Hippo Genocide 04: Hippo on Hippo Action
By STEPHEN aka Astray Penguin
Welcome to Hippo Genocide : Hippo on Hippo action. After a couple of weeks rest I'm finally writing again. I've not been playing much Magic but the games I have been playing have made me wonder a few things, one of which leads to this article.
When you play EDH you're not in a vacuum, many people think playing 10 bonus turn effects is a great idea, or (formerly) putting Emrakul in your deck would be a great finisher. But your deck is not only your deck, it's also resources other players can access. How often do you consider cards you're playing if they're used against you? Can you deal with someone taking your extra turns or using Bribery to snag your finishers?
In a recent game I was playing a Wrexial, the Risen Deep deck on MODO and I was against a mono blue deck, he had taken an extra turn earlier and I figured his deck would be full of that stuff (which I will point out, I absolutely hate). So I'm running one of my favourite blue cards ever Knowledge Exploitation and target him with it, hit another copy off his deck and then tag a Time stretch. In total this gives me 6 turns just from his deck alone and bashing with Wrexial (not including other creatures I was playing who were also stealing stuff from people's decks). After the game the mono Blue player made a snarky comment about me “playing his deck”. Well yes I did play his deck, I locked the game up using his extra turn cards, Lightning Greaves and my general. I couldn't of done any of that stuff without him deciding to put it in his deck. If he doesn't like people playing those cards then why is he playing them himself?
In EDH cards like Rite of Replication and Bribery get included in almost any blue deck that can play them. They win games because people love to play massive spells, spells that auto win the game or reset the game, but no one ever questions what it means to get hit in the face with their own stuff. Can you survive a massive Eldrazi hit or an opponent taking two extra turns? One thing I have found while playing Wrexial is that most people's decks can't handle the cards they play. The white board sweepers cripple their own decks just as much as they do everyone else. So maybe building decks which can't counter themselves is the next step in the EDH evolution. Token decks full of board wipes and every card making 3-4 dudes is a perfect example of this. Where as a mono black deck which exploits the graveyard is completely open to having their own Relic of Progenitus shutting down their entire deck.
Obviously if you're running a narrow deck it maybe easy to avoid countering yourself (Maybe an Uril the Mistwalker deck that runs no enchantment removal or board sweepers), but if you're a graveyard based deck, zero graveyard hate would leave you wide open to countless problems as it is a commonly used resource. So when you're designing your deck maybe it's worth keeping this in mind, many pro Magic players ask themselves “What do I lose to on this board” and play around that, since this is EDH, you can do exactly the same thing, except with your deck.
As a footnote : Cairn Wanderer is awesome. Fear him and his insane abilities, him and Necrotic Ooze are top tier bros.
The Rasputin video is marked as private.
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