#deck ideas

today i will be talking to you about one of my more recent decks that has very quickly become one of my favorites!!

it is...

GANDALF THE WHITE POLYARMORY

now, this deck name might sound confusing. but its really quite simple. this is a mono white grouphug deck with the sole purpose of copying the etb of wedding ring to give one to the whole table and marry every player. the goal of the deck is to put everyone in the game into a polyamorous relationship!!

the rest of the deck is a mixture of typical group hug elements, such as shared card draw (secret rendezvous, howling mine, font of mythos) and general etb abuse (elesh norn mother of machines, panharmonicon) and when you combine these two aspects the deck helps out all players but can also effectively control the board by triple copying a meteor golem or loran of the third path!!

i havent had the chance to play this deck all that often but when i have played it it has some real killing power surprisingly. the main thing i realized playing this deck is that doubling or tripling your etbs gets out of hand fast. like obviously it does, but youll be surprised if you decide to play with it.

this deck is rather weighted on the artifact side. i couldnt find a large amount of legendary creatures that copy with gandalf so artifacts were the obvious choice. most of them draw cards on etb or add mana, while the rest copy etbs and are just general group hug cards. this deck could easily be changed to be much more competitive if you removed some of the group hug elements and added more interaction (most of my decks have an emphasis on fun and therefore the interaction might be lacking in some of them).

there are a few cards in this deck id like to talk about as overperformers. this deck does some silly things and these cards felt especially strong from my games with the deck-

eriette's charmed apple: this card when doubled with a panharmonicon type effect (aka your commander 👀) is disgusting. nobody expects the mono white deck to untap and steal their creatures for a turn, which results in turns where you steal the biggest creatures on board and swing for lethal on someone. i nearly killed my girlfriend this way out of nowhere in her life gain deck and it doesn't seem far fetched to do that most games. there is also some graveyard artifact recursion in this deck which allows you to loop this which, in the late game, really adds up.

master of ceremonies: this one is probably obvious to anyone who has played the card before, but this was my first time. if you stick this and no one kills it (which they aren't initially inclined to do) it just spits out so much value. you get three things every one of your upkeeps, whether that be three treasures (broken), three cards (broken) or three creature tokens (yay blockers!!) or some combination of the three. this adds up so fast and gives you a huge advantage for the small price of helping your opponents a bit.

tenuous truce: this card single handedly kept me in the gane by enchanting the player with the biggest board. its crazy what people will do when they get an extra card every turn. obviously gets worse the more people know about your deck cause one card a turn wont stop your average player from swinging at who they deem a threat, but still. its still really good and much better then it seems!!

as for how to play the the deck, its mostly stay alive till its you and one other player. you can do this by killing key targets with your etbs (this deck deals with artifacts and enchantments especially well) or getting people to believe you are not a threat cause you are feeding their card draw. this deck can very easily be ran over if you don't pull a board wipe for the creature decks or if you lose to something that you couldnt interact with cause you are mono white. thats just kinda the brakes. but this deck has more staying power then i ever gave it credit for when i built it.

in closing, this deck is probably around a 6 or so in power level and i wouldnt play this at a high power table but if you and your friends want to have fun then you should give it a try!! i got to marry most of the table in my first game with the deck and it was so satisfying, plus when everyone has a wedding ring the amount of card draw and life gain going around gets out of hand fast. especially if you have extra card draw effects out everyone can be drawing upwards of two cards every single turn lmao

(also dont tell anyone but this deck has another thing in it thats fun to do with your transfem friends, and that is jinxed choker. this is an artifact that is in the deck purely to joke about how whoever has control of it at any given time is collared up. you can marry and collar your friends with this deck and both will make your gay friends go nuts at the edh table lmao)

Just when you thought it was never going to happen again, it’s time for a new decklist post! Today we’ve got a slightly more eccentric build than my usual lists as we take a look at my colorless Hope of Ghirapur deck. This deck started as something of a local meme in my area, as myself and a few others used to joke about building a list for Hope as far back as the spoiler season for Aether Revolt. There were -- and still are -- other colorless lists within the local playgroup, but for some reason the idea of building this little thopter never really progressed past a silly idea that we chuckled about.

A few months ago, though, I was looking through my big storage binder of older rares and I realized that I had a lot of cards that would make sense in a list for Hope, and so I decided to try putting it together just to see how it fared. The deck came together fairly quickly and garnered several responses of “Oh, you actually did it!” and “Finally!” when I first sat down with it. After a few games and some minor tweaking, I actually came to like the way it played a lot, and now it’s one of the decks I keep in active rotation.

Great, inexpensive way to make a shared deck, private- a roll-up bamboo screen creates a lovely wall. 

Combining keywords can be fun, and today we’re messing around with a very potent combination.

Keywords: Deathtouch and First Strike

When a creature with both first strike and deathtouch battles another creature, the other creature is usually destroyed before it gets to deal any damage. The creature is virtually unbeatable. of course, there are a lot of ways for an experienced player to break up this combo, but it’s good to let the kids feel like they’ve run into something broken once in a while.

I recommend only letting kids play this deck against adults an not each other, as this deck has the potential to be frustrating to play against for the kids.

Focus Cards: Nightshade Peddler & Hanweir Lancer

We’re using the Soulbond keyword to grant the abilities. these creatures can be paired together to make two death-strikers, or they can be combined with other creatures to make more disposable death-strikers.

We of course can’t rely on always getting both of our Soulbond creatures, so we’re including alternatives, where we can replace one of our soulbond creatures with a regular French Vanilla

If the kids ask why this card is white bordered, you can tell them it’s what they used to do with reprints, but this isn’t something they need to know unless they ask

I’m also including other simple keywords, as well as both high power and high toughness creatures, so the kids can experiment with which combinations works best.

Since we’re granting deathtouch, I’m omitting trample from this deck since the interaction can be confusing.