Ertai Planeswalker wrote: ↑2 years ago
I've had a rebels deck many years ago and have been contemplating putting it back together for years. Looking at your list though, I wonder how you actually win other then Mirror Entity? I know you are mr. mono white so I'm sure the deck is good but i don't see how?
Also, I'm going back and forth on either going mono white with guaranteed access to Lin Sivvi, or doing Esper Zur with Arcane Adaptation. Do you have any experience with that version? And what are your thoughts on one vs the other?
Sorry for the lack of card tags but those are tedious on iPhone
Mirror Entity is my primary wincondition mostly because of how less efficient and accessible most others are. I could do something like
Coat of Arms as a secondary but it would put more emphasis on pulling a ton of bodies or making a ton of tokens in one shot. Lots of my boardstates often ended up being somewhat of a mix of things which often made me second guess coat of arms. Its ironic as Coat of Arms probably works well with
Mirror Entity but that doesn't make the deck less reliant on Mirror Entity. I thought about some other options like
True Conviction and
Dictate of Heliod but most of them feel like they don't pack quite enough punch for my like. There is also the issue of inconsistency with a lot of the other anthems. You might not draw them when you want them and you might be stuck with no anthem when you need one. I resorted to
Mirror Entity a little because of its accessibility as well as how well it worked with the big mana concept that a lot of my token generation also worked on.
I think there are a few equipment that could also be used alright as another option. Its not really as much of a go wide strategy with most of the ones I was thinking but the equipment tutors increase their consistancy.
Blackblade Reforged (the equip cost for non legends totally sucks),
Strata Scythe (just because the equip cost for blackblade sucks),
Quietus Spike (would work well on
Zealot il-Vec). Some of my concern for these equipment though is they are a bit expensive to throw around and there are only a few rebels that really seem to make them shine. Beyond this they still aren't all that explosive in my mind.
All in all, I am someone who tends to build with very few dedicated wincons to a deck. I prefer to push a deck to perform well on more of a turn to turn basis and be strong at surviving and having a good game rather than focusing on wincons. Its just how I build but its what I enjoy.
Zur - I think Zur comes with his own challenges as well. I have played against a number of competitive Zur decks in my day and I will tell you I don't care what flavor of Zur you built. I will throw literally anything and everything I can into Zur never activating if I can help it. Zur has several of the same challenges that
Zirda would have in that you need to increase the number of rebels in the deck. I think he is also very weak on
Arcane Adaptation being interacted with. If you loose adaptation to something that exiles it or even just removes it I think its going to end up being a really bad Zur deck and a bad Rebels deck. I think that Zur is fine if that is what you want to play but I think that doing Zur as rebels is making a bad rebel and a bad Zur deck (my personal take without having played with or against it). I don't know the consistency of the deck as a whole but I just get the idea that its going to be sort of weak to opponents interacting with you as the point of everything seems like it would fall apart with a little interaction.
The big question in my mind would be what Zur does for you outside of
Arcane Adaptation. My own personal take is that I wouldn't be all in on Zur for only one card so if you can find some other ties that makes Zur appealing for a rebels concept outside of a single card that when removed invalidates your commander choice then I guess it would sound more appealing to me. Again, I have not tried this but I constantly get the feeling that you might draw attention as a Zur player while playing a super bad convoluted concept that is easily dismantled when focused by the entire table. Its possible that if you play in one meta and people get to know what you are doing they might not all focus you but they will also realize your focus point and keeping
Arcane Adaptation alive when you build that heavily around it sounds hard.
At one point I entertained the idea of doing
Gaddock Teeg as a rebels concept. The upside there is that he stops a lot of sweepers and potentially slows down / stops a lot of game ending spells. In the end though, even with all of these concepts I just don't actually get a strong opinion that going away from mono white is an improvement. Lots of these ideas add a lot more complication in setting up and feel like they might have issues with control concepts. Many of them require larger rebel packages and possibly the loss of some control and interaction as well to make room for other packages they require. My concern is that I don't feel that rebels is ever going to be that fast of a concept so my own take is that it might be better to be a little more interactive and slow than to try to race with a concept that is ultimately kind of slow.