Sorry if this isn’t the right community, and if it isn’t hopefully someone can point me in the right direction!
I am looking for some input on an EDH deck I am working on. This is the deck and it revolves around [[Gandalf the Grey]] as the commander. So lots of instants, sorceries, and prowess. Mostly aiming for Gandalf commander damage as the win condition by combining the 3 damage to each player and then putting Gandalf back on the top of the library. I played this for the first time last night and while it has a ton of potential, I definitely feel that things are missing.
Things I am looking for are:
- More card draw. This was without a doubt the biggest issue and I’ll take any input on how to improve this!
- More counters. Less of an issue than card draw, but definitely was struggling against my buddy’s Balen/Token deck.
- Any sort of board wipe. This was definitely an issue but by the time I could’ve really used the board wipe, I had fizzled out due to no card draw.
Hopefully folk have some input! I would definitely love to keep this on the cheaper side as this deck so far has cost me $15 for a couple boosters. Most of the deck was inherited from someone in college years ago lol.
You could consider
Card draw
Id personally cut down to maybe 36 lands and add a few mana rocks in. Definitely at least a Sol Ring
EDHRec is a good reference for what other cards people are running and synergise well
edit - for the specific theme of abusing gandalf commander damage, ghostly flicker and other similar cards so you can reuse the “choose one not chosen”
The phrase “that hasn’t been chosen” refers only to that specific Gandalf the Grey. If Gandalf the Grey leaves the battlefield (possibly because of the fourth mode of its ability) and then returns to the battlefield later, it will be a new object with no memory of the modes chosen when it was last on the battlefield.
edit as another comment has mentioned, Gandalfs 3 damage pings don’t count for commander damage
https://draftsim.com/mtg-commander-damage/
Commander damage is a pretty simple rule. When your commander hits a player for combat damage (i.e., only during combat when the commander is attacking and is unblocked), note how much damage that player has taken from your commander. If a player has been dealt 21 or morecombat damage over the course of the game, they lose.
These are awesome! I’ll have to take a good look at EDHRec, I don’t know how I never found that website. I’ve pretty much been exclusively using Moxfield and just searching cards there which has been painful to say the least. Thanks for the input!
For deck building purposes, I always have Scryfall up, and if I’m doing EDH, EDHRec is something I like to reference to see if I’m missing something obvious.
I want to build a deck largely out of cards I have, and I want it to be my deck, not just what people consider to be the best shell for my commander. But, I can always use a very powerful search tool, and sometimes my knowledge of cards is pretty limited, so seeing what other people are doing can help inspire me to look for similar lines or concepts in my own deckbuilding.
That’s exactly how I feel about it! I just started getting into MTG and bought the Animated Army bloomburrow precon after making a couple wacky modern decks out of the inherited cards I have and it just feels so generic. Like if I took it to a LGS I could very likely run into someone with the exact same deck and that isn’t quite as fun as something very uniquely you yah know?
EDHRec has been awesome to find some cheap spells though and I definitely spent too much time at work looking through other folks decks lol. But at least with being able to go through other folks decks I’m able to find some cheap(er) cards that definitely can have some use, and that’s really what I was looking for!
I might be misreading your gameplan, but just in case: Commander damage only counts combat damage. So accumulating 21 damage on an opponent by attacking with your commander.
Gandalfs 3 damage do not count into that.
Oh damn, I was under the impression that damage done by a commander abilities counted as commander damage. That definitely lowers the viability of this deck. Bummer!
Absolute classic blunder. I think most people had that realisation at some point.
Of course, you can always house rule it with friends.
Or maybe it can be more of a value engine deck, i think it still has legs.
I was thinking keeping Gandalf as the commander would work great for the spell splitting property, but also using [[Stormsplitter]] to double dip more or less and just replace some of the red spells with lower cost instant casts. Again the card draw is still an issue but hopefully the suggested cards above help out!
To expand a little bit on the red card draw because it sometimes isn’t as obvious:
Effects like [[Light up the Stage]] or [[Jeska’s Will]] are awesome in red, because they expand your “hand”, sometimes until end of turn, sometimes until the end of your NEXT turn even.
Downside is that you lose those cards if you can’t manage to cast them, but usually they make sure you don’t run out of gas.iirc the effect is also called “bottle” or “bottling” due to some r&d game design vocabulary.
Oh yeah that looks awesome! Super fun interaction
Blue and red have so many strong card draw abilities, i’m sure you’ll get it to work
If you have cost reduction in your deck, Clockspinning
https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=109673
Is one of my favorites for counters, it’s one at a time but easy mana dump and works to add or remove one of any counter
Also, Vadrik astral archmage
https://edhrec.com/commanders/vadrik-astral-archmage
Is absurd with buyback cards since cost reduction is the final modifier.
Sorry if you already have these in your deck, I couldn’t look since I’m at work
So Gandalf’s damage ability doesn’t count towards commander damage. Commander damage is only from when a commander deals combat damage to a player via attacking.
You want the cheapo hard counters like Arcane Denial, Dispel, Mental Misstep, Red (or blue) Elemental Blast, etc. Basically, counters in EDH can be rather subpar because you have multiple opponents and you’re 1-for-1’ing. You and the owner of the countered spell are each down a card, while the other players are the same. They means you want them to be cheap or have draw/replacement effects on them. tl;dr-- holy fuck get rid of that Cancel it hurts my eyes.
For draw spells, there’s Treasure Cruise, Gitaxian Probe, Brainstorm, Ponder, Preordain, Windfall, Prosperity, Narset Parter of Veils, Lorien Revealed, Frantic Search, and some others I’m forgetting. One trick is to combine Ponder and Brainstorm with a shuffle effect from cards like Merchant Scroll and Scalding Tarn to act as an Ancestral Recall.
And for fuck’s sake where is you Command Tower and Sol Ring? That’s how every deck in EDH should start lol. Both have been printed into oblivion so you should buy them for dirt cheap. Go do that. Like right now before you do anything else Magic related. Hell, someone might just give you one if you ask nicely.
