Ephara, God of the Polis - Flash & Taxes

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pokken
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Post by pokken » 1 year ago

TheAmericanSpirit wrote:
1 year ago
Howdy! Is there a "budget" version of the deck buried somewhere in these 1000 posts? I've had my eye on this primer for a while and I'd like to give a basic version of the deck before blowing a huge amount of dough on fancy cardboard. Got room in my roster for a WX deck and I'm itching to fill the void
Heya! That's a good question. Generally speaking you can just cut all the expensive stuff and put cheaper dudes in :) two color allied mana bases are fairly trivial. The fetchland ramp and intuition spellseeker lines are easily replaceable.

That said I think the best budget build for ephara is a significant departure toward life gain tokens. There are so many good effects to making tokens off of lifegain at instant speed.

If I were to build closest to my general approach to the deck I'd focus on recursion combos - altars and reveillark stuff are all cheap $$ mostly except phyrexian which is not really critical.

All the key ephara derps like soulherder whitemane lion nadir kraken etc are fairly cheap.

The best value in cheaper casual stuff is usually sweepers. Very hard for budget decks to hang with hour and devastating mastery type stuff. And white recursion and mass blink are great counterpoints to that.

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Post by TheAmericanSpirit » 1 year ago

@pokken that is simultaneously really useful advice and also not at all what I was looking for! :laughing: NGL I was hoping someone better at brewing than me had cooked something up that I could shamelessly steal. Damn it, my laziness is thwarted again!
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Post by cheonice » 1 year ago

@TheAmericanSpirit WizardMN covers some budget options in their Primer. And let me shamelessly promote my own, more traditional Ephara build without those fancy Recruiter and Spellseeker chains.^^

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Post by pokken » 1 year ago

TheAmericanSpirit wrote:
1 year ago
@pokken that is simultaneously really useful advice and also not at all what I was looking for! :laughing: NGL I was hoping someone better at brewing than me had cooked something up that I could shamelessly steal. Damn it, my laziness is thwarted again!
I did cook up a big list of lifegain duders at one point - it's fairly out of date tho
https://deckbox.org/sets/2383832

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Post by pokken » 1 year ago

The more I ruminate on the spell based blink deck the more I feel like it's just a bad version of another deck I had in my head (tivit blink). Kinda leaning toward "making tokens with spells" stuff --

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Post by shermanido37 » 1 year ago

You're right, Cloud of Faeries needs to go in. I love it as a mini Teferi, Hero of Dominaria +1 along with Soulherder, but it's also a combo with a sac outlet, Archaeomancer, and Brought Back.
I mean, if you're not comboing with Brought Back, it probably shouldn't be here.

I personally don't like the Arch plan. It's pretty weak and relies on one fragile creature or its more expensive copy. Torpor Orb and friends ruin your day, targeted discard effects ruin your day, grave hate ruins your day. And running like 3 combos means that you're running more cards that are individually weaker.
For instance, I don't like the weaker noncreatures, like Teferi's Time Twist. Your deck doesn't even have 30 creatures, and of those most ETB effects are on expensive creatures. To me, once you've resolved those, you should kind of already be winning, so flickering them with such low effect spells feels pretty mediocre.

I'm curious about new Norn for Ephara. It's simultaneously an ETB buff and an ETB hatebear, but it also makes a lot of our classic cards like Whitemane Lion potentially bad. The body is much stronger when compared to 5 drops than when compared to 7 drops, but the 7 mana version is a hate effect to opposing tokens that helps our team get in for the kill.
What are your thoughts?

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Post by pokken » 1 year ago

shermanido37 wrote:
1 year ago
You're right, Cloud of Faeries needs to go in. I love it as a mini Teferi, Hero of Dominaria +1 along with Soulherder, but it's also a combo with a sac outlet, Archaeomancer, and Brought Back.
I mean, if you're not comboing with Brought Back, it probably shouldn't be here.

I personally don't like the Arch plan. It's pretty weak and relies on one fragile creature or its more expensive copy. Torpor Orb and friends ruin your day, targeted discard effects ruin your day, grave hate ruins your day. And running like 3 combos means that you're running more cards that are individually weaker.
For instance, I don't like the weaker noncreatures, like Teferi's Time Twist. Your deck doesn't even have 30 creatures, and of those most ETB effects are on expensive creatures. To me, once you've resolved those, you should kind of already be winning, so flickering them with such low effect spells feels pretty mediocre.

I'm curious about new Norn for Ephara. It's simultaneously an ETB buff and an ETB hatebear, but it also makes a lot of our classic cards like Whitemane Lion potentially bad. The body is much stronger when compared to 5 drops than when compared to 7 drops, but the 7 mana version is a hate effect to opposing tokens that helps our team get in for the kill.
What are your thoughts?
Yeah I don't think this build is going to stick, it's just vulnerable to too much stuff and can really fold to interaction. If someone kills Archaeomancer while you're casting a spell, you can get 2-for-1'd as well which is bad. Being weak to both grave hate *and* etb hate is rough. Fundamentally this build just feels like a bad Hinata, Dawn-Crowned deck.

I'm kinda paused on playing magic these days so just trying to figure out how to rebuild. I think I might like to go with more beef and more sweepers---more like, just trying to ride a Nadir Kraken type card to victory? But I need to think about whether I can get critical mass. Field of the Dead is really good too.

Fundamentally the strongest thing Ephara does is survive Hour of Revelation, moreso than the card advantage even, so I'm ruminating on whether I'd like to just go that route.

Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines gets me really interested in a more hatebearsy build, she's so strong, but she also goes infinite with Palinchron which is dope. The tension with her is that she's not real good with Hushbringer--you can't really go whole hog on the torpor orb effects. She's definitely on my list.

Norn adds a few more infinite combo options too like archaeomancer blink spell turn spell or resto felidar and any etb creature.

Might be worth thinking on though lately I've been kinda thinking about trying to apply more board pressure.

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Post by SavageToaster » 1 year ago

I can relate to the board presence point (I actually built Ephara because of this whole thread).

Lately I have found myself being able to wipe the board but maybe don't rebuild as strongly as my opponents. Have been thinking of adding in the Heliod that Makes Clerics (survives Hour of Revelation) or like Footprints of the Stag to beef up my offensive pressure. I run Oketra but no ways to really tutor for her.

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Post by pokken » 1 year ago

SavageToaster wrote:
1 year ago
I can relate to the board presence point (I actually built Ephara because of this whole thread).

Lately I have found myself being able to wipe the board but maybe don't rebuild as strongly as my opponents. Have been thinking of adding in the Heliod that Makes Clerics (survives Hour of Revelation) or like Footprints of the Stag to beef up my offensive pressure. I run Oketra but no ways to really tutor for her.
Yeah this is a good reason to run Stenn, Paranoid Partisan and Fleeting Spirit btw, those cards are ones I would run before getting Heliod and Oketra back out. 4 cmc is really yucky in Ephara.

I am giving some thought to moving toward getting my sequence to be more along the lines of "play ephara, sweep the board, *then* deploy an engine creature" - something like Nadir Kraken or Battle Angels of Tyr or whatever.

Honestly I would run Sacred Mesa again before thinking about running any 4 cmc token makers. The 3W cost to make a token is just too damn high. The downside to that is that Hour of Revelation and Devastating Mastery really are our premier sweepers though. It might make sense to start moving toward more creature sweepers and enchantments/artifacts that make tokens (e.g. Retrofitter Foundry / Sacred Mesa). Vanquish the Horde is *really* good.

I haven't played it much yet but I think that Eerie Interlude et al would probably be really good for the sweeper angle too.

That said, none of this really jacks up the offensive pressure that much, and being the guy who one-sided-sweepers just paints a bullseye on your chest.

So I am really torn as far as sweepers go; I think it might be a higher win rate to get more pressure on board with stuff like Monastery Mentor / God-Eternal Oketra / Battle Angels of Tyr type stuff, and just go deep on removal and protecting things like Serra's Emissary or Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite.

Lots to think about :)

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Post by pokken » 1 year ago

Just a note I am shutting down my old webhost so I'll probably need to fix some of the images in this primer at some point. If anyone has suggestions of a free image hosting site that can be embedded in forums I'd be interested :) Thanks!

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Post by Rumpy5897 » 1 year ago

I've been using Imgur in mine, and it's been fine.

That said, it's also possible to head to the testing area here, upload the images, and link to them from the primer. Apparently I uploaded stuff there back in 2019, but then proceeded to keep Imgur links in the primers. Huh.

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Post by pokken » 1 year ago

Rumpy5897 wrote:
1 year ago
I've been using Imgur in mine, and it's been fine.

That said, it's also possible to head to the testing area here, upload the images, and link to them from the primer. Apparently I uploaded stuff there back in 2019, but then proceeded to keep Imgur links in the primers. Huh.

"Image"
I think I got them figured out with google drive hosting. it's not amazingly fast but seems OK.

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Post by shermanido37 » 1 year ago

Just venting frustration, Drana and Linvana is a bit of a letdown. If Linvala had been cool enough to stay Azorius that kind of effect would have been incredibly cool - a flying vigilant Scheming Fence for their entire board? Yes please!! But I guess it's not meant to be. It's not even the first good hatebear that Orzhov gets that we wanted, like Kunoros, Hound of Athreos.

However, even though the bears are disappointing, Heliod, the Radiant Dawn // Heliod, the Warped Eclipse is actually pretty spicy. It returns our incidental enchantments, like Sacred Mesa, Eidolon of Rhetoric, or Spirit of the Labyrinth to our hand (but not Ephara). We can also pay 3-4 mana during our turn to transform it, giving our stuff flash and reducing our spells by at least 1 during each of their turns. This is essentially a better version one half of Teferi, Time Raveler on a creature (though not the overpowered one). I've found that there are quite a few of my bears that stay at sorcery speed, so I'll be glad to give them that flexibility.

EDIT: While Faerie Mastermind isn't a hatebear, it's a nice boon effect if your opponents like drawing cards. However it's far less powerful than something like Deep Gnome Terramancer or even Archivist of Oghma, depending on your group of course.

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Post by pokken » 1 year ago

shermanido37 wrote:
1 year ago
Just venting frustration, Drana and Linvana is a bit of a letdown. If Linvala had been cool enough to stay Azorius that kind of effect would have been incredibly cool - a flying vigilant Scheming Fence for their entire board? Yes please!! But I guess it's not meant to be. It's not even the first good hatebear that Orzhov gets that we wanted, like Kunoros, Hound of Athreos.

However, even though the bears are disappointing, Heliod, the Radiant Dawn // Heliod, the Warped Eclipse is actually pretty spicy. It returns our incidental enchantments, like Sacred Mesa, Eidolon of Rhetoric, or Spirit of the Labyrinth to our hand (but not Ephara). We can also pay 3-4 mana during our turn to transform it, giving our stuff flash and reducing our spells by at least 1 during each of their turns. This is essentially a better version one half of Teferi, Time Raveler on a creature (though not the overpowered one). I've found that there are quite a few of my bears that stay at sorcery speed, so I'll be glad to give them that flexibility.

EDIT: While Faerie Mastermind isn't a hatebear, it's a nice boon effect if your opponents like drawing cards. However it's far less powerful than something like Deep Gnome Terramancer or even Archivist of Oghma, depending on your group of course.
Yeah it's a bummer that Linvala doesn't work for us, Linvala and like...someone blue plz

New Heliod is absolutely strong. Slam dunk for sure. Really powerful especially if we're running more enchantments, which I'll be honest I have been considering moving back toward Sacred Mesa.

A really strong play pattern I have seen recently is to sweep the board then drop Nadir Kraken or Whitemane Lion or something that draws like crazy. I think we could actually do with quite a bit fewer creatures and a little more ramp, but more free/nearly free impactful "draw 4 cards a turn cycle" cards like Saltskitter and Nadir Kraken and Fleeting Spirit and Sacred Mesa too.

I'm going to be doing some serious thinking on the deck lately, might need to play it a few times and see how it's doing :P

Faerie Mastermind seems reasonably worth trying I guess, having flash makes it really closer than if it didn't.

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Post by shermanido37 » 1 year ago

Wow, I was just talking, and here we get an absolute banger.
Errant and Giada are absolutely awesome for us. Might not be recruitable but are very very worth it. Get in my deck!

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Post by pokken » 1 year ago

shermanido37 wrote:
1 year ago
Wow, I was just talking, and here we get an absolute banger.
Errant and Giada are absolutely awesome for us. Might not be recruitable but are very very worth it. Get in my deck!
Hrm. Looking at the top is good. Not sure if my flash flying component is high enough. Honestly it seems great for some ephara decks but in general pure card advantage effects are not that great.

Really cool card tho for sure.

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Post by shermanido37 » 1 year ago

As you get to higher level tables (that aren't quite cEDH), Theros Gods are not that difficult to get rid of, and in that rare case our deck becomes super duper fragile. This card can function as a superb insurance plan in case Ephara bites the dust a few too many times.
There's also something to be said about a card engine that itself draws a card with Ephara when it comes into play. It turns the card from a "wait until we have 7 mana to play this along with another card" to possibly a "yeah I'll just jam it now and get the card, and see what comes after". It's not too powerful, but I love the options that it gives. Dig dig dig...

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Post by pokken » 1 year ago

shermanido37 wrote:
1 year ago
As you get to higher level tables (that aren't quite cEDH), Theros Gods are not that difficult to get rid of, and in that rare case our deck becomes super duper fragile. This card can function as a superb insurance plan in case Ephara bites the dust a few too many times.
There's also something to be said about a card engine that itself draws a card with Ephara when it comes into play. It turns the card from a "wait until we have 7 mana to play this along with another card" to possibly a "yeah I'll just jam it now and get the card, and see what comes after". It's not too powerful, but I love the options that it gives. Dig dig dig...
In my experience at higher power tables, and that's been basically my entire experience with this deck, no one removes ephara unless it's splash damage like farewell or similar. It's just not worth spending removal on her. Her card advantage is medium and I have enough other sources (emeria, chip, titan, top, spellseeker, recruiter, etc.)

Usually a new player will remove ephara once or try to, but they learn quickly that it's a waste of effort. I'll recast her and now you're missing removal for a combo.

I do like some card advantage pieces in this deck but they should be related to finish the game. Things like reality chip plus Stenn / top.

If it worked on instants or something I'd be more inclined but the CA is bad too. Your odds of hitting a flash creature or flying is like 1/6 or so with my build I think.

I think I might just give up and play rhystic study and remora :P

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Post by pokken » 9 months ago

The Watcher in the Water is something else for sure. Yeesh. That's exciting to have a new card.

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Post by cheonice » 9 months ago

pokken wrote:
9 months ago
The Watcher in the Water is something else for sure. Yeesh. That's exciting to have a new card.
Uh, this looks really nice! It's a bit of an bummer that it doesn't has evasion, but spamming tokens makes up for that, I guess. Really cool card. I think I will swap it in for God-Eternal Oketra.

Why isn't this an Elder Kraken, though? Missed opportunity!

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Post by pokken » 9 months ago

I'm working on another build of Ephara based on Watcher for Tomorrow and Fleeting Spirit as engines that can just really get you churning through cards at a rate. Higher individual card quality, less synergy, no combos. The goal is to just go ahead and try to close it out with combat damage. This may be..ambitious.
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I am not 100% sure this deck is alright. It feels...alright. But at least it is definitely an Ephara, God of the Polis deck.

I felt for a long time that this deck was just becoming a bad version of another deck (sometimes blink.dec, sometimes artifacts.dec, sometimes combo.dec). This deck is a UW control deck that tries to use Ephara's ability with as little mana investment as possible. No spamming away at Whitemane Lion, etc.

The downside is that sometimes Ephara is merely an indestructible Phyrexian Arena. The upside is we're spending our mana better and our card quality is higher.

There's some more UW goodstuff in here to fill out curves and make sure we have some more ways to draw cards independent on Ephara, but our goal is definitely to crank out cards with Ephara and start to kill people primarily with token producers.

I'm debating whether we need to add Akroma's Will; the main issue with it is that it doesn't protect Sacred Mesa from sweepers and such.

We'll see how this does; honestly it's probably my last attempt to make this deck playable in casual metas. The combo builds were just both 1) way too good, and 2) crappy copies of Urza or Tivit or Tymna, depending.

We now have an Ephara deck again, so hopefully it works :)


"one card engines" Bit of an asterisk on Cartographer's Hawk, Stenn, Paranoid Partisan and Spellseeker but they should both generate quite a bit of CA (and Seeker can find a tutor for Rhystic Study yeah I know super interesting gameplay:P

Our goal is to find one of these and ride it to card advantage town independently of other cards for the most part.

We are somewhat reliant on fetchlands for a lot of our shenanigans, but we have a decent number of ways to recur/abuse them.

Urza's Saga is really interesting in this deck; with Crucible of Worlds or Brought Back (et al) we can potentially make quite an army of dudes, but we can also find Field of the Dead with Expedition Map so that's nice.

I added in some of the traditional artifact ramp again, thinking that with my higher density of sweepers that can avoid it that it might be OK.

I have no idea if this deck is going to be OK, or if the fetchland support for Felidar Retreat is good enough. Heretofore, people have actually removed Field of the Dead two of the times I've played it.

I think I may find Winds of Abandon too slow for this deck, and need to fetch something like Devastating Mastery, but I like that Winds and Farewell stuff Heroic Intervention which is one of the most played counter-sweeper cards I've seen in a while.

Wish me luck :) A lot of the old pieces will go to make my Esper blink Tivit, Seller of Secrets deck I think.

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Post by pokken » 9 months ago

Man, this deck was an absolute joy to play. The Watcher in the Water was *amazing* - I went absolutely bananas with it with Teferi, Master of Time and Brainstorm and then killed everyone by ultimatting both teferi and Elspeth, Sun's Champion. I ended the game with like 18 tentacle tokens.

Everything was quite smooth and having a few non-ephara card draw/filtering effects really helped.

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Post by pokken » 8 months ago

Got another game in this week and ephara won. Closed it out with field of the dead and felidar retreat cranking out massive bodies and eventually sacred mesa.

As usual this deck leans hard on sweepers. Resolved an overloaded rift, farewell and winds of abandon.

Man farewell is brutal. I swept up artifacts and creatures and managed to keep ephara and retreat which let me close the game.

At one point i gilded draked a Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain and Stenn, Paranoid Partisan proved his value by letting me draw a metric crapload of cards with rocks and top.

All in all I think the deck is in a great place. Felidar retreat was really good. Being able to swing away with vigilance was superb.


One topic of note is - I am not sure cyclonic rift is good enough anymore. It's nuts. These days if I don't kill someone right after resolving it I might as well have just not played it. People recover so fast and often you give up value. I'm thinking about swapping it for Devastating Mastery. Here's hoping we get another farewell level sweeper lol. Exile is so great.

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Post by WizardMN » 8 months ago

pokken wrote:
8 months ago
One topic of note is - I am not sure cyclonic rift is good enough anymore. It's nuts. These days if I don't kill someone right after resolving it I might as well have just not played it. People recover so fast and often you give up value. I'm thinking about swapping it for Devastating Mastery. Here's hoping we get another farewell level sweeper lol. Exile is so great.
I have started thinking the same thing after a game with Volrath a couple months ago. I think the biggest thing is that it is still a great way to deal with a ridiculous board, especially as they are coming at us in combat. But to your point, and in my experience, the recovery from it is just getting faster and faster. I still think it has a place as a defensive spell, even at 7 mana, but you are right that if it is not being used offensively to actually get rid of someone, the board just gets back to what it was and we are still struggling keep up in some cases.

So, I am not ready to cut it from any of my lists quite yet but I can see where you are coming from and this list in particular has other options in Hour of Revelation, Devastating Mastery, Farewell, and Winds of Abandon. While the latter only deals with creatures, it ensures they basically can never come back.

On the topic of Farewell, I have been liking it a lot more than I thought I would. Not hitting Planeswalkers is a limitation but any time I cast it in my other decks, it feels great to just start over and try again. It is still somewhat niche in that I don't want to be firing it off in every deck but it makes sense here and in a couple other decks that aren't Karador, Ghost Chieftain. I think it is only a matter of time before we get yet another one of these effects as they seem to be coming slow but steady over the past couple years. It is possible one of those finally leads to Rift being cut, as least in white decks.

Rift still has a great place in nonwhite decks though as other colors cannot do what white can. But here, I can see the idea of there being better options for a full reset.

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Post by pokken » 8 months ago

WizardMN wrote:
8 months ago
I have started thinking the same thing after a game with Volrath a couple months ago. I think the biggest thing is that it is still a great way to deal with a ridiculous board, especially as they are coming at us in combat. But to your point, and in my experience, the recovery from it is just getting faster and faster. I still think it has a place as a defensive spell, even at 7 mana, but you are right that if it is not being used offensively to actually get rid of someone, the board just gets back to what it was and we are still struggling keep up in some cases.

So, I am not ready to cut it from any of my lists quite yet but I can see where you are coming from and this list in particular has other options in Hour of Revelation, Devastating Mastery, Farewell, and Winds of Abandon. While the latter only deals with creatures, it ensures they basically can never come back.

On the topic of Farewell, I have been liking it a lot more than I thought I would. Not hitting Planeswalkers is a limitation but any time I cast it in my other decks, it feels great to just start over and try again. It is still somewhat niche in that I don't want to be firing it off in every deck but it makes sense here and in a couple other decks that aren't Karador, Ghost Chieftain. I think it is only a matter of time before we get yet another one of these effects as they seem to be coming slow but steady over the past couple years. It is possible one of those finally leads to Rift being cut, as least in white decks.

Rift still has a great place in nonwhite decks though as other colors cannot do what white can. But here, I can see the idea of there being better options for a full reset.
Yeah, I'm not *quite* there. The ability to reset a board of planeswalkers is really powerful, and people are playing more of those lately. I still sometimes use it offensively, where I can kill someone after I drop it, but that sometimes creates some weird feelbads too where I then have to kill the next person and it takes a while :P

re: Farewell I was really really hesitant to play it, but it's been a total house both here and in breena. Breena especially because it has almost no enchantments/artifacts. I do wish there was one that got planeswalkers but the surgical nature of FW is nice. Not hitting Ephara, God of the Polis unless I really want it to is the best part, that really makes it stand above Devastating Mastery or Akroma's Vengeance. I don't think Austere Command has a place anymore because for the most part you need more--exiling, being cheaper, or more flexibility.

In Karador, Ghost Chieftain if you're running sacrifice outlets it seems fantastic honestly, but it depends on how many creature vs. non-creature enablers you're running ;) I'd be inclined pretty strongly to be a Viscera Seer heavy build myself where I'd just sac my board and junk everything except graveyards with some regularity. But I am very down on enchantment/artifact enablers these days, in almost all decks. Even here in Ephara I tend to not care about anything except Ephara and not run out enough onto the board I can't afford to pop creatures.

I think the main thing keeping Rift for me right now is the availability with Spellseeker and Muddle the Mixture - but I am definitely keeping my eyes peeled for new sweepers. Vanquish the Horde has been spectacular for example.

The downside with the early bird creature only wipes is that they often wind up helping other non-creature decks (particularly planeswalker people) so gotta pick and choose there.

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