Good Cards We Don’t Play | The Command Zone 508 | Magic: The Gathering Commander EDH 

Rachel is my favorite even before she joined the crew. She builds good decks, knows rule interactions (She's a CAG Member) and she's not afraid of flavorful Jank.

The cards I don't choose to use can be very easily grouped: "cards that are more then 10 bucks and I didn't pull from a pack myself"

4:50 the episode starts here 6:46 Murph 11:29 Craig 14:19 Gaurav 17:45 Jake 20:33 Arthur 28:52 Ladee 31:00 Damen 33:55 Manson 36:51 Jordan 40:32 Josh 42:45 Rachel

I love when Rachel caught him on “I don’t use board wipes” … “So do you use Cyclonic Rift?” ………. “I use Cyclonic Rift in EVERYTHING”.

This is exactly the kind of discussion I love Rachel for instigating and I'm so glad her voice is being amplified by joining the staff here! Yay for Rachel!

This is the best content you've released in a long while. Feel like every creator is stuck on spoiler/review/repeat and it's boring af

The advice of focusing on advancing your own board rather than effectively destroying your opponents board is a perfect summation.

More Arthur Medowcroft! Smart, attentive, insightful, polite, and humble. Seems like the good human being I actually want to sit across the table from.

Great topic! I really appreciate the not playing cards that make opponents say "Oh *sigh* i gotta do what now?" theme.

I really hope Craig is in the game knights episode for the phyrexia set. Haven't seen him play in a while + want to his what infect shenanigans he will pull

Rachel is such a wonderful addition to the command zone.

I'm absolutely on the "No Tutors" train. It feels like too many games boil down to "let's get the same card". It's especially difficult if I'm in a "control" style list and I tutor for... What? I have a 5 color Ramos deck that uses nothing but modal spells. If I have a tutor for it... What do I tutor for? There's too many options.

I think Gaurav is just using Coat of Arms incorrectly. There is 0 reason to play it when creatures are still going to be entering or leaving the battlefield. Your goal is to have 10+ tribal creatures, and drop CoA like a craterhoof bahemoth. You should be dropping CoA, declaring attacks, and winning the game with it. Or you hold it because if you are the only tribal deck someone is going to kill it before it has its biggest possible affect. You don't drop CoA early and "whittle" people down with your slightly buffed creatures.

I love how Jake references reading rainbow. Made me lol but also reminisce

i remember when i played my landfall deck that the player next to me had rakdos charm in their hand while i kept making scute swarms to the point i took 16 million damage from 1 spell

Rhystic Study, Smothering tithe, and other cards where I feel like I'm stepping on someone else's turn with all the triggers. They feel like they throw off game rhythm even with experienced players and they are awful with new players. If I am reacting on someone else's turn, I would rather have that one spicy moment where the whole table yells like casting Sublime Epiphany.

Honestly from all of these the one that stuck with me the most and the one I relate to heavily is Arthur Meadowcrofts take on tutors! Really good one.

Scute swarm is one of my favorite cards, I find that the easiest way to keep track of it is to stick my phone calculator on it makes calculations much easier

I really appreciated this insight. I wish they would have asked, “which deck would you absolutely play this card in”. Some of these cards are evergreen, but a few seemed narrow.

Really cool video. Great explanations of why each player doesn't play those cards.

Regarding Smothering Tithe: My approach is to tell the table, "I am going to make a treasure every time you draw a card unless you tell me otherwise." This gets rid of at least some of the nuisance factor in my experience.

My good card I don't use is Telepathy. Gives a good advantage, but slows things to a crawl and makes everyone at the table hate you

I love this question, and I think it's really important for people to consider. Specifically in regards to a card being too powerful and you either think it won't make for fun games, or will draw you too much hate at the table. It was very interesting to hear everyone's perspective.

I think mine would be Dockside Extortionist. It’s so easy to put it into every one of my Mardu decks but the only one I have it in is Kelsien, which has a lot of blink effects.

I also don't run generic tutors in my decks. I'll occasionally run a thematic limited tutor if it fits the deck, but I prefer my games to play out differently every time. When I run tutors I find that the decks end up playing too linearly for my preferences.

Jewelled Lotus - to avoid the situations Josh outlined, it can be good to hold it in your hand until a few turns later, when there are other threats at the table / you're more set up to deal with the heat it might give you. It's still a great ritual effect, saving your lands that turn to use reactively. The same principal can be applied to "remove on sight" commanders; often the best way to play them is to not play them until you have the ability to protect them.

Great fun episode. Definitely a template I'd be happy to see repeated for different topics

I don't play Aetherflux Reservoir anymore. I felt as if I was holding the entire table hostage. It sucked the joy out of the game and really brought the mood down for the rest of the night.

Honestly, I don’t drop a lot of Likes here anymore, especially from the earlier days of the channel when Jimmy & Josh are mainly advocating for the strongest options available. This episode is nice… & different, presenting other considerations for not auto-including said strongest options. I too, have standing dis-preference towards certain cards/categories for reasons like logistics (Cathars’ Crusade), common annoyances/grievers (discard, play other players’ card, steal permanents, etc), even non-thematic staples (like the classic 1 MV removal spells). I Liked this episode

Rachel is a great addition. Keep these episodes coming.

I immediately thought of cathar's crusade. you need so many dice and especially with tokens

Rad episode thanks for the hard work team! I believe in brewing and playing the deck you want and like but the one card I hesitate adding more than any other is dockside extortionist.

The card I don't play anymore is curse of opulence (thanks richard from mtg goldfish) 1) It makes one person the punching bag, basically forcing them to lose slowly as they fall behind in life and resources 2) if there are multiple arch enemy commanders, you king make Just doesn't lead to fun situations

The card I don’t run is Curse of Exhaustion. It just removes a player until they get an enchantment removal, which ruins the game not only for them, but the rest of the table. I just added Smothering Tithe to a Kwain deck. It’s so much upkeep when I make all players draw a card. I might not be keeping it in there long. My favourite thing with Scute Swarm is to make 5-10 copies, then when I play a land, mystic reflect them into something else. Last game, I made 12 Eternal Witnesses, got my grave back, The time before, I made 10 copies of a creature with initiative, and those 10 ventures won me the game

genuinely compelled to watch more often with Rachel on ❤

The tutors one was interesting. I've been playing magic about 6ish months at this point and everything I come up with and plan out a new deck, the person who taught me constantly suggests tutors and other search cards but when I've played, I see tutors getting used so very rarely. Now I don't know if I'm just bad at deck building and my friend doesn't want to tell me and instead suggests tutors coz they may be the only way to make a deck functional, or if it's just that how he plays, he likes to be able to go and get those annoying combos and know exactly how he's going to win, and it's rubbing off on his advice giving, but it is still interesting to hear someone talking negatively about tutors.... I mean the only deck I've properly built from scratch rather then just editing a precon atm is running tutors but I may end up swapping them out for better cards... maybe more lands or land searchers since goodness knows I have terrible land luck.

I definitely agree with the tutor advice. I've taken them out of my decks too. I will still run them in my one high power deck. But I actually like the lack of consistency that I get when I don't run tutors. I don't want every game to play out the same way.

The con sounds fun, but I was just in Philly for PAX Unplugged and can't justify going back again so soon. As far as food, the Reading Terminal Market has wide variety of options. Also, the convention center is near a good sushi place and a good pho place.

Rachel you are AWESOME! You're definetly a great addition to the command zone crew. Stay cool!

"I want to win. I don't want my cards to win." - this is why everyone loves Rachel's decks and Rachel!

I also loved Arthur’s comment on tutors…I’m fairly new to using tutors in my deck as I too prefer the surprise of what I draw…however, in some of the decks, such as my ur dragon it’s a necessity so I can find the cards that make my dragons easier to get out I.e. fist of suns and nyxbloom ancient…but I only have 1 or 2 tutors per deck because I don’t want to always have the answer I want to work towards it!!!

A great follow up may be what bad cards do you put into your decks. As an inverse of this where it may not be the optimal solution but your personal favorite for one reason or another. Or maybe one where you choose a cheaper option that performs a similar role as a budget focused episode. For a long time I would try to make Storm spirits work. That was back around Mirage block and I never really got it to be worth the hassle of getting it out. Maybe now with commander and or spirit support I could make it work, though it would still be pretty bad with so many even better options. Coat of Arms maybe needs a lighter math version maybe with counters and an activation trigger for when it checks. Removing the tutors sounds like sound advice to get more of the draw hype experience. Drawing a good chance card sounds more fun than a sure solution. Especially in Commander where part of the appeal is seeing a wider variety of stuff. Reducing the number of auto include type of cards is probably good all around. I dig the better help ad. The bit where Jimmy accepts the loss was gold as comedy and message. I never really understood necropotence well enough to use it despite knowing it is supposed to be good. I like the outside perspective on some of these cards and how they impact such as the time sink of sensei's divining top. I never really actively thought about turn or play efficiency from the perspective of time sinks or mental sinks dragging down the experience or stalling out the game flow with things like the voidwalker. Are there other types of acceleration like the jeweled lotus that can be cut to create a better play experience? Scute swarm sounds like you would need a calculator to keep up with it in short order. Imagine the math of that with Coat of Arms.... Is the blue castle background based on a card or a piece of art? I kind of want to change my pc background now.

I know that pain with Coat of Arms. I also run one in my elf tribal deck. The last time I played it, it resulted in a hilarious standoff because it was buffing the other players' boards thanks to my own creatures. May end up replacing it with something else now that I'm thinking about it.

I love playing without Tutors! I replaced it with card draw and I felt my decks became less powerful but I had more often fun as I more often had a hand to interract with the game. :)

I used to be a patron of the command zone, but with my life situation changing and time I found myself not watching the podcast episodes any more. Commander sphere has been my favorite podcast for the past three or so years, so when Rachel came here, I immediately decided to come back! It's so great to see what she brings to the podcast, and I'm looking forward to listening to every episode again!

love the episode, I'd love to see one talking about some of your favorite cards to play for Commander EDH

Josh’s take on Jeweled Lotus was good. I decided against getting one for my Niv-Mizzet, Parun deck since I already get targeted whenever I play that commander so adding Jeweled Lotus would brand me as archenemy even more.

I have a Venture into the Dungeon deck with Acerak. Everyone always says I should add Rooftop storm to it to go infinite, but that ruins the venture gimmick of the deck

Two of my three were mentioned. Tutors (other than land ramp) as I don't like decks getting the same thing all the time. As Rachel said, it's nice to try to win with what you draw Cathars crusade, I don't have enough dice for that Reserved list cards, some are super powerful and I don't think it's fair for me to have access to them when many people can't and won't ever have the chance

Always great to have a team episode

Mine is 100% thassas oracle and my reason is it's just too easy to pull off, I rather run lab man since it's not as complicated to interact with

48:26. The soccer team gets out but one of the rescuers do not make it in real life.

I have a treasure generating deck that 1 of my 1st cuts was Dockside Extortionist. Sure, it gets me treasure, but it also gets me noticed, and draws the ire of anyone else utilizing treasures.

I realized this week that my card is Telepathy! I played it at Tuesday night Commander this week, and it was too much/less fun.

I take Scute Swarm and I raise you Iridescent Hornbeetle! "{4}{G} • Creature - Insect • 3/4 • At the beginning of your end step, create a 1/1 green Insect creature token for each +1/+1 counter you've put on creatures under your control this turn." This means any time you consider playing this you have to keep track of the number of +1/+1 counters you are putting on your creatures and every turn going forward if it stays on the board. In decks like Phylath world sculptor or with cards like branching evolution, grumgully, master biomancer, and others this gets way more annoying to keep track of than even Scute Swarm. It has the potential to be a very powerful card, but it is such a headache and time suck to resolve it's ability I immediately cut it from my list.

I would go with Blightsteel Colossus. It’s just such a groan inducing card from your opponents.

I run overwhelming splendor since there are multiple cards like "Songbird's blessing" that can cascade into it, and cards that can grab it from the grave and put it into play.

I would suggest to Gaurav to view Coat of Arms more as an overrun effect than a piece you rush out. Like, say I have 25 goblins on he field, then cast CoA to swing for lethal.

I run tutors in my voltron decks. If I'm going to experience the same playpattern of my opponents casting removal spells on my commander before I can properly set up, I might as well play into that by making sure I can defend against the guaranteed answer to my main wincon.

That was a great Episode. Reminded me to put Jeweled Lotus in my Tergrid Deck. I'm only playing it once every 2 months and then really try to CRUSH and show people why she is the god of FRIGHT :D Which is not happening when i play her on turn 5 when everyone has an answer and mana ready.

I won't be able to attend the convention in my hometown sadly, but I can at least recommend some places you have to go to. 1. You have to hit up the Redding Terminal Market, plenty of great food there and imo you can't go wrong with any shop in that place. 2. Try out Wawa, it's a convenience store with some good options for quick food on the go and it's pretty much all solid. 3. Go to Pat's, Steve's, and Geno's, and when you get your cheesesteak, I recommend you get it "wit" aka with onions (I'm not a fan personally but it is tradition and you gotta follow tradition at least once before you break it if you are not from here). A lot of people from Philly will swear by one over the others (to the point of violence, part of the charm of our fair city) but for my money I just recommend travelers to try all three and form your own opinion. The only thing I ask is that when you form your opinion, you stand by it and take no guff from anyone who dares think otherwise, it is the Philly way. (In case anyone wonders, my preference is Steve's). As for the other question, I have a very simple answer, I play in a budget pod, and as a result, I don't play pretty much any good card that cost's more than 10 dollars (and even then only one of theose $10 cards in a deck generally speaking). I have personally found the experience to be infinitely more enjoyable than standard EDH. Budget unrestricted honestly wound up feeling very samey after a while, kept seeing the same cards constantly pop up and none of them were actually fun. Rift, tithe, [insert one sided board wipe here], dockside, good tutors, ect. All the usual suspects. Since converting the pod to $100 budget decks we have more fun games with more creative decklists. Everyone gets to pretty much do whatever their decks were designed for even if they don't win and even though the games generally take more turns (since on that budget it can take a couple extra turns for everyone to get rolling), the games are overall faster and we get to have more in a night.

Philadelphian here! Reading Terminal Market is right next to the convention center and is an absolute must to check out for food. Beilers in the Reading Terminal Market is a must for donuts, Old City Coffee (also in Reading Terminal Market) has great coffee. Tons of great food options as well. Passeros is also a good local coffee place. McGuillian's pub is the oldest pub in Philly and worth checking out.

Top can also be a trap card when deciding if you want to mulligan. Keeping a 1 or even 2 land hand and thinking, "Well there's a Top so I can just Top into a way out." rarely works out.

I play Overwhelmig Splendor in my Light-Paws deck so i can get Eldrazi Conscripion out on her :)

13:45 fun thing for many players, that reanimator deck players also hate & hope you wrath instead bc less of their shit gets used, is that Cyclonic Rift prevents recursion. Note, it's fun to use this after they have glode reanimated with, for example, Day of the Dead, Living End, OG Liliana Vess, etc. Reanimator players, don't hate me. I sometimes play reanimator decks, I just don't get as worked up. Yeah, it can be Annoying, but I use plenty of reanimation & spell recursion. Or I'd play dredge with answers to Dauthi whatsistface.

I actually have a perfect example of this; Sage of Hours. My Favorite deck is my Ramos, Dragon Engine deck. it is a multicolor counters deck, and sort of a Ghave Secret Commander deck. The idea of the deck was finding ways to convert +1/+1 counters into other resources, move them around, and just do inventive things with them, or just even come in tall if all else fails. Sage of Hours has gone in and out multiple times, either for not having enough stuff that targets, or when I did fix that problem it felt like that was the way I was winning most games thanks to the deluge of counters flying around. There's so many extra win cons like Simic Ascendency or Door to Nothingness or Ghave loops to go wide or other fun things and it felt like I was winning SO many games with Sage of Hours loops that it just got people resenting the deck and it simply went into retirement. It's also a card that creates solitaire situations in a deck that normally doesn't have them TOO badly.

I'm a few days late, but here are some cards that I don't play: stuff that wins super easily (Triumph of the Horde, Mechanized Production), cards that can be seen as combo pieces (Ashnod's Altar, Isochron Scepter), cards that create to much rules problems and moving stuff around, cards that just shut down other decks completely (old Elesh, Planar Void, Null Rod). Cards that I try to add: stuff that can turn a game completely around, like Inkshield, Rakdos Charm, Deflecting Palm and Narsets Reversal.

Love the topic, for me one of them is Pitiless Plunderer in my Juri sacrifice deck. It is incredibly good, and can go infinite, what I dislike and why I preclude it, is that it goes infinite so easily. Any of my other mana producers on sacrifice, be it an Altar of Ashnod or cards like Pawn of Ulamog, etc., I can combo it in so many ways and just go infinite. I don't enjoy that as the sole win con, so I more curated to do effects similar, but they aren't infinite and only scale upward without a response.

Topic suggestion: gameplay techniques that help simplify complicated plays for the table to understand. What are the tricks you like for things like: making the stack easier to understand, handling lots of tokens counters and temporary effects, floating mana, etc.

Discussion of Relinquary Tower make me take out Thought Vessel. Now that I think of it discarding extra hand is also useful for graveyard play!

This topic was made for me. In my Dina deck I don't run any planeswalkers, double faced cards, and I only have a single card that can "search my library". I also specifically took out Exquisite Blood, because I just didn't like how it was basically an instant win card. It made my deck super inconsistent based on if I drew it or not, and it didn't let me do the thing I wanted to do with the deck (keep on playing permanents until I overwhelm with a million pings of life loss). Even though it's literally the perfect card for this deck, it just didn't match the power level I wanted. In my Meren deck I don't run any planeswalkers, double faced cards, or any cards that let me draw cards. I also specifically kept in my copy of Entomb and will not replace it, even though there are cards that have better synergy in this deck. This is my flagship deck, so I made it to represent me, and the collector part of me wants one of each of the masterpiece cards in the deck. Entomb, being the Amonkhet masterpiece that works best for this deck, stays, just to complete the set. Likewise, I hate double faced cards and planeswalkers were what got me out of the game years ago, before I came back. Not drawing cards is just a fun thing that I could work around with Meren, and happened to help avoid nonbos with Chains of Mephistopheles. My Yedora deck only runs a single instant and a single sorcery. It's fun to find ways to work around the missing spells, and there are some fun combos and synergies you get to do too. My Tevesh Szat and Rograkh deck doesn't make red mana. It still gets to use red spells, but only if they don't need red mana to be used. My Omnath, Locus of Mana deck doesn't have anything that makes colorless mana. It makes it simple to synergize with the commander, but you'd be surprised how many staples you get to avoid. No Sol Ring? Yup. My Ayula deck: every nonland card in it has "bear" in its name or typeline. Because bears, that's why. My 60 card monogreen elves deck doesn't have any cards that work on their own, outside of maybe Llanowar Elves (I have four of every functional Llanowar Elves reprint too). Because elves are powerful no matter what you do, so why run Craterhoof Behemoth when instead you could assemble a Pathbreaker Ibex with a Wellwisher via Emergence Zone? It makes games way more fun. I even have a cEDH deck made of entirely handwritten proxies that runs almost entirely cards that are strictly worse than other cards, like Wasteland instead of Strip Mine, just to annoy cEDH players. The deck also doesn't have any infinite combos, and usually wins by slow combat damage, again, just to show how silly the cEDH format is. The point is, building with deck and card restrictions makes the game way more interesting and fun. It can also keep you in check, if you, like me, can get hyper competitive without meaning to. That's just one reason I only own black and green cards. I can't imagine how unfun it would be to play against me if I allowed myself to make blue decks. I know this from the few times I played blue or red or white in draft, or when I pilot someone else's deck for a game - I get so much hate. Sticking to Golgari colors also gives me a specific identity at my LGS ("Oh hey, you're the golgari guy!") and it helps my budget when new cards come out (I think I'll just ignore that new $200 blue planeswalker thank you). So I highly recommend limiting yourself in creative ways. If you don't win, you still got to play a really creative way, and if you do win, it's that much more satisfying. Either way, the game will be much more enjoyable for the whole table - I mean come on - everyone loves mono-bears.

THAT is the commander content I want more of. You guys are right, what you don't include tells as much, if not more, about what kind of player you are.

Interesting how I've had similar realizations on some of the same cards, but it does come down to how you want to play your deck. A friend of mine has been trying to evaluate how well his Hazezon deck runs but the games where Scute Swarm appears really skew the data. As for me I've taken Reliquary Tower out of decks because I don't have decks where I draw excessive amounts of cards and evaluating which 7 of your cards can win you the game is important. I also realized I've removed Spellseeker from almost all my decks, despite having 1) a wizard tribal deck, 2) a blink/ETB deck, and 3) a spellslinger deck. I have one copy left among those three, and I think it's #2 (because the value is absurd). #1 didn't have enough instants/sorceries anymore, while #3 I leaned more into just including instants and sorceries instead of tutors. I de-tutored one deck and entirely restructured it because if I drew a tutor (like Spellseeker) I would just tutor out the same combo pieces and go for the win. So I never got to utilize the other cool, lesser-known cards in the deck. The most efficient combo wasn't even unique to the commander or exciting, it was just Dualcaster Mage+Twinflame. Dualcaster Mage is another card I've removed from decks, and both Twinflame and Heat Shimmer remain in my binder.

In my Playgroup we play No Ban format. Two rules: #1 If you get beat by an opponents deck you get to play that deck against them in the next game. #2 You can't complain to the group about any ambdominal aches caused by laughing too hard!

In my omnath deck I run jokulhaups and a koma, float the 13 mana, cast the jokul and then the koma. People usually scoop once koma hits since it's such a fast clock . Better to have 1 wrath and use it effectively rather than 10 and using them willy nilly.

Start with Reading Terminal Market in Philly. There's a ton of awesome stuff there and it's right around the corner from the con

Reliquary Tower is a lot better when instead of just running some incremental card draw, you have ways of drawing MASSIVE numbers of cards. For example: * Necrologia/Necropotence * Peer into the Abyss * Decree of Pain * Massive ramp + X draw spells * Greater Good (or other "draw cards equal to creature's power" effects) + enormous creatures

Rhystic study, if I am in blue there are a million ways to draw cards that don't annoy people. Mystic Remora, above but also people just ramped with creatures of just held off until I gave up on it

OMFG, I love your commercial about better health. I'm a massive advocate for mental health services.

I've been following the command Zone ever since this teams first few gameplays. Most of the time I place orders now, I do order through Card Kingdom. I do shop around to see what works best as far as price goes but definitely Card Kingdom has been the store where I can order all the cards I want or at least most of them in one transaction.

I really enjoyed this episode. I recently removed Dockside and Thoracle from my decks the former because it draws a lot of hate and I wasn't looping or anything so it often wasn't worth the trouble. The latter I removed because I was utterly bored of the wincon. I feel there is little interaction with thoracle and there are more "fair" ways to win by drawout like labman or jace.

One of my favorite things I've ever done in magic is mindslaves someone playing Pako and Haldan. I made them play my exiled stolen goblin caboomist, tap out, and pass the turn.

Cathars' crusade... i had it in an Isshin deck. and then 1 game Krenkro, tin street kingpin attacked and i did not want to keep up with the math....

Blood Moon. Even with a goblin king combo, it can be on par with land destruction and kill the fun at the table.

Hey uh… I’m new to the channel but I was wondering… could you guys play Alaundo the seer as one of the decks? He’s my favorite blue green commander based around untapping. He’s crazy with intruder alarm and pemmins aura

Dictate of Erebos is one for me, I love Aristocrat strategies but with enough creatures you can end up holding the board hostage until someone can out it, and enchantments ofc are one of the hardest to hit permanents for some colors.

Card I most identified with cutting: Tutors. My three new decks for 2022 had no tutors in them and they were more fun to play, and to play against, becasue of it. Every game feels different and every card gets to shine in its moment. Card I least identified with cutting: Reliquary tower. But the reasons given were excellent and I'll put serious thought into cutting that and thought vessel. In a 15 card hand, I'm not sure that cards 8-15 are worth the threat perception they create.

Made a post in one of the EDH fbook groups talking about a personal ban list I use when building . . .everyone LOST THEIR MINDS OVER IT! Lolz. Everyone going off about how to stop combos and such. Accusing me of being a failure at magic, etc etc. It was wild.

Totally agree with Josh about the lotus. I didn't even bother about buying it, even if my playground plays kinda 8ish decks with pretty nasty things into it. It's kinda unfun and a pretty dead draw in many cases. About this topic in general I think we have to think about what is too powerful/ unfun in our particular deck, not in general. For example, I'm not playing mana crypt anymore in very commander centric decks, with very powerful commanders that can be summon too early because of it (let's say Korvold / Orvar as pretty obvious examples). But I still play the crypt in other decks, especially no green ones. In the same mindset, I can play very powerful cards if they match my deck's theme and serves its game plan. But not in other decks when it's just winmore or just a "goodstuff" card. I play dauthi in Yuriko, because it can't be blocked and I don't care about my graveyard. I play scute swarm in my land deck because it's a wincon by itself in this deck, and it draws attention away from my real key cards. I play tutors in combo decks but I never include any combo with less than 4-5 cards to go off. It's a general balance topic, in your particular deck, and in your pod in general. Removing sol ring / crypt / lotus in the entire pod can also be a good start to add balance and fun

I agree with Rachel. What you choose to omit from your deck says a lot more about you as a deck builder than what you do include.

Jordan rocking that Orvis jacket

I still play a few wraths in each deck but my take is: if you don't think you are well positioned after a wrath, you're (usually) kingmaking or dragging out the game unnecessarily. If I don't think I have a shot at winning after the board is wiped I'd much rather shuffle up for another game.

Really GREAT idea for an episode!!!!!

Really loving the input from Arthur, Damen and Rachel! They rep a different, slightly more casual experience from the veterans of the channel which is a breath of fresh air!

I would never consider playing Sensei's Divining Top for any and every deck. That's a very odd take to me. I've only ever considered it for decks that care about topdeck manipulation only.

Very cool idea for an episode. I liked this a lot.

Removing Tutors has vastly increased my enjoyment of the game. I can't recommend it enough

as someone who loves games that go long and always thinks a quick game is a feel bad moment, i feel so out of place now

Damen Lenz is a hero for picking Smothering Tithe; it's one of the cards I would choose to ban if I could, for a similar reason as my number one pick which is... Rhystic Study. This card disgusts me to such an absurd level that I won't even put it in my cedh decks. 3 mana for a card that can win the game by itself (essentially), as it will draw you cards at a rapid rate with zero deck synergy required; however, that isn't the worst part about it. The most grotesque thing about Rhystic Study (and similar cards) is when a second player puts one out on the board, early in the game. Unless someone casts a board wipe that hits enchantments (and it resolves), now the remaining players are left to sit and watch as they are left in the dust, lest they choose to pay 2 mana for every single spell they cast. As a side note, Rachel's choice card (Scute Swarm), I'm surprised she forgot to mention how difficult it is to remove without a board wipe. If the spell isn't countered or an etb trigger doesn't occur from it hitting the board, the controller retains priority to make another action, such as...play a land to trigger the ability to receive another scute swarm, allowing it to pseudo-dodge targeted removal.

I feel yall on the tutor take, I've really noticed that players eyes start to glaze over when you tutor more than once in a single turn. We play high power so it's all far in love and war but there are feels bad moments when you're tutoring and they would rather scoop because it's easier to just start a new game