PrimevalCommander wrote: ↑2 weeks ago
What happens when they do have the board wipe, or the spot removal for Ghired, and your field/hand is full of 1-drops and a couple french vanilla 4/4's?
Yes, aggro is weak to board wipes. But if they don't have it, they die. You can't win them all, but that's not the goal - the goal is to win more than they do.
Anyway I think I'm running basically all of the good protective creatures that block either spot removal and wipes to hedge as much as I can. There are also a decent number of token producers that survive creature wipes (planeswalkers etc).
EDH brain has evolved to care about resiliency and more long term advantage at the expense of raw speed and power.
I don't really see how kiki-jiki in this context is any less vulnerable to a wipe. I guess he grants haste? I wouldn't mind having more haste enablers though I'm not sure which ones would actually be good here. Maybe
Hammer of Purphoros.
I understand completely the want to prioritize getting an engine going
Ghired is already an engine, and a powerful one.
Because when they do, it just leads to a non-game for the pilot.
I thought it was obvious but maybe I should clarify - Currently I'm just looking at tokens and small utility dorks that can use Ghired's ability with the cards I currently have up. I will likely also want cards that do other things like drawing, tutoring, and other forms of longer-term value. Though as much as possible I'd like those cards to also be useful to the short game.
Dragonmaster Outcast is a perfect example of a card that fires on all cylinders here.
yeti1069 wrote: ↑2 weeks ago
Pest Control wipes like 90% of your field. Any mass bounce spells set you
way back.
Why would I build my deck around a brand new card that (in my estimation) won't even see play in this format?
The only mass-bounce spell I see frequently is rift, and this deck could very easily kill someone, if not multiple people, before they have rift mana online. How would you want me to hedge against rift, anyway?
Anyway, we're playing aggro. If they have it they have it. If they don't we win. And as far as aggro decks go, Ghired does provide a lot of threat with pretty minimal resources if you're forced to rebuild.
If you're going to run anything with an attack trigger (like the myriad guys) you really want to pack some ways to grant haste.
I don't disagree with that. Maybe
Lightning Mauler, or one of the 1-drops like
Goblin Motivator? There are some lands that can also provide that utility (though pretty slow for this sort of deck).
Why no token doublers? Sure, you have the ability to make multiple tokens a turn off Ghired's ability, but the acceleration from doubling all of those even once is going to help get under a wrath I think. Maybe not, since a lot of your token producers come in at 4+ mana and most (all?) of the token doublers are also 4+. Still, with how Ghired functions, you probably are looking at T1 creature, T2 creature, creature, or a token of some sort, T3 Ghired (copy a token if you've made one), T4 make a token and copy it 2-3 times. T5, you're doing what? Making another token? Playing some more dorks? Baseline, you're making the number of tokens you made on the previous turn, so 2-3. If you drop a doubler, that goes to 4-6. I'm not seeing any plays you have T5 that are better than this.
I might decide they're worthwhile, but currently I see a couple possible curves. We start with a 1-drop, ideally 2 1-drops on 2, ghired on three. From there, we could make a 4-mana token and copy it 3-4 times, and then do the same thing on 5. Or, we play the doubler on 4 and then make twice as many tokens on 5. Same number of cards etc. But in the second sequence, we've missed an attack step with ~20 power. And if we draw the doubler with no token production, we've got nothing, whereas if we draw 1 token producer without a second one, we're fine.
Sure, if the game drags on the doubler gives us more long-term value, but we're swinging for 20 damage on turn 5, why are we playing for the long game?
The deck has very little interaction of its own.
See above - this is just the token production element of the deck I'm focusing on. Though likely it will be low-interaction because it is an aggro deck.
Ultimately, as someone who has been playing an OG Ghired deck for a few years now that is trying to play a big threat, copy it, and then make multiple copies of the token copy, yes, sometimes you get wrong-halved, although OG Ghired does fine on his own. That's more enjoyable than dumping random tokens on the field, making more of them, and attacking, and it opens up options for interaction or more dramatic increases in damage output than copying vanilla 4/4s and the like.
Old Ghired is much slower than the new version, and with a much lower ceiling, so I would expect a deck built around him to focus more on building up engines and longer-term value. I don't think that says much about what we're doing here, though.
3drinks wrote: ↑2 weeks ago
It's really not a difficult concept.
What is "it"?
I don't see the point in running those cards since copying 1/1s is not making good use of Ghired's ability, when it could be copying 5/5s.
Unless you mean hardcasting decree, in which case I just think we have more efficient options.
I think it's worth having some more basic repeatable token engines - even
Sacred Mesa looks strong when you start cloning your dopey 1/1 flyers.
That's why I'm running cards like
Nissa, Ascended Animist - I'd much rather copy a 6/6 than a 1/1.
I'd also consider the eternalize cards (I see timeless dragon already, but
Timeless Witness would do well here too).
Yeah that one isn't bad. Kinda slow but a pretty huge late-game play.
You'd probably do a lot of good with a
Mitotic Slime to keep
that loop going in perpetuity as well.
Don't think it really goes "in perpetuity" - once it dies the first time and I copy the 2/2s a couple times, I can't go back up the chain and get a 4/4 again (or any new 2/2s after the first turn of copying them). And I can't reliably get the 2/2s either unless I run sac outlets (which I don't think I need).
I do see value in having a wipe-protected token, but a 2/2 isn't very much pressure.
You
probably should be on
Dual Nature here as one of the few places that it makes sense in. That's sweet.
Seems kinda dicey since it could backfire pretty easily. Anyway I'm not trying to run a bunch of really powerful creatures - the point is that they're tiny replaceable dorks who mostly exist just to use Ghired's ability. I'd rather make more copies of
Advent of the Wurm than
Selfless Savior.
Overall I find this commander niche as it is
I don't really understand what that means. I'd call a card "niche" because it goes into few decks, but Ghired IS a deck. Do you mean he isn't very versatile? I dunno, considering how much my list differs from EDHrec - and from suggestions I'm getting here, including from you - that doesn't seem to be true. Seems like people have a lot of different ideas about how he should be built.
you could just play tokens and smash.
I don't think
Advent of the Wurm gets there on its own. I think you kinda need some synergy to make the damage numbers big enough. You could play anthems and cheap tokens instead, but that's just a different version of a similar strategy, so I'm not sure why that would be "just playing tokens and smashing" if this isn't?
I kinda like old
Ghired, Conclave Exile more since it brings a friend to play at it's base level, so it's not exactly a prime removal target.
It also costs 5 and has a much lower ceiling.
Definitely there's a threat of Ghired getting removed, as there is for most commanders, but that's why I'm running a bunch of protective dorks (which in this case have the double utility of making tokens).
Also, just populate is better than this "clone a token that was made this turn" effect.
Yes, populate is strictly more powerful than what Ghired's ability does (aside from being unable to copy non-creature tokens), but show me a 3-mana commander with haste that gives "tap: populate" to all your nontoken creatures. OG Ghired costs 5, lacks haste, and can only populate on his own.
Trostani could be okay as a longer-term play. Once you populate a token, Ghired's ability to be used to copy it with all your other dudes. Seems pretty slow for a deck like this, though. I'd be more interested in something like
Determined Iteration. Actually, now I think about it, that should 100% be in the deck.
Ideally we only need to make 1-2 initial tokens before we kill everyone, so repeatable engines shouldn't be super important. Those options in particular I'm pretty low on since they're expensive and don't make good tokens inherently. But the aforementioned
Determined Iteration could be a reasonable inclusion as a cheap way to keep the party going.
