Readers!
I heard you like data! Well, technically, I heard you heard I like data. Well, technically, I really didn’t hear that. But I heard that I like data, and now you have heard that, too. Data makes my job easier, and while there isn’t a ton of it, there’s enough to start sifting now and keep sifting as decks get added. There are just too many EDH picks for me to track all of them myself, so I’m doing what I typically do and just explaining my thought process so you can decide for yourself. It will be fun, trust me. Let’s look at this set already!
We don’t have decks for every commander, but we have quite a few. I won’t belabor this article with Umezawa picks since he got his own article a while back and nothing there has changed much, but there are some interesting decks being built.
Tatsunari is super interesting because while Grolnok proves there really haven’t been enough Frogs to do a decent Frog tribal deck, a Frog/Enchantmentfall hybrid can work if there is some synergy. The deck looks like fun, and it’s pulling specs out of two different buckets which rules hard. I don’t know if this will stay #2 with the addition of the EDH deck exclusive commanders, but it’s doing well for now.
This is an important aside about EDHREC that I think you will want to not skip over so you can scroll down and see my picks. Some of the Enchantress stuff took a hit, but most of it didn’t. Remember, this first list is the high synergy cards, cards that appear in this deck but not too many other places. I think that the recency of Grolnok decks have obscured how relatively novel Frog-focused cards are. Any Frog tribal card is in Grolnok because there aren’t enough and it needs to play all of them to have an entire deck. Some of the stuff from the High Synergy cards on Grolnok’s page would be here if not for Grolnok, and that’s important to remember. Don’t miss out on checking there.
I don’t love reminding people to pick bulk because it implies I think everyone has bulk, but I wasn’t picking some pretty decent cards that are very much not bulk and should have been. You’ll find Shimmering Wings, Whip Silk, Mourning, Lignify, Oath of the Ancient Wood and some other stuff in bulk. The older stuff likely goes up and stays up – Whip Silk is potentially already a thing and I won’t admit I don’t know why because it will look like I don’t pay attention to pauper (I don’t, but I don’t want you to know that).
Copies of this under $20 basically don’t exist at this point. This would have been an excellent time to reprint this, but I guess they figure since they have Estrid’s Invocation, demand for this is low enough?
It’s not above the fabled 10k mark we all like to pretend is significant, but it gets some play and will get more play as decks from this set are built. This seems like a slam dunk to me, even at a $15 buy-in. Reprint risk seems medium-to-low with cards like this increasingly ending up on The List rather than getting proper reprints.
Blood Funnel is very good here. You sac Keimi to play an Enchantment that has its cost reduced and when that Enchantment resolves, Keimi comes back into play. It is better to sac another creature, but you always have one. This isn’t high synergy but it should be, and at bulk, it’s a 0 risk spec. Stock is pretty low of this, probably because it was bulk and bulk migrates into boxes and binders then spikes hard when the inventory is gone. How much inventory, you ask?
None, that’s how.
Baneful Omen is a slam dunk, imo.
There has never been a better deck for Baneful Omen than Hidetsugu. You didn’t want to be ripping cards off of the top in Yuriko so this card never saw play then. This is a RoE non-mythic which sounds rough, but RoE has some real gems.
If Keening Stone can be $3, so can this. That said, Realms Uncharted crashed back down to $5 so get out fast, imo. A sextuple up is very tasty, and if supply crashes in a chaotic day of trading, you’ll have copies for the people paying $12. I like this.
Supply on this is drying up, and it’s not just Hidetsugu doing it. Remember last time I brought up Draco and said there was a deck in another format using Draco to dome people when they reveal it on top? Remember how I said I’d figure out what deck that was? I didn’t, sorry. Maybe there is no deck. All I know is that there are also no copies of Draco, just about, so go nuts.
These are playable in WAY FEWER decks than Illusionists’ Bracers, I’ll grant you that, but $2 for the extended art version of a card that is similar to one that grows like this deserves a mention.
That does it for me! Next week I’ll be back for more decks and more data. Until next time!
