TheAmericanSpirit wrote: ↑1 month ago
Despite having a landbase with nearly all the trimmings (save OG duals), I've never been able to build a 5c deck with any degree of satisfaction. I get decision paralysis with so many cards and strategies to choose from and I'm bad at self-limitation. The last time I tried was a 5c Lands deck built around field of the dead, but the landbase was too crowded and I found that it was basically a green deck with a splash of everything instead of the true five color pile of my intentions.
What I really want is a 5c control deck a la the 5c control decks of the lorwyn-shards era of standard. That deck was so cool and finding a way to properly port it into EDH is a dragon I will chase for years yet.
I have built many 5-color decks, and I have experienced everything you note. Quite a bit, actually. When I build one that sticks, it usually is because I build within a block with something that intrigues me. For Lorwyn, that was
Horde of Notions, and the obvious synergy with the tribal elementals of that set. The Horde was so slick back in the day. Using
Smokebraider, I could get it jamming turn 3 and bring stuff back late-game. The addition of
Thunderkin Awakener changed the resiliency of the deck in a huge positive direction (meaning I wasn't dependent on keeping the Horde alive), and largely made the Horde expendable.
The Alara intrigue was the 2 mana 3 pip "blades" cycle, that and the shard charms. The twenty blade creatures and twenty charms did okay, but often suffered from mana issues and couldn't recover fast, post-sweeper. When
Knight of New Alara came out, though, along with the two rainbow big critters, and the
All Suns' Dawn, that settled into a fun, free-for-all deck that is still together today.
The D&D set hook was
Tiamat and D&D-based chromatic dragons. I wanted to make a dragon deck that wasn't about the biggest-dragon-legendary-death-combo-thingamajig.
The token matters deck is simply the 65-card singleton distilled from the
Sliver Queen edh I just disbanded. It was built as a token deck with Sliver Queen as the anchor, kind of like the Horde. <Interestingly, I do have
Horde of Notions in an edh as Commander, so I still get to play it.> But, the 5-color token deck is still focused on one topic. So, yeah, every time I've sat down to design a 5-color deck without that initial hook that catches my fancy, nope, doesn't work. 40k+ cards will do that you!
It is common to see it swing for 15-25 pts per turn without tokens.
