Phoenix Down [EDH]

[Oversoul]

Perusing the stupidly vast list of potential commander options from the Final Fantasy set, I discovered that one of them has the same name as my little brother. Well, it's got to be him, then. I then learned that Joshua here actually has an older brother and that the older brother is *also* a card in this set (Clive, Ifrit's Dominus). This might be the first time I've put myself in one of my EDH decks. Anyway, I threw this together based on past experience with other Boros reanimator-like EDH decks that I've played. Since I'm already running ten other decks, some cards I just couldn't dig up a copy of or just opted out of for the sake of a little variety. So this thing's not tuned, but it's probably fine. Probably.

Commander:
1 Joshua, Phoenix's Dominant

1 Abrade
1 Academy Rector
1 Angelic Renewal
1 Anger
1 Ao, the Dawn Sky
1 Argivian Find
1 Arid Mesa
1 Ashnod's Altar
1 Atsushi, the Blazing Sky
1 Aura of Silence
1 Blasphemous Act
1 Bloodstained Mire
1 Breathkeeper Seraph
1 Buried Ruin
1 Burnished Hart
1 Cathartic Reunion
1 Cauldron of Souls
1 Chaos Warp
1 Children of Korlis
1 Clive, Ifrit's Dominant
1 Codex Shredder
1 Combat Celebrant
1 Conjurer's Bauble
1 Containment Construct
1 Crucible of Worlds
1 Dangerous Wager
1 Demand Answers
1 Elixir of Immortality
1 Esper Sentinel
1 Faithless Looting
1 Feldon of the Third Path
1 Field of Ruin
1 Fiend Hunter
1 Goblin Bombardment
1 Heartwarming Redemption
1 Humble Defector
1 Imperial Recruiter
1 Jailbreak
1 Kami of False Hope
1 Karmic Guide
1 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
1 Land Tax
1 Loran of the Third Path
1 Marsh Flats
1 Mother of Runes
14 Mountain
14 Plains
1 Plateau
1 Prismatic Vista
1 Promise of Loyalty
1 Prosperous Partnership
1 Recruiter of the Guard
1 Reveillark
1 Sacred Foundry
1 Scalding Tarn
1 Scroll Rack
1 Selfless Spirit
1 Serra Ascendant
1 Sevinne's Reclamation
1 Solitude
1 Storm of Souls
1 Sun Titan
1 Swords to Plowshares
1 Thermopod
1 Thrill of Possibility
1 Thrilling Discovery
1 Tithe
1 Wheel of Fortune
1 Winds of Abandon
1 Windswept Heath
1 Wooded Foothills
1 Wrath of God
1 Zealous Conscripts

 

[Oversoul]

Tried this deck out on Wednesday. One of my opponents became the archenemy at the table. I expressed the sentiment that if this trend continued, the guy across from him would probably take the game with his combo deck because everyone's resources were being used to contain the archenemy. Well, that ended up happening. So it's hard to say, but the deck felt alright. It's not high-power, but the commander gives it a bit of consistent card-drawing to smooth things out. I like it.

 

[Oversoul]

Despite using Land Tax every turn and drawing cards multiple times, I mostly just kept drawing lands when I played this deck last night. I couldn't get creatures on the battlefield or in my graveyard that did anything really meaningful. Still, my opponents usually couldn't hurt me much either, and it became a war of attrition. Although I was mostly trying to navigate combat as this game dragged on with an eye toward eventually setting up some sort of combo or other big play, I ended up instead finding a line in which I just kept surviving as everyone else got picked off and having more creatures than my last remaining opponent. It was a weird, middling-power slugfest, but it did result in this deck's first win.

 

[Oversoul]

I tried this deck for my first game last night. It was OK, but the power at the rest of the table was too much. Tried to buy time with Wrath of God, but he cast Ripples of Potential and all of his creatures already had counters on them, so he pulled way ahead and dominated the game.

 

[Oversoul]

I tried this deck last week but one of my opponents was a playing a blue/black deck that was a mill deck based around stealing opponents' creatures. Once he made a copy of my Sun Titan and exiled the original, I realized that my deck could only ever feed his deck and let him easily run over the whole game. So I conceded. Crap. Better luck next time?

 

[Oversoul]

I played this deck in a rather long game last night. It was fun. I got to cast a pretty good Storm of Souls, among other things. I was, somewhat, the victim of threat assessment here. After Clive transformed, I picked an opponent to swing in on with my 9/9. The Giada deck had gained a lot of life, so I figured I'd try to even that out a bit. That player then proceeded to alpha strike on me every turn for the rest of the game until I was dead, including using some instant I can't remember and now can no longer even find in the game, but it somehow redirected an attack that was going to hurt him and finished me off instead. Doing so, he gave a Blim deck plenty of time to set up. What I really liked, though, was that the Giada player would probably have won the game, except he got greedy and chose graveyards for Farewell. So when the Blim player passed him an Immortal Coil, he didn't have enough cards left in his graveyard to keep himself alive.

 

[Oversoul]

My final game for this week saw this deck in another hard-fought battle that it eventually lost. One of the players in the pod has a cool Pharika deck that I've played against before. But he had Tortured Existence and Faerie Macabre, which he could keep holding up to stop me from doing most of the things this deck tries to do. Fortunately for me, he had to devote some of his resources to staving off the other players, and couldn't conduct a dedicated campaign against my graveyard.

Something about glass houses and stones. I don't know. If I'm going to keep getting hit by Bojuka Bogs and Faerie Macabres by other graveyard-based decks, but I'm not running such cards myself, then I need to just accept that. Whining won't help.

Anyway, it was a pretty good game. I was behind for most of it, but I had a few tricks. Didn't get there in the end, but that's how it goes.

Looking back through my posts in this thread, I am a bit surprised to see that that this deck has only ever won with ordinary midrange combat stuff. Is that right? I'd have thought that I pulled off an infinite combo at some point, but I guess not. Interesting.