is a horrible metric to judge how powerful a deck is. Disagree. Assuming competent deck building, the presence of counterspells is a pretty good barometer for whether or not the deck is expected to go against one-dimentional "my board states i...