Oversoul
The Tentacled One
I'm already working on my deck for the next West Coast Commander League meetup, so I'm ahead of schedule on that compared to my usual these days of "Don't start until the night before." But I've fallen behind on reporting my decks as they're played. So here's my deck from the 1st. But it's weird enough to require some explanation. For December, our league's point system has kind of a Christmas/holiday theme. We've also changed some of the permanent points...
-The "First Blood" point has been replaced with "Spread the Love" (deal combat damage to all of your starting opponents).
-The "Scholarly General" (+3 points) category, which we used last month and which was well-received, has been added to the permanent points. To get it, within the course of a game you must attack with a creature, block with a creature, activate a non-mana ability, draw more than one card in a turn, tutor for a card, and discard a card. All pretty easy things to do individually, but hitting each of those requirements within the same game is a good sign of a well-rounded deck.
-The "Legendary Legends" category dropped from 2 points to 1 point. While four different players have earned points in this category and others have said they'd try, the majority of these entries have been by the same two people. And those two people also tend to score more points over time than anyone else. I'm one of them. We're earning more points because we almost always build decks from scratch with the monthly and weekly points in mind, not because of the boost from "Legendary Legends" specifically. But the issue was raised that 6 extra points in a day is a lot, and that using crappy commanders isn't really holding us back. So yeah, fair enough.
The monthly points for December are...
-Beards On The Battlefield (+1): Your commander has a beard and you cast it at least once.
-Winter Wonderland (+1): control 8 snow permanents.
-Family Gathering (+2): Control two or more non commander family member cards (family relation is in the card name, e.g. Uncle Istvan, Mad Auntie).
-Gift Exchange (+2): Leave the game either by winning or losing while controlling a permanent you don't own and an opponent controls a permanent you own.
And for the first time, we get to know all of the weekly rotators in advance...
-12/1 Holiday Colors (+1): Your commander has red and green in its color identity and you cast it at least once
-12/8 Elvish Work Ethic (+1): Activate an ability from 3 or more different elves.
-12/15 Here comes Hanukkah (+3): Activate Sensei's Divining Top, Candelabra of Tawnos or Magus of the Candelabra 4 or more times.
-12/22 Santa's Reindeer (+2): Control 9 elk and or caribou.
-12/29 Its a bird, its a plane, its.... (+2): Cause 3 or more creatures you control that do not naturally have flying to gain flying.
So this time around I got a really late start. I brought a bunch of red and green cards with me to the store, planning to build a deck with The Lady of the Mountain as commander. While building my deck in the store, I switched to Stangg because his reprint in Masters 25 has a beard. I borrowed a copy of the reprint and used my original as the Stangg Twin token. This was mostly just because I asked the guy in charge if a token with a family relationship in its name counted (original wording said "card") and he decided that it did. This meant my commander made a token that got me halfway toward "Family Gathering." And my deck was red/green. And my commander had a beard. And of course I was using snow-covered lands. So all that was left was to do some gift-exchanging, which I did.
So this deck earned a lot of points. I tied my previous personal record of 40 points in one day (but still didn't earn the bounty for next week because the guy playing Nebuchadnezzar scored 45 points). But the actual playability of this pile of cards, its capacity to win games, is negligible. This was a pile of garbage. Oh, I'll play some bad decks in the future, but maybe not quite this bad...
Commander:
1x Stangg
1x Abundance
1x Arcum's Astrolabe
1x Arid Mesa
1x Beast Within
1x Brood Monitor
1x Broodhatch Nantuko
1x Brothers of Fire
1x Burgeoning
1x Child of Gaea
1x Conquer
1x Constant Mists
1x Crown of Doom
1x Crucible of Worlds
1x Cultivate
1x Cytoplast Root-Kin
1x Decimate
1x Descendant of Masumaro
1x Domri, Anarch of Bolas
1x Domri, Chaos Bringer
1x Dragon Broodmother
1x Eternal Witness
1x Explosive Vegetation
1x Far Wanderings
1x Fauna Shaman
1x Finale of Devastation
1x Fires of Yavimaya
1x Gaea's Cradle
1x Gauntlet of Might
1x Genesis
1x Harrow
1x Highland Weald
1x Humble Defector
1x Hydra Broodmaster
1x Insurrection
1x Jinxed Idol
1x Juvenile Gloomwidow
1x Kodama's Reach
1x Life from the Loam
1x Manakin
1x Maze of Ith
1x Misty Rainforest
1x Mother Bear
1x Mountain Valley
1x Okina, Temple to the Grandfathers
1x Omnath, Locus of Rage
1x Rainbow Vale
1x Rampaging Baloths
1x Regrowth
1x Runaway Steam-Kin
1x Sachi, Daughter of Seshiro
1x Sakiko, Mother of Summer
1x Savage Ventmaw
1x Scalding Tarn
1x Scapeshift
1x Scrying Sheets
1x Seasons Past
1x Sisters of the Flame
8x Snow-Covered Forest
8x Snow-Covered Mountain
1x Sol Ring
1x Spike Weaver
1x Squee, Goblin Nabob
1x Starke of Rath
1x Stomping Ground
1x Strip Mine
1x Survival of the Fittest
1x Sylvan Library
1x Taiga
1x The Mending of Dominaria
1x Thermopod
1x Titania, Protector of Argoth
1x Ulvenwald Hydra
1x Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
1x Verdant Catacombs
1x Wasteland
1x Wheel of Fortune
1x Windswept Heath
1x Witch Hunt
1x Wooded Foothills
1x World Shaper
1x Wort, the Raidmother
1x Wrenn and Six
1x Yavimaya Hollow
1x Zendikar Resurgent
1x Zuran Orb
-The "First Blood" point has been replaced with "Spread the Love" (deal combat damage to all of your starting opponents).
-The "Scholarly General" (+3 points) category, which we used last month and which was well-received, has been added to the permanent points. To get it, within the course of a game you must attack with a creature, block with a creature, activate a non-mana ability, draw more than one card in a turn, tutor for a card, and discard a card. All pretty easy things to do individually, but hitting each of those requirements within the same game is a good sign of a well-rounded deck.
-The "Legendary Legends" category dropped from 2 points to 1 point. While four different players have earned points in this category and others have said they'd try, the majority of these entries have been by the same two people. And those two people also tend to score more points over time than anyone else. I'm one of them. We're earning more points because we almost always build decks from scratch with the monthly and weekly points in mind, not because of the boost from "Legendary Legends" specifically. But the issue was raised that 6 extra points in a day is a lot, and that using crappy commanders isn't really holding us back. So yeah, fair enough.
The monthly points for December are...
-Beards On The Battlefield (+1): Your commander has a beard and you cast it at least once.
-Winter Wonderland (+1): control 8 snow permanents.
-Family Gathering (+2): Control two or more non commander family member cards (family relation is in the card name, e.g. Uncle Istvan, Mad Auntie).
-Gift Exchange (+2): Leave the game either by winning or losing while controlling a permanent you don't own and an opponent controls a permanent you own.
And for the first time, we get to know all of the weekly rotators in advance...
-12/1 Holiday Colors (+1): Your commander has red and green in its color identity and you cast it at least once
-12/8 Elvish Work Ethic (+1): Activate an ability from 3 or more different elves.
-12/15 Here comes Hanukkah (+3): Activate Sensei's Divining Top, Candelabra of Tawnos or Magus of the Candelabra 4 or more times.
-12/22 Santa's Reindeer (+2): Control 9 elk and or caribou.
-12/29 Its a bird, its a plane, its.... (+2): Cause 3 or more creatures you control that do not naturally have flying to gain flying.
So this time around I got a really late start. I brought a bunch of red and green cards with me to the store, planning to build a deck with The Lady of the Mountain as commander. While building my deck in the store, I switched to Stangg because his reprint in Masters 25 has a beard. I borrowed a copy of the reprint and used my original as the Stangg Twin token. This was mostly just because I asked the guy in charge if a token with a family relationship in its name counted (original wording said "card") and he decided that it did. This meant my commander made a token that got me halfway toward "Family Gathering." And my deck was red/green. And my commander had a beard. And of course I was using snow-covered lands. So all that was left was to do some gift-exchanging, which I did.
So this deck earned a lot of points. I tied my previous personal record of 40 points in one day (but still didn't earn the bounty for next week because the guy playing Nebuchadnezzar scored 45 points). But the actual playability of this pile of cards, its capacity to win games, is negligible. This was a pile of garbage. Oh, I'll play some bad decks in the future, but maybe not quite this bad...
Commander:
1x Stangg
1x Abundance
1x Arcum's Astrolabe
1x Arid Mesa
1x Beast Within
1x Brood Monitor
1x Broodhatch Nantuko
1x Brothers of Fire
1x Burgeoning
1x Child of Gaea
1x Conquer
1x Constant Mists
1x Crown of Doom
1x Crucible of Worlds
1x Cultivate
1x Cytoplast Root-Kin
1x Decimate
1x Descendant of Masumaro
1x Domri, Anarch of Bolas
1x Domri, Chaos Bringer
1x Dragon Broodmother
1x Eternal Witness
1x Explosive Vegetation
1x Far Wanderings
1x Fauna Shaman
1x Finale of Devastation
1x Fires of Yavimaya
1x Gaea's Cradle
1x Gauntlet of Might
1x Genesis
1x Harrow
1x Highland Weald
1x Humble Defector
1x Hydra Broodmaster
1x Insurrection
1x Jinxed Idol
1x Juvenile Gloomwidow
1x Kodama's Reach
1x Life from the Loam
1x Manakin
1x Maze of Ith
1x Misty Rainforest
1x Mother Bear
1x Mountain Valley
1x Okina, Temple to the Grandfathers
1x Omnath, Locus of Rage
1x Rainbow Vale
1x Rampaging Baloths
1x Regrowth
1x Runaway Steam-Kin
1x Sachi, Daughter of Seshiro
1x Sakiko, Mother of Summer
1x Savage Ventmaw
1x Scalding Tarn
1x Scapeshift
1x Scrying Sheets
1x Seasons Past
1x Sisters of the Flame
8x Snow-Covered Forest
8x Snow-Covered Mountain
1x Sol Ring
1x Spike Weaver
1x Squee, Goblin Nabob
1x Starke of Rath
1x Stomping Ground
1x Strip Mine
1x Survival of the Fittest
1x Sylvan Library
1x Taiga
1x The Mending of Dominaria
1x Thermopod
1x Titania, Protector of Argoth
1x Ulvenwald Hydra
1x Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
1x Verdant Catacombs
1x Wasteland
1x Wheel of Fortune
1x Windswept Heath
1x Witch Hunt
1x Wooded Foothills
1x World Shaper
1x Wort, the Raidmother
1x Wrenn and Six
1x Yavimaya Hollow
1x Zendikar Resurgent
1x Zuran Orb