After the spectacular disaster that was Ao, you’d think I’d have learned my lesson.
Spoiler alert:
I had not.
So, to my simple mind, the only reason Day-Oh sucked so badly was that there were just too many stax pieces and not enough color variation. I mean, you need blue to counter other people’s things, right?
Right?
The remedy to all these problems was to find a multicolored commander that suited all my needs.
I approached this in a logical fashion.
I overheard a conversation, thank you PTSD, about this Abzan commander named Thalia and the Gitrog that was great for people learning to play cEDH.
And this is where my brain tuned out.
So I Googled it to see what Thalia and her pet frog were about, since from what little I heard, this was obviously the commander for me.
They checked every box I could imagine.
Multicolored? Check.
Known commander? Check.
Great for beginners? Check-ish.
And off to the races I went.
In typical Shi fashion, I began the same way I did with Day-Oh. I went to EDHREC.com and utilized their search function to pull a list of the cards most commonly played with Thalia and the Gitrog in a Bracket 5 deck.
Did I learn anything from the last time I did this?
No.
I, in all my infinite wisdom and ability to learn absolutely nothing from my previous mistakes, applied the same logic to this list that I did to Day-Oh. I had to understand, again using the word “understand” loosely, the mechanics of the card, and it had to be affordable. At the time, affordable meant under $50.
I mean, hey, if my precon was $70, I should easily be able to build a functional cEDH deck for under $100.
Yeah, I know.
I was, and apparently still am, idealistically dumb.
I sifted through the list of almost 300 cards and was pleased to see some cards I recognized: Delighted Halfling, Silence, Swords to Plowshares, Cauldron Familiar.
I also saw a lot that I had no idea what to do with.
To this day, Animate Dead fries my brain.
It’s way too wordy.
Honestly, WOTC, if you had to lower your font size to get all the text on the card, maybe change the way it is worded!
After narrowing my list down to approximately 125 cards, I went to my card guru, Sean, and started machine-firing questions at him to cut the last 25.
Poor Sean.
He patiently explained things in true, spectacular brother-in-law fashion, often multiple times because my brain has the retention power of a tire with a nine-inch spike in it.
One of the first things he did was pop my budget bubble, reminding me that good cards are expensive for a reason.
He also advised me to proxy before I bought anything because they were obviously “expensive.”
With this newfound advice, I took my deck to the shop for its launch.
And it went swimmingly….
BAD!
In my efforts to achieve maximum cheapness, I used 15–20 basics, no shock lands, no fetch lands other than Exotic Orchard and Evolving Wilds, and any dual mana land I had entered the battlefield tapped.
So turn two, Dog-Thras, and two or three mana sources later, my dumb ass had two lands, and one of them was tapped.
Not exactly the most ideal situation when playing a four-mana commander.
After a few unsurprising losses and one frustrated stax stalemate, my friends started giving me tips to improve my gameplay.
By tips, I mean one huge tip.
The one thing I needed to address before I tried to play another game.
Fix my damn mana base!
I removed a bunch of the tap-and-do-nothing lands and added in a batch of fetch lands and shock lands.
I swallowed my convictions and added a Bayou, a Scrubland, and a Savannah.
But I stood my ground on the Ancient Tomb, the Gaea’s Cradle, and all of the zero-mana dorks.
I am, after all, a woman of integrity!
Yes, I know integrity doesn’t pay the bills or win the cEDH match.
Who knew switching out one mana-producing agent for another mana-producing agent would make my deck infinitely better?
Not good enough to win steadily, but I was able to do more with my little pieces of recycled trees.
Once I had the mana production figured out, it brought another glaring issue into the light of day.
I had one easily interactable wincon: Witherbloom Apprentice and Chain of Smog.
And I was very inconsistent at trying to get it onto the board.
I preferred to rely on my stax pieces to slow the game down enough for me to just kill everyone with commander damage.
This was what my friend Zack referred to as:
“Stax without a plan.”
As much as I hate to admit it, he was kinda right.
But also partially wrong.
I had a plan.
It wasn’t a good plan, nor was it feasible 99% of the time, but it was a plan nonetheless.
In my mind, I had done what I set out to do.
I had a cEDH deck.
It wasn’t the worst deck.
That spot of horror is currently occupied by Day-Oh.
It also wasn’t a very good deck.
But it was mine, and it had my loyalty.
So much so that I treated it to a new-to-me Bayou, Scrubland, and Savannah at my very first TCG convention, SCG CON in Richmond, VA.
Take that principles and convictions!
And for three months, I lived in blissful ignorance.
I had Thalia and the Gitrog.
My casual decks.
My friends.
I didn’t need anything else.
Right?
Right?
What the hell was I thinking?
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