What a Deck Wants vs What a Deck NEEDS | EDHRECast 311 

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Joey should edit that "your Voltron needs protection" rant into a short so I can send it to some of my friends. 😂

Doublers are the classic example. When your engine is on, they crank it into overdrive - but when the engine is not on, it's a dead card. Anyone who's played long enough has had the moment they realise they've pulled out so many engine cards for doublers that there's no longer enough to double.

I'm just picturing Borborygmos singing "What a Gruul want. What a Gruul need.... IS SMASH" *Gruul things ensue*

to address the akroan horse in the room: some therosian scoundrels saw the opportunity to reuse the trick on a whole new plane that had never seen it before - how often do you get to reuse a trick as iconic as that???

Even though it was a bad trampoline joke, Dana should be able to bounce back pretty quickly...

Joey, I will not be gaslit. You came up with the idea of this episode while jamming out to Christina "What a deck wants, what a deck needs Whatever makes me happy sets you free And I'm thanking you for knowing exactly What a deck wants, what a deck needs Whatever keeps me in your arms And I'm thanking you for giving it to me"

When I built my Adrix and Nev, Twincasters deck, I found that what the deck wanted to do more than anything was find and cast Koma, Cosmos Serpent. After a few games of playing the deck I decided that it was better if I just made the commander Koma. The plan of getting and casting Koma is a lot easier when he is just sitting in your command zone.

Anikthea was a learning curve as it NEEDED the mill and card draw but did not need the pillow fort, cause you resurrecting your enchantments as creatures is your pillow fort especially with token doublers.

joey's point about putting a lot of goad effects into a goad commander makes a lot of sense. i made a Baeloth deck recently with Noble Heritage as the background, and he was great at just goading a lot of stuff anyway. i put Nelly Borca in the 99 as a card draw piece and later realised it made much more sense to just make her the commander with Baeloth in the 99. i know the episode seemed to be centric around changing the 99 to fit your commander, but sometimes swapping out the commander is a great way to 'fix' your deck too

I'm playing Kaalia for years and what I've learned is that this deck does not need more good stuff beaters. It needs tutors to refill your hard. Since then I'm playing all 7 tutor demons, that's a win win for me.

OMG THAT SYMBOL IS A VAULT DOOR? I was actually wondering why they put Enterprise on mtg

I’ve been brewing the new Obeka recently, and this feels so relevant. As much as I want to jam 30 upkeep cards in that deck, it’s clear it functions best when most of the deck is dedicated to facilitating the gameplan with protection, control and voltron, allowing a few payoffs to work consistently

What I've found helps to ground me in deckbuilding is a theoretical ratio. 3 parts SOURCE 2 parts SPENDER 1 part MAGNIFIER I need more etbs in a deck than I need recursion or flicker pieces, for instance.

in case you ever wondered what chair Matt uses it is the Realspace Radano Mesh High-Back Executive Office Chair, Black

Whatever makes it happy and sets me free, and I'm thanking you for knowing exactly...

I've found you can run less lands in your landfall deck if you're good at returning lands to your hand to then replay afterwards. Storm cauldron for example is probably the meanest stax piece out there, so good in landfall, it's insane. Also, you can run the old moonfolk creatures and they will put in some work.

I learned the landfall 'play more lands' thing the hard way. Honestly I think Young Pyromancer is a better fit for Omnath than Rampaging Baloths. He's cheaper and you get elementals off your ramp spells that will turn into lightning bolts later with Omnath's ability. Functionally they become 4/1s when Omnath comes out.

I ran/run at least 2 bounce lands in each of my iterations of landfall decks; basics are super important, but since you can bounce itself, it's repeatable land drops all day.

Really enjoyed this, it's a point I sometimes struggle with, my collection features more than a few cards that are 'wants' and not 'needs'. On the other hand, 'weird $#!7' is also great, part of me thinks a deck should run a few objectively bad cards to help signify when you've 'drawn poorly', but ymmv.

I like to pump up my creatures with Galadriel Light of Valinor, she triggers one of her abilities whenever another creature ETBs under my control to put a +1/+1 counter on everyone, so I thought running cards like Hardened Scales, Laezel Vlaakith's Champion and Conclave Mentor would be fantastic, but I realized it was kinda slow; the answer to optimize the engine was to spawn *more* creatures, specially *during my opponent's turns,* so token generators became a priority than having just more creature cards in my deck.

This is the first podcast of yours that I tuned in to, really enjoying listening to you guys, and a funny little coincidence that I got to hear something about my main edh deck - Chainer. Took me a long time to cut Flayer of the Hatebound even knowing of their interaction, cuz I was running quite a few Reanimate type spells, but he did get cut when I got to the conclusion you're actually talking about here - Chainer doesn't need that many of those effects since he already solves that by himself. Cool stuff, can't wait to listen through the entire backlog of your podcasts!

I feel the "this deck needs a way to close out games" thing in particular. I have a Gavi deck, and yes, that deck is famous for generating massive amounts of value without going anywhere - a few tokens here, a bit of pinging there, but within the more narrow cycling/drawing/discarding remit, it's tough to find ways to win. I eventually decided to up the quota of "whenever you draw your second card each turn" triggers like Irencrag Pyromancer and Minn, Wily Illusionist (I was already playing the draw doublers). It helps, but I'm still holding out for an actual cycling payoff that isn't "deal a small amount of damage".

Needed this as I upgrade and update decks. Thanks for the info!

Thank god yall dropped the better help

I built my first actual Gruul deck a bit ago around Stonebrow and what I learned really fast is that, sure, it ramps super fast, but the lack of card draw and protection meant that I could run things that inately have trample, but they'll never benefit from Stonebrow's buff if he's constantly getting removed so I cranked the protection but it still lacked card draw to refuel the engine so it was a matter of adding things like Garruk's Uprising and Hunter's Insight and stuff that gained benefit when damage is dealt to players. Not to mention ways to give deathtouch to maximize the amount if trample damage. When I was originally building it, my mentality was that I just need big dumb trampling creatures to smash into things

My second ever EDH deck was UW control. I just emptied my rare folder and stuck a deck together. My commander, Isperia Supreme Judge. I knew this card wasn't good, so every time a new UW commander was printed I tried them out as commander of the deck, Brago, GAIV etc. with always worse results. The reason that I didn't realse was just how important it was to have a 6/4 flying creature in the command zone, that since my deck is particularly annoying as UW control deck drew extra cards when other players attacked me. Eventually I swapped to Dragonlord Ojutai that fit the goal of large flyer that draws cards. I moved to an LGS with timed rounds now so I can't just have 2 hour games any more so my UW control deck has being forced to amp my ability to kill with Ojutai so I have added double strike enablers.

Great topic! I've thought this quite a bit looking at my 200 cards that need to be half that.

Alexa, play What a Girl Wants by Christina Aguilara.

IT'S ABSOLUTELY THE STARSHIP ENTERPRISE!

I completely missed scene of the crime was an artifact land! Great challenge, Dana.

I *really* experienced this building Braids, Arisen Nightmare. I wanted to fill it with stupid little recursive dorks and drain effects that I could be cute with, but what it really needed was some gas that would let put together a threatening position with that extra card draw.

Great episode guys. These lessons hit me hard with my Heliod Sun Crowned deck. Its a lifegain deck that makes tokens, pumps the tokens and attacks, and doesn't use broken cards like walking ballista or aetherflux resevoir, or infinite combos, its just a go wide deck. And what I thought the deck needed to cross the finish line in my first draft was card draw, removal, and anthems, but it turn out that wasn't it. Everytime I saw one of those cards I wished it was a lifegain card, and dealt less damage that turn than I could've. It took a lot of playtesting to figure out that more tokens was card draw, they're sort of reccursive value that means I don't have to play more cards because I'm winning on the board and can save the cards in my hand for the next wave. I repurposed those card draw slots with heavy duty ramp pieces instead and token makers I can pour mana into and that may be when the deck became consistent. I've never felt good playing removal, ever, so those were easy cuts but I always had the sense I needed them. I would put them in and take them out and put them in and take them out, and the day I finally stripped away all the removal for good I put in lifegain enhancers so I wouldn't feel as pressured by opposition, and that was absolutely the right call. Now I can ignore attacks, which is a big part of what makes the archetype fun for me. I remembered upon that change that my first iteration of the deck had Rune-Tail Kisune Ascendant as the commander and that I loved it specifically for its ability to endure. When I thought about the games where I had a really rough time and didn't enjoy playing Heliod, it was the ones where my friends got a little or a lot upset not understanding their window to cast a lightning bolt or some such spell. I try to be so so careful to never ever ever miss a trigger and properly pass priority but it still happens when they could've killed something as a 2/2 and then it's a 5/5 and I try to go back and let them do it at 3/3 becoming 4/4 but then they think I lose the last trigger and its feel bads all around. It took a lot of bad vibes to realize I do need interaction and it has to silence effects. That made it perfect, once I added as many silence effects as I could I felt like I could gain my life free of fuss and win or lose I was having fun and it was healthier for me and my friends. There's still cool cards I wish I could add but the truth is the deck is pretty tuned now and doesn't have a lot of room, so all the cards I wish I could be playing will just have to go into a different deck. Great episode guys, I love hearing the journey others go through with their decks, what they optimize towards, and how they go about it

For karazikar run vensers journal, you get no max hand size and heal for amount of cards in hand at upkeep, also its colorless. It is such a slept on card

Using Karazikar as a jumping off point. For more expensive commanders like him you want to avoid effects that only do something when your commander is in play. For example, without Karazikar on the battlefield Goad effects only just goad -- there is no other upside to goading opponent's creatures without Karazikar on the battlefield. So, you are better off avoiding Goad cards unless they are generically good on their own.

I disagree about Sythis and having too many draw engines. Yes she is a low cost commander, but at least in my playgroup people will take her out every chance they get. So you do need some backup draw effects, personally I have 6 backup draw effects and iv always been glad to have it in my deck.

By all means the hardest deck that i've ever had to brew, would be my Muldrotha The Gravetide deck. for the most part it's very overwhelming, because of the pure amount of tech you have access to. thankfully my deck is to the point where it's consistent, but it took a lot of work to get to that point.

This topic comes up every time I brew any kind of control deck. So right now I've been tinkering with a Fog deck and originally the list had over 20 fogs. It's literally the name of the deck and I wanted to play with a card type I really hadn't and play with some of the less known ones. But as I built the deck I found myself needing to make more and more space for enablers such as token generators but then there had to be the standard sac package too. So it's a hard process for these decks sometimes. The deck wanted to focus on the fogs and while there are still over 10 and it is the focus, I could not make them as numerous as say a kindred deck with 25-35 of THE THING.

I have a Jodah the Unifier deck with the joke theme being team up cards so every creature in the deck are cards like "Thalia and the Gitrog Monster" or "Shalai and Hallar" so in order to make this list actually function with all the contradictory needs of each team up card 15% of my deck list is taken up with command spells because they are capable of turning on whichever effects are most beneficial when certain creatures are on board... also just to be clear Jodah the Unifier is basically never cast in the deck as the main focus really is the team up cards.

Sythis was one of my first commanders and one of my favorites today. I think your point about running sythis in the CZ and needing less enchantress effects checks out. I always draw a lot of cards, but winning the game can be challenging. Approach of the Second Sun gets the job done, but it's not everyone's favorite card to see at the table. I mainly play "casual commander," and i personally try to avoid 2-card win the game combos, but Walking Ballista and Heloid would end games for me. I've just seen it done in cedh many times, and 2-card combo wins are not that casual in my mind.

I've had a Sythis deck for about 2 years now and I agree with this take. I've recently been taking out many of my Enchantresses and replacing them with cards that do more for my game plan than just decking me out.

Amen on planeswalker decks. I have Guff that I’ve tweaked. I spent a lot of time making sure I’ve got winning ults and paths to victory. Splurged on extra protection. And even cut a bunch of proliferate. Like come on. Karn’s Bastion, and Nesting ground? I got them cuz they’re in every list, but I never used them. Nah fam. Maze of Ith and Kor Haven are where it’s at.

I am SO putting Nettlecyst in my Tivit deck is what I've learned so far xD

After the first 2 or 3 games with my Regna & Krav Deck I realized how many cards Krav can draw. Even after getting rid of half or so of them I still had to be careful not to deck out. With that I also saw the need for more wincons, but at least I knew what to cut for them :)

I like to work on my decks and always find out where improvements can be put in and what intentional flaws can be streamlined and more obscure.

I've learned this with my Minthara merciless soul deck. a deck I initially had a decent sized blink package in that i more or less gutted because most of the repeatable blink I wanted was at end of turn meaning I missed my minthara trigger turning the deck into an orzhov sacrifice list that doesn't really play like an aristocrat deck with a lot of ways to consistently generate fodder and sacrifice consistently if not en masse because I want that minthara trigger every turn. deck is also one of the few I've gone light on ramp with because I'm much more content to get my board set up with 1 drop 2 drop 3 drop minthara get first trigger on turn 4 compared to ramping into my commander and having no way to get that first trigger.

Regarding Sythis, having a ridiculous amount of card draw by virtue of the commander and several other enchantress cards on top of lots of cheap enchantments means you CAN blaze through large chunks of your deck every turn, so in THEORY you do not need as many cards in the deck that are some variety of win-con. And if you DO blaze through the deck that rapidly, playing tons of enchantments in a single turn, that means even the cheaper and weaker "whenever/for each enchantment" effects can have a big enough impact to be real game-changers. The real problem instead becomes that it takes you forever to play out your turns, which can really suck the joy out of the game for the other players. 😅

What a deck wants, what a deck needs: whatever makes me mana and sets you free

I have been building a clone deck with multiple shells, and I found what that deck needed was ramp, hence my commander deck landed on malcolm and sakashima.

For Chainer, Nightmare Adept, I checked EDHREC for the average deck and while it may not combo with the Commander, there were 11 cards in that deck list that had creatures enter the battlefield from your graveyard (12 counting the Flayer).

With my Greasefang deck I thought I needed more interaction and card draw but I really just needed more creatures to crew and backup my vehicles so I added a bunch more utility creatures instead of the non-creature cards that provided those things. They weren't as good as it those effects but they were worth being sub optimal versions of those effects in order to make the deck work.

As someone with a Treebeard generous host voltron deck I feel the "play more protection and less payoffs" so much. It's so easy to make the commander being able to two shot or even one shot an opponent, but keeping it around and keeping my grip full of cards were the actual things that deck needed. And still it's a work in progress because it's very hard to fine tune (eg I'm playing mana dorks because they synergize with stuff like "when creature enters gain life") but it's such a mess

So glad I'm not the only one with Cristina Aguilara in my head. Sythis is the first commander I built I (not started by a precon) and almost anything I put in it to replace cards still works. I don't like attacking so it works for my play style but still too easy.

As far as landfall is concerned, play lands you can sac or play with other abilities (cycle, channel, etc) and bring back.

For the Chainer challenge, I'm aware of the nonbo, but the Flayer works with the strategy in general that's still worth running it, works with reanimate, exhume, etc. and more important, with itself. Also nonbo with living death.

Chainer challenge: i use Chainer to throw the flayer and dragon in the bin to reanimate later. And especially Phyrexian Dragon Engine, i throw both half cards in the bin then double reanimate and attack. The ETB of the dragon is not wanted at times.

I wanted to build a wraith tribal / cantrip hybrid Lord of the Nazgul deck, since I'm new to MTG with the Lord of the Rings Universes Beyond set... but after playing it I realised why everyone else builds the commander as cantrip payoffs... most wraith cards aren't very good, and aside from a few effects like kindred discovery, most tribal anthems were dead if my commander wasn't out to generate loads of wraiths. It's just a bunch of cantrips / instant and sorcery value now, and it's way better lol

I have a Grismold voltron deck. There is almost no actual buffing stuff in the deck, but there are 7 different cards that grant hexproof, shroud or indestructible. The rest of the deck is removal, makes tokens, or scrifices stuff. Gris buffs himself. I don't need cards to do it.

It’s ironic. I took apart my Sythis deck for the same reasons you stated. It had difficulty finishing opponents. I switched to Tuvasa, it was meh. Took out the blue, splashed red for voltron Uril. The enchantresses fill the card draw slots. The deck has Arden and Kediss as well. It has been stronger than Enchantress decks. I also have Obuun landfall. I run 38 land. Seems right to me though I could run 40.

My Lord Windgrace Deck runs 44 lands, not counting the 2 MDFCs I am also running. In order to actually 9/10 times draw two cards with him, you need the fuel for that. The rest of the deck can be pure fire, then!

On the sythis question, and also just in general.. does anyone else find that 1 card per thing generally isn't enough in EDH? Like if I replace enchantments in hand with random cards from my deck, I'm going to run out of stuff pretty often, but with sythis+an enchantress on the board I should be able to actually churn through the deck. And then tied into that, wincons are usually the worst cards in the deck, so you'd rather run few of them and keep drawing until you find the few you chose to ran. I feel like the core annoyance of commanders like this is that building them better involves making them not win as "easily" from a dominant board state.

Midnight haunting for Sithis enchantress is another win-con that works well for me.

Whatever makes the deck happy sets you free

I play 40 lands in my Obuun deck. but I also run 3 ways to play lands out of my graveyard and every good fetch available. I feel like what the deck wants most is better ways to draw cards, but I can see blue based landfall wanting significantly more lands. Maybe its commander dependent?

I found that my prosper deck contains only good stuff but not wincons. That is why i switched to captive kingpin, who don't use treasures (more boring in this strategy) and can win even without commander

My favorite thing with sythis is playing cards like celestial ancient and swinging with a super buff mesa enchantress

I see a different form of this want vs need issue in decks where the theme doesn't have a lot of support, like the new Vannifar, Evolved Enigma. She seems to want a morph/manifest theme, but it turns out to get really effective she needs a ton of big permanents like eldrazi so she can cheat them out and blink them to flip them for cheap using a rules loophole. You can do a morph/manifest deck, but it just doesn't pull a lot of weight because there isn't a big card pool for making those cards that good.

My karazikar is just a commander that draw me card + combat tricks to send problematic creatures to others, there are 2 hidden commanders in the 99

yea, kinda agree that goad mechanic is like salt & pepper on a diner table. It's nice, cool and awesome when sprinkled but the flavour devolves when everything the deck do were just goad and goad payoffs

My Rage Omnath deck had 63 lands. Most of the other cards let you play or find more lands. What's better than making multiple 5/5s every turn?

Still gotta test it...but I'm thinking Greasefang is a blink deck needing blink creatures than a vehicle deck per se

I play Hazezon with 30 lands + 5 mdfc lands, I feel it works because my deck wants to have deserts enters into play every turn more than increase the number of lands in play, I find it funny that I can have 5 lands and still have 20+ sand warrior tokens

I've mentioned this deck a few times before. A Black, Blue, red, white deck. It WANTS green. It will make you have conversations with it, begging you to add green to it. Don't listen to it! It doesn't need green. Five color lands are something it wants. Does it need green from those lands, No. But i'll admit it probably does need five color lands.

My most successful 'refocus' so far has been my Cadira deck - I thought I wanted lots of token generators that make lots of tokens - turned out I mostly just want to keep her alive and evasive, and then have a lot of ways to make one token and start the ball rolling. My strangest discovery along these lines was that my Erebos (God of the Dead) deck doesn't really want cards like Night's Whisper and Sign in Blood (I know, I know, I'm sorry Dana, it's not my fault...) - he has the ability stapled on him and I can spend as much mana and life as I have to draw cards over and over - mostly I just need more ways to gain life (preferably by draining it from my opponents).

Whatever makes me happy sets you free.

What a deck wants. What a deck needs. Whatever makes it happy sets it free

Made the Weekly Patron Shout-Out!! BWWAA! BWWWWAAAAA!

Tbh every red deck that lacks protection needs to play Possibility Storm for the sole purpose of never allowing cpunterspells to resolve

Lol @ Joey because I feel like in over half the videos, Baba Lysaga is ALWAYS the example

That trampoline... He had all March to get a jump on that.

Every time you guys bring up sythis/enchantress decks I scratch my head a little. Is a deck with a ton of auras to make creatures huge and unblockable going to have trouble closing out a game? Do people not play enchant decks like this?

Just chuck a Psychosis Crawler in your Sythis deck. Now all your card draw drains your opponents

Sythis does need all of the enchantress's. I originally did play less enchantress's because there was one in my command zone. But then Sythis just kept getting removed and I didn't want to waste a turn paying 4 or 6 for an enchantress. So I added the rest of them back into the deck.

Smeagol landfall is the best because the other players bring the lands to the table for you.

There are few things more humbling than having your nonbo pointed out like this

Uh oh, EDHRECast is talking about Landfall again and 33-land Landfall deck has already rotated out of the database. Oops. Guess that means it's time to rebuild it.

Oh it's a vault door that makes more sense. I thought it looked like an American football helmet.

i think 38-40 is perfect for landfall, 45 is overkill

what decks need? there is only one answer! more lands!!! 😂

What a deck wants: a fun play pattern with a splashy payoff to win the game in style What a deck needs: 30 cards for ruining everyone else’s fun play pattern/negating the payoff so they’re out of the game.

Saying you need 45 lands in a landfall deck is insane

Dana had to put 8 more basics in a deck and chose to give up on the deck instead 😂😂😂

Cheat code for votlron decks; In red: Extra combat steps, AND Chandra’s Ignition. These two will end the game quicker, you don’t need two extra equipments. In blue: Extra turns=extra combat step+ramp and card draw. In green: artifact hate like ouphe. You’re in green. You can ramp without them. In black and white, similar stuff I guess.

I'm having that dilemma with my ziatora deck

1:49 let's hope Dana will be able to BOUNCE BACK from that

5:16

I just built Merry and Pippin and my friends and I sat around at our LGS discussing how the deck worked, how it felt playing it, and what I have added but the deck already does on its own.

Han didn't shoot first. Only Han shot.

“Play more lands?! If you are certain…” -says the guy that plays a 69 (nice) land Omnath, Locus of Creation deck

Video starts at 5:17