Actually your statement is very helpful to me for deck building as for the longest time (mainly because I started after dual lands) i've avoided fancy lands like the plague they are, but it sounds like at least in the scars expansion they are both easy to get and interesting. So it sounds like I should make an effort to replace my basic lands with as many double/triple use lands as possible?
When you say "double/triple use lands" do you mean lands that produce multiple colors or lands with effects besides producing mana?
Either way, yes you should get good lands at any opportunity you have. A good mana base makes a huge difference to a deck's effectiveness. Also, getting lands that do something other than produce mana is an excellent idea as well. If you can put an effect on a land that you would use on a spell, you've essentially added a card slot to your deck and increased the odds of having something relevant at any given time.
Also the mythic rares, I mentioned them earlier as well, and in essence its WotC making sure that the 4 or 5 more powerful cards they are print are immediately noticed by giving them a different "color" of rarity. It was always the case that you would buy a lot of booster packs and not care about 3/4 of the rares in them but there were four or five or six of those things that you really liked seeing come out. Wizards just made it official.
Around when mythics came out someone did the math and determined that mythics at their current distribution do lead to fewer copies per card in circulation than the prior system which can and does drive up prices, esp in expansions (vs core sets) since they see a shorter print run. Jace is a good example of this in action. If you compare his prices to cards like Jitte or Tarmogoyf which were similarly dominant, he was (and still is) orders of magnitude more expensive.
Also, there are crap mythics as much as crap rares and not every chase card is mythic. In fact, one of the primary justifications for mythics when they were first released was that they would specifically not be "chase cards" but rather big splashy effects that were cool and iconic but not 4 ofs in competitive decks. This promise (which was couched in ambiguous language but was absolutely a big part of why there was relatively little backlash over the introduction of mythics) was kept for exactly one block before they went ahead and started printing mythic chase rares.
Working on a few Commander decks (I almost exclusively play commander nowadays, since it's more of a creative exercise than a competitive event), and I need some input.
Yeah, I play commander (though I usually call it EDH) when I play at all (which isn't often these days but that's a function of money as much as anything else. D&D using the SRD and homebrew is lots cheaper than MTG.) I've always prefered multiplayer and commander is a multiplayer format with a wide support base. If I do run into people who play non commander multiplayer, a couple of my decks work well enough if you shuffle the commander in and/or leave it out.
Deck 1
Karador is the commander of the first deck, and it's based around modular creatures and the manipulation of +1/+1 counters. The commander WAS going to be
Animar, but there is already an Animar player in the playgroup, and animar sucks at recovering from hate. There are also a few combos that only work with access to black.
Current tricks:•
Mikaeus the Unhallowed +
Ooze Flux + The creature base of the deck, since they are all either
Sunburst,
Clockwork, or
Modular creatures.
Result:1G: Put a X/X Ooze token into play, where X is the total amount of +1/+1 counters among all the above creatures you control. •
Mikaeus the Unhallowed +
Ooze Flux +
Core ProwlerResult:If an opponent swings without flying, I get a free proliferate.On the subject of proliferate: I really wish I could have had blue in the deck (Animar T-T) for
Inexorable Tide, but having access to black was too important, as without black or Karador's graveyard ability, a wrath or two would shut the deck down.
• Planeswalkers+Proliferate/doubling season=Pretty obvious here. Loyalty Counters are effected, so I can play planeswalkers and immediately pop them.
Are you only using artifact counter creatures? If so, unless you're tied to that plan for thematic reasons, there's quite a few other counter producing/counter using cards you might want to look at.
Forgotten Ancient seems like an auto include in this deck. Generate counters when anyone plays a spell, then move them around as you like.
Fertilid is decent, if pricy, mana ramp by itself but in a deck that does counter farming it can turn into a mana explosion that vomits all your land onto the field.
Spike Weaver is an older card that uses counters and can effectively prevent you from losing to combat damage ever if you have a way to put counters on it/ recur it.
Persist is Undying in reverse and can open up some new combo options.
Cauldron of Souls could be fun with creatures that come into play with counters. Since plus and minus counters cancel each other out, you can use CoS every turn on the same creature and it'll keep coming back, just with one fewer counter than normal (this is potentially decent with things like fertilid.)
Not sure how much, if any, of that is news to you but that's what came to mind looking at that deck sketch. Was there something specific you were looking for imput on?
Deck 2
Karona, False God leads this tribal
Allies deck. Very vulnerable to hate, but it's steadily coming together.
•Allies+
Volrath's Laboratory=Hand-independent ally triggers.
•Mirrorweave+Kazuul Warlord: Everything is Kazuul Warlord, and all my warlords trigger on each other when I play an ally.
This seems fun. I've tried allies a bit in casual but never seen them in commander. Will probably be a difficult deck to make work but ever so amusing when it does. The Mirrorweave trick looks fun, though
Turntimber Ranger or
Hagra Diabolist might be better targets than the Warlord.
Are you using Changelings at all? A few of them (
Taurean Mauler,
Mirror Entity,
Chameleon Colossus) are decent cards in their own right and they'll trigger your allies.
Patriarch's Bidding will help a bit with opponent's wraths.
Twilight's Call is similar but helps your opponents more. Still might be worth it.
Cauldron of Souls is an alternative form of wrath protection and reusable due to the counter interaction I mentioned above. Because of the way the allies' abilities work you'll lose anything with 1 toughness but you'll still get its ETB trigger and its ability will trigger off all the others.
Riptide Replicator is a second copy of Volrath's Lab.