Kaboom!

I’ve found EDH is at its best when players take risks and play high variance cards. Save the sure-bets for limited and standard and let EDH be the format for taking huge risks. People won’t remember who won a given game, but they’ll remember the crazy low probability plays that turned a game on its head. Winning is cool, but EDH is all about winning with style.

A recent EDH session of 5-player star had the following memorable scenario play out:

Me: proteus staff your Jenara
Doug: reveal blightsteel colossus and put it into play
Me: oh shit. Pass turn
Jon: drops hand and draws 5 new cards thanks to my teferi’s puzzle box, plays act of treason on the blightsteel and attacks Doug
Doug: condemn
Me: phew

Now, anytime you’re forced to condemn your own blightsteel to avoid death it’s pretty funny, but what I especially liked about that sequence was how the high variance cards of proteus staff and puzzle box made the blightsteel and the act of treason that much more epic.

This breed of card is becoming my new favourite thing in EDH. It doesn’t take a genius to play bribery, but nobody will find it particularly fun watching you poke through their deck and take their best card. Now let’s try that again with Telemin performance or stolen goods - the reward is a surprise and everyone is curious to see what you manage to pull, unlike the boring inevitability of a bribery. Whether you hit the jackpot or whiff brutally odds are it’ll be more fun either way.

There are a lot of high variance cards out there that are great for shaking up EDH. Some of my favourites are temporal aperture, proteus staff, omen machine, mayael the anima (great general for this effect), and even warp world if its not being abused.

My most recent discovery in the random rewards program is this little beauty:

It’s worded a little strangely, but basically you reveal a separate card for each player you target - going in turn order. I almost always at least consider putting breath of malfegor in my red/black decks - kaboom is the same idea with much higher variance, and thus much more entertainment value. This beauty went right into my mayael the anima deck - with hopes of living the dream and revealing krosan cloudscraper or autochton wurm - but knowing that there’ll be times when I land my sensei’s divining top or kodama’s reach.

Macaroni or Cheese

Any of these random reward cards are pure macaroni as long as you’re not setting up your deck to optimize it. I’ll admit to running congregation at dawn and a divining top in Mayael, but I’m just as happy (if not more so) to blindly roll the dice and see what comes up. Plus how can you not love a card named “kaboom!”?