Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Some Removal Required


Long time no blog...
It’s been a while since my last post, but we got in an EDH session last weekend and I’m feeling interested in the format again. A quick update on some of my experiments:

1. The Hidetsugu deck was a flop, as monored EDH is every bit as boring as advertised. You’re a fool not to play gauntlet of power, extraplanar lens, caged sun and a bunch of firebreathing/x spell/mountain-based cards, but playing those makes the deck criminally dull. I don’t blame hidetsugu for the failure, I blame monored in general.

2. Rafiq is too strong to be fun. I played a single game with him, and of course 1-shot an opponent on turn 5 with might of oaks, then followed up by playing finest hour and going after my other opponent for 24 general damage per turn (star format). My hand at game end a turn later included loxodon warhammer and mass calcify, so things looked pretty much sewn up no matter what he did. I could have re-cast rafiq two more times without breaking a sweat even if he had died.

3. My replacements for these two generals are kaervek and zedruu. I think group hug decks are retarded, so I’m trying to make a viable (and not terribly obvious) zedruu deck - will do a post on it if it turns out decent. Kaervek is just a coolstuff.dec so far but has been pretty fun to play.

Public Service Announcement: Removal is good
During our weekend session there were several games that got extremely out of hand when not a single opponent around the table could muster a single removal spell for an easy target. In the first instance I played a turn 3 Edric that went uncontested until a turn 7-8 spitting image. In the other a turn 5-6 Kalia of the vast went uncontested for the entire game (along with her dragon army).

Its a fairly sad state of affairs when you get obliterated by a 2/2 flier or a 2/3 ground creature with no survival properties whatsoever. In both cases the generals win by amassing ridiculous armies, which means they are also hugely vulnerable to sweepers. The problem is removal spells are almost universally less exciting than big flashy sorceries or permanents, and end up getting chopped from decks in favour of those more exciting alternatives.

I’d advocate a 10-removal-card-minimum for any deck worth its salt. Most of these should be high potency, surefire kill spells and sweepers like final judgement, doom blade, beast within, spine of ish sah - anything that can take down your average creature and ideally a couple that can wipe out your average army. They usually won’t synergize with your deck or help its theme, but they will be crucial to not folding to the first threat that turns your way.

On top of that you can usually throw in a few niche removal spells like hull breach, snapback, or arcane denial. These spells are usually great, but their inability to permanently deal with a creature thats pounding away at you means you can’t rely on them too heavily.

Two other ways to improve your removal count is to play creatures that act as removal (dread, michiko konda, hateflayer) and to dig through your deck (flux, diabolic tutor), but again there’s often no replacement for a good old fashioned wrath of god or terror, so you should find room in your 60 playables for some iteration of those cards. Thinking you can race your opponent instead of removing the problems is usually a recipe for failure, as they’ll just start buying back a constant mists or lob down an island sanctuary. Heed my words of wisdom: at least 10 pieces of removal per deck!

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