Mavinda, Abject Failure
Posted: Mon May 24, 2021 1:57 pm
I almost didn't want to record this deck because it's kind of an embarrassment. On the surface I like the idea of Mavinda - take the sweet ability of Kess, Dissident Mage but balance it out by making it mono-white, and then balance it some more by (heavily) incentivizing targeting your own stuff, and as a tradeoff shave a mana off your commander and allow it to work on enemy turns - cool.
Unfortunately, within the realm of mono-white instants and sorceries that target your own thing, there's only a few major categories:
-terrible combat tricks
-protection spells
-flicker effects
-cantrips
Cantrips was a given. A few protection spells, also pretty easy. But then things get kinda tricky - flicker effects are in relatively heavy supply, but there's still only like a dozen, and unlike Feather you don't get to just keep casting forever - just twice per spell. So is it really worth committing to a blink strategy when I might only draw a couple of them in an average game?
Well, I decided no, and decided to instead go a different direction...and ended up far in the weeds. Totally lost track of what the deck was trying to do, and ended up in one of my mono-white defaults of board wipes + planeswalkers. Probably some bias going on there to make me think it was a coherent idea - part of which, most likely, was the fact that I don't have a fair number of the weaker blink spells, which would have been irritating to track down. As a result, the deck is really all over the place, and doesn't do much with Mavinda outside of using her as a source of occasional card advantage and a mediocre body.
I think if I tried to trace my though process, it started off with the cantrippy, value stuff, which pushed me towards a spellslinger strategy using cards like Monastery Mentor which then pushed me towards tokens, which then pushed me towards planeswalkers since some of them make tokens or buff tokens, alongside anthems that also buff tokens...and then I guess board wipes to protect the planeswalkers...it's all over the map.
Despite being fairly scattershot, it's not the worst deck ever. It can still win a decent percentage of games. But it's basically just mono-white superfriends control with a passable card advantage engine in the CZ. If I was going to give it a grade, it'd probably be a 2/5 simply because I like the mono-white superfriends strat (or maybe even a 3/5...I really like mono-white superfriends lol), but it's not really a Mavinda deck by any reasonable standard, so I don't really feel justified grading Mavinda as a commander for this one.
Anyway, maybe I'll try Mavinda again if I feel like committing to the blink strat, or maybe they'll print enough other spells that work with her to justify something else. I do kinda like the mono-white spellslinger strat, but I think there might not be enough fodder to make it work at this time. Or maybe there is, and I just got sidetracked. Maybe I'll take another stab at it. Anyway, for posterity, here's this train wreck.
Also I realized afterwards that I somehow misplaced some really solid cards like Shelter even though I'd separated them initially...oops.
Unfortunately, within the realm of mono-white instants and sorceries that target your own thing, there's only a few major categories:
-terrible combat tricks
-protection spells
-flicker effects
-cantrips
Cantrips was a given. A few protection spells, also pretty easy. But then things get kinda tricky - flicker effects are in relatively heavy supply, but there's still only like a dozen, and unlike Feather you don't get to just keep casting forever - just twice per spell. So is it really worth committing to a blink strategy when I might only draw a couple of them in an average game?
Well, I decided no, and decided to instead go a different direction...and ended up far in the weeds. Totally lost track of what the deck was trying to do, and ended up in one of my mono-white defaults of board wipes + planeswalkers. Probably some bias going on there to make me think it was a coherent idea - part of which, most likely, was the fact that I don't have a fair number of the weaker blink spells, which would have been irritating to track down. As a result, the deck is really all over the place, and doesn't do much with Mavinda outside of using her as a source of occasional card advantage and a mediocre body.
I think if I tried to trace my though process, it started off with the cantrippy, value stuff, which pushed me towards a spellslinger strategy using cards like Monastery Mentor which then pushed me towards tokens, which then pushed me towards planeswalkers since some of them make tokens or buff tokens, alongside anthems that also buff tokens...and then I guess board wipes to protect the planeswalkers...it's all over the map.
Despite being fairly scattershot, it's not the worst deck ever. It can still win a decent percentage of games. But it's basically just mono-white superfriends control with a passable card advantage engine in the CZ. If I was going to give it a grade, it'd probably be a 2/5 simply because I like the mono-white superfriends strat (or maybe even a 3/5...I really like mono-white superfriends lol), but it's not really a Mavinda deck by any reasonable standard, so I don't really feel justified grading Mavinda as a commander for this one.
Anyway, maybe I'll try Mavinda again if I feel like committing to the blink strat, or maybe they'll print enough other spells that work with her to justify something else. I do kinda like the mono-white spellslinger strat, but I think there might not be enough fodder to make it work at this time. Or maybe there is, and I just got sidetracked. Maybe I'll take another stab at it. Anyway, for posterity, here's this train wreck.
Mavinda I guess
Approximate Total Cost:
Also I realized afterwards that I somehow misplaced some really solid cards like Shelter even though I'd separated them initially...oops.