theposterchildofgrixis

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Commander Mana Bases and Beyond.

Commander Mana Bases and Beyond.

This week’s article shall be focused on mana bases in Commander, with a bit more focus on the competitive 1v1 environment.   A proper mana base is imperative to playing and enjoying a game of commander. From balancing color requirements so that a deck can consistently play the cards it wants when it wants, to finding a stable balance of lands to non-lands such that the deck never draws too many…

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Today marks this blog’s first official post about Grixis, the Blue-Red-Black color combination from Shards of Alara block.

The focus of this article will be the backbone of Grixis, effectively indicating cards that are a good baseline for any building any Grixis deck in EDH.

First, it is important to note that Grixis has many unique and varying identities in EDH, some such themes being Spellslinger and Reanimator. These types of decks both utilize their graveyard as a resource, whether as a storage space for useful spells later on, or a way to circumvent the high cost of getting a powerful creature into play. Both strategies can benefit from cards such as Forbidden Alchemy or Entomb. Forbidden Alchemy provides a bit of filtering to find land drops or situational answers, while also supplying additional targets in the graveyard. Entomb is effectively a Demonic Tutor for one less mana for some decks, and at instant speed, can set up a perfect subsequent turn with limited time for opponents to disrupt.

  Grixis also has a tremendous strength in varying forms of draw power. Players can choose between effects that Reforge the Soul that can fill the graveyard of all players for reanimation targets while also drawing each player a fresh new hand, opt for low CMC draw spells that cost life as well, such as Night’s Whipser, or merely instead choose direct draw power in the form of cards such as Deep Analysis. These options will vary from deck to deck, as each general and player may have a different preference.

Removal in Grixis is pretty solid, as the color combination can destroy any type of permanent except for enchantments, which it can bounce if necessary. Two of the premium removal spells are Crosis’s Charm and Dreadbore. The former is a modal spell, with great utility in answering just about any problematic card on the board at instant speed. The latter is merely an efficient answer to any creature or planeswalker.

  Speaking of planeswalkers, there are a great many possible planeswalkers to run in a Grixis deck. The three most versatile are Dack Fayden, (the Greatest Thief in the Multiverse), Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy (who does not start as a planeswalker, but definitely has a home in many a deck on either side), and Liliana Vess. Dack Fayden, besides stealing Sol Rings, provides looting and helps put desirable cards into the graveyard. Dack’s plus can also be used on opponents in niche situations where that could be beneficial (such as doing so while controlling a Notion Thief). Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy also a solid Looter, but differs when he transforms into Jace Telepath Unbound. Jace’s minus allows Grixis players to rebuy instants and sorceries to furter reap their benefits. The best part to this ability is that the chosen card stays in the graveyard if you don’t cast it. Jace’s -3 can be used to target a counterspell “just in case”. Finally, Liliana Vess is a planeswalkers whose discard helps disrupt opponents, but can also pitch cards into the graveyard to be reanimated. Her -2 tutors any card to the top of the library, where it is typically safe from opponent interaction, and if perchance it happens to get milled, that’s just another resource for Grixis. Her -8 also allows Grixis decks to take over the game through mass reanimation of all graveyards to any so fortunate as to keep her around long enough.

  That’s all for now! Thank you for reading! Let me know what you liked/disliked about this article and if there are any other standout cards that you think I overlooked. Hopefully, I’ll be able to conduct further analysis and write about the Grixis wizards from the new Commander 2017 deck soon.

~The Poster Child of Grixis

About Time: A Grixis Post Today marks this blog's first official post about Grixis, the Blue-Red-Black color combination from Shards of Alara block.

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Working on new post schedule

Working on new post schedule

Sorry for the lack of content, I’m trying to find a better post cycle to provide interesting content while also spreading out my posting to something closer to every other day, rather than bottle-necking around the middle of the week.   ~The Poster Child of Grixis

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ARE YOU READY FOR IXALAN SPOILERS KIDS?

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Limited Resources

There will be no article today or tomorrow, as I am still gathering information to provide insightful, interesting, and enjoyable content. Saturday may see an article pertaining to EDH Cube again, as that has been my primary focus these past few weeks. Thank you for understanding ~The Poster Child of Grixis

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To all our fans in the visible zone, happy eclipse everyone!

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EDH Cube update: Mono-color thoughts.

EDH Cube update: Mono-color thoughts.

Recently while scanning my EDH Cube, I discovered that I had an imbalance of mono-color legendary creatures. http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcurve/75121 This fact had evaded me for quite some time since mono-color is very infrequently drafted. Each mono-color is supposed to have eight general options. However, green only had seven: Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger, Titania, Protector of Argoth, Yeva,…

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Welcome to another Gruuling Wednesday! This week’s article features a very irate elemental: Omnath, Locus of Rage!

The primary focus of this deck will be Elemental tribal with a small supported sub-theme of landfall. The former is unique to Omnath, Locus of Rage. There are many unique utility cards, including an Elemental tutor in the form of Flamekin Harbinger. The deck also runs fetch lands to trigger landfall additional times, churning out as many elementals as possible. The flashiest thing  is to sacrifice multiple elementals to Ashnod’s Altar or Seething Pathblazer while Omnath Locus of Rage is equipped with Grafted Exoskeleton, to close out the game quickly through infect damage.

    The second theme in the deck is positioned around the card Scapeshift. When paired with Prismatic Omen, all lands become mountains, meaning each additional land entering the battlefield triggers Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle.

A few similar-yet-different variations on Scapeshift appear in the forms of Boundless Realms and Splendid Reclamation. The former is a massive ramp spell searches out a number of basics equal to the number of lands you control, and the latter returns all lands from your graveyard to the battlefield. Keep in mind that all three of these (Scapeshift, Boundless Realms, and Splendid Reclamation) will trigger Omnath, Locus of Rage’s landfall ability, creating a 5/5 Red and Green Elemental for each land that enters the battlefield. In order to further capitalize on this, the deck contains both Fires of Yaviama and Anger to give creatures you control haste.

Another noteworthy Elemental that benefits off of fetch lands and Scapeshift is Titania, Protector of Argoth. Not only does she create more elementals for Omnath, but she also can return a valuable land like Valakut to the battlefield in case it gets destroyed. In a way, she serves as a secondary general to the deck in the instance that Omnath has either died too many times, or is simply unable to be cast.

Crucible of Worlds and Ranumap Excavator continue to allow this deck to use fetches to generate elemental tokens and stay in the game. Nissas Vital Force and Worldwaker also continue to provide mana acceleration while providing elemental synergy as well. The rest of the decklist can be found here:

http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/14-08-17-omnomnomnom/

Thank you as always for taking the time to read this article on Omnath, Locus of Rage. Please let me know any feedback you may have!

~The Poster Child of Grixis

Landfall? More like… Wait… it is Landfall this time. Welcome to another Gruuling Wednesday! This week's article features a very irate elemental: Omnath, Locus of Rage!

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Disclaimer: This is not the first time Moonring Mirror has been reviewed by me. However, this time around, I shall be more professional in my analysis.

The link to the original post can be found here: https://theposterchildofgrixis.tumblr.com/post/106826474577/mirror-mirror-on-the-board

Moonring Mirror is a unique card from Champions of Kamigawa that aims to provide an amount of card advantage. By itself, Moonring Mirror is a slow draw engine, similar to Bomat Courier. No player is allowed to look at the cards exiled by Moonring Mirror, so it can also make tutors more difficult to use if the desired card is exiled instead of being in the deck. Conversely, if the controller of Moonring Mirror searches their library, they will have an idea of what cards are currently exiled.

There are many possible homes for this card. It can give colors such as white and red access to additional card draw. It can also increase the potency of draw spells in blue and black decks. A great example of this would be casting a Blue Sun’s Zenith on your opponent’s end step, just before your turn. Even though you’ve just drawn X cards, none of them are particularly helpful at the moment. Thankfully, Moonring Mirror also exiled X cards from your library face down. On your upkeep, you can swap out your hand for the cards in exile, effectively giving you an entire second hand.

The longer Moonring Mirror stays on the battlefield, the longer it is able to accrue value for its controller. However, the mirror also comes with a few major drawbacks. Once in play, Moonring Mirror will exile a card for every card its controller draws. This is not an optional trigger, which ties into the second, much larger problem. When Moonring Mirror is destroyed, the exiled cards remain face down and are inaccessible to their owner for the rest of the game.

A card like Moonring Mirror will need protection. Cards such as Slobad, Goblin Tinkerer and Padeem, Consul of Innovation keep Moonring Mirror safe throughout the course of the game. Additionally, being 5 mana means that the Mirror may sometimes be the highest CMC artifact on the battlefield, enabling Padeem’s bonus draw.

  Another use of Moonring Mirror is to protect certain cards until they are useful. By swapping out your hand on the first upkeep after the Mirror is in play, you can keep your desired cards safe from hand disruption until you want them. This can prove especially potent if you find yourself with a combo in hand that you don’t have the mana to play yet. Simply set it aside for and replace it with the new hand Moonring Mirror accumulated.

Moonring Mirror functions very similar to cards such as Alhammeret’s Archive.

It is important to note, however, that Alhammeret’s Archive does not provide an extra draw for the regular card drawn for turn. Additionally, Moonring Mirror circumvents opposing cards that interact with drawing cards, namely Consecration Sphinx and Notion Thief.

  Moonring Mirror can find a home in many different decks. Here are some examples:

Massive Draw power decks: Arjun, the Shifting Flame, Prime Speaker Zeganna,

Decks which Empty their Hands quickly: Malfegor, Azusa, Lost but Seeking,

Decks which crave card advantage: Slobad, Goblin Tinkerer, Eight-and-a-Half-Tails

  Thank you very much for reading this article! Please feel free to comment and share it if you’d like, and include any suggestions you may have for future Tech spotlight articles!

~The Poster Child of Grixis

  Reflections on Moonring Mirror Disclaimer: This is not the first time Moonring Mirror has been reviewed by me. However, this time around, I shall be more professional in my analysis.

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Sassy Cat

Welcome to another Saturday Article! This week will feature a theme deck built around the new Commander 2017 Mirri, Weatherlight Duelist. The theme for this deck is all about Mirri. Mirri is a cat warrior who served on the flagship Weatherlight, and whose lore is actually far more fleshed out than I know. She received her first official card in Exodus as Mirri, Cat Warrior.   In continuation of…

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INCOMING!

Welcome to another Gruuling Wednesday! This week’s general features the head of the Gruul Clan himself: Borborygmos Enraged! Wait… that’s not quite right. There we go. First and foremost though, it should be made clear that this week’s deck won’t have any fancy infinite combos, but it will have some massive damage output. The primary win condition of this deck is to throw a fistful of lands at…

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Zombies Milling Around

Welcome to another Tech Tuesday! This week features a blue Zombie from original Innistrad! Undead Alchemist has a number of uses in EDH. This card acts as a silver bullet against decks such as Karador, Ghost Chieftain, Sidisi, Brood Tyrant and other reanimator strategies. Undead Alchemist actually makes cards such as Buried Alive dead in hand, while also denying future targets through combat…

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Welcome to another random Saturday post! This week will be a deck tech for Ishkanah, Grafwidow.

Ishkanah is a fun and unique Golgari commander who focuses around the Shadows Over Innistrad mechanic delirium, and is the first and currently only Legendary Creature- Spider.

This deck will be a mixture of combo-centric gameplay and spider spamming (not to be confused with Spider Spawning, which sadly will not be appearing in this deck). The first few turns should be focused on enabling Delirium, so that by the time you cast Ishkanah, she is bringing along her little baby brood. Then, through blinking, the Nim Deathmantle +Altar combo, or simply casting her multiple times throughout the game, an army of spiders shall wrap up the game in a nice, neat little web! In case you missed this week’s tech card, Nim Deathmantle, you can find the link to that article here, explaining the combo: https://theposterchildofgrixis.wordpress.com/2017/08/01/an-equipment-by-any-other-nim-would-play-as-sweet/

Win conditions for the deck include the staple green finisher Craterhoof Behemoth, but also the two tribal anthems: Door of Destinies and Coat of Arms (or in this case, Coat of Legs), both of which were missing from the Radha Elfball deck.

        Besides the combo mass-production of spiders, there are also wonderful niche EDH cards within the tribe. There are silver bullets in the form of Acid Web Spider and Stingerfling Spider, and Nyx Weaver both enables delirium while also providing a means to reclaim anything necessary later in the game.

    The rest of the deck plays cards like Panharmonicon and Doubling Season to increase the number of spiders produced when Ishkanah enters the battlefield.

Myr Battlesphere is here for combo purpopses with Nim Deathmantle, added benefits with token doublers, two instances of card types for delirium, and because I just love myr!

http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/spider-butt/

Thank you for reading! Feel free to comment and share and also request any other EDH decks you’d like to see me brew!

~The Poster Child of Grixis

Spider Ma’am Homecoming Welcome to another random Saturday post! This week will be a deck tech for Ishkanah, Grafwidow.

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Made a new blog

It’s a Wordpress named theposterchildofgrixis, and i’m planning to post tri-weekly (hopefully).

It might not interface well with tumblr, but i hope you enjoy it!

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Welcome to another week of Gruuling Wednesdays. This week’s deck shall be a massive spell-slinger Wort, the Raidmother deck!

  Wort and her young conspirators  give players more bang for their buck, from copying ramp spells to get ahead in a game, to ultimately casting multiple finishing X spells. That’s exactly the goal here: ramp hard, and then burn out the table!

Let’s start simple and mention that some of our ramp spells tutor any land to our hand instead of basics to our field. This is to find utility lands, namely Boseiju, Who Shelters All.

This land in particularly ensures that, for a little bit of life, that spell will go through. It’s important to note, however, that any copies of the spell, say through conspire, can still be countered.

So if the ultimate goal of the deck is to “Big X” our opponents, there needs to be a lot of mana. Infinite is typically a lot of mana, and there are actually two combos that can achieve that goal. The first is Ashnod’s Altar and Nim Deathmantle.

    This was the combo discussed yesterday, as Nim Deathmantle was the featured card for Tech Tuesday. A link to that article can be found here: https://theposterchildofgrixis.wordpress.com/2017/08/01/an-equipment-by-any-other-nim-would-play-as-sweet/

Although Ashnod’s Altar is helpful in adding extra mana to close out a game, Nim Deathmantle actually has some dyssynergy with conspire. Remember, Nim Deathmantle changes the returned creature’s color to black (it will no longer be red or green). Conspire states that the both tapped creatures need to share a color with the cast spell.

The second way to produce infinite mana is through Mana Geyser and Reiterate.

    Normally, this combo requires 11 mana (and always requires that your opponents have at least  seven tapped lands total), but with Wort, this is reduced to just the cost of Mana Geyser! (Technically six lands are enough to continually cast and buyback Reiterate, but that will only produce infinite storm count, rather than infinite mana; seven lands nets 1 red mana every time.) By conspiring Mana Geyser, the copy will resolve first, and so long as your opponents control seven or more tapped lands, you will gain enough mana to cast and buyback Reiterate to copy the original Mana Geyser an infinite number of times.

The rest of the deck falls into place with lots of different X spells, ramp, and removal.

The full list is here:

http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/raid-boss-combo/

Thank you so much for reading! As always, feedback is appreciated! Hope you enjoyed reading, and happy brewing!

~The Poster Child of Grixis

A Wort to the Wise Welcome to another week of Gruuling Wednesdays. This week's deck shall be a massive spell-slinger Wort, the Raidmother deck!

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Hey so I’ve been out of standard since... Burning Vengeance rotated and I just felt like building something fun and silly, but kinda optimizing it for game day?

Suggestions greatly appreciated!!! (except gideon.)

[theposterchildofgrixis]

this just reginited my love for Gideon as a character! <3 <3

Let’s Talk About Brazen

Today’s Magic Story is Brazen by Michael Yichao. The story seems to confirm one fan theory that was lingering about, and gives us a great look into Gideon’s mind. Let’s go!

Bontu’s Monument by Joans de Ro

Keep reading