[mtgnexus] Random Card of the Day - Runechanter's Pike

[Ruiner]

Mentor generally performs pretty fantastically in my Nahiri, the Lithomancer deck, basically letting me draw an extra card every single turn when I use Nahiri's + ability if I can spare 1 mana, which is not a huge problem..

[materpillar]

I recently slapped Helm of the Host on one which was immensely satisfying. Durdly and not as strong as a million other things to slap helm on but very satisfying trying to figure out just how fast I was about to tear through my deck.

Mentor is a great card draw engine with minimal work to get it running. It can become a pretty mana intensive engine though.

[capitacommunist]

Mentor is still a fine card, drawing you additional cards in some colors that need it, without requiring your deck to be built too much around it (a lot of white decks play a lot of power two or less creatures). It's quite good with Monastery Mentor.
That said I have found that in my deck building I have been cutting it from nearly every multicolor deck, as each other color has better and more efficient options to draw cards with. Even Boros has enough red card draw options that I don't really want to be spending six mana to draw three, conditional on mentor surviving and having creatures to draw off of. And as mentioned it typically doesn't lead to more cards in hand, and it's also a very weak top deck.

[knight_seb]

I use it in my Kemba deck. It acts like a Phyrexian Arena here with the loss of 1 mana instead of 1 life. It shines in a pack with small creatures and/or tokens.

[3drinks]

Thursday, January 24th, 2021; Kaalia of the Vast

"No comment."

[toctheyounger]

I quite like Kaalia for what she does. I think the hate she gets is at least a little overwrought, purely because it's not served up on a silver platter; there are still hoops to jump through to make her hum. Nonetheless, convincing people that she isn't *that* bad isn't easy, people are gonna think what they want to think, so you really do need to be prepared to game hard or assume the mantle of archenemy with her at the helm.

[Mookie]

Kaalia of the Vast is a classic glass cannon deck, and an interesting commander from a historical perspective. When I first started playing, she was a massive threat, cheating out beefy bodies and applying a ton of pressure. As time has gone on, better angels, demons and dragons have been printed, which means that Kaalia has theoretically also gotten better.... but her power level relative to the rest of the format has dropped significantly. I think that people have also gotten significantly better at building decks, and are more likely to have spot removal to shut Kaalia down and stop her from attacking. If you build your deck around cheating stuff out with your commander and don't have the ability to actually cast any of the fatties clogging up your hand, you're going to have a bad time.

I'll note that Kaalia tends to draw a lot of hate as a result of this - people tend to expect the worst from allowing Kaalia to live, so she tends to be a removal magnet. Simultaneously, when I see a Kaalia across the table, I usually have a mental model of 'get rid of Kaalia, and I can ignore this player entirely for a few turns' - the tempo loss from loosing access to the commander tends to be pretty big.

That said, Kaalia is still a powerful engine - cheating out an Avacyn, Angel of Hope or Rune-Scarred Demon is still quite solid. Even better if you can do so a turn or two ahead of curve by giving Kaalia haste with Lightning Greaves or Hall of the Bandit Lord.... or ramping into her on turn 3 with a T2 signet. There aren't that many angels / demons / dragons that can provide long-term advantage to snowball with if your board gets wiped (read: no card draw / ramp), but sometimes the tempo advantage is enough to win by itself. Kaalia also has some very silly interactions with stuff like Master of Cruelties and Rakdos the Defiler.

....on the other hand, I'll also note that the original Kaalia precon is possibly the worst-constructed deck ever built, given how many cards in it don't even work with her. Dread Cacodemon, really?

....I don't think I'd ever run Kaalia as part of the 99, but I will note Kaalia, Zenith Seeker as an alternative in the command zone that allows for a grindier gameplan.

[materpillar]

Kaalia of the Vast is pretty fair if you Lightning Bolt her the first time she gets cast. Her decks are usually fairly manageable as they'll likely be full of huge timmy creatures and not hyper cost-efficient simic bs that fly away even without their pushed general. She can definitely feels bad murder the entire table if she's hasty swinging turn 3. However, as the list of generals that do that grows longer and longer, the odds of me having a Lightning Bolt in my hand to answer them goes up and up. Hence, I'm less and less scared of Kaalia the more time passes.

Why should I care about a turn 4 Kaalia when I have decks in PlayEDH's "Low Power" threatening infinite combos turn 5-6? Heaven forbid you're playing in a higher powerlevel.

[Hawk]

"In the beginning, the format was Kaalia of the Vast nonsense versus Rafiq of the Many and Uril, the Miststalker voltron versus Arcum Dagsson or Azami, Lady of Scrolls combo versus Azusa, Lost but Seeking, The Mimeoplasm, and Animar, Soul of Elements good stuff, and we saw that it was dumb". I abbreviate, but that was sort of the "non-tier zero meta" ignoring Hermit Druid nonsense at the dawn of WotC printing Commander decks.

Like Mookie said, historically Kaalia was a massive threat in a class all her own. She changed the way we play the game. But since her first printing almost a decade ago, the format has evolved around her. With more pinpoint removal, Kaalia and her goons are more likely to die before the accomplish much. Meanwhile, with more tuned decks that have better ramp, lower curves, and more synergy, the tempo advantage of cheating out a turn 5 8-drop monstrosity is also less impressive. Sadly for pilots that love her, she still draws crazy amounts of hate.

[toctheyounger]

Why should I care about a turn 4 Kaalia when I have decks in PlayEDH's "Low Power" threatening infinite combos turn 5-6? Heaven forbid you're playing in a higher powerlevel.

As an aside, this is total BS. People doing this are the worst. Partly I blame WotC for their recent pushed designs, but there's a lot of jerks out there playing EDH with randos.

[PrimevalCommander]

"In the beginning, the format was Kaalia of the Vast nonsense versus Rafiq of the Many and Uril, the Miststalker voltron versus Arcum Dagsson or Azami, Lady of Scrolls combo versus Azusa, Lost but Seeking, The Mimeoplasm, and Animar, Soul of Elements good stuff, and we saw that it was dumb".

Mostly accurate 😁. Luckily my playgroup rule 0'ed out the Arcum Dagsson and Azami decks. Goodstuff builds were all the rage and Rafiq could kill a table in short order back in those days. Before commander precons were a thing it was even worse, and the Planar Chaos dragons were used mostly for their colors. It wasn't uncommon to go an entire game without casting your commander at those times when commander options were limited in many colors. I say this as someone who sleeved up 2 Planar chaos dragons and went several games without casting either one.

Kaalia still gets hated because of the previously mentioned Master of Cruelties and Rakdos. No one wants to be put to 1 life on turn 4, so removal is pointed her way. If I knew someone was playing a more casual Kaalia build I may not be so trigger happy. But I like targeting commanders in general. Typically the commander is either a valuable engine, or linch pin for the entire deck, so I like targeting commanders with removal in general. I find it works quite well for me. Kaalia would even be above average on the hit list without knowing anything about the deck.

[Dunharrow]

Kaalia is the posterchild for 'might kill you out of nowhere', so she draws hate. The hate is probably not warranted 90% of the time, but your opponents don't know what you have until you attack, at which point it may be too late to do something bout it.

It's like telling people Maelstrom Wanderer is not so bad, I usually hit ramp spells, and then cascading into Etali, Primal Storm and Sphinx Ambassador. Just because you have a low percentage of doing something crazy, doesn't mean people shouldn't be threatened.

Master of Cruelties, Rakdos the Defiler, Avacyn, Angel of Hope and others can all break the game.

It is so telegraphed I actually think Kaalia 2.0 is a better commander because you are more likely to cast your big threats than to cheat them in with Kaalia 1.0.

[Toshi]

Interesting what part of Kaalia of the Vast appeared to be scary back then.
Sure, the one guy in my playgroup did run Rakdos the Defiler and Master of Cruelties, but what made her one of the real bogeywoman in our playgroup was, that if she went unharmed for a spin around the table, you've sent prayers that the follow up play wasn't Armageddon, Decree of Annihilation, Boom // Bust or Ravages of War - or Rune-Scarred Demon as one of her drops to fetch one of them.
In our playgroups' tier system she still ranks 7/10, which is very respectable. Without MLD she'd be a 6/10 which also pretty good.
She was one of the KOS commanders back then and is still one to keep an eye on, but there are most certainly others i'd nuke first.

[3drinks]

Why should I care about a turn 4 Kaalia when I have decks in PlayEDH's "Low Power" threatening infinite combos turn 5-6? Heaven forbid you're playing in a higher powerlevel.

As an aside, this is total BS. People doing this are the worst. Partly I blame WotC for their recent pushed designs, but there's a lot of jerks out there playing EDH with randos.

Still struggle to believe PlayEDH is still a thing. I got banned from there years ago as a proponent to MLD decks (shocker, I know). You'd think everyone would leave that "community" and move over to Guardian by now.

[toctheyounger]

Why should I care about a turn 4 Kaalia when I have decks in PlayEDH's "Low Power" threatening infinite combos turn 5-6? Heaven forbid you're playing in a higher powerlevel.

As an aside, this is total BS. People doing this are the worst. Partly I blame WotC for their recent pushed designs, but there's a lot of jerks out there playing EDH with randos.

Still struggle to believe PlayEDH is still a thing. I got banned from there years ago as a proponent to MLD decks (shocker, I know). You'd think everyone would leave that "community" and move over to Guardian by now.

Never even heard of Guardian tbh. I use untap.in. Not saying its any better for community (in many cases its worse for pubstompers, random game abandoners, durdlers, and general jerkoffs) but it is minimal setup, which is my main determining factor for whether I get to play or not.

[3drinks]

As an aside, this is total BS. People doing this are the worst. Partly I blame WotC for their recent pushed designs, but there's a lot of jerks out there playing EDH with randos.

Still struggle to believe PlayEDH is still a thing. I got banned from there years ago as a proponent to MLD decks (shocker, I know). You'd think everyone would leave that "community" and move over to Guardian by now.

Never even heard of Guardian tbh. I use untap.in. Not saying its any better for community (in many cases its worse for pubstompers, random game abandoners, durdlers, and general jerkoffs) but it is minimal setup, which is my main determining factor for whether I get to play or not.

I only found them on the twitter birds a couple weeks ago. They're my primary reason I'm actually looking at getting in bed with Comcast for a better internet speed than the trash Century Link has had for me. I don't like it...but I'm fiendin' pretty hard for some games >_>

[toctheyounger]

Still struggle to believe PlayEDH is still a thing. I got banned from there years ago as a proponent to MLD decks (shocker, I know). You'd think everyone would leave that "community" and move over to Guardian by now.

Never even heard of Guardian tbh. I use untap.in. Not saying its any better for community (in many cases its worse for pubstompers, random game abandoners, durdlers, and general jerkoffs) but it is minimal setup, which is my main determining factor for whether I get to play or not.

I only found them on the twitter birds a couple weeks ago. They're my primary reason I'm actually looking at getting in bed with Comcast for a better internet speed than the trash Century Link has had for me. I don't like it...but I'm fiendin' pretty hard for some games >_>

You've probably still got a better setup than I do here in Middle Earth tbh.

Got a link for Guardian? I'm literally waiting for something better (but still free) than untap to come along and tick all the boxes. I guess people are jerks everywhere, but you never know.

[3drinks]

Never even heard of Guardian tbh. I use untap.in. Not saying its any better for community (in many cases its worse for pubstompers, random game abandoners, durdlers, and general jerkoffs) but it is minimal setup, which is my main determining factor for whether I get to play or not.

I only found them on the twitter birds a couple weeks ago. They're my primary reason I'm actually looking at getting in bed with Comcast for a better internet speed than the trash Century Link has had for me. I don't like it...but I'm fiendin' pretty hard for some games >_>

You've probably still got a better setup than I do here in Middle Earth tbh.

Got a link for Guardian? I'm literally waiting for something better (but still free) than untap to come along and tick all the boxes. I guess people are jerks everywhere, but you never know.

They're streaming tonight in fact. I'd watch buuttt.....Critical Role is finally back from holiday so there's that. Seek out @GuardianPod on Twitter for an invite to the server. Apparently I can't do it as just a member.

[toctheyounger]

I only found them on the twitter birds a couple weeks ago. They're my primary reason I'm actually looking at getting in bed with Comcast for a better internet speed than the trash Century Link has had for me. I don't like it...but I'm fiendin' pretty hard for some games >_>

You've probably still got a better setup than I do here in Middle Earth tbh.

Got a link for Guardian? I'm literally waiting for something better (but still free) than untap to come along and tick all the boxes. I guess people are jerks everywhere, but you never know.

They're streaming tonight in fact. I'd watch buuttt.....Critical Role is finally back from holiday so there's that. Seek out @GuardianPod on Twitter for an invite to the server. Apparently I can't do it as just a member.

And there's where it falls over. I don't twitter. I'm a boomer with Facebook only. Oh well.

[3drinks]

You've probably still got a better setup than I do here in Middle Earth tbh.

Got a link for Guardian? I'm literally waiting for something better (but still free) than untap to come along and tick all the boxes. I guess people are jerks everywhere, but you never know.

They're streaming tonight in fact. I'd watch buuttt.....Critical Role is finally back from holiday so there's that. Seek out @GuardianPod on Twitter for an invite to the server. Apparently I can't do it as just a member.

And there's where it falls over. I don't twitter. I'm a boomer with Facebook only. Oh well.

I think they're on facebook as well.

[3drinks]

Friday, January 15th, 2021; Farfinder

I for one am glad the lil fox exists for non-g players out there.

[BeneTleilax]

What deck doesn't want to spend the extra mana for Sad Robot?

[folding_music]

any deck aiming for cute over utility :3 vigilance is meaningful when you're planning to do some serious equipping too

[Hermes_]

it's cute!

[Sinis]

What deck doesn't want to spend the extra mana for Sad Robot?

I can see it for decks that are interested in 3cmc specifically. Tayam, Luminous Enigma jumps to mind.

It's also an acceptable mutate target; some generic ETB value, and a not-terrible keyword at a fairly low cost.

I don't see myself playing it over something like Pilgrim's Eye (or sad robot) most of the time, though.