The General Zone: Obzedat

Showing posts with label Obzedat. Show all posts

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Better Deckbuilding: Obzedat, Ghost Council

Happy Thor's Day Zoners, and welcome back to Better Deckbuilding!

I'm pretty excited to share my deck based around the Ghost-iest Gangstas of Gatecrash- the Obzedizzle!

While some might say it's not that difficult to build a Commander deck, that doesn't mean it's good. I spent a lot of long hours building several different iterations of Orzhov, finding them to be clunky, somewhat boring iterations of GoodStuff decks that never resonated nor represented the kinds of decks I wanted to play.

Although I only made the Resolution last year to find versions of Boros and Orzhov I could be happy with, you could say that this has been moving a lot longer than that.

So I'd like to dedicate this special episode of Better Deckbuilding to others who may be on the strugglebus, still looking for that Legendary Creature to get excited about, or that one special little space in design that you've always seen, but never found before. Although playing and winning with these decks is awesome, nothing gets me more jazzed than finding the surprise. And building around Obzedizzle was surely that!

WHY OBZEDIZZLE?

Back when I reviewed Gatecrash, I was pretty salty about the flavor of this card. My biggest criticisms being 1) Generally, that the creatures on cards updated from our last visit felt a little "too easy" to design and 2) Specifically, that gaining Haste felt like a forced flavor foul, made so that it would see play in Standard (which, it did.)

None of this is to say I didn't think the card was good- just a little unimpressive in terms of design. It stunk that I couldn't get excited about a new potential Commander in colors I wanted to play. I mean, I love Haste just as much as the next person. I even get the argument for being the "Black" part of the ability, and that the combined effect is a "Chinese Take-Out Style" (This is what Mark Rosewater calls it when they combine effects of two different colors. See also Recoil) print on the card.

So it took me some time to get over myself in order to take him for a test drive. Fortunately, some other things I didn't realize were compelling me towards Obzedat, as well as a good headspace for deck design.

The first factor was a metagame choice to bring back the Wrath. Over the last couple years, my metagame has experienced some serious shifts. We've had too many Wraths and not enough spot removal. We've had not enough removal, and too much Battlecruiser Magic. Now we have a ton of spot removal, and not enough ways to clear the board.

Because a healthy metagame really wants to have the same qualities that pitchers and hitters do in baseball, where they're constantly making adjustments to psych the other one out. I liked the idea of playing a Wrath deck, but with a little bit of a twist.

The twist, naturally, involves playing around our General. With the additions of some powerful, faster mass removal effects, a combination of old stand-by's and ones that I wanted to try out, I came up with a really nice control-based Orzhov deck that I've had a lot of success with.

THE STRATEGY

Basically, it's a Wrath-Based Control Deck. We are fortified with answers, so that we can play most of the early game with spot removal for serious threats while building up a big enough mana base to get Obzedat out and doing its thing.

While there are a lot of Obzedat lists out there doing some serious Extort and dedicated Life Gain strategy and Combo, this deck is avoiding these intentions. There are a few cards in the deck that help create engines based on the Obzedat's Syphon Life trigger, but the deck's not specifically designed to rely on these effects, making them ironically, as you'll see, a little bit more potent.

THE TECH

There are quite a few popular cards that see a significant power boost in this brew- Oblivion Stone, Nevinyrral's Disk, and Magus of the Disk.

I've attempted to make the Wrath-proof battle deck several times with no success. Tajic and Zurgo have been the Commanders, and they weren't successful.

What's better about this deck is the timing flexibility and its conjunction with Obzedat's ability. With Tajic, the problem was that being only a 2/2, he needed stuff he could pick up and swing with. Not wanting to lose the equipment, these cards were avoided in favor of cheaper, Sorcery-speed Wraths, which made the deck hard to play, with too many cards and not enough mana to play them all in a single turn.

With Obzedat, we get to, much more literally, get people to "play into our Wraths." We have a solid creature needing no equipment, and, with no creature on the battlefield, we can actually lure players into attacking us, protecting the Obzedat from our own stuff while also eliminating cards from our opponent's hands and board.

Because I don't get to play this color combination enough, you can almost always guarantee that I will be rocking this card, and mentioning it as a piece of tech.

I understand that this innately makes it almost the opposite of tech, but it is my favorite Fog effect, because I get to say, "Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh Batwing!"

Fun story- I have actually won multiple games with this card, so even if it it isn't tech anymore, I can't explain how it continues to win me games.

Anyway, back to Wrath tech. I think people are very reluctant to commit to such an expensive card, but it's a good one.

Frankly, it's not on my list of favorite Wraths, but it shines here, where I already play Rout and Angel of the Dire Hour. Seven sits at a good spot in our curve, where we're cleaning up the big 6-drops, clearing way for the Ghosts to get in for damage.

One of the cool tricks with this card is the ability to respond on our own turn, before Obzedizzle returns, or on our end step, when we exile him.

The latter, tapping out on our end step, may sound inefficient, but it's actually fine. Letting our opponents untap is sometimes too much time, and we all need a good scry every now and again.

Before we get back to our cool removal, let's talk about some of the creatures I'm playing.

Stinkweed Imp, as I've found out across the Interwebz, is becoming a relatively popular include for Karador decks, and that makes me happy.

I think this is a card that Gramps brought up when talking about Pauper a while back, and I decided that I should just play this card in normal EDH and see what happens.

What happens is you get an incredible creature with a lot of re-tread value. Having a huge Dredge cost attached to a huge Rattlesnake effect makes this an effective card for decks that don't play a lot of creatures, and don't want to tap out so much while also having at least some permanents permanently on the board (Obzedizzle tends to come and go, remember).

Long story short, I will be trying to slide more copies of this card into more decks. And I will be looking for a foil one too. Cause this is the kind of card I like to get in foil. Janky weird stuff.

My copy of Retaliate had an unsuccessful run in my Darien, King of Kjeldor deck, where it was silly for anyone to want to attack when Darien was out, and chances were, I probably didn't have enough mana to support it.

Doing my binder check after my first run with the deck, I had Executioner's Swing sitting out, and realized this would be a much bigger improvement. With Obzedat gaining a steady amount of life, I don't mind giving my opponents the opportunity to think they've done something meaningful if I can get rid of their board as a result.

Sometimes, cards we think are bad don't turn out to be so horrible. I've already used this a couple times, taking like 15-20 damage, and completely obliterating my opponent's board because they chose to attack.

So we'll run back the other Fated card in Obzedizzle's colors.

Fated Return has been an incredible addition to both of the decks I've played it in so far.

My first was in the Doran Defender deck, where I cast Fated Return to Reanimate an opponent's Sun Titan and ensure I had my Rolling Stones out for my nonsense Walls.

A few weeks ago, I cast Fated Return on my opponent's Pontiff of Blight and took Obzedat into Extorts-ville. It was the coolest.

And by coolest, I mean, I won the game by casting Solemn Simulacrum with multiple Extort triggers. So I've done that.

Last card I'll talk about is a piece of old school CommanderCast tech- Seht's Tiger.

This card is seriously, seriously bonkers. I don't usually tell you to get up IMMEDIATELY and go buy a card, but if I did, it'd be this one.

I've been listening to a lot of Mark Rosewater's Drive To Work podcast, and one of the elements he's mentioned that he likes to do in design is create cards that players have to discover their possibilities.

Seht's Tiger is definitely one of these. Because at face value, this doesn't look like a way to both counter Fact or Fiction and Fog your opponent. But it's both. And it's a creature. Also, I love Flash. This card is all the things I love, which is why it was on one of our first episodes of The Stack, and it's back again (and so too, will be The Stack).

Here's the list in its entirety, so's you can check out the rest of it. Obzedizzle

Remember to come back by on Saturday for the triumphant return of The Stack!

Pass.
-UL

Thursday, May 30, 2013

RTR Deck Series #3: Money, Money, Money, Money (MONEY!)

Hey there, planeswalkers! Welcome to another installment of the RTR deck series!

Last time, I built a deck focused on law and order-

Damnit, not that. I meant Isperia and her Azorius senate. Anyway...

This week, I decided to bring you the other side of the law, or what I like to call "When Good Priests Go Bad"-

Ughhhh, nevermind. Anyway, here's a look at the flavor of the Orzhov Syndicate:

Run by some ghost Oligarchy
Some goth lady carries out their bidding
They operate under the front of a church
Everybody in Ravnica knows, so it's a terrible mafia front
Black and White normally make grey, but in MTG, it's gold!

Obzedat, Ghost Council is basically the same thing as Ghost Council of Orzhova, except it's a 5/5; and for having to pay 1 extra mana in the casting cost, it automatically blinks and the ETB makes your opponent lose 2 life. Not the most original design, but I'll work with it.

Building a deck around the Obzedat could go multiple ways:

Blinking for life gain/loss
Sacrifice tokens and graveborn
Creature removal/control
Barrage of B/W badasses

The fatal flaw with any ONE of these is that I need ALL of them in the deck, in at least one way or the other. The only strategy that Obzedat seems naturally inclined to would be blinking, but I didn't find it worth putting in every known flicker card out there just for the general who I won't be able to cast until turn 5. Sacrifice/life gain seems to be the strategy of choice for most B/W players I've encountered, but I refuse to play Grave Pact (part of a long list of cards that go against my ethos).

My other big problem: not much money to fool around with for buying MTG singles. I decided to use only the cards that I had in my personal catalog or cards that I pulled from booster packs and drafts. After pulling two Blood Baron of Vizkopas from the same fat pack of Dragon's Maze, I didn't need to spend too much money anyway.

So life gain/loss would be the main feature of this deck, supported by creature removal/sac and a plethora of just plain crazy. The initial decklist looked like this:

Commander: Obzedat, Ghost Council

Creatures (21):

Disciple of Griselbrand

High Priest of Penance

Blood Baron of Vizkopa

Sepulchral Primordial

Artifacts (5):

Orzhov Cluestone

Orzhov Keyrune

Chalice of Life // Chalice of Death

Instants (16):

Sorceries (11):

Enchanments (6):

Land (40):

Vault of the Archangel

Plains (x16)

Swamp (x16)

The strategy is fairly plain: a mix of good black and white removal cards, token generators, a board wipe, graveyard control, and some heavy-hitters. Life gain is especially present in this deck; several creatures have lifelink or can double life gain returns. If life gain was the stock market, this deck would be doing better than the S&P 500.

A couple of the cards, I admit, are a tad odd for the strategy I'm going for: Mind Rot, Purge the Profane, and Painful Quandary, most notably so. I figured that I would explore some options as far as discard goes, plus Painful Quandary is painful to deal with.

Moriok Replica wasn't my first choice of creature card, but he presents a lot of card draw opportunities, especially with Treasury Thrull and other retrieval cards.

Very minimal extort was put in the deck. Treasury Thrull is a great retrieval engine without extort, but he happens to have it. I needed another 2 drop creature to balance out the mana curve, so Tithe Drinker went in. Lifelink 2/1 with extort? Mediocre at best, but I still wanted to play it.

Test runs had very mixed results. I first played this deck against Anowon, the Ruin Sage, and despite getting to flex some sacrifice muscles, the game was quickly lost to the vampire shaman, since I only have two vampire creatures in my deck, neither of which were drawn in the twelve turn course of the game. The next game had more luck: with enough creature removal and life loss, I was able to beat Anowon, although the game was close and he'd done 16 commander damage to me throughout the course of the game.

Against Doran the Stompy Tree, however, the deck failed miserably. My buddy's Doran deck put me in a defensive stranglehold. Either more creatures or more creature removal would have made Obzedat stand a chance, but once Rolling Stones was in play, my ass was grass.

My opponent kept saying "Man, you need a Sanguine Bond in that deck." And I realized: he's right. That card would make my deck a much more formidable threat. I, however, didn't want to pay $9.99 for a one in ninety-nine chance at being an unstoppable force. At least for the time being...

"Exsanguinate, maybe?" said my Stompy Tree friend. Now we're getting somewhere. Before making more changes, though, I tested this deck against Radha, Heir to Keld. Obzedat did surprisingly well against the red/green stomping machine. The only creature removal I had was the Archon of Justice and the High Priest (and a couple resurrection spells). Once the Rhox Faithmender and Vizkopa Guildmage were in play, my opponent was losing twice as much life. A Terrastadon plus an Elderscale Wurm slowed me down, but the Archon came back out on the battlefield for another round of exiling. Two turns after removing the Wurm from the game, Obzedat swung for the win with a Gift of Orzhova to lift him above the Terrastadon.

I was pleased with its performance, but much improvement was needed. Before getting my life gain combos on the battlefield, the game was looking to be in my opponent's favor. I seriously considered purchasing some cards like Exquisite Blood, which could infinite combo with my Vizkopa Guildmage. As the test games continued, I started getting fond of the little Guildmage. All of the Ravnica guildmages are actually pretty good; but, this one especially pleased Obzedat.

So it was time to make some revisions to the deck.

I realized how well an Exsanguinate would work in the Obzedat deck, as well as Exquisite Blood. Blood Reckoning really wasn't doing much in the deck, and neither was Cluestone; as much as I wanted to make the Cluestone work, it's performance in the deck was mediocre at best. Better card draw came from the Well of Lost Dreams and the Moriok Replica. In with the Bloody Cards, out with the Reckoning and Cluestone.

Tithe Drinker is useless unless you can beef her up somehow, and Extort wasn't doing much. A far more effective use of mana is Purgatory, my new favorite B/W Enchant. It's like graveyard retrieval only better; and paying 4 mana and 2 life is not big deal for the Obzedat. They'll simply say, "Fuggeddaboutit! That's chump change."

Mind Rot, although occasionally useful, was not as good as a good old Fleshbag Marauder. I also ditched the Cower in Fear for a Zealous Persecution, a much better and cost efficient spell. On the topic of creature removal, Unmake was put in Purge the Profane's place, since it had the advantage of also being an instant.

In favor of more creatures, I took out a Swamp for a Souls of the Faultless, a delightful little defender. My mana curve wasn't suffering.

Enough change, Obzedat wants cash money.