To have a heart... or not

As a player who creates new decks for just about every EDH session, I like it when games go relatively quickly. If we can do a match in under an hour I’m happy, as it means I’ll get to try out more of my decks during the session. This is part of why I like to switch to star games when our group hits 5 or 6 players, and split into two tables if we’re 7 or more - FFA games of 5 or more are just too damn long, and I have too many decks I want to play.

One of my longest standing decks is a “game over” black-red build that’s had kaervek and malfegor as generals. Its packed with cards that damage each player or each opponent in order to end games as quickly as possible - win lose or draw.

The deck was initially a response to my first playgroup’s love-in with cards like loxodon warhammer and pulse of the fields. It was black and red to rain death and destruction on the life-gaining-extravaganza, and played a series of “F U lifegain” enchantments like forsaken wastes, sulfuric vortex, and everlasting torment.

While black and red are clearly the heavy metal colours of death and destruction, the combo precludes me from playing the most obvious general for the theme:

Hidetsugu has always been in the deck, and pretty hilarious when played with lightning greaves on the board (wait for it... wait for it.. boom everyone under 10 life in “one turn”!). The question is whether its worth the loss of black spells to have him in my command zone.

On the downside, he actually non-bos with a lot of the deck, since everytime you tap him you’ve effectively cut all damage dealt “so far” in half. So those early ankh of mishras and spellshocks become a lot less painful. Also, dropping black costs me some fun cards like repay in kind and plague of vermin (hilarious with earthquake in hand).

On the upside, he is the biggest, baddest damage dealer in multiplayer magic. Going monored gives access to the usual suspects for monored EDH - mountain-based-damage, red-mana-based damage, and mana-doubling. Although whether thats an upside or not is debatable since a lot of those cards are boring and predictable (extraplanar lens... ashling... yawn)

So the move to hidetsugu as the general is an experiment - hopefully he’ll be fun to use as a general, but if not I can always slink back to Kaervek.


Macaroni or Cheese?

Hidetsugu is tolerably cheesy. Taking out massive chunks of life by just tapping is pretty annoying, but he hits his controller along with the rest so its not exactly “unfair”. He probably heads into true-cheese when you can give him haste and/or get off two quick taps (e.g. thousand-year elixir)