My throwback EDH deck idea...

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
So, despite missing a couple of key weeks, I managed to just barely sneak into the Top 8 on achievement points in my local Commander League. I'm tentatively planning to dedicate more of my active deckbuilding efforts to that league, so I'll be tailoring new decks or revisions to existing decks to suit that endeavor. Aside from decks for the League, I'll definitely be keeping Gitrog County Municipal Lake Dredge Appraisal going. And I have another one I broadly sketched out, but haven't finished...

Meanwhile, there's something else I want to try. It's not for the league. I don't even know if I'll finish it. This is more of a longterm project anyway. If I do build it, I'll take my time.

I want to build an EDH deck using only cards with the old "pre-Modern" frame. The right and proper card frame. No new card frames! And so far, well, that's all I've got. That's all I'm sure about anyway. Well, I have some other possible goals...
  • I was thinking of making this all white-bordered cards, but I think that constraint might be a bit much. I don't think I'll hold myself to all white borders, but I intend for this deck to use a lot of white-bordered cards. Wherever available, I'll use a white-bordered version of a card. Unless it's got the new card frame. In that case the frame is more important and I'll have to go with a black border.
  • I want to use a lot of tacky-looking and obscure cards. I want this to have stuff that we don't normally see in Commander games. That goes for actual card selection as well as other details. I'll be on the lookout for bad art, especially if it's a relatively obscure reprint of some card that originally had better art. Maybe something from the Beatdown box set or from one of the Portal sets. This is the opposite of the typical EDH bling. I want this deck to look nasty (I won't deliberately ruin cards or anything, but if I own heavily-played copies of something, that's a consideration). Speaking of which...
  • Absolutely no foils. Under any circumstances.
  • I still own a few old cards my friends vandalized many years ago (the cards weren't mine at the time they were vandalized). If I can find them, they're strong candidates for this. That definitely goes for sharpied basic land proxies.
  • Just to really drive the point home, I'm going to be sure to use different versions for all of my basic lands. No two of them will be alike. Hopefully all of them will be white-bordered too. Should be pretty easy. Got to get some bad artwork in there too.
  • While the aesthetic criteria are important, this is also going to be a real deck. It'll have some kind of functional theme(s) and should be able to hold its own in Commander games.
I haven't settled on a commander. My first thought was either Adun Oakenshield or Ramses Overdark. They don't come with a white border, but that's probably fine. I toyed with the idea of a white-bordered commander as a requirement for the deck, but options are surprisingly bad. In fact, other than a bunch of monocolored guys in Portal: Three Kingdoms and all of the multicolored reprints in Chronicles, it's just these Ihsan's Shade and Mirri, Cat Warrior in Anthologies. And that's it. Now, there are some decent creatures in there, but none that really seem worth it just to have a white-bordered commander, especially since I'm probably using a lot of black-bordered cards here anyway.
I know that's not much to go on, but any ideas and input would be appreciated. Like I said, I'm taking my time with this one and I'm not far into it yet.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Well, it's been nearly a year and I still haven't built this deck. But I did get a hearty dose of motivation about a month ago. There's a LGS near where I used to live (which rudely didn't open up until several months after I moved to Auburn) and the owner has his own fully white-bordered EDH deck. He stole my idea, maybe even before I had it! Johan is the commander for his deck. The deck is pretty bad, but looked fun anyway.

Pretty sure I want to do the same with Xira Arien, but my deckbuilding skills don't extend to decks that are this bad.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Thanks, but I probably already have the cards, or at least almost all of them (we'll see). It's a matter of figuring out which ones make a deck that stands some chance of doing anything interesting in an EDH pod, even if the pod is all pretty casual.

Maybe you can help me narrow down some kind of coherent list. I wouldn't be stumped if I were fine-tuning something more like my normal decks, but what I'm looking at is a huge pool of, um, dubious possibilities. Here's where I'm at for the moment, pasted in from a tentative decklist/pool I've had on TappedOut for a while...

1x Abyssal Hunter
1x Active Volcano
1x Ambition's Cost
1x Animate Dead
1x Arena of the Ancients
1x Argothian Elder
1x Ashen Powder
1x Ashes to Ashes
1x Barbarian General
1x Beast of Burden
1x Befoul
1x Berserk
1x Birds of Paradise
1x Black Knight
1x Blaze
1x Blood Lust
1x Blood Moon
1x Bloodrock Cyclops
1x Bloodshot Cyclops
1x Bone Harvest
1x Bounty of the Hunt
1x Burning of Xinye
1x Call of the Wild
1x Cao Cao, Lord of Wei
1x Cao Ren, Wei Commander
1x Carrion Ants
1x Cockatrice
1x Colossus of Sardia
1x Concordant Crossroads
1x Conquer
1x Crashing Boars
1x Creeping Mold
1x Dark Ritual
1x Death Stroke
1x Demonic Hordes
1x Demonic Tutor
1x Desert Twister
1x Diabolic Edict
1x Dirtcowl Wurm
1x Disintegrate
1x Dong Zhou, the Tyrant
1x Dregs of Sorrow
1x Duress
1x Earthquake
1x Elvish Lyrist
1x Elvish Piper
1x Erhnam Djinn
1x Exhume
1x Fallen Angel
1x Fallow Earth
1x False Orders
1x Fatal Blow
1x Fecundity
1x Feldon's Cane
1x Fellwar Stone
1x Fertile Ground
1x Fervor
1x Fireball
1x Fissure
1x Forcefield
1x Fork
1x Fyndhorn Brownie
1x Fyndhorn Elder
1x Fyndhorn Elves
1x Gaea's Liege
1x Gauntlet of Might
1x Giant Growth
1x Goblin Gardener
1x Goblin Snowman
1x Gravedigger
1x Grinning Totem
1x Hammer of Bogardan
1x Hell's Caretaker
1x Hidden Horror
1x Howl from Beyond
1x Hua Tuo, Honored Physician
1x Hurricane
1x Hymn to Tourach
1x Hypnotic Specter
1x Ice Storm
1x Icy Manipulator
1x Illicit Auction
1x Illusionary Mask
1x Imperial Edict
1x Imperial Recruiter
1x Imperial Seal
1x Incinerate
1x Inferno
1x Jester's Cap
1x Jokulhaups
1x Juggernaut
1x Keldon Warlord
1x Kird Ape
1x Lady Zhurong, Warrior Queen
1x Lava Burst
1x Lhurgoyf
1x Library of Leng
1x Lightning Bolt
1x Living Death
1x Llanowar Elves
1x Lu Bu, Master-at-Arms
1x Lure
1x Ma Chao, Western Warrior
1x Mana Vault
1x Meekstone
1x Megrim
1x Might of Oaks
1x Mind Twist
1x Mirri, Cat Warrior
1x Mishra's Factory
1x Mogg Fanatic
1x Necropotence
1x Nekrataal
1x Nevinyrral's Disk
1x Overrun
1x Overwhelming Forces
1x Pillage
1x Rampant Growth
1x Reanimate
1x Reclaim
1x Regrowth
1x Riding the Dilu Horse
1x Rolling Earthquake
1x Simulacrum
1x Sol Ring
1x Sorceress Queen
1x Spike Weaver
1x Spoils of Victory
1x Sylvan Library
1x Takklemaggot
1x Thorn Elemental
1x Three Visits
1x Two-Headed Giant of Foriys
1x Untamed Wilds
1x Vampiric Tutor
1x Volcanic Geyser
1x Wei Night Raiders
1x Wei Scout
1x Wheel of Fortune
1x Wildfire
1x Wildfire Emissary
1x Winter Orb
1x Wood Elves
1x Worldly Tutor
1x Xira Arien
1x Zodiac Dragon

What sort of stuff should I cut out and what sort of stuff should I keep? Any promising white-bordered additions I missed?
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Getting back to this. Any ideas? Anything jump out at anyone else? I kinda let this project lapse again, but I really want to physically construct the deck at some point. In the previous post, I've got a kind of hodgepodge of cards, but no real theme other than "white bordered." I'm not coming up with anything that looks really cohesive.

But let's see...

I do have the option of using the Ashnod's Atlar* + Fecundity combo, but white-bordered cards don't really have any good token-generators. Now, I could also try to cast Living Death, which would let my regular creatures all count twice. That could be a lot of cards and a lot of mana.

I have access to most of the Horsemanship creatures, which is tempting. The problem is that most of them just aren't very good and I don't have much in the way of boosts to benefit from my creatures getting through unblocked. There's Berserk, Might of Oaks, Howl from Beyond, etc. Also, if I go heavy on Horsemanship, this makes Rolling Earthquake really good.

I've got a lot of good spells for killing stuff. Not sure which ones to use or what kind of stuff I should worry about destroying. But there are options.

Bone Harvest + Call of the Wild seems decent. Never seen anyone use it before, but it seems decent.

*Ashnod's Altar isn't in the list of cards I drew up for the previous post, but it is available in the pool. Just didn't think I'd want it at the time I created the long list.
 
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