My #4MTGCARDS

Praise be to the Norse God of Thunder once again, Zoners!

Today I'm gonna be a little sentimental, but I hope that's not going to keep you from reading.

My pals over at CommanderCast were following the #4MTGCards trending on Twitter the last week or so, and I thought it was a good opportunity for me to follow suit. I'm a huge advocate for using non-relevant things like trading card games as a means to constantly enlighten us and teach us about the greater experience that is life, and I think these four Commanders really exemplify what I'm about. If you're joining us from over on Twitter (which, makes me happy that you're picking up on my media, so thanks!), this is going to be a succinct, but deeper meditation on the cards I've shared today.

So here we go, in chronological order!

I'd been playing Commander for a couple years before I realized I know what I was doing. This culminated the night I threw my Intet deck against the wall.

I've written and talked about this night a lot because I think it's important for a couple of reasons. Number one, that everyone who has ever been an expert at anything has to find that space between where they are and where they want to be before a goal can be realized, and that means admitting to one's self that they are in fact bad or inexperienced with the task at hand.

I owe a lot of my development as a Magic player and enthusiast because of Grandpa Growth, and most of it stems from this moment, where he helped me to understand that what I was lacking was self-accountability in my deckbuilding. Basically, that if I was building my deck, playing my deck, and wasn't winning, there was neither luck nor anyone else to blame but me for continuing to lose. It was a tough lesson, and one that subverted a lot of my expectations, but I am the most grateful for this lesson, because it's translated into an innate trait that I not only use in Magic, but also in life.

Glissa T's is one of my oldest Commanders in the current Deck Portfolio, and one of my most important. Over the years, she's evolved from being a defensive creature for a silly Infect deck to a Dollar General master to now the not-so-cleverly named, "Green Eggs and Glissa" deck I play today.

One of the great things about Glissa, the Traitor is that it is one of the only Commanders I share with Gramps here on the blog, and that's pretty cool. Gramps' Glissa deck was one of the toughest decks I grinded against back when we were grinding out games, and while not nearly as oppressive because of my playstyle and card choices, I still tend to play it more his way than my own.

Despite having a crazy power level, Glissa has helped me not only to have connections with friends from my past, but also friends in the Commander community in the future. My Editor over at CommanderCast, Mark, actually knew who I was before we'd met because of this Green Eggs and Glissa list, which is a really cool connection. Because of Gramps' crazy Glissa Engine, I'd effectively reinvented her, thereby creating an inspired Human-Glissa-Centipede, you know, without the ass to mouth.

Lu Bu is on this list, but not actually a Commander or card I've even played. It belongs to one of my best friends and fellow Zoner, Awston AKA Retardo_08.

Much like my other cards on the list, Lu Bu has a couple reasons that make it special. The first is that it taught me how to build a deck not just for myself, but for someone else. What people dislike so much about net-decking is that it often does not lend itself to sculpting and catering to the person playing it, which translates to stiff, lame, and games that are not compelling.

Awston had come to me looking to build a new deck. He loved Lu Bu, and wanted it to be risky- basically he wanted to play coin flip.dec.

Knowing him, and knowing the kinds of decks he was gonna play against (mine, mostly), this just had bad idea written all over it. Not there wasn't ways to create winning strategy- just that, without tutelage, there wasn't gonna be any consistency.

Rather than set himself up for failure, we studied and brainstormed until we were able to find the middle of this Venn Diagram, where his "risky" flavor met the Red's color pie limitations, and where those two pieces were supported by my idea of having more consistency to resemble winning strategy.

And what we invented, little did we know, was this emerging archetype of Trick Voltron. Combined with combat tricks, Final Fortune, and other Double Strike and Multiple Combat step spells, we were able to establish something together that was much stronger, and much more unique, than what the two of us would've come up with by ourselves. Overall, it's one of the decks I'm most proud of, simply because it's not something I made for me. The rivalry between Lu Bu and my Animar deck has created a long-lasting "Snake and Mongoose" battle, which has only increased the kind of excitement that we can only have here in Commander.

My last card is the Commander of a more recent addition to my Deck Portfolio, but one that I will keep together for years to come.

The reason I can't seem to stop talking about this deck is that it hits just about every mark in terms of what I want to accomplish in a given Commander game.

-He subverts the blue stigma of obligatory counterspells.
-He promotes a high level of interactivity, not just with my stuff, but with my opponents creatures as well.
-He gives me multiple lines of play as well as multiple ways to win. I've won with Milling, I've won with 40 damage, I've won with Planeswalker Limit Breaks!
-He powers up oddball cards like Hatching Plans and Stormbound Geist, while also making good cards like Gilded Drake and Reef Worm even better.
-His reactive and proactive flexibility allows me to scale his power level to all kinds of different decks and players.

And even if he didn't hit all of these points, one of the best parts about the Barrin deck was the process. It was one of the most natural, organic deck building experiences I've ever had, mostly because I didn't know who my Commander was gonna be, and at pretty much every point from design to where it is today, I have enjoyed the mystery of not knowing what the card is going to be, much less what the next game is going to look like. In this way it embodies everything that I want to do right when I think about how I want to play the format, and that pairing is in every way the force that compels me to play Magic's greatest Kitchen Table Sandbox format.

Be sure to follow me @unclelanddrops. I'd love to hear and see what your #4MTGCards are, so tell me about it somewhere, will ya?

Pass.
-UL

UL's Better Deckbuilding: Barrin, Master Wizard EDH

Another Thor's Day, another Landdrops List.

Better Deckbuilding returns with one of the most ambitious brews built around one of the strangest cards Blue has to offer- the oldest sage, Barrin.

WHY BARRIN?

Barrin completed the "Double Rainbow" of Old Border/New Border Mono-Colored Commander decks I had, which was as follows:

Green- Silvos/Melira
White- Lin Sivvi/Isamaru
Red- Starke/Heartless Hidetsugu
Black- Greel/Akuta
Blue- Barrin/Thassa

Shortly thereafter, I became disillusioned with the maintenance of all these decks and have reduced it down to one apiece.

Still, it was the initial Old-Border requirement that drew me to Barrin. I'd gone through several different plans, ideas, and really had a lot of difficulty picking out Commanders because there isn't a lot of design space. You're either Aggro-Control, Artifact-Combo, Control, or just plain Gimmicky.

And if you see what's going on here, your Spidey Senses are right. This deck is pretty Gimmicky.

THE STRATEGY

Aside from Barrin being OB, the other big design quality was to create a blue deck which could control the board without playing counterspells. This was pretty congruent with my more aggressive approach to Commander. Back in January, I realized that I didn't do a whole lot of attacking in games, and in my interests to better both me as a player, and inform you as a blogger, I decided to concoct some techniques for more aggressive players who want to get good in a Wrath-Heavy format.

The strategy with Barrin is pretty simple. He is the Ultimate Unsummoner, throwing away everything on your board to throw threats back into your opponent's hands.

This goal is accomplished by committing permanents to the board state, and constructing lines of play in the game to pursue value. Much like Greel, we're able to get a little extra out of cards we play by doing something in the game that could be construed as anti-value or counterintuitive.

Because most players have to play creatures as threats to deal damage, this deck matches up well by out tempo-ing your opponents, not only with creatures, but other atypical permanents.

THE TECH

The first card we'll talk about is Jace, Memory Adept.

Not only does this deck feature most of the blue walkers (Still Mind Sculptor-less), but it also has a very strong "Jace" theme.

The idea with this comes from the staleness of seeing Jace get re-printed over and over. My playgroup in particular is just tired of seeing him, and so am I.

Though playing him doesn't sound like I support the paradigm, the idea was that sacrificing Jace and all his things to make a game more interesting gave the deck a silly but fun way to shed light in an otherwise angry beef with Wizards over the guy who is clearly their favorite blue p-dub.

While most of the walkers in this deck don't unite to form a real theme, one of the neat parts of my design is the sort of improvisation it takes to play it. Ultimately, this yields some seriously high variance in terms of games, which is not something I'm used to at all, let alone in a color that plays so consistently.

JMA is up here because I actually won a game using his second ability multiple times. Never thought I'd get that many chances, but I did, and it was cool. The planeswalkers in this color really have an underrated sense of respect at the table (with the exception of Tamiyo), and so it's not impossible in this deck to buy enough turns to go off with an ultimate ability, which gives us a chance to win.

So, not everything in here is an oddball.

Should be common knowledge that Gilded Drake is an incredibly powerful card. Along side his buddy Barrin, GD's even better, acting as recurring removal for your opponent's threats. Coupled with Sower of Temptation, these cards have the ability to continue to take your opponent's best thing, and combo with Barrin in order to force your opponent's removal spells.

Gilded Drake is the cheapest and most effective tool we have in the box.

The best way to play Barrin is to have cheap cards and enough Islands to get out before you cast him the first time.

Hatching Plans, the Wellsprings, and even Ordeal of Thassa have been nice options in this department.

HP is obviously the least flexible of the aforementioned, but it's still powerful. Barrin wants to play as much stuff as he can get out, and blue is never in short supply of weird things that let you draw cards. This is probably one of the better cards that takes advantage of the "permanent" requirement in Barrin's ability.

Early on in testing, I was playing a lot of Clone effects, which I deemed "too good" for what I was trying to accomplish.

Enter Master of Predicaments. Our group tends to love the Fact or Fiction subgame, and this resembled the spirit of the subgame, so I went with it. Turns out, it's been fun.

We play good cards in here, but not everyone should be putting a target on your back. Sometimes, you gotta live a little, and Master of Predicaments embodies the the philosophy and personality I've given to the deck.

One of the things that makes this card good is that the balancing number is 4. Conveniently, this is where a majority of my cards sit, including the Jace suite. Having spells that sit in this range just make it a little more difficult for your opponent to guess.

With access to bounce effects, we can potentially get multiple uses out of Morph creatures.

Since Khans dropped a bunch of new ones on our doorstep, I decided to do a little bit of testing.

Spellsnatcher is a card Grandpa really liked in his review of the set, and it's one I like too. Bringing in the Morph package for this deck is where I fudged my rule about counterspells, but the deck was having trouble with some answers, and I figured it was better to have them in fun, permanent-sized morsels. So no, I don't feel bad about it.

Bringing in the morph dudes also provided me the chance to add Ixidron for extra removal and another layer of trickery.

The last janky card we'll talk about is Shapeshifter's Marrow.

Before milling effects on planeswalkers became a plan in the deck, I had Geralf's Mindcrusher and Shapeshifter's Marrow in the deck.

It's kind of a happy accident that these cards all oddly worked together. The idea for Mindcrusher was just to be a nuisance, since it could be sacrificed and bounced to reset itself. And Marrow, disguised as an Enchantment, could be come an opponent's creature, and reset if I didn't like it.

Even though this card is more likely to get pitched by Merfolk Looter, I haven't seen enough of it to warrant cutting it. The theme and eccentricity exuding from it fit so well in here.

There are a lot of neat tricks in here, like resetting Solemn or Scourge of Fleets, or throwing 0/1 Goats from Springjack Pasture away to get rid of real creatures.

Aethersnipe ranks right up there. This is a significantly better card in Pauper, I'll admit, but I'm not against playing it in Commander.

Since Evoke gives you a chance to respond, Aethersnipe's trigger can actually be stacked and used in conjunction with Barrin's ability to either double your bounce triggers or recur Aethersnipe. Same goes with Nevermaker and Mulldrifter, some of TGZ's favorite pets. Again, just a another way to navigate the deck, especially in a tight spot.

Anyway, here's the full list:
The Bollocks Barrin Plan

Stay Tuned to the TGZ Station! C14 Spoilers are around the corner!

Shipping the Turn to You!
-UL