We Build Popular Commanders, But Wrong | Commander Clash S15E3 

Wizards: okay, you can eat the food with korvold, very fair Players: okay. I play fetch, sac and draw Wizards: wait...what are you Players: I make treasures, sac and draw Wizards: ....stop...

Technically, it wasn't the "set designers". All four of those commanders (Korvold, Chulane, Alela, and the other one) were designed by guest "designers" with minimal to no modification by the professional designers.

​@@MagicalHackerMTGreally? Wizards should've known that cod make things quite imbalanced. 2.5 of those commanders are very broken. Chulane and korvold are busted af and aleila is extremely strong as well.

​@@camael4209Alela stax is quite a potent combination. All you need to do is just keep playing stax pieces and she just passively builds you an army as a result. 😆

@@stfinalwrath true she is very strong, but not on the level of chulane and korvold who just go infinite so easily and reward you heavily, with card draw, for the most basic things in mtg

🙏

Yes, love Phil. And I always feel bad when he gets teamed up against, because he never talks his way out of it. 😢

I totally missed that and realized afterwards lol! To me world tree is just a chromatic lantern 🤣

The moment he played the Nexus, I thought "this is game over next turn". And then I forgot about it until Niuttuc's note popped up, and then I thought, "Oh, right! Ertai could be tutored instant speed!"

Does that win through the Spore Frog?

​@@jackl8025he'd do it in response to Seth sacrificing Spore Frog. One of the creatures he tutors would be Ertai, which has an ETB trigger that can counter an activated ability.

Nobody expects the 11-mana Stifle out of the manabase

Ha, good call!

They give themselves activated abilities by becoming a basic land type

​@wilholloway2924 I'm not good at explaining the rules interactions, but Judging For The Win made a video explaining this on his channel. He used Urza's Saga as his example, but Urborg and Yavimaya work (or rather, don't work) similarly in this example.

@@wilholloway2924 once they're on the battlefield yes

@@wilholloway2924they don’t become basic lands until on the battlefield, so they aren’t basic lands during deckbuilding which means they can’t be played. Somewhat similar to Grist, as they can be your commander because they are a creature during deckbuilding

Ohh, that could be fun!

Aragorn ditches Arwen and pairs up with Eowyn instead 😂

Korvold as a commander is so powerful, it barely matters what theme you use. Food, lands, Horse tribal, whatever

​@@stevenyukabacera160horse tribal outside of white leaves you with like 3 horses lol

​@@kaemonbonet4931and korvold will pick up all the slack still

Korvold was actually designed to work with food. All the brawl commanders were designed for eldraine mechanics (Chulane and adventures, Gwyn and knights) but they decided to make them open-ended and overpowered for various reasons. So it ends up being that Korvold is so busted with good cards that building him as a Food deck is the "wrong" way!

@@MTGGoldfishCommander I think it would have been fun to build him as a jund dragons deck. He's just too good to put in that slot for normal games I think. It's like putting esika as your commander for a shrines deck. Yeah she can help you ramp and tutor up enchantress pieces but anyone who sees that is gonna think, "I'm about to deal with some bs." That's kinda what I'm thinking when we say playing it wrong. I'm using the card but it's primary synergy is not my focus. That said, cards that popular are so popular because they're good. Kenrith is the same way, yeah he could be a commander for a zirda style activated abilities deck. But reanimation card draw and haste from the command zone is just flexible and good.

Mechanically speaking sure but flavor wise that would have been a huge fail.

and yet building Korvald Food with no fetches is still building Korvald "wrong" (really it's the no fetches that's super wrong, they juice korvald like crazy)

Yeah for Standard.

@@Spaced92 for Brawl

I don’t think maskwood nexus applies to creatures in the library. You “control” permanents on the battlefield and spells on the stack, but not cards in the library.

@@Cheerwine091nexus explicitly applies to creature cards you own that aren’t on the battlefield

That's what I saw too -- with Ertai he would've been able to Stifle the Spore Frog.

Actually, at that spot ( 2:07:10 i.e. once he'd drawn Wishmonger ) I think Seth has exactly enough mana for a direct line to win that turn through combat. Quick summary: use Wishmonger (cheated in cheaper via Arcane Artisan), giving 2 colors of protection to get through the two fliers, and then pumping the Flailing Manticore with remaining mana. Details: At that point, Seth had access to 11 mana (8 untapped lands, 1 from The Celestus, 2 from Mana Cache). 1. Activate Arcane Artisan for U (reduced from 2U by Zirda) to draw an arbitrary card and exile Wishmonger from hand, putting a token copy of it onto the battlefield [10 mana available] Crim has 2 flyers available for blocking: Linvala (white and blue) and Faerie Rogue token (black) 2. Activate Wishmonger twice, for a total of 2 mana (1 each, since reduced by Zirda), giving Flailing Manticore protection from Black (for Faerie) and from Blue (for Linvala) [could also do white, but would need to make sure that pro-white resolved last to avoid giving the Manticore protection from Wishmonger's ability] Crim is at 22, Manticore is currently a 15/15 (originally a 3/3, but pumped +12/+12 by Coat of Arms since Crim's 12 creatures are all types due to Maskwood Nexus) [8 mana remaining] 3. Activate the pump on the Manticore 7 times, making it 22/22 (with flying, pro black and pro blue), and attack for lethal [1 mana remaining] IF Crim decides to sac Linvala, to reduce Manticore down to 21/21 (i.e. Coat of Arms only pumping +11/+11), Seth can use the remaining 1 mana to pump Manticore back up to 22/22.

@@erikshimshock9315 Crim had Teferi's Protection and could have used that to avoid all combat damage

Was that the game winning line of play the video referred to?

@@hellmans_fury490 i would think so. As we saw crim had some anwers to the frog Reanimation Combo/synergie in his deck, bis boardstate was quite unchangeable, with the worldtree he had the anwers faster

but its not 3 mana win the game. its 3 mana save your winning board state. if they didn't lock counter spells behind blue though we wouldn't have a lot of these kind of over tuned interaction cards in colors that aren't allowed to counter spell.

Imagine that...the guy that always pre-metas against the theme tried to do it again...

YES! I double-checked the text on the zero mana counter to see if I was missing something!

Linvala can be sacked to make all your stuff indestructible. It's really good wrath insurance.

Oh thats a great point. thanks!

Well he did say that he was running it. Just didn't have it in hand lol

He did put it in with Arcane Artisan