Ok, I made some adjustments to the list to get it down to 100 cards. Unfortunately I can't remember exactly what I cut but I did add
Immaculate Magistrate and
Numa, Joraga Chieftain to add a little bit of a potential wincon to this list as it was feeling maybe a little bit not great before. I think I still need to test and see some more things as I wasn't blown away by these ideas especially given that my commander doesn't gain much for evasion in most cases. I still think some of the green pump gods could be an option but I am going to explore some more options.
I played my first game with the deck tonight and I think I got really lucky in that game. I ended up with
Skemfar Avenger in my opener and drew
Oracle of Mul Daya on curve so my curve out play was looking really good. I got an early
Journey to Eternity and setup to abuse some stuff with
Prowess of the Fair which was fun. I got really nice and set up but then an opponent with a
Grave Pact got another player to play
Ryusei, the Falling Star which I thought I was fairly well defended from with
Prowess of the Fair but my opponents ganged up and spot removed it and then chained all the removal off. I ended up drawing like 24 cards thanks to an opponents
Fecundity and my
Skemfar Avenger.
The next turn I just shot out a tonnnn of elves using
Heritage Druid to play out a bunch of cheap elves and then Nykthos to finish it off. I played out Guardian Project just to keep things going mid turn but I ended up putting something like 10-12 elves into play this turn with
Elvish Warmaster and
Wolverine Riders which side note I missed that the warmaster creates tokens from the riders but the following turn a mix of mass forestwalk from
Eladamri, Lord of Leaves and I 4x activated
Elvish Warmaster to turn my elves into a bunch of massive beaters to murder my enemies.
Sooooooooo that was just one game but I was reasonably impressed with things. I think I want a few more winconditions and perhaps a tad more draw options but I really don't have a good enough baseline to push too much around yet.
Ulka wrote: ↑2 years ago
Needs more
Lich effects such as
Lich's Mastery to turn the elfball swing into massive card draws
I think I am a bit leery of the all in nature of these cards as well as the fact that elves don't seem to defend that well in general often lacking size and flying. I want to use my commander's lifegain as a resource mostly but also something to buffer me against decks with a lot of chip damage like opposing aristocrats.
Slightly unrelated but I actually quite liked my commander choice for this list. He gained me something like 20 life in I think just three attacks before he got swept out by a combination of sweeping my board and edicts following it. If not for the fact that both things happened I think him staying in play and being sticky is really nice.
Shabbaman wrote: ↑2 years ago
I made Lathril because I always wanted to turn my old 60 card Prowess of the Fair deck into an EDH deck. So, yay Golgari Elves! My personal preference is not to run Grave Pact though, but having played Pact for ages... I think you could need a few more sacrifice outlets. I like Vampiric Rites (another lifegain trigger) and Evolutionary Leap. Fallen Ideal can be brutal (but it can suck most of the time as well). My favorite? Plumb the Forbidden.
For a finisher you could look at Throne of the God-Pharaoh.
Ulka wrote: ↑2 years ago
Needs more
Lich effects such as
Lich's Mastery to turn the elfball swing into massive card draws
This is a nice idea.
Grave Pacts - I am a bit undecided. I just really like going a little more control based especially given how proactive elves can be I really wanted to take an approach that wasn't just racing as fast as I could. I am not saying I couldn't get off of the pacts but I think a big selling point of going for disposable elves with a sac outlet commander is being able to trigger cheap sac effects.
I do think I want to look a bit more into some of the non elf stuff that could support what I am doing.
Lifeline for instance might be a card that makes a lot of sense just looping the hell out of things like
Wood Elves. I really haven't done nearly enough looking into the support cards and its on my to do list but it might also take me playing the list a few more times to really figure out what is and isn't working. This is a bit off topic but I went into a side note after talking about
Grave Pact about support cards.
Throne of the God-Pharaoh - Yea it could be something to explore. Its nice in that it plays well with some of the tap for mana effects but I also don't think I am scaling my creature counts up as high as I really want for this. Its also hard to justify some things like this where the point is going super wide on a non elf card just from the standpoint of how many cards I could look at that fall into go wide non elf cards. I think something like this also competes against overrun effects and if I really wanted to go into making this work I would possibly want to scale up some of the support cards to make my things tapped like getting more
Cryptolith Rite type effects.
Ruiner wrote: ↑2 years ago
I run a GB Abomination of Llanowar deck (list in my signature if interested) and while my list is very much of the full of aggro style which you are not really going for, I think there are a few cards I run that you aren't currently that would be rather useful.
Ezuri, Renegade Leader really helps when you have tons of mana going as a way to push through some significant damage. This could easily be a finisher option.
Tyvar Kell has a mix of just generally useful abilities.
Immaculate Magistrate, if it sticks it can get out of control pretty quick with anything that gets evasion/trample. Also fun to use on opponent's creatures when someone decides to not block (although thats risky when it decides to come for you).
Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord is another sac outlet that can do some damage. Might be a decent backup if your commander gets taxed out but you still need a sac outlet.
Ezuri, Renegade Leader - It might be something I look at. Originally I didn't think my creature count would get that high as I sacrifice some of my count as a means to draw cards so my fear was that I wouldn't be able to make a wide enough board. I need more testing I think before I go one way or the other on this I think.
Tyvar Kell - My fear is my inability to defend it. I don't have much for big elves or flyers / reach creatures so I just don't want to get into walkers much because I don't feel confident in playing defense for them.
Immaculate Magistrate - I added it to the list before playing but I wasn't that impressed with how it turned out. I got to tap it once before getting swept off the board and if it wasn't for the fact that it was a combination of damage sweeping with edicts with removing my enchantment to make elves on death I guess it might have saved something relevant. I need to test more but it did feel slow and clunky.
Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord - my concern is mostly that my creatures are tiny. He might be decent sized but also lacks evasion and sacrificing other elves for his ability doesn't seem very good outside of pairing him with
Immaculate Magistrate.
Its late and I should go to bed. I don't have much for changes right now but I do want to look more into the enabling cards, maybe a little more draw, and possibly one more win condition for the deck. I think I need to do some looking at cards for a bit and possibly take this deck out for another spin in testing.