Sorry if this isn’t the right community, and if it isn’t hopefully someone can point me in the right direction!
I am looking for some input on an EDH deck I am working on. This is the deck and it revolves around [[Gandalf the Grey]] as the commander. So lots of instants, sorceries, and prowess. Mostly aiming for Gandalf commander damage as the win condition by combining the 3 damage to each player and then putting Gandalf back on the top of the library. I played this for the first time last night and while it has a ton of potential, I definitely feel that things are missing.
Things I am looking for are:
- More card draw. This was without a doubt the biggest issue and I’ll take any input on how to improve this!
- More counters. Less of an issue than card draw, but definitely was struggling against my buddy’s Balen/Token deck.
- Any sort of board wipe. This was definitely an issue but by the time I could’ve really used the board wipe, I had fizzled out due to no card draw.
Hopefully folk have some input! I would definitely love to keep this on the cheaper side as this deck so far has cost me $15 for a couple boosters. Most of the deck was inherited from someone in college years ago lol.
I might be misreading your gameplan, but just in case: Commander damage only counts combat damage. So accumulating 21 damage on an opponent by attacking with your commander.
Gandalfs 3 damage do not count into that.
Oh damn, I was under the impression that damage done by a commander abilities counted as commander damage. That definitely lowers the viability of this deck. Bummer!
Absolute classic blunder. I think most people had that realisation at some point.
Of course, you can always house rule it with friends.
Or maybe it can be more of a value engine deck, i think it still has legs.
I was thinking keeping Gandalf as the commander would work great for the spell splitting property, but also using [[Stormsplitter]] to double dip more or less and just replace some of the red spells with lower cost instant casts. Again the card draw is still an issue but hopefully the suggested cards above help out!
Oh yeah that looks awesome! Super fun interaction
Blue and red have so many strong card draw abilities, i’m sure you’ll get it to workTo expand a little bit on the red card draw because it sometimes isn’t as obvious:
Effects like [[Light up the Stage]] or [[Jeska’s Will]] are awesome in red, because they expand your “hand”, sometimes until end of turn, sometimes until the end of your NEXT turn even.
Downside is that you lose those cards if you can’t manage to cast them, but usually they make sure you don’t run out of gas.iirc the effect is also called “bottle” or “bottling” due to some r&d game design vocabulary.
If you have cost reduction in your deck, Clockspinning
https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=109673
Is one of my favorites for counters, it’s one at a time but easy mana dump and works to add or remove one of any counter
Also, Vadrik astral archmage
https://edhrec.com/commanders/vadrik-astral-archmage
Is absurd with buyback cards since cost reduction is the final modifier.
Sorry if you already have these in your deck, I couldn’t look since I’m at work
So Gandalf’s damage ability doesn’t count towards commander damage. Commander damage is only from when a commander deals combat damage to a player via attacking.
You want the cheapo hard counters like Arcane Denial, Dispel, Mental Misstep, Red (or blue) Elemental Blast, etc. Basically, counters in EDH can be rather subpar because you have multiple opponents and you’re 1-for-1’ing. You and the owner of the countered spell are each down a card, while the other players are the same. They means you want them to be cheap or have draw/replacement effects on them. tl;dr-- holy fuck get rid of that Cancel it hurts my eyes.
For draw spells, there’s Treasure Cruise, Gitaxian Probe, Brainstorm, Ponder, Preordain, Windfall, Prosperity, Narset Parter of Veils, Lorien Revealed, Frantic Search, and some others I’m forgetting. One trick is to combine Ponder and Brainstorm with a shuffle effect from cards like Merchant Scroll and Scalding Tarn to act as an Ancestral Recall.
And for fuck’s sake where is you Command Tower and Sol Ring? That’s how every deck in EDH should start lol. Both have been printed into oblivion so you should buy them for dirt cheap. Go do that. Like right now before you do anything else Magic related. Hell, someone might just give you one if you ask nicely.
