Sports on a Frozen River by Aart van der Neer (1660). Shaman of the Great Hunt by Ryan Alexander Lee.



This week I had planned on writing about my EDH "bucket list", but then something happened that gave me a better idea and something of a story to share.



I was playing EDH last Tuesday night at the LGS where I run a league on Saturdays. I jokingly told a friend of mine who was opening some boosters that if he opened a Paradox Engine, he should give it to me because I need another one for my Yisan deck. I've pulled my Engine out of Yisan and put it in my new Niv Mizzet deck, but Yisan really wants one and I don't switch cards around or use a proxy system for my decks. This friend proceeded to whip out a binder and give me a Paradox Engine he wasn't using and had no plans for. I did pay him fair value for it, and now had to figure out what to take out of Yisan to fit it in.





Dominoes



You know when you stand up a long chain of dominoes, topple the first one and watch as they all fall over?

Working on decks can be like that for me.

I make an edit to one deck which leads to an edit to another deck, and so on and so on.

It's definitely a indication that I've got too many decks.

When you have two or three, this probably isn't as much of a problem, but when you well over a dozen, it's a frequent occurrence. It's rare for these chains of deck edits to go further than four decks, but every once in a while it gets pretty crazy. This isn't one of those times, but the other night I sat down and worked on my decks.



Yisan



Paradox Engine needed to go into Yisan, but what would it replace?

The deck still has a druid theme, but after looking through it I was able to find a card that could come out. Selvala's Stampede.



Yisan has lots of druids and a few heavy hitters but the chances that Selvala's Stampede would truly wreck a table in my Yisan deck aren't that great. It's a good card and it's helped me win games but I feel like it wants a deck that has more fatties that want to be cheated into play.

A deck like...



Mayael



My Mayael deck has lots of fatties. It's a fun, goofy deck that takes a while to get rolling and can truly run away with a game if it blows up. Selvala's Stampede should be a perfect fit for Mayael, as the chances of getting big creatures out is much higher than with Yisan.

So what to pull out? The choice wasn't easy, but there was one card that I eventually chose: Purphoros, God of the Forge.

I'm not sure why my Mayael build included Purphoros.

I think I put it in when I was imagining it pairing with Avenger of Zendikar or Chancellor of the Forge, but in reality that deck is about stuff like Bearer of the Heavens, Worldspine Wurm, Blazing Archon and other big dudes that lend themselves towards a tall strategy, not a wide strategy.

The reality is that Purph belongs in decks that will really use him. He's already in my Zada deck, as that used to be a dedicated Purphoros goblins deck. There is another deck it will make better - my current favorite deck in the whole wide world...



Sidar & Tana



I love this deck so much. It nearly always establishes a board and can be very hard to deal with. While it really struggles against Elesh Norn and has other obvious weaknesses like boardwipes and mass -1/-1 effects like Contagion Engine, it is also resilient, has solutions for players with insane life totals, lots of fog effects, and is very fast and tight.

The basic goal is to get Tana out, get Sidar out so Tana is unblockable, swing to make lots of tokens and eventually overwhelm my opponents with post-blocker pump spells that affect my whole team. It's all about combat tricks and unblockability. The latter is the reason I had originally put Grenzo, Havoc Raiser into the deck.



It's a cute idea to goad my opponents' creatures, even though his second ability is arguably stronger. The problem is that my wins generally came from a combination of impact tremors damage and combat damage and Grenzo never really made a difference in any of the games I played with the deck.

Purphoros was in, and will be amazing in this deck, so Grenzo had to be shown the door...





Road Trips



Last year my son and I took a road trip from our home up in the Boston area down to Pennsylvania to visit my family. On the trip we stopped by a number of fantastic local game stores and got the chance to play EDH with the good folks at The Portal in Bethlehem, PA. It was a great time, we met some great people, and we were even able to get my brother in law to join us for some games at The Portal's monday EDH night.



He played Magic back in the day but was on to other hobbies and wasn't seriously into Magic at the time, so he would borrow EDH decks from us when we played. We had fun, and at the end of the night I grilled him on the kind of deck he liked to play, fully planning on building him one at some point in time.



I've built decks for other people a few times over the years. They all too often don't see the kind of use that I'm hoping they will. You hope your efforts will bring them into the format, but it doesn't always work that way. Still, this is my brother in law. He's a great guy and I felt like I promised I'd build him an EDH deck. He probably doesn't even remember at this point in time, but I do and I don't like to fail to follow through on something like this.



Fast forward to the present day.

I still haven't built him that deck.

He also hasn't mentioned it, but I haven't forgotten and now I have a Grenzo, Havoc Raiser looking for a home. I could probably shove Grenzo into a deck or more likely into a binder, but I could also buckle down and build a deck around him for my brother in law.



Grenzo is hilarious. When you do combat damage to someone, you get goad their creatures, which means you force them to attack someone else on their next turn. It's the kind of political shenanigans that I think my brother-in-law might just find fun.



We're heading down in a week and again are planning to stop at game stores along the way. We are also planning to play EDH at The Portal if they still run an EDH night on the Monday night that we'll be in the area. For anyone reading this that might want to join us, that's April 17th.



I may not finish building Grenzo until the night we arrive in PA, but let's look at how I would go about making a deck around him.





Building Grenzo



This isn't going to be a top-tier deck. This is Grenzo, Havoc Raiser.

As a side note, they really should have named him Grenzo, Havoc Wreaker. It's far more fun to wreak havoc than it is to raise it, but I guess they weren't in the mood to challenge their player's language skills when they printed Grenzo.

We're going to focus on how to maximize the amount of goading we'll be able to do in the hopes that raising a little havoc is both entertaining and can put us in the position to maybe steal a game or two once the dust settles and there are only two players left. At that point goading is useless but his other ability might help us out.





Menace & Intimidate



We are going to load up with creatures that can get damage through. In red that means Menace and Intimidate. It has to be combat damage, so that limits our options, but we can load up on little guys with those keywords and add in whatever else we can find that will get the job done. Duct Crawler, Goblin Balloon Brigade, Dragon Whelp, Boggart Brute, Krenko's Enforcer and the like will fill out our army, but there will be all-stars as well.

Adding in Kari Zev and Pia Nalaar provide for alternative commanders to use with the deck. We'll have lots of little guys with menace and intimidate, and Pyreheart Wolf will give Menace to the whole team. Goblin Tunneler can help get someone through even if our opponent has gone wide. Goblin Battle Jester, well... he's just awesome, and we expect to be casting plenty of red spells with this deck.





Combat Tricks



Spells and creatures that can keep opponents' creatures from being able to block will be very helpful. It's OK if it targets only one creature because sometimes that will be enough to make our Menace guys get through.

We can add in some pump as well, but the thrust of this deck is going to be around our commander's abilities. If we can get our opponents to have to swing in on someone else, they will be open to attacks from us and from other players, so maximizing the hits we can get through is important.

It's actually OK that our guys are mostly little - that may help us from appearing as a major threat at the table. We find the major threat, make them attack someone else, and try to get the table to gang up on that player instead of on us. We also use goad to isolate combo pieces and key creatures that opponents will never block or attack with and force them to put those guys in harm's way.





Ramp and Firebreathing



We're going to go with artifact ramp because we're in red but may throw in a Mana Geyser and possibly even Seething Song to help get a bump in the amount of mana we have available. We'll run some creatures like Dragons and Ogre Menial that have the ability to turn mana into damage for those times when someone is low on life and we want to get a kill when our board isn't presenting as being that dangerous.

I still need to line up a Seething Song and Extraplanar Lens for the deck, but on our trip down to PA we'll be hitting stores and picking up cards, so I am optimistic that we'll get there. It should go without saying that we'll have basic artifact ramp like Sol Ring, Ruby Medallion, Fire Pendant, and even Forsythian Totem so we're not behind all the players in colors that lend themselves to ramping more easily.



Goodstuff



I've got a Blood Moon that I pulled out of my Niv Mizzet deck to throw into this mix. It's hard not to argue that Blood Moon should go in every mono-red deck you build if you have the means to get one. I happened to have two and it'll make this gift deck a much nicer gift, so it's in along with a number of other cards that will round out the top of our mana curve..



I don't want this deck to only have small cards - a few big splashy cards with big impacts on the board will help it be fun and not feel like it's always overwhelmed by decks with big creatures.





Removal & Draw



This deck is far from complete, but we'll have to find some removal and draw to round it out. Goading an opponent's creature can function as a form of removal in the right circumstances, but may just result in the player with the worst boardstate getting beat up on a little faster than normal. I'm currently thinking that a slot of burn spells will have to go in to serve as removal, and I'll probably throw in a bit of artifact destruction as well. As for draw, I'm not sure yet how I'm going to tackle that problem in red, but I'll probably lean on my son, who is a fantastic deckbuilder, for suggestions.





Coming soon to a Portal near you!



So we'll be heading down to Pennsylvania soon. If all goes well, on April 17th we'll be looking for folks to play some EDH with. If you're a reader, I'd love to have the chance to lose (or maybe even win) a game of EDH against you. Hopefully my brother in law will be able to join us with his shiny new Grenzo deck.