The Golos Project - Monocolored Golos decks

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pokken
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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

So I've finally finished all of these decks and I'm just going to put them here in the OP.

The idea here is a set of 5 mono colored golos decks each themed around a particular land - I had to give up on mono red and just do Nykthos, which several of the other decks use, but it has its own unique feel with wonky high pip cards.

All of the decks are limited in some way, and they spend a lot of energy making sure they can cast golos on turn 4 or so and almost always 5. They use cascading cataracts to enable activating golos, but do not expend a lot of energy trying to generate golos mana in general.

I try to avoid a lot of typical tropes of the various mono colored builds and explore some different avenues of attack.

I have always really loved lands in EDH and getting to use lots of my favorites without being quite as oppressive as most lands strategies - particularly not being so reliant on crucible+multiple land drops+tons and tons of shuffling - has been really a treat.

* NOTE* These decks may be slightly out of date. It's quite a bit of work to keep them up to date. They are always correct on my deckbox.

Mono Green - Gaea's Cradle

Link: https://deckbox.org/sets/2598546

This deck seeks to do some of the less obvious things mono green can do; instead of focusing on playing tons of extra lands, we're focused on untapping lands to do stuff, specifically generating a lot of activations of thawing glaciers or gaea's cradle. This deck has a lot of mean tricks, and can win off of generating infinite mana and infinite-bouncing things with temur sabertooth.

Like all of the decks there's a strong subtheme of land toolbox with untapping maze of ith and deserted temple putting in a lot of work. winding canyons serves as a way to enable instant speed golos activations on other turns - it's the only one of the five that really tries hard for multiple golos activations.

This build has a subtheme of podding/evolving golos for value.
Golos Mono Green Combo

Artifacts (2)

Approximate Total Cost:

Mono Red Devotion - Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx

link: https://deckbox.org/sets/2603527

This deck has a vibe like mono red devotion from its brief stay in modern. It's overwhelming when it works and has a few tough mono red combos like godo helm, kiki conscripts, and dualcaster/twinflame. It has a very strong subtheme of creating token copies of Golos with methods such as twinflame and flameshadow conjuring.

The land toolbox is focused on giving creatures haste and having a small endgame in valakut.
Golos Mono red

Planeswalkers (1)

Instants (2)

Approximate Total Cost:

Mono White Enchants and blinking fatties - Serra's Sanctum

link: https://deckbox.org/sets/2423059

This was the first deck, a bit of a riff on mono white Heliod enchantments. It focuses on generating obscene value through blinking creatures with skybind including Golos. It can assemble the powerful infinite combo of opalescence and parallax wave and is the only deck with a second crystal quarry effect. The deck does not generate a ton of mana with serra's sanctum most games, but can usually generate enough to be comfortably activating Golos and casting some other spells.

There's a small reanimator subtheme, and the backup land toolbox uses hall of heliod's generosity and emeria, the sky ruin to present a powerful endgame. It also tries to generate enough colorless mana to enable eldrazi displacer.

The deck can achieve powerful soft locks with heliod, god of the sun and skybind that cascade into functionally infinite mana.
Mono White Enchantments

Sorceries (3)

Approximate Total Cost:

Mono Blue Artifacts - Academy Ruins

link: https://deckbox.org/sets/2579047

This deck has quickly become a fan favorite and one of my favorites to play. I've never really cared for an artifact theme deck before but this one has turned out really fun for some reason. I'm not sure what it is about it but it's really powerful, resilient, and does a lot of interesting things and somehow doesn't set off my derp alarm.

This deck gets to play my mishra's workshop which is awesome, but the main thing it looks to do is get academy ruins to protect its nonsense artifacts. It can use rings of brighthearth to generate truly comical value with the various artifact abilities.

Its land toolbox includes cards like inventors' fair and buried ruin.

This is probably the objectively most powerful Golos deck but it has a lot of intentional glaring weaknesses - skipping out on some of the really powerful artifact payoffs like staff of domination and cost reducers such as etherium sculptor. It tends to need to assemble multiple cards over multiple turns to win but it can occasionally go off. It's pretty light on interaction and vulnerable to artifact hate - probably the most vulnerable to stony silence effects.
Mono Blue Artifacts

Enchantment (2)

Approximate Total Cost:

Mono Black Goodstuff - Cabal Coffers

Link: https://deckbox.org/sets/2467360


This Golos deck uses mana doublers and cabal coffers to generate overwhelming amounts of mana. It pointedly does not play X spell finishers because they felt too easy - torment of hailfire for example. It does a pretty fun job of reusing Golos through various reanimation methods. This deck is probably the least reliant on Golos activations to win because the bombs it slings are huge, and it has the best card advantage engines of the project (e.g. necropotence.

This deck is largely patterned around mono black goodstuff which has existed for most of EDH's history.

After playing it a lot, the mono black deck tended to be shut off hard by enchantments and artifacts, particularly graveyard hosers. So I gave it a secondary attack axis of eye of ugin and big eldrazi like emrakul, the promised end and ulamog, the ceaseless hunger. This tends to work really well since this deck generates by far the most mana of any of the project decks.

The land package includes allstars such as volrath's stronghold and phyrexian tower which together assemble an engine capable of recasting Golos every turn when needed.
Mono Black Goodstuff
Approximate Total Cost:

Last edited by pokken 4 years ago, edited 10 times in total.

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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

Reserved
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Dragonlover
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Post by Dragonlover » 4 years ago

Unless I'm missing something, you can't currently activate Golos in the black version, I feel like Cascading Cataracts is a necessary play there. Or a Chromatic Lantern I guess?

Cool idea for a set of decks though, I'm guessing Valakut for red and Cradle for green?

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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

Dragonlover wrote:
4 years ago
Unless I'm missing something, you can't currently activate Golos in the black version, I feel like Cascading Cataracts is a necessary play there. Or a Chromatic Lantern I guess?

Cool idea for a set of decks though, I'm guessing Valakut for red and Cradle for green?

Dragonlover
Yeah I need to get another cataracts - I also was considering just playing lantern but there's no reasonable way to recur it in monoblack, so it's probably cataracts.

My current thoughts are gaea's cradle for green, nykthos, shrine to nyx for blue (lots of crazy cards for that like invoke prejudice and land equilibrium.

For red I was actually thinking of just playing 38 snow-covered mountains and running extraplanar lens, gauntlet of might, mana flare and gauntlet of power and caged sun. Mostly because I have a gauntlet I wouldn't mind using.

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Post by Dragonlover » 4 years ago

Sounds fair for the red deck, that's gonna be a lot of mana. For the green one may I suggest Prismatic Omen?

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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

Dragonlover wrote:
4 years ago
Sounds fair for the red deck, that's gonna be a lot of mana. For the green one may I suggest Prismatic Omen?

Dragonlover
That sounds like a damned fine way to get golos mana.

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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

Decklist
Approximate Total Cost:

Figured I'd take a quick snapshot of my current build of this, it's really pretty tedious to extract out of deckbox for some reason.

I am really enjoying mono black Golos! I dumped the eldrazi in there to make up for the enchantment weakness and it's seriously paid off.
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Post by gilrad » 4 years ago

I was actually thinking about converting my old Bosh, Iron Golem into a mono-R Golos deck. The deck is already really heavily focused on lands anyway, and the ability to add a few value hybrid cards like birthing pod and phyrexian metamorph sound pretty fun too.

Off the top of my head, the relevant components (aside from a lot of artifact recursion and search) are:
there's probably a few more I'm forgetting about, but even without Golos for the guaranteed search, most games that go long end up with multiple triggers of Valakut putting some pretty hefty pressure on the table. With multiple searches from recurring Golos, I imagine getting three Valakuts and multiple landfall triggers to be regularly achievable.

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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

gilrad wrote:
4 years ago
I was actually thinking about converting my old Bosh, Iron Golem into a mono-R Golos deck. The deck is already really heavily focused on lands anyway, and the ability to add a few value hybrid cards like birthing pod and phyrexian metamorph sound pretty fun too.

Off the top of my head, the relevant components (aside from a lot of artifact recursion and search) are:
there's probably a few more I'm forgetting about, but even without Golos for the guaranteed search, most games that go long end up with multiple triggers of Valakut putting some pretty hefty pressure on the table. With multiple searches from recurring Golos, I imagine getting three Valakuts and multiple landfall triggers to be regularly achievable.
That sounds sick. Isn't there a new goblin from modern horizons that tutors mountains too?

yeeeah alpine guide.

I would consider playing all the bounce lands in your colors so you can redrop mountains, at least one so you can tutor it up and replay mountains. cloudstone curio may also be worth considering. I always forget it can bounce lands if you want.

There are a ton of good hybrid cards in red but unfortunately not all that much for this build.

I think Saheeli might be pretty good, and then maybe Mindwrack Liege as a mana outlet.

You're definitely going to want petrified field and crucible of worlds

And koth of the hammer sounds great :)

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Post by vandertroll » 4 years ago

pokken wrote:
4 years ago
Decklist
Approximate Total Cost:

This is my Serra's Sanctum commander deck. I feel like 5 mana is a fair price to pay for always having access to Sanctum or Nykthos. Which is basically all I want form an Enchantress deck. So I built this thing that doesn't leverage Golos all that much -- it can get pretty out of hand with his ability with skybind and orrery, but otherwise mostly just uses him to get lands.

It has several typical mono white plays (e.g. opalescence + Parallax Wave combo), and a number of large goodstuff creatures that you can protect with Heliod and Skybind shenanigans. It runs a number of cards that are pretty good but do insane stuff with the Opalescence combo.

I am pretty excited about the idea to try out a few cards like Enchanted Evening and Dovescape at some point. It's pretty neat that Golos lets you not have to care about that while also playing exactly as many colors as you want.

One thing I tried to get away from is the idea of trying to use enchantress type effects to gain a large card advantage; instead, Golos provides the card advantage if I need it, and I try to play enchantments that are just very strong independently.

So far the deck has been a really fun budget addition to my stable; it's able to grab combo wins, stax people out with effects like Aura of silence and static orb, do Avacyn+fall of the Thran combo, and has a fair amount of interaction. It goes over the top of most decks and is able to deal with the problem decks of my group (aggro mono green) very well with lots of effects that tax attacking or simply shut off attacking forever (Skybind + Stonehorn Dignitary).

Golos' very consistent ramp allows us to play some very high mana cost cards that can take over games, such as Avacyn, ANgel of Hope and Luminate Primordial -- the deck fairly consistently will play Golos and then ramp from 5 to 9 or 10 mana the next turn with either of the acceleration lands.

I purposefully did not throw all the obvious goodstuff in here like Ancient Tomb and lots of 2/3 mana ramp to get to Golos early because I wanted to keep it a bit more casual than my other builds. But it still does pretty well.

The deck plays a very unconventional control approach that doesn't wrath a lot, which I really like.

Hope you enjoy it :)
This is a very interesting take. Did you consider adding Delaying Shield with Solemnity for stalling the game until you get your engine running? Also in mono white I try to run group hug cards like Howling Mine, Anvil of Bogardan and Font of Mythos so I can find my wraths and armaggedons faster :)

EDIT: Just noticed Parallax Wave. I guess it doesn't work with Solemnity ?
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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

yeah solemnity oddly craps on a lot of stuff, I did think about it hard though since I like it with phyrexian unlife too.

stopping parallax wave is the big problem though, since that card is pretty core to the approach. I don't want to trap myself out of a combo win by having it out, which is one of the reasons I am wound up cutting suppression field.

I haven't played the white deck in a while but I most likely will be jamming a cavalier of dawn in there at some point.

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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

I played the mono white version of this the other night and I think I would have won, but the Windgrace deck did me a solid by not crucible wastelanding me (which he could have done). I realized the deck doesn't have any huge answers to that and so I am considering trying to find yet another crucible.

To be fair I think he would have set himself back pretty far and I would have had to respond by luminarch ascensioning him -- I had both serra sanctum and nykthos in my opening hand, but I also played turn 2 LA that survived. Later in the game after he developed his board I was able to get Karmic Justice into play which would have punished the wastelanding pretty hard.

I did a lot of really fun things with this deck:

* I activated Golos a truly ridiculous number of times (every turn from turn 5 on)
* I killed everyone with Luminarch Ascension which is the first and only time that has happened, but I also got everyone to forget about it by going even bigger than LA -- I didn't want to start activating it until I could win in a turn or two, so I just kept activating Golos.
* At one point I got to do a ridiculous amount of Emeria Shepherd stuff where I was doing things like sac'ing golos, recurring it with wayfarer's bauble crack, which recurred something else.
* Luminate Primordial actually kinda controlled this game; I recurred it a bunch of times and blinked it a bunch of times, basically keeping everyone's board clear and forcing answers to that.

I think the white version of this deck has the potential to be very strong. I am really glad I tried something new for me and ran a bunch of big fatties instead of just forcing all enchantments. They make for really huge golos turns, and presenting a strong creature board amplifies ghostly prison's effectiveness as well.

I could see tuning this deck up quite a bit by adding an ancient tomb, weathered wayfarer, and a couple other decent early game ramp pieces -- but as is its power level is pretty balanced to create the kind of casual games I'm looking for it to create -- it consistently applies serious pressure around turn 5-6 and can answer a lot of other people's stuff, without being super oppressive.

The black version of the deck I am a little less sold on at this point since the necessary edict effects make it a little punishing when it gets going. It tends to develop board control so strong that people can't really break out of it, when it's doing its thing.

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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

I finally finished this project. All five decks are in fairly final form, though I will make updates periodically. I'm super excited to have completed this, my first major multiple-deck deckbuilding project. Hope you find it inspiring in some way.

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