cheonice wrote: ↑1 year ago
May I request an epic roast for myself?
Meet Akiri and Sakashima, my proudest try of a Voltron build! To me, it is perfect in every way, ceterum censeo Hullbreacher never should have been banned!
viewtopic.php?f=35&t=31626
It's no surprise at all to me that someone who is pro
Hullbreacher is also in favor of the new "I make multiples of my commander with
Sakashima of a Thousand Faces that's so origin!" design of decks. Let's not play anything actually synergistic, let's just make multiple copies of my commander because. I don't think I need to look at this deck to know that
Helm of the Host and multiple ways to make more akiris will be in there.
Well, I was wrong. There aren't any. Somehow that makes the choice of commander worse. So
Sakashima of a Thousand Faces is just there to...double voltron. Well that's cool I guess. At least the OP didn't make multiple akiris out of a misunderstanding of the legend rule and clones.
We didn't want to go with an actual synergistic card that generates card advantage and lets us into black like
Silas Renn, Seeker Adept because, well, dare to be much %$#%!
Cranial Plating is garbage anyway.
So I'm really a big hater on badly selected mana rock packages, but because OP doesn't describe how this deck plays I'm going to try some next level thinking and try to understand why we play 2 mana rocks with a 2 mana commander who curves into a 4 mana commander that you can never really cast before the 2 mana commander.
My thinking is that the submitter's plan is to dump their hand and find some number of haste enablers before casting Akiri / Sakashima in the same turn and donking two people half dead at once. This seems like an OK plan if people just let you drop all your artifacts I guess, and you've got a lot of counterspells.
Here's the problem with that plan.
There's only one haste enabler artifact in the deck, so they have to share pants if that ever wants to happen on the same turn. Or one of them gets the pants and one goes to
Flamekin Village to get fast.
Are we too good for
Crashing Drawbridge or
Swiftfoot Boots? Literally every other magic deck in existence has
Swiftfoot Boots because some youtuber said so, and we don't play it in the deck where it's actually strong synergy wiht your commander?
The equipment package, as per usual, is a bit mysterious to me.
O-Naginata is a flavor thing? Akiri is a samurai or whatever? He's a Kor. Is it really that efficient compared to, I don't know, anything that generates card advantage?
Is
All That Glitters really so good that it's worth yet another do nothing slot? I mean,
Embercleave is a card.
A very confusing thing to me about this deck is that
Akiri, Line-Slinger being huge with first strike and vigilant is the best defense in the deck but we spend a ton of energy giving him trample instead of flying, which would be way safer. Just randomly dying to fliers must be cool I guess.
Trailblazer's Boots? What even is that? Count on your opponent doing something to make your commander unblockable seems great, with no other utility. The odds of this card outperforming an unblockable cantrip effect is really low. Traaaaash!
I guess we don't have to worry about card advantage because we have two other sources of it in the deck, everyone's favorite
Rhystic Study and at least moderately synergistic
Shimmer Dragon. And bonus, no way to find them! So no real need to run any good card advantage artifacts like
Bident of Thassa or something, we can just rely on
Sword of Hearth and Home blinking one of our four ETB creatures or maybe just showing dominance by stripping all of the pants off Akiri and putting them back on later.
Or maybe
Fact or Fiction with zero graveyard synergy (except
Emry, Lurker of the Loch despite all the massive amounts of graveyard artifact synergy such as
Daretti, Scrap Savant,
Trash for Treasure and
Scrap Mastery and
Open the Vaults.
Academy Ruins with no way to find it, even in a deck where
Expedition Map would be spectacular (for finding
Inventors' Fair off
Trinket Mage).
Smuggler's Share feels almost strictly better than
Monologue Tax to me, generating CA and treasures. Maybe just a missed upgrade.
One thing I really don't understand is why
Hullbreacher is still in the decklist. Is the thought that people won't notice?
All things considered this isn't that badly a constructed deck. It's one of the better ones. I enjoy the use of
Stubborn Denial with a natively giant an very cheap commander a lot, just subtle synergies for fun. I really like the treasure theme with
Akiri, Line-Slinger even if it's kind of pedestrian.
That said there are a lot of other random sins in this deck that confuse me.
1) So many enchantment goodstuff engines when there are powerful artifact synergies available that are almost as good and way more explosive. It's just so damned boring to see a
Rhystic Study in a deck like this that could be on something that draws cards when you cast artifacts or something that returns all artifacts from the bin or whatever. Planeswalkers are really darned good in these decks and we have one really mediocre one.
2) no
Sensei's Divining Top in a trinket mage deck is loooooose.
3) No mass artifact reanimation is similarly loose as discussed
4) Just random ridiculous trash cards in an otherwise tuned deck like they're there to trick people into thinking it's not a good deck.
Bronze Guardian -- see that, my deck is casual!
Linvala, Shield of Sea Gate instead of
Siren Stormtamer - see, CASUAL!
Tenza, Godo's Maul -- CASUAL!
Okay, now I'm swinging at you and you with 21/21 unblockable akiris on turn 5, See my casual
O-Naginata on that one?
but it's casual so I'll have
Kediss, Emberclaw Familiar blast the third player for 42. it's not commander damage, so it's fine.
Fundamentally this deck feels sound, but it's got maybe a little too much going on and a bit too much good stuff. It feels incredibly boring to play against as well as most all-in voltron decks are.
I imagine that 95% of games go like this:
okay I dump my hand
okay, I kill person who has no interaction
okay, you swept the board, guess I will cast
Rhystic Study when it's no longer relevant.
(half an hour goes by while the player who got eliminated goes on a food run)
okay I'm dead
I am not 100% sure though. Part of me looks at this deck and is like, if it had just a hair more interaction and ways to stay in the game without having to commit too hard, it could just soak up a bunch of treasures and baff the entire table at once. But I don't see quite enough interaction for that and there's a lot of cute %$#%$#% taking up space.
I'm not sure exactly how tuned this deck intended to be. That's a huge problem I have in assessing it. On one hand we've got
Hullbreacher and
Windfall for no damn reason but we don't have
Deflecting Swat or
Flawless Maneuver or any other sick blowouts.
And we have serious tryhard %$#%$#% like
Hushbringer and
Ethersworn Canonist but we're too good for an
Enlightened Tutor or
Gamble in our voltron combo deck that really wants specific cards?
It's jarring to look at to be honest. It feels like what it does is goes to metas with no artifact sweepers and just kicks them around and cackles while saying "why don't you play some removal scrubs? oh you played removal,
Negate!"
And finally, this deck needs
Spellseeker and
Winds of Abandon. Whift is amazing in this kinda deck.
So this deck doesn't really suck as bad as most of the decks we've seen but it's still weird and annoying and is chock full of moderately synergistic mana rocks, has a %$#% equipment package selected via the throw darts at edhrec method, and of course plays
Rhystic Study and
Cyclonic Rift. My only ultimate conclusion is that this is either a tryhard deck for abusing very specific scrubs, or is adhering to some ridiculous unstated ethos that keeps it from being any real good.
This deck Sucks!
it's honestly not that bad in terms of I can tell you were being deliberate. 
Zacama
