EDH Deckbuilding for Dummies
17 Jun 2010 | Graham Croucher
EDH Deckbuilding for Dummies
So it’s been quite a while since my last articles, and they were about standard, which I currently loathe. As such, I’ve been playing more EDH and hence having more fun. This is why I wish to share some of my wisdom with you all in regards to building an EDH deck.
We’ll start this (hopefully) series with a very very simple build, just to show you the basics of building your EDH decks. As an amusing aside, I actually have this deck ready to play, so if you want to help me fine-tune it in some games, drop by GGs Sydney some time!
To begin, you need one of 3 things:
• A colour choice (from 0 to 5)
• A theme, or
• A general
For this deck, we are going to start with a theme: Allies. I hope this makes the deck as accessible as possible for the newer or thriftier members of the EDH community. Choosing this theme gives you a definite deckbuilding strategy right out of the gates: The aim is to drop allies, get cumulative advantage and win through their abilities or beefiness. With that in mind, we search through the database of your choice (I use Beta.gatherer.wizards.com) for every Ally Creature, of which there are exactly 30. Then, just to be over-the-top with the theme, you can do another search for every Creature with the ability “Changeling”, that is, a creature with all possible creature types (including Ally!). Of these there are exactly 20. Looking at this creature base, we are going to have to be 5 colour, in order to play all of them. In addition to all these creatures, there is Join The Ranks, which should be included, as it makes 2 Allys at instant speed (could be a game-breaker!). We’ll discuss this spell later.
Now is a good time to deal with card numbers in an EDH deck. First off the deck must be exactly 100 cards, including the general (who is, at this point, undecided). Of this 100, you want just under 40 land (depending on the average casting costs in your deck). You probably want some mana fixing/acceleration, such as Ravnica block Signets, Coalition Relic, Solemn Simulacrum, Darksteel Ingot, Sol Ring, Thran Dynamo or practically every Green card ever (especially Yavimaya Elder, Sakura Tribe Elder, Krosan Tusker, Recross The Paths, Kodama’s Reach, Explosive Vegetation, etc etc). Any of these cards are good in the deck we are looking at, but we only have limited room in the first version of the deck, because we are running 50 creatures. On average, you want probably 5-10 pieces of acceleration/fixing, leaning towards the upper end for fixing if you are playing a budget multi-colour deck, or the upper end of acceleration if you are planning to drop big CC bombs in any deck.
For this deck, I’m going to go with 44 pieces of acceleration/fixing/mana in total. This leave me room for 5 business card to support the ally strategy (and 1 general, remember?), and should give me enough fixing, given a decent manabase to work with. Speaking of the manabase.. what lands should we be running?! Ideally a 5 colour deck wants to be running 10 dual lands, 10 Ravnica shock lands, 10 Fetch lands (Onslaught and Zendikar) and 5-10 other, including hopefully 1 of each basic, a Reflecting Pool, a Ancient Ziggurat (remember the 50 creatures?) and maybe some of City of Brass/Forbidden Orchard/Gemstone Mine/Grand Coliseum.
Since this deck is not looking THAT expensive (go look up the prices on dual lands some time!) we will look for cheaper options. There have been plenty of multicolour land coming out recently that are common or uncommon, and some of the best options can, again, be found in Ravnica. Here is a short list of your cheaper options:
• The 10 “bounce” lands from Ravnica, such as Simic Growth Chamber and Orzhov Basilica
• The 5 Tri-lands from Shards of Alara, such as Jungle Shrine and Arcane Sanctum
• The 5 Panoramas from Shards of Alara, which are slower than fetches, but cheaper!
• The 5 rare land from Magic 2010, such as Glacial Fortress and Sunpetal Grove
• The 5 Vivid land from Lorwyn, such as Vivid Grove
• The 10 “filter” land from Shadowmoor/Eventide, such as Sunken Ruins and Rugged Prairie
• The 10 painlands from Tenth Edition (and many previous sets), such as Llanowar Wastes
• The 5 “fetches” from Mirage, such as Flood Plain
• The 5 Refuges from Zendikar, such as Akoum Refuge
• The CIPT lands from Invasion and Cold Snap, such as Boreal Shelf and Shivan Oasis.
• The 5 “charge” lands from Time Spiral such as Calciform Pools
And those are just the ones I’d be seen dead playing! Now, some of those are rare, but can be had for $10 or under and are a sound investment for both EDH and standard (in the case of the M10 lands). I would also hope that you can afford to use at least a few of the Zendikar fetchlands, as you might have them from playing limited or standard recently.
Now, what did I end up using for my version of this deck? Well as I am working just with what I have sitting around, I have a slightly unsymmetrical manabase consisting of 5 Ravnica shocks, 7 Shadowmoor/Eventide filters, 5 Zendikar Fetches, the M10 duals, the Shards tri-lands, 5 basics and 5 “other”, which are Reflecting Pool, Gemstone Mine, Ancient Ziggurat, Evolving Wilds and Terramorphic Expanse.
This leaves 2 sections left in the deck: Manafixing/acceleration and the 5 business spells. Let’s start with the manafixing section, which is always fun! I listed some possibilities previously, and I am basically going to take the ones I have available and then throw in a few that might surprise you. I have room for 7 cards here, as I ended up with 37 lands. I am trying to avoid overly relying on green mana, so I have 3 artifacts here: Coalition Relic, Solemn Simulacrum and Pilgrim’s Eye (more reason for the 5 basics that I mentioned earlier). The other 4 are: Sakura Tribe Elder, Prismatic Omen (just what you need for budget 5 colour decks!), Krosan Tusker and Mirari’s Wake. Of these, only Mirari’s Wake is dedicated acceleration, but it’s also an anthem-effect which is quite useful to the primary goal of the deck – beating people to death. I didn’t include a Yavimaya Elder due to its heavy green requiring casting cost.
The last section is the one that requires some thought and decisions. What 5 spells would best help this deck dominate an EDH game? To accomplish this I turned once more to Gatherer. Sorry GoodGames, but you don’t have the search utility of the Gatherer database! These slots took some more effort to fill. Firstly I searched for “choose a creature type” in any text box, and ended up with a list mostly consisting of cool tribal themed cards like Brass Herald (good), Conspiracy (irrelevant here), Coordinated Barrage (um) and some cards that just slipped through the search function, like Cloud Key, Blood Oath and Callous Oppressor. From this search I think the best options to consider are Volrath’s Laboratory and Riptide Replicator, which basically do the same thing: make Allies. Also strong contenders are Patriarch’s Bidding, Steely Resolve and Urza’s Incubator. Now for my personal copy of the deck, I only have 1 of those cards available: Volrath’s Laboratory, so in that goes, and we keep looking for more business elsewhere!
Now we need to think of what other cool things you can do with Allies? Clone them? That gives you another trigger of all the ally effects on the board, and doubles up one of them, which might just win you the game. There are usually 2 colours which clone creatures: Blue for permanent copies and red for one-time token copies. Since we are 5-colour, we’ll look at both. In Red it’s easier: Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and Splinter Twin are pretty much your options. I don’t like Splinter Twin as much, since it’s very narrow, and gets hit by even more removal spells than Kiki, who is stellar, as long as you can cast him! I am going to put one of my Kiki-Jiki’s in here, because I love him so much. Blue is harder, as there is a long history of cloning creatures with creature spells such as Clone, Vesuvan Shapeshifter and so forth. The best one for this deck, in my opinion is a recent spell that totally rocks in an ally deck: Rite of Replication. If you manage to kick this targeting ANY of your allies (except maybe Joraga Bard), you should be well on your way to winning the game. I’ll put that in, as I feel it is the best of the blue clone effects.
Lastly, what else is cool to do with Allies? Put them onto the Battlefield… a lot of them.. Repeatedly.. That’s pretty much the only way to win. Recently in Extended season there was an Elves deck that won by generating infinite combos out of some mana elves and Cloudstone Curio. Looking at that artifact for this deck, I see a lot of potential. It’s not going to make any infinite combos, due to a lack of Heritage Druid style effects, but it DOES allow you to always have Allies to play, even if you are drawing nothing but land. Let us put one of those in the deck. How else can you put creatures onto the battlefield without drawing them? Chord of calling? Possibly but it’s a bit green intensive (unless you get lucky and hit a couple of green creatures to Convoke with). How about Lurking Predators? This complete joke in Standard is a standout of EDH play, letting you burn through your library as fast as your opponents can play spells. As it is a 6-drop, I’m less worried about the heavy Green requirement that stopped our using Yavimaya Elder. Also it’s a complete game-breaker, so we’ll have to make allowances for that!
And that’s 5! To list them again: Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker, Rite of replication, Volrath’s Laboratory, Cloudstone Curio and Lurking Predators. These are the 5 business spells I found to put in my EDH Allies deck. Now to sleeve it up and play…
Oh wait, we forgot something.. THE GENERAL! Ok ok.. Normally the general is one of the first things decided when making an EDH deck, as it dictates the flavor, or at least the colours of the deck. Since we worked from the other direction, it’s the General that is going to have to fit in with the dictated flavor and colours. Since we are 5 Colours, there are very very limited choices for our general. Remember they have to share all the colours with the deck, and have to be legendary. So let’s make one final trip to the database search and check it out. In the Gatherer site, the easiest way to do this search is to set mana cost to “WUBRG” and the type/subtype to legendary creature. Here is our list of choices:
• Atogatog: Hilarious, but pretty bad. It “combos” with all the Changelings in the deck..
• Child of Alara: Defeats the purpose of the deck, potentially killing our Allies!
• Chromat: Doesn’t do anything specific for our strategy
• Horde of Notions: Doesn’t do much for the strategy, again “combos” with Changelings
• Karona, False God: This little one might be our winner, as it improve our beatdown game.
• Scion of the Ur-Dragon: Ur..no
• Sliver Legion/Overlord/Queen: A totally different tribe, with nothing relevant for us here.
From that list, I chose Karona, False God. She might not be “all that”, but she at least has some synergy with the decks plan, and she is very unlikely to tread on anyone else’s feet in a multiplayer game, since no one really uses her for 5 colour strategies. This, as it turns out, is the only card for the deck I don’t have (other than Taurean Mauler, which is busy in another deck right now). Remember when I said we’d discuss Join the Ranks later? Well for me, as I’m missing the Taurean Mauler, it’s just going into that slot as the 50th “ally creature” card in the deck. If you do happen to have the problem of too many cards, then I might suggest that you cut one of the worse changelings to make room for Join the Ranks.. Tortiseshell Changeling springs to mind.
And there you have it. The EDH deck design process from start to finish in one big convoluted thought-process-written-down kind of way! Let the discussion/beatings begin in the forums!
By Graham Croucher.
For discussion.