have any of you  hit that point while cataloging cards where you basically have to stop and wonder when you got so many cards? Or for those of you like myself who haven't been playing for very long or at least had a long hiatus in there, wondering when you got so many older cards?

I also find myself having a lot of single cards, but i think that's more to do with my  being a mostly EDH player and not seeing a point in keeping a bunch of duplicates.

Well noted, evidently i failed to read the parenthetical note on level up skill. I blame my not playing magic between Tempest and Innistrad for not knowing that particular ability's workings.

Good call drgolovacroxby, taking that in mind it also plays well with Inferno Titan and Lord of Shatterskull Pass

That noted it is still only useful for 8% of this deck, which for EDH is decent odds but still not great.

This is the antithesis of my Karn, Silver Golem Deck to a scary extent. Between the Nonbasic land hate and the artifact hate my deck is sunk.

I think the only thing I'd drop is Braid of Fire. It looks like an amazing card until you realize the mana is only good if you have other cards with an upkeep cost since the mana goes away at the end of your upkeep according to Oracle.

Personally i like the Leyline of Punishment in this deck, there are a lot of EDH decks that can gain ridiculous amounts of health, it seems a fair way to combat it and it is a nice bit of redundancy incase you don't get Stigma Lasher.

Toss Darksteel Citadel in there too, cause you're about to lose all your lands otherwise

From the title I'd assumed you were literally talking about the competitive formats. Which are Standard, Modern and Legacy, those are about the only formats you'll see a sanctioned tournament for unless they're pushing a new casual set.

Also any of the casual variants tend to have different deck building styles and requirements so the exclusion of them when talking about deck building is pretty normal.

I'm running a Red/White/Blue Zedruu the Greathearted group hug deck.
Honestly this is meant to be a silly deck to accelerate the game and push the other players into ridiculous board states. Win conditions never seem to be a big worry for group hug decks. In fact i think the only one i've ever seen was a Haze Frog+Crystal Shard+Elixir of Immortality combo since your opponent would eventually mill himself off the sheer card draw.

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(9 replies, posted in Decks and Deckbuilding)

You may want to look at Witchbane Orb's second paragraph again, that isn't flavor text. Hexproof on the player could seriously shut this deck down.

If i was looking for something to just help myself I'd use Quicksilver amulet, that's my usual replacement for show and tell, but i'm trying to make this deck super friendly. Show and tell definitely plays into that and so does Braids, conjurer adept who already had a spot in the tentative deck list. Honestly my biggest issue with the deck thus far is not having Green to work with, there are just so many great friendly group hug cards in green that cards less effective than Braids and Show and tell get overlooked in the other colors.

Congratulations, you've just learned about the most frustrating thing in Magic. We suck at naming new deck ideas. We tend to find a good name and stick with it no matter how much the deck changes. For example, Izzet takes it's name from one of Ravnica's guilds, as long as it is a Red/Blue deck it can be called an Izzet deck. Ravnica's guilds and Alara's shards are the basis of most the color combinations (2 color and 3 color respectively) that you'll encounter.

If there are specific combos we could help you build around those, but as someone who doesn't play much in the standard metagame i'm not really the best person to explain those. However if you want to know how a deck works thaere are plenty of resources online. Daily MTG has several columns about deck building. Top 8 and Reconstructed being 2 columns i would suggest starting with. Top 8 discusses what is popular at tournaments right now and how it works. Reconstructed takes user submitted decks and tunes them. The second doesn't sound as helpful i know but it'll help you understand why certain combos work as it discusses how to make the decks better.

Also, check out this for a basic run down of deck archetypes. Not the resource you're looking for on how to beat them, but an idea of what the archetype looks like.

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(9 replies, posted in Decks and Deckbuilding)

You might want to consider changing some of the Simic Guildgate to Izzet guildgate.
Creeping Renaissance also isn't likely to help you much unless your enchantments are getting canceled. The only other permanents in your deck are lands.
I see what you're trying to do with burning vengence, and it seems pretty good, however it is possible to shut this deck down with a single witchbane orb. You may want to look into something like vandalblast,smelt, or ancient grudge.
Check out curse of echoes to go with you curse of bloodletting. Worst case scenario you get some worthless pump spells. best case scenario you send their own spells back at them for double damage.
Also, since you already need green for one of your flashbacks, you might consider sideboarding some fog in case you get stuck without removal versus a creature heavy deck.

It does look like a promising deck, play with it some and let us know how it goes

Why a thread like this isn't already a thing is beyond me.

I'm looking for a card to replace Show and Tell in a super friendly RWU commander deck, any suggestions?
Anyone else looking for other options to any card feel free to hijack this thread.

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(3 replies, posted in Decks and Deckbuilding)

I don't see a Wort deck in my near future, you did give me some good cards to make my Krenko deck more efficient though.
I started playing with a Geist of Saint Traft desk this afternoon, looks like it might become a catholic deck.

As tempting as the Trostani deck is to me, i think my local players would kill me if showed up with another token generator deck. Then again, stuff with standard tokens might not be as bad as my artifact deck with mirrorworks. Lol, that deck ends up requiring an empty seat next to me when it goes off correctly. Lord help us if a group hug deck decides to egg it on.

I've been toying with the idea of a control deck recently, not really sure if that one will take off. I don't play control often, so any suggestion for a good commander there are appreciated.

he was saying add 7 swamps to get the deck up to 60.

while you do have plenty of mana sources, they all require mana to get onto the field.
Personally I'd add 11 mana and see if i couldn't find at least a couple more cards to cut since 20% of your cards require 5 mana or more.

Magic's own products recommend more mana than that.

Deck Builder's Toolkit wrote:

Most Magic decks have 24 land cards. Very fast decks might run as few as 21 land and slower controlling decks might have 27. But 24 is a smart number to stick to until you have a sense of what your deck needs.

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(3 replies, posted in Decks and Deckbuilding)

I want to make a new EDH deck but I'm kinda drawing a blank for ideas, so my questions for you all is what are some of your favorite EDH decks to either play, or play against and why?
It could be specific decks or just deck archetypes, I'm just looking for something fun to play.

Wow this is going to take forever. I recently organized my collection and realized just how many unique cards I have due to playing mostly Commander and trading off unneeded duplicates.

Only thing i see that i'd really address is your mana curve. You have a fair amount of 6 mana or better cards in the deck, and while this is an EDH deck having too many high cost card to early is the same as getting mana screwed. The 10 test hands I ran all had at least 2 cards over 6 mana in them.

Depends how aggressive the deck using it is. If you don't mind a combo that should be considered kind of a dick move try Mycosynth Lattice + Darksteel Forge + any creature with Worldslayer. Board wipe combo that is repeatable and leaves you alone.