[mtgnexus] Random Card of the Day - Golgari Thug

[hyalopterouslemur]

Sweet little commander of yesteryear. With just a dash of chip damage every turn cycle, this fellow can draw quite a few cards for bargain bin mana.

And remember you can use things like Hideous End and Prodigal Sorcerer and friends to that effect.

In the 99 he's even better, since you now may have access to red (so, more Tims, and bolts) or white (and Norn's Annex, which becomes scary with "life loss matters" cards like these, taking a shock is much harder of your opponent has this and a Tim out).

Painful Quandary is fun. "Do you want to lose a card, or do you want me to have one and you lose 5 life?"

[toctheyounger]

Sygg is pretty great, definitely holds more value than it looks like at first blush.

I'm brewing a vial/kraum deck at the minute and I really like him for the 99. I can't see how it won't be free value.

[Myllior]

He's a great piece for Curious Control-style decks, where he's often another Curiosity effect for your Vial Smasher the Fierce triggers and can help amass significant card advantage. Getting incidental advantage when opponents fetch into shock, get hit by others, have Bob out, etc. is just gravy.

His place is certainly in somewhat slower, more advantage oriented games. I believe he used to feature a lot more in cEDH Curious Control lists, however the speeding up of that format with Turbo Naus and Breach combos - along with the printing of many new bomb cards (e.g. Dockside Extortionist) - has caused him to fall out of favour.

[3drinks]

Wednesday, February 16th, 2022; Nikya of the Old Ways

[Melua]

Fun card as a commander, but not sure which decks want her in the 99. Definitely more suited for slower metals though.

[tstorm823]

Fun card as a commander, but not sure which decks want her in the 99. Definitely more suited for slower metals though.

I have a deck that has only lands and legendary creatures in the 99, so she fits great there.

[Mookie]

I run Nikya of the Old Ways in my Animar, Soul of Elements deck. Not being able to cast key artifacts / enchantments can be annoying at times, but the vast majority of the spells in my deck are creatures, so the percentage of cards that are shut off is pretty low... and if I really need to get her off the battlefield, Shrieking Drake and Ancestral Statue exist.

Anyway, worth consideration if you're running a creature-heavy (40+) deck. If you're running 50+ creatures, she edges into autoinclude territory. If you're running fewer creatures, I would pass - there are other, less burdensome options for mana doublers.

[Hawk]

In Gruul or in Temur or Jund commander lists, she seems like she can be good. She's the most efficient asymmetrical doubler in the game - Gauntlet of Power and Nissa, Who Shakes the World don't work as well in a multicolor deck while Mana Reflection, Regal Behemoth, Zendikar Resurgent, Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger, and Nyxbloom Ancient all are considerably more expensive. Heartbeat of Spring, Extraplanar Lens, Mana Flare, Dictate of Karametra, and Overabundance are all cheaper or more flexible, but at the cost of being symmetrical. There's also Zhur-Taa Ancient which is symmetrical but has no other drawbacks.

What's awkward to me is that the spells I most often want to have excessive mana for tend to be X-spells of the noncreature variety. So the fact that this doubler doesn't help me slam massive Finale of Devastation or Crackle with Power or Torment of Hailfire (at least not without hoops, like floating a ton of mana then saccing Nikya of the Old Ways) is pretty disappointing.

Obviously better and better the higher your creature count is, and totally worthless in Naya where you can just run Mirari's Wake and Keeper of Progenitus.

[hyalopterouslemur]

Decks that want her:

Animar, Soul of Elements
Ruric Thar, the Unbowed

On the plus side, you can use Horned Kavu and friends (I personally like Invasive Species.) if you need to. Or if you already have it out, Cloudstone Curio. Or Roaring Primadox or Stampeding Wildebeests.

The problem is that Naya has better options, namely Mirari's Wake.

[vandertroll]

I tried to make her to work so many times. Maybe she needs a sac outlet after tapping out in order to take advantage the mana with big noncreature spells.Perhaps I'd give her another go with her..

[wildfire393]

My lists in general tend to skew to 35+ creatures and even I look at Nikya a little side-eyed.

On the one hand, being a one-sided Mana Flare on a body is strong, and I believe she's the cheapest option for that. But Regal Behemoth is a single mana more and provides card advantage to boot, plus doesn't have the drawback. And for two more mana you get Nyxbloom Ancient. (And three gets you Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger.) And honestly, the biggest advantage to slapping this kind of effect on a creature is the fact that you can cheat them out with Reanimate type spells or Natural Order or similar - so being slightly cheaper isn't as big of a boon as it might seem.

So really the biggest thing she has going for her is that you can play her from the Command zone, which none of the other options besides Vorinclex (who's monocolored and the most expensive) offer. And you can certainly build that deck, it's just likely to be creatures + lands + Primal Surge and largely a snoozefest.

[3drinks]

Thursday, February 17th, 2022; Overburden

[3drinks]

So really the biggest thing she has going for her is that you can play her from the Command zone, which none of the other options besides Vorinclex (who's monocolored and the most expensive) offer. And you can certainly build that deck, it's just likely to be creatures + lands + Primal Surge and largely a snoozefest.

Turbo-Clex is certainly a deck haha! I had that deck, and no it's not a primal surge deck. It does, however, require ~52% of the deck to be dedicated to ramp because you're aiming to slam your stupid eight drop on t3 (t4 is slow). It's hilarious for you....but certainly all you'll get is your friends throwing books at your head 👀

[pokken]

Overburden is probably the most toxic stax card I ever played. It got worse reactions than Winter Orb. Hot garbage.

[TheAmericanSpirit]

I once played against a Tatyova deck that slapped this down on t2 against myself (playing monogreen Selvala) and a relatively new player with an Edgar Markov precon. I kept a pretty bad hand and kinda got stuck with a Elvish Mystic and a sheltering Ancient in play whereas markov got 2 vamps down before stalling out. Anyhoo, I managed to put all the cumulative upkeep counters on this 1/1 vampire and we beat Tatyova to death with the ancient and the vampire before the dude could muster a defense. The Tatyova player goes ballistic, claiming that he was unfairly made the victim of politics despite playing this card very early against 2 creature-oriented decks.

After that, I resolved to never play against that Tatyova player again. If someone can't understand why the table killed them after playing cards like Overburden, then they shouldn't be playing EDH imho. They're just slightly too stoopid to grasp how this format works.

[Dunharrow]

I have seen this card a dozen times and never once thought of it as a stax card. I just stared wondering how I can combo with this. LOL, my brain sometimes.

[wildfire393]

Thursday, February 17th, 2022; Overburden

Overburden has the problem that a lot of "stax" cards do, which is that you think it's gonna hurt the ramp-happy green player, but in reality they're probably best-equipped to mitigate the disadvantage and run away with the game.

There's certainly decks where this would be good - Tatyova, Benthic Druid/Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait spring to mind immediately, just throw down a couple Exploration effects and go to town. Kodama of the East Tree also makes it trivial to circumvent. Tameshi, Reality Architect is another one that seems tailor-made for it, as you'll draw a bunch of free cards off of everyone else bouncing their lands.

The problem is, it's just miserable to play against most of the time. You'll either grind the game to a near-halt and drag it out, or someone will use it to their advantage and everyone else will have trouble keeping up. It's going to hurt the people doing the worst the most.

As tempting as it might seem, you're probably best off just pretending this card doesn't exist. Same goes for Mana Breach and Storm Cauldron. Nofun city.

[RowanKeltizar]

I was planning on building a 100% enchantments only Bruna, Light of Alabaster deck just to see if I could pull it off and this was one of the potential includes. Basic strategy being to stall the game with stax enchantments until I can land Bruna and beat face.

As others have pointed out, Overburden is the sort of card that most likely paints a fat target on your head. Not the best thing in EDH I've noticed >.> But I think timing is very important. I just think people need to run more spot removal to be perfectly honest. I play in a semi competetive meta and I think in most cases folks would understand me wanting to run this type of card.

As I keep saying, the meta (at least for me) has shifted largely to fast aggro and this is exactly the answer to that strategy. Some people don't enjoy stax, but I don't enjoy getting one shotted on turn 4 or 5 when I'm trying to play more mid range or theme oriented decks.

Of course, if you get hated out for playing this card, that's on you!

[Serenade]

I had this card in my early EDH days, back when Numot, the Devastator was the only Jeskai option. Yeah, it's not fun.

I have a foil version, though, and maaaaaaaan, those old borders looked great in foil.

[hyalopterouslemur]

If you're into keeping lands tapped, this is decidedly not what you want. One of the classic ways to break Winter Orb is to bounce your own forests.

[Mookie]

Overburden is a stax card. It is the sort of card I see occasionally out of Tatyova, Benthic Druid or other decks with lots of ways to ramp out lands that they throw in without realizing it is a stax card, only for it to draw an absurd amount of hate. So... yeah, don't run it without a plan. I could see running it in a creature-light deck that wants to slow down its opponents a bit, or you have a burning desire to hate out a particular flicker deck in your meta... but most of the time, it will just make the table miserable.

[vandertroll]

I use it in my Tatyova, Benthic Druid deck, the table moans and they spend the next 3-4 turns trying to kill it while I assemble my value engine.

[3drinks]

Friday, February 18th, 2022; Renegade Rallier

[Mookie]

Renegade Rallier is a sweet value creature, assuming you can trigger it consistently. The baseline of a 3/2 Farhaven Elf that recurs a fetchland is pretty good, and if you have something juicy to recur, it looks even better. That said, triggering revolt isn't trivial for every deck, and it is pretty underwhelming if you don't get value from it, which is definitely possible on the early turns. It goes down in value significantly if you aren't running fetchlands or sac outlets to support it.

.....I've been wanting to build a Tayam, Luminous Enigma landfall deck for a while, and Renegade Rallier seems like it could be fun there.

[Toshi]

One of those cards i'd really love for my Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle deck...

Other than that i see it frequently as a combo piece in Saffi Eriksdotter.

Overall i like baby Sun Titan impressions a lot and wish i had more decks for them.
As for Revolt, it's one of those mechanics that did get a lot better with the over abundancy of Treasure creating cards lately.