this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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EDH Deck Help (lemm.ee)
submitted 2 months ago by Rusty_Red@lemm.ee to c/mtg@mtgzone.com
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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:

  1. More card draw. This was without a doubt the biggest issue and I'll take any input on how to improve this!
  2. More counters. Less of an issue than card draw, but definitely was struggling against my buddy's Balen/Token deck.
  3. 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.

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[–] shapesandstuff@feddit.org 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Rusty_Red@lemm.ee 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] shapesandstuff@feddit.org 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Rusty_Red@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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!

[–] shapesandstuff@feddit.org 1 points 2 months ago

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 work

[–] shapesandstuff@feddit.org 1 points 2 months ago

To 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.