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My second deck updated for 2025, kind of... -1 Gaea's Blessing -1 Restoration Angel +1 Six +1 Witch Enchanter Gaea's Blessing has some nice uses. I like the card, but it's a liability for Life from the Loam. I decided that the general utility isn't worth that liability and the "it can save my...

I played this deck twice on Friday, but it was pretty uneventful. First game the whole table got slaughtered by a high-powered Winota deck. Second game one of my opponents used Descent into Avernus, which let me ramp early into a big Selvala's Stampede and attack everyone for a bunch of damage...

I might get to play some EDH tomorrow. So even though I won't have any new decks for 2025 ready yet, I can make some minor revisions to this one as my first EDH-related thing for the year. I've really come to love the card Harrow in this format, and I'm loathe to cut it, but minimizing the...

My thoughts for 2025... One thing I'm really happy with was that I retained some aspects of my focus/theme from each year I've done this. I dropped the extreme pace of deckbuilding that I used in 2022, but still kept churning out a lot of decks every year since then. I didn't go back and revise...

And here are the "top ten" lists. As always, because there's no way to break a tie, we keep going if a tie takes us above ten. So some lists might be exactly ten cards, but others might be longer. For instance, we can't get a top 10 for non-land artifacts going to cards that I used 6 times this...

Welcome to my sixth annual article in this series. I had at some point gotten the idea into my head that this would be the fifth one because there was a five-year anniversary for a 2019 event at work, but thinking about it exposes the flaw in that thinking. These reports have been for complete...

I played in an "Oops, all Maelstrom Wanderers!" pod. It took two of us working together to stop a third player from being able to loop Temporal Manipulation for infinite turns. Then once the turn got passed back to me I was able to win the game with Terror of the Peaks triggers.

Tried this deck out on Friday. It got manascrewed.

Well, I played this deck multiple times on Friday. I know that I ran it for my first game of the day and for my last, and I think there were a couple more in there as well. I wanted to get data. Mostly, I think the deck is fine, but it was badly outmatched by the high-powered crap at that LGS...

And the thunderhead is back! I had time to build one last EDH deck for 2024. Commander: 1 Pashalik Mons 1 Aether Vial 1 Ashnod's Altar 1 Basilisk Collar 1 Beetleback Chief 1 Bloodstained Mire 1 Braid of Fire 1 Cavern of Souls 1 Chaos Warp 1 City on Fire 1 Conspicuous Snoop 1 Dark-Dweller...

It's time for the five-year retrospective on my "Elk Need Not Apply" article. I've gone back and reread the article a couple of times, in anticipation of this five-year anniversary. While I didn't think that I could predict what the game would look like in five years, and never pretended that I...

This deck was a turn or so too slow against a Vorel "Hydras" deck that never drew a single hydra. It was a bit of a joke between us. The player's deck totally popped off and he eventually had Willbreaker (his copy was Russian and when I asked about it he was mistakenly calling it "Willbender"...

Played this deck yesterday. After some typical back-and-forth, I set up my commander as a blocker and worked to mill myself. I did the full combo with Dance of the Manse bringing back Parallax Wave, Parallax Tide, Parallax Nexus, Mirrormade (copying Parallax Wave), Opalescence, and Attunement...

The reason that I pulled this deck out yesterday was actually that someone was asking me before the game started if we could make it a quick game. His friend was working at the game store and he wanted him to have time for his lunch break or something along those lines. I said that I didn't...

I honestly can't remember much about yesterday's game with this deck. I used Eriette 1.0 to protect myself a lot and eventually lost the game, but I forget what even killed me. Probably just superior creatures.

Played this deck yesterday. Got run over by slivers. Oh well.

I did get to play this deck again before Christmas Day. Unfortunately, it was only a three-player pod. One of the players kind of dominated with his Toralf deck, and the other player never really had anything to deal with that. If I'd had better topdecks, then I might have been able to turn this...

After having this deck lose pretty quickly in its first outing, I was hoping to try it a bit more before giving it to my brother. Well, the results are in, and this deck slaughtered everything over the course of three different games. Crucially, no one had removal to point at Imodane in these...

This deck continues racking up wins. I brought it out for the final game of Wednesday night. Apparently I'd been told "No board wipes" by the manager at the LGS, but I never heard that! One of my opponents had Forced Fruition and was digging for an Underworld Dreams effect to kill the rest of...

I designed this deck a week ago, and got the final pieces of it together on Wednesday evening. Christmas is next week, so I have some time to test it out before passing it to its rightful owner. I wanted to be sure that it packed as much of a punch as I thought it could. Don't want to give me...