Primary Topic
This episode delves into the nuances of playing the color green in Magic: The Gathering, emphasizing strategy, key card selections, and gameplay tactics with expert guest Brian Kibler.
Episode Summary
Main Takeaways
- Green's primary strength lies in its ability to ramp mana efficiently, enabling faster and more impactful plays.
- The color supports powerful big creatures, making it ideal for aggressive strategies that pressure opponents.
- Flexibility in green's gameplay allows adaptation based on the board state and opponent's tactics.
- Green decks can exploit the synergy between creatures and the land, utilizing effects like trample to maximize damage.
- Understanding green's weaknesses, such as its traditional vulnerability to flying and control strategies, is crucial for refining gameplay and deck construction.
Episode Chapters
1: Introduction to Green
Overview: Kibler discusses his background with green decks and their evolution over time, highlighting key strategies that define the color in Magic. Brian Kibler: "I've been playing green since the dawn of time, known for pushing the boundaries of what green can do on the competitive scene."
2: Key Green Strategies
Overview: The discussion centers on specific green cards and strategies that enhance both mono and multi-color deck performances. Rachel Weeks: "Green is not just about big creatures; it’s about creating a synergy that overwhelms the opponent."
3: Green in Competitive Play
Overview: Insights into how green decks can be optimized for competitive play, including card choices and tactical planning. Brian Kibler: "My success with green has largely been about anticipating the meta and choosing cards that counter prevailing strategies."
4: Audience Q&A
Overview: Listeners ask questions about green deck building and how to handle common challenges faced by green players. Brian Kibler: "Adjusting your deck to manage the meta and specific opponent strategies is key in tournaments."
Actionable Advice
- Master Mana Ramp: Focus on building decks that utilize green's mana ramp capabilities to outpace opponents.
- Balance Your Creatures: Ensure a good mix of creatures with various abilities to maintain flexibility in gameplay.
- Utilize Green's Strengths: Leverage the power of green's big creatures and trample effects to maximize battlefield impact.
- Adapt Strategies: Be ready to adapt your play style and deck composition based on the specific challenges of each match.
- Continuous Learning: Stay updated on the evolving meta and adjust your green strategies accordingly.
About This Episode
It’s not easy playing green – unless you’re two-time Pro Tour champion and Magic Hall of Famer Brian Kibler!
People
Brian Kibler
Guest Name(s):
Brian Kibler
Content Warnings:
None
Transcript
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Rachel Weeks
Hello everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Command Zone podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Weeks, and today we have a very special guest joining us. It's Brian Kibler. Hello, hello. Of commander at home fame and also the hall of Fame.
Brian Kibler
Any other fames that covers most of it? I guess those are the primary things today. If you read the title, you know what's going on. We're talking about Magic's biggest and lushest and stunt color. It's green.
Rachel Weeks
We're going to be discussing the strengths, the weaknesses, the strategies that you need to play green correctly and some of the staples that come with green and why they're staples. And of course, we had to have Brian come in and talk about green because nobody plays green better or longer. But before we get into it, if you want to pick up any of the cards that we're talking about today, go over to cardkingdom.com. Command card Kingdom has a huge selection of magic cards, green ones. You can get a ton of different versions of cards.
You can get them in different conditions. We're magic players. We're picky about the versions that we get. I know when I'm looking for a deck, I'm trying to find exactly this version of the card. I want it in exactly this condition.
And when you shop at a place that has a huge selection of cards. You can get as many of them in one place, and then they're going to ship them to you professionally. And you know that the cards that you ordered online are going to be the ones that show up on your doorstep. No more chasing envelopes through the mail and finding out, did that ever arrive or did I just not order it? You can do so.
You can pick up some sweet magic cards and you can support the show. Over@cardkingdom.com. Command. Once those cards are in your hand, you're gonna need to protect them. You gotta go pick up some sleeves, some deck boxes.
Over@ultrapro.com. Command. They have all of the officially licensed magic art. So if you're into magic cards, we assume you are. You're here, you can find ones that you like.
You can go on the Ultra Pro website and see if they just have the art. If you're really into a set like the most recent outlaws of Thunder Junction, there's a lot of cowboy core going on on Ultra Pro right now. They have these flash sales all the time. If you sign up for their newsletter, the whole website will be on sale for like 40% off all of a sudden. So if you're like me and you go on deck building binges, and you're like, I need four deck boxes and four sets of sleeves all at once, you can get them, and you can get them at a discount and know that you're getting high quality accessories when you do it.
And of course, you can do so while supporting the show@ultrapro.com. Command the final way to support us is directly over@patreon.com. Command zone. Our patrons get a bunch of cool perks, like getting access to extra turns and game nights a day early without ads. You get to hang out with us in the discord to talk about magic or your deck or ask us questions, and you can come hang out with us.
Plus, we shout out one lucky patron every single podcast episode. And this one is dedicated to Cameron Knopp. You rock. Hopefully that's how you say that. Let's get into it.
We're talking about green today. We're going to be talking a lot about mono green, because I think the best way to get good at being a deck builder is to really understand each color individually, to understand the strengths of it, the weaknesses of it, so you can shore it up with other cards or when you're building like a monocolor deck, like I really like to do. Like you really like to do, you know, exactly what to be worried about and how to play to sort of patch up some of those things. So we're gonna be talking about green. We're gonna be spelling out a lot of the strengths, the weaknesses, the strategies.
And we brought in Brian to talk about it. And I wanna take a moment to explain your history with Green. Cause you've been a green player for a long time. Yeah, yeah. I've been playing green since the dawn of time, and I'm sort of most known as a sort of green player because of my success on the Magic Pro tour with Greendex, and specifically even my success on the pro tour with Greendex before most people thought they were good.
Brian Kibler
Most notably, my first pro tour top eight was in Chicago in the year 2000, which is when I got the nickname the Dragon Master for putting Armadillo cloak on Rith the Awakener and beating Jon Finkels v Malshow. Yeah. Everybody thinks of you as a dragon player, but green is always there. Yeah, yeah. But I've actually even been told that my deck from that pro tour was something that magic R and D looked at and were like, we want more decks like this to be good, because so many people, when they come into magic, they look at big creatures, like back in Alpha Shivan dragon or Craw worm or whatever, and they want to play those creatures.
But for so long, the spells in magic were better than the creatures. It was just so much easier to kill creatures, creatures than it was to play them and actually win with them. So most good decks were not green decks, because green was mostly good at creatures, and creatures were bad. Right, but finding the ways to make creatures good by ramping out to your big creatures and then armageddoning all your opponents lands away while you had mana creatures, that was pretty good. It worked for me.
Don't try that in commander. Your friends won't like you, but they'll be dead. Yes. Priorities.
But we saw over the years, creatures got a lot better, right? And you started seeing things with end of the battlefield triggers, like Primeval Titan, that won me my second protour. Or things with Ward, like Voga Scar. Commander player. There's all kinds of just very powerful things that are associated with creatures nowadays that didn't exist back then.
And one of the reasons why creatures, and specifically green creatures, have become much more powerful and much more prominent, both in competitive 1 volt one play as well as in Commander. Yeah, the green. It was very sorcery speed. It was very like, if you react, I'm gonna have trouble. And they've definitely come a long way to shore up some of those weaknesses before we move on.
Rachel Weeks
Why green? Why do you like playing green? So I have always enjoyed flexibility in my sort of playstyle. I'm sort of iconically a mid range player, and mid range as like a concept or an archetype generally means that you take different positions based on the different matchups that you're in. So this is mostly a one v one sort of thing, but it can apply to commander as well.
Brian Kibler
But a mid range deck against a more aggressive deck will frequently have well statted creatures that it can block with. It'll have some removal spells to help it stay in the game and then will eventually go a little bit bigger than the aggressive deck and be able to win with that. Against more controlling deck, you can use your well statted creatures to be aggressive. My favorite card in all of magic is Knight of the reliquary, and it's because of that kind of flexibility and modality. Right.
Knight of the reliquary gives you the ability to play a really well studded creature early in the game if you're using fetch lands to play it, and you have creatures in your graveyard, or lands in your graveyard, not creatures, but also has all these interesting choice points of how you build your deck and how you sort of play from the point that it comes down. And again, it's against aggressive decks. Great blocker, because it can be huge early on in the game, but it can also just both give you sort of the utility of finding value against control decks if you need to, or just smash them in the face with a giant monster. Sweet. That's fun, too.
Rachel Weeks
All right, we're gonna start with what Green is good at. And I know a lot of people are screaming at their camera. They're just like, Green's good at everything. It's not exactly true. Green's good at a lot of things, and a lot of them are sort of high priorities in commander, I think.
And none of those is more so than just rampant fixing. Not only is green really good at accelerating you into the late game faster, it's also good at supporting these three color decks that commander players really like playing. I would say some of the most popular commanders of all time are three color green decks or four color green decks or five color green decks, depending. So green can do so in a ton of different ways, which is the really interesting thing. Green has land ramp, which it's most famous for its rampant growth and nature's lore.
And farseek. It also has single, like, individual lands that create more mana than a normal land would. Like. Castle Garenbrigg is a nice cheap one, but guy's cradle is the one it's most famous for, or, like, growing writes of it. Lamarck gives you a guy's cradle at home, or guy's cradle in a home, starts at an enchantment and pops out.
So those kind of lands reward you for playing more creatures, playing more like green wants you to. There's also mana dorks, which are your favorite. The land where elves, the birds of paradise, but also bigger mana dorks, like circle of dreams druid, which taps for the number of creatures you control, or heart of the wilds, which gives you mana for the power that you have on the board. It can also turn any old creature into mana dorks using cryptolithrites and the variations thereof, which just give any creature the ability to tap and add mana. And then finally, it has enchantments that give you more mana, like wild growth and utopia sprawl, which go on your lands and make lands tap for additional mana.
Even carpet of flowers kind of goes in that category, although they don't really print carpet of flowers as much anymore, I guess. And finally, mana doublers, which are usually more expensive and give you twice as much mana. Or three times for two or three. Times, I was gonna say, or even more. So that's, like, a huge amount of choices for, like, how you're accelerating your game from your basic one land per turn to way more mana than you should have on turn five.
So I guess my big question before we move out of this section is how do you choose what ramp to put into your green decks? Because they're so different. Yeah. And I think it really depends on the general direction that the deck takes. Right.
Brian Kibler
Like, for instance, my mowu deck or my samut vizier of. I don't remember the specific name. Vizier of fast. Vizier fast. Yes.
Vizier of everything has haste. It's the gruul one, the uncommon one. Those are both decks that want to have a bunch of creatures because they're putting counters on things or have haste enablers, which enable you to attack with your mana creatures with simut and draw cards. So those generally of my decks lean on playing specifically mana creatures. I have other green decks that, for instance, my gear red deck, which isn't mono green, it's three colors.
But that will play basically artifact stuff like talismans and signets, as well as land ramp, because the deck plays its own sweeper type effects and wants to be more resilient against sweeper type effects because of the nature of the strategy. It can be because it's able to rebuild if it gets swept, because the commander naturally brings another creature along with it and kind of rebuilds quickly in that sense. Whereas the others are like, okay, well, if you wrath me, you wrath me. I've already committed four cards to the board. Fundamentally, my strategy about playing out creatures and making those creatures bigger, or the smooth deck is just, well, I have haste, so wrath me.
Okay, just play them again. Attack you? Yeah, I'm drawing cards the whole time. In those sort of structures. It's like the creature band is great.
Whereas if I'm trying to make my deck more resilient against sweeper effects, then I'm going to lean more on the land ramp and non creature sources of mana acceleration. The one that we didn't really talk about is the enchantments, the auras. These are obviously really, really powerful and enchantment dedicated strategies, these auras. I also really like the utopia sprawl and the wild growth in green heavy decks with three mana commanders that you're trying to get out on turn two. Cause it gives you just a slightly better curve.
Rachel Weeks
But they're also better when you're not super creature focused. Cause otherwise I would just include a lana where elves to get it out. I do think that wild growth and utopia sprawl are probably underplayed because people really kind of think about green as being about mana creatures, and they don't really consider like, well, actually, this is like a mana creature that doesn't die to a sweeper, right. Wild growth utopia sprawl, for instance, in my moab, because yes, it cares about that, but it also wants to have a little bit more resilience to sweepers. And these are really efficient.
Brian Kibler
They cost one. They're so accelerate you. And utopia sprawl specifically, you have to be very heavy green. Obviously a mono green deck is that, and you do have to keep in consideration, it reduces the number of utility type lands that you might be able to play and some other decks that might not be mono green. It's so good, right?
Rachel Weeks
They're so powerful. I mean, I do think that these are, in certain decks, should be played more than rampant growth, and should be played if you're not using some of that land ramp to fix your mana. If you're not using rampant growth to find a third color or a fourth color, then slamming one of these is just going to give you more mana more efficiently. And it comes in untapped, if you have another land, you can put it on, which is really, really powerful. Mana doublers are sort of reserved for those decks that are really trying to generate as much mana as possible, which is certainly a green strategy.
Those usually are paired with mana sinks, like activated abilities or just a huge amount of card advantage. If you're drawing, like, the deck's idea is to draw a ton, a ton of cards and commit big things to the board, then that's where you can kind of get into the mana doubler category. But they're not necessarily like a slam in every green deck that needs mana. Yeah, I think the opposite. I think that those big things tend to be overplayed, whereas the cheap things are underplayed.
Brian Kibler
Right? Yeah. Cause people love the idea of, oh, this can get me 30 mana. It's like, what are you gonna do with 30 mana? Right?
Rachel Weeks
30 mana. And I think this is a good time to mention just how important your commander fundamentally is to how it interacts with these sort of things. Right. Because if your commander has a mana sync, then mana doublers might be great. Because your commander is the card that has the most interaction with every other card in your deck.
Brian Kibler
It is the card that you will see the most in every game. Cause, well, it's right there in the command zone waiting for you to play it. And again, if it dies, whereas every other card in your deck, it's like you have to draw it, and if it goes away, it goes away. Right? Yeah.
Rachel Weeks
My Feldergrift deck has mana sinks three of them. So that's where I run my mana doublers. But if your commander cares about creatures like Samet does, then you probably lean on creature ramp. If your commander cares about, then you probably lean on land ramp or the land section we're going to talk about a little bit later. Any questions that you have about what to do can usually be answered by your commander.
Probably the most iconic category of green is the big boys, those big old creatures. Green has the best statted creatures, just naturally. There's four mana, six sixes. There's five mana 1010s. Green gets power and toughness for very cheap, more efficiently than other colors would.
But good stats don't mean a ton in commander. A five mana 1010 is like a gigantosaurus is just not gonna do a whole lot unless you have a deck specifically built around either devotion or power. Cause it's just not a great attacker. And I think that's for anyone who might have a background more in the one v one formats who's watching this? Cause I'm here.
Brian Kibler
It is a very steep difference or sharp difference between commander and something like standard or modern or whatever, where just having a powerful creature that's cheap can be good. A powerful, cheap creature in commander is just not very good. Even, like you said, a gigantosaurus. Five mana, tenten. Okay, say you get that down on turn three.
Yes. You have to hit a commander player four times before they die. And then there's three more opponents, right? Just to contextualize why that's the case, why it's so different. I remember when Yargle and Moltani came out and people were like, oh, that's so many steps.
Rachel Weeks
18 six. It's not enough. Even 18 power over five beta, not enough. So it's very, very important that the creatures that you do play do more than just offer you stats, right? So the kind of big, chunky creatures that you can play in commander, the ones that you'll see the most are ones with a bunch of extra utility, right?
So, like Elder Gargoroth, it's hard to get more extra utility than a five mana six six. Trample, vigilance reach that makes you creatures, draws you cards, and also gains you life for five mana. There's a lot. That's the kind of, like, if you're gonna play just a well attacking, beefy creature, it needs to hit that quality of abilities, or it just doesn't really make the cut. I will say that if Elder Garreth did not have draw card as one of its three abilities, it probably wouldn't take a while.
Brian Kibler
Probably wouldn't. If it was just the other two. Options, you probably wouldn't play that gain for life. And it's like, okay, mega creature, but I have to attack with it.
Rachel Weeks
Another thing that's just like, I was trying to think of an iconically big creature, and one you mentioned was Mana Gorge or Hydra, which is whenever a player. Player cast a spell, you put a one plus encounter on it, which in commander, there's a lot of players. A lot of players gets really big, really fast. I was in a game recently with a man of Gorge or Hydra. They got up to, like 30, 30, and you could give it double strike.
And we were like, you don't have to keep putting counters on this. We get it. It's really. It's really, really big. But, like, that's the kind of the big thing about Mana Gorge or Hydra, isn't that it's just big.
It's that it also has trample because Trump blocking in commander is so much easier when you're used to making a ton of just crap is part of most strategies in commander right now is just making a lot of stuff. Yeah, there's lots of just, like, mana creatures or tokens or whatever that people have almost incidentally, even if they're not necessarily a core part of their strategy. So having trample on your big thing can be really, really important for it to actually be able to impact the game in any meaningful way. Another big, just well statted creature that I think is really powerful for Green was Coughla. Kogla is a six man, a seven six.
When he enters, he fights something, and then when he attacks, you can blow up an artifact or enchantment, and you can give him indestructible and reuse etbs on eternal witnesses and stuff. Coughla is. I still think Cougla's undervalued and committed. Cogla's fantastic. It's creature removal on a giant thing.
Brian Kibler
And then also artifact removal that also. Blows up other stuff. And I still feel like cocoa doesn't get played that much. Cause he's kind of expensive, but he has so much utility built into him that he's like, being a big creature is almost incidental. Yeah.
Rachel Weeks
So I wanted to. Before we move on, I want to ask what you look for in a green creature, especially when you want power out of it. We want specifically power as in power. The stat. Like a big.
What do you want out of a big creature? Like a high mana value creature? It's gotta do most of the time, it needs to do something if it's expensive, even if it's killed. Right? I mean, we're talking about the primeval titans of the world.
Brian Kibler
Even though primeval titans banned, you want something that impacts the board, right? If I'm gonna spend a lot of mana on this, it needs to do something before I get to my next turn. Right. And that's one of the reasons that even something like elder Gargoroth is like. Yeah.
Cause if someone just kills this and it's not even necessarily someone specifically trying to kill your things in commander, someone could be like, using a sweeper because someone else is scary. Right. So that's one of the things that makes it so important for your creatures to either have haste naturally or to have some sort of enter the battlefield trigger that does something very powerful. And then, of course, there's the things that are just so powerful that it's like, okay, well, this is worth it, right? Like an avenger of Zendikar.
Rachel Weeks
Or something. That's like huge army in a can, right? Yeah, I mean, we'll talk about it in a second. But like an old nawbone, it doesn't do anything, Nessie. You have to have other things.
But it does something right away if you have that thing. Exactly. Yeah. All right. Green doesn't always just go tall.
It doesn't always have just big things. It also goes wide. Remember, green is the color if you. Want to, a color that can do both. It's a color of life.
Right? So green is about just making accruing value, and it's an additive strategy. So tokens make a ton of sense here. And I think it's, you can't really make more tokens than scoots warm. I don't think they're like, white's the token color.
Brian Kibler
I'm like, yeah, well, I made a thousand scoot swarms with a precon recently. So you talk about going above and beyond. I can't believe they made scootswarm a digital card. It's been breaking the arena since it was printed. Oh, yeah.
Rachel Weeks
Scootswarm. Avenger of Zendikar tender shoot Dryad, which makes one per turn. Even rampaging bailoss still sees a lot of play in token decks. And all of these make tokens basically right away. Like tendershoot Dryad on the very next turn.
Avenger of Xanderkar on ETB Scootsworm. You really don't play until you can start copying it at least once. That turn and rampaging bail us cast, follow it up, you get minimum of two things again, getting that value right away. And I think creature tokens make a ton of sense in green intuitively. But magic has also given green the power to make non creature tokens as well.
With old Nabon, Olivia's favorite card. Yeah, she's screaming at home. Old Nabon makes treasure tokens equal the amount of damage you've dealt with creatures this turn. That's absurd. And then even stuff like tireless tracker or tireless provisioner makes treasure tokens, food tokens, clue tokens.
You're making a lot of stuff. Again, green additive. But it's interesting cause this adds sort of a different complexity to what green is doing these days. Cause it's not just making creatures and making them big and attacking, it's also making a ton of other stuff and getting value out of that as well. Just sacking permanents generally.
Brian Kibler
Yeah, it just gets a lot of stuff. And once you have all that stuff, you gotta make it big. You can have 60 scoots worms. And that's not necessarily a lethal threat in commander, it's true. Which is what a world we live in.
Rachel Weeks
Absurd. But if you combine those board states, the token board states, or even the big creatures we were talking about before often need a little help to deal 120 damage. And that's where these overruns come in. This is overwhelming stampede crater Hoof Nyssa ascended animist is one that I really think is still underplayed because people just don't naturally like planeswalkers. But you know, that kind of overrun is the stuff that usually closes out the game for green.
But there's also anthem effects like unnatural growth or even zoopandrel hunger dominus that just make your creatures bigger but don't necessarily give it the trample. That is so key for most overrun effects that are popular in commander. Yeah, even just green creature decks that I play like Garruk's uprising, right? It doesn't buff your stuff, but it's kind of a combination of like, well, this enables my big things because it gives them trample and it's also a card effect for being able to keep playing big things. Is trample the most important keyword in green?
Brian Kibler
I think so. Because Green doesn't have much in the way of flyers, doesn't have unblockable creatures. It has big stuff. And like we mentioned, there's lots of little things just waiting around a chump block when you send your gigantic monster at them. So trample is super, super important for ensuring that your creatures actually have to do something.
And don't just run into a one one human token and then be like, all right, I guess I'm done here. Yeah. And then you're like, you lost your one one. But I my 99 didn't do anything. It's like you incidentally, got this off of some effect and I spent a bunch of mana and cards and everything to make my creature gigantic.
And it's 80. 80 and. Okay, you chuck blocked your turn. Yeah. Green has these really powerful anthem effects like Beastmaster ascension that just pumps everything plus five, plus five in unnatural growth.
Rachel Weeks
But if you don't have enough creatures to go around all of the just gak on the board, it's not gonna do enough for you if you don't have that evasion. So I think that's really, really interesting. In green, you can have all the power on the board, but you need another piece.
We didn't mention it. But also encounters is a great way to buff up your creatures. It's like an anthem that sticks around. Mowoo is one of my favorite decks that I have. Mono green.
Brian Kibler
Just make my creatures absolutely gigantic. So big. Yes. I feel like all of your plus one counters decks make more plus one counters than I've ever seen a deck make. I mean, right at this point, we're just looking to sell our dice.
Rachel Weeks
It's more of a marketing scam. But no, I've definitely. There are a couple of things in life that I wish there was a real life achievement counter for. One of them is how many landowar elves I've played on turn one in my life. I would love to know.
Brian Kibler
It's got to be six digits or something. At this point, the other is biggest creature, right? Cause like, my mow deck, the commander is Mowoo, and Mowoo gets really big. And Mow doesn't need to be bigger than 21 or whatever, because it's a commander, it'll kill people. That's not.
I keep track. It's like 600. Sure, we'll do better. We'll do better. You want like a green Spotify wrap at the end of the.
Rachel Weeks
It's such a green mindset to be. Like, how big can you be? Like, I know that you're dead to this, but how dead? I mean, there is the point where we're like, okay, this is arbitrarily large and I don't want to do the math anymore. Right.
Brian Kibler
That happens a lot. I do think that, like, as a white player, I'm very jealous of green players where you just get to slam a crater hoof and be like, you're definitely dead. There's no way you're not. I have 400 damage on board where I'm like, if I only had one. More point, I could kill someone.
I will say that, like playing, you know, like I said, I love playing mid range decks in like one v one formats. And those are about like precision and figuring out exact races and things like that. Commander. It's funny to me as someone coming from a competitive background for a very long time, that commander's most popular casual format, because it's also just the hardest, because there's the most going on at any given time. There's three other players.
They all have a bunch of unique cards and you have to figure everything out. And that's why at some point my brain just shuts down and it's like, okay, I'm just going to make sure it's big enough because it's way too big, right? These numbers are off the chart and you're definitely all dead. And then sometimes you do that and you're like, oh, I was one off. Shooting on the math.
Rachel Weeks
Having those big green counter adders, I think is a big part of this. Vigor always adds a huge amount of counters. Defiler of vigor. Vigor. I guess plus one counters are just.
Brian Kibler
The word means in magic. But even little things like one I really like lately is the biophagus. It's a little mana dork that when you cast a creature with it, it gets a one plus one counter. That's two things that you want, right? That's the counter and it's the ramp.
Rachel Weeks
On a creature, it gives you a ton of value all in one box. And I think that leads into the next question, which is a really difficult balance in making a green deck because you need all these creatures, and then you also need all these ways to break the parity on all of these creatures. So ways to give trample or ways to give overruns. And most of those cards don't do anything if you don't have the creatures. So how do you balance when you're deck building those two kinds of effects?
Brian Kibler
Very carefully. Yeah. Some of it really depends very specifically on the commander you're playing. Right. Because I actually had someone ask me recently, it was like, oh, with my samwise deck, it's like, oh, I want to try playing all these token doubler type things.
And do you think that's reasonable if I want to try and make tons of food or whatever? And it's like, well, specifically because the commander interacts with this, you can kind of go almost as all in as you want, because, again, the most common card you see interacts with those cards. Always going to be doing something bigger. Commander. So if you have, for instance, Mowoo, more things that generate counters and double counters, obviously Mowoo is in kind of a weird spot because the probably better commander for that deck is Voron Klek's monstrous raider.
But I want to kill people with a giant dog. Way more fun having Voron kleks as your commander. You just kind of have a token doubler built in. So any card that giving pulse and pulse encounters is like, this is really, really powerful. Right, right.
Rachel Weeks
Mow will also drop doubles counter, so. Only on himself and, you know, but, yeah, you kind of need more pieces to make it work at that point. Mow is a payoff for counters, so you know that you can include just tons of counter effects because you always have a great target for it. People don't like leaving Moa in play at. That's true.
Brian Kibler
When he gets to be 500 power or whatever, they're like, not this time. Nope. One of my favorite moments of the MoA deck was, is it like stalking Leonin is like the. You secretly choose a creature, and I literally had to secretly. I had a 500 power mou.
Someone played a stalking leonin. Someone else copied the stocking Leonin. I'm like, you don't need to write anything down. We all know. We know.
We all know what you secretly chose. That's a real cat and dog situation, too. That's so cute. The cats are alike. I'm gonna secretly choose a creature, so if he attacks, I'm gonna absolutely annihilate the third player is like, okay, yeah, it's a really careful balance.
Rachel Weeks
I think it goes a lot in something that we were talking about earlier is just about having stuff that does both. Having creatures that also buff other creatures, having effects that make creatures that also provide a buff, or like Nyssa is also a removal spell. Defiler of Vigor is really nice because its ramp and its creatures and its a great threatening body. So if you can have stuff that does both, then it just makes your synergy so much more powerful. The fewer cards that you have that are only good in certain specifics situations.
Of course, we talked about counters. Green is good at counter synergy, taking advantage of those counters either by doubling them with a Voronclex monstrous raider or by adding additional ones, like hardened scales. Doubling season, also doubling anything that can take a one v one scaled card and make it too much is very powerful in green. Commander strategies. I think one of my favorite counter synergy wives is Kodama of the west tree.
This card's so good. This is actually a card that when Neandidhe came out, Olivia and I were opening boxes just to get Kadamas because I knew that I wanted it for Mow in another deck, and we just couldn't find them. And we're just like, come on, mythic. But, yeah, it kind of does it all because as you mentioned earlier, when you have these big creatures, you really want them to have trample and Kodama gives your modified creatures trample and Kodama also has the effect that when a modified creature deals combat damage to a player, you search for a basic and put it into play, which this effect is good. But also, if you have a bunch of modified creatures, you're ramping a ton.
Brian Kibler
And also, I think that the deck thinning portion of getting lands out of your deck is generally overstated in terms of importance, especially in commander, when there's a hundred card deck 35, 37 lanes. But when you're doing this, every time you hit someone with a creature and all your creatures have trample, you're gonna get most of your lands at your neck pretty fast. Right. This is such a good example of a creature that is good early. Like, it's great on turn three.
Rachel Weeks
When you have a modified creature, you can get some ramp early. It's also really great in the late game when you have all of these threats and you just need him to have trample. And it's a body that wears counters really well. Cause it naturally will have trample if it has counters on it and it has reach, and it's just three mana through three. It's so good in these kind of strategies that it's really hard to build a counter deck without that kind of card.
Another one that I think is really great is Rishkar Pima Renegade. It has a similar effect where it's like, it's great early. You put some counters on the creatures that you've put underneath. Like you said, they'd be probably running mana dorks. Like turn one, lanowar elves, turn two, rish kapima renegade.
Put two counters on it. Obviously that it doesn't change taps for mana twice. See? Put it on a. What's the one that cheats a land into play the sloth with reach.
Brian Kibler
Oh, arboreal grazer. Arboreal grazer. There you go. That's the combo I'm looking for.
Rachel Weeks
Yeah, but it just gives you that utility early. It gives you a little bit of extra mana, and then late, when your board is wide, you're like, all right, now I have a ton of extra mana to really push myself over the top.
There is one more form of ramping that we haven't gotten to yet because I think it deserves sort of a different category, which is just Green's affinity for lands in general. It has ways to play additional lands, like exploration or dry to the legion grove. It has effects like bird that cheat lands into play. It has landfall payoffs like Lotus Cobras, and the new bristly bill. Guy's so good.
He's so good. This is gonna come out after the pro tour that I am competing in. There's a very good chance I play bristly bill in the pro tour because, oh, boy, that card is very powerful. You should read him because I don't know how many people. Bristly Bill is a two cost.
Brian Kibler
Tutu is a plant druid nice landfall. Whenever a land enters a battlefield under your control, put a one plus one counter on target creature and green green three, double the number of plus one plus encounters on each creature you control. Talk about counter synergies. Yeah. So the last time I played in a pro tour was about a year ago, and I was playing a green white plus one plus one counter deck.
Basically, it was an ozilith bountiful brawler. I think it was a two drop that gets counters when other things get counters. It's green white, right? Green and white, yeah. It comes up with two counters.
And whenever another creature gets a counter, it also gets a counter the first time each turn. But, yeah, Bruce Lee, Bill, he's the whole package because he is a card that gives counters, that can carry the counters himself and then has a payoff for your things. Having counters with the doubling for five mana, you're like, what, I'm a creature to wear these? Yeah. And I mean, I think that this is a very good example of a card that kind of fulfills its own condition in a way that other cards don't.
I think the card is roaring earth is a similar card that I have in my mobo deck. That's an enchantment. Yeah. This is a two mana enchantment with just this landfall ability and an additional channel. I've never channeled it in my life.
Rachel Weeks
I don't think I really should. I channeled it unlimited once, but this. So one thing that even if Bruce Lee build didn't have the double text on him, I think this would be a better card than roaring earth because it can just put counters on itself. Right. Whereas if you have roaring earth on a bunch of lands, you're not really doing anything.
Yeah, you're still missing the third piece. Yeah. If you've bristly built a bunch of lands, your opponent is going to die in a couple turns. So not only is a, this is a very good card, but B, I think it's a very good example of how cards sort of being synergistic with themselves, as weird as it might sound, is actually pretty important for those cards being good in a lot of decks. Yeah.
Any card that answers its own question is gonna be really good. Cause counters are not good without creatures. Well, luckily I'm a creature. Well, these counters are not enough counters to win the game. Well, I can give you more counters.
Bristly Bill has everything you need. Evolution. Sage is also a great example of just landfall that works with other things. Green's good at proliferating all of those counters. And then finally, green is really good at tutoring for lands.
It's good at tutoring for creatures as well. But I think the land tutors are very popular in commander, especially the big ones like scape shift that get a ton of the lands you're looking for and get them all into play at the same time. Trigger these landfall abilities and give you exactly the lands you're looking for. Maybe the castle Garnbriggs and the guy's cradle stuff we were talking about earlier. And then stuff like crop rotation, which is very efficient tutor spell that can get you the powerful landscreen is known for, or interaction for the powerful lands across the table.
Brian Kibler
You can get your guys cradle or a wasteland for someone else's guy's cradle. There you go. Boom. That's the thing about tutors. This is a really interesting section.
Rachel Weeks
And I have it separate from the other ramp sections because I feel like it's not exactly that. Because it requires more of a deck building, not restriction, but consideration when you're building with the lands ramp package. Yeah. One of the interesting things is that when you're playing a deck with a bunch of mana ramp effects, whether it's land search in the form of a nature's loa or farseek, or it's manic creatures, you're going to cut down on the number of lands that you play based on the number of other cards that you have that effectively produce mana or find things that produce mana. These sort of cards, you actually wanna play more lands.
Brian Kibler
Cause if you have burgeoning or exploration or explore, you want to have more lands, take advantage of it. Cause if you just play exploration, you have one extra land to play, you just play it. Explore the draw card. If you play burgeoning and you have two extra lands, it's like, okay, well, you basically played unextra land, unless you're on extra land. So it's this weird space where you probably don't wanna go lower than 40 land in a deck that has an exploration or a burgeoning sort of effect.
Whereas others, I'm as low as 34 in some decks that have just a ton of mana creatures. It's interesting. Cause I think these cards, people are like, oh, they're green effects. They go with rampant growths and that kind of thing. But what they really go with in my head is just card advantage.
Rachel Weeks
If you're playing exploration and burgeoning dried of the Elysian grove, the best way to take advantage of those effects is to either be able to play cards out of your graveyard like Crucible of worlds, which is a form of card advantage or just a ton of card draw, which is why it really goes in simic strategies, because blue provides that card advantage, the unconditional card advantage. And obviously there's a lot of simic cards that work toward this strategy as well. But green on its own, actually has a tough time kind of supporting landfall strategies like this because that kind of card advantage isn't as explosive as you sort of need it to be to keep fueling a burgeoning like Azuza in the command zone deck. Mana Green Azuza decks need so much card advantage to take advantage of Azuza. And you end up needing to play things like horn of greed, right, which benefit your opponents too.
Brian Kibler
It benefits you more. But you just need to make sure that you're not just running out because you're like, okay, I played all these lands, now I have nothing, right? And running an exploration in a gruel deck, in a creature deck, that kind of thing, it doesn't do you as much good because what you want is not necessarily more lands, it's more creatures. It's funny, I actually have one deck that has both land of ralves and exploration in it, which normally do not. Go in a deck together.
Yeah, I have exploration in no other decks. And it was playing my Samut deck, the haste deck, that I realized, oh, I'm drawing a bunch of cards and I'm going to discard a lot because I'm just overdrawing my hand. It's also, I think, one of the only decks I have that has reliquary tower because I just end up hitting people with a bunch of haste creatures and drawing a ton of cards at once. But that deck really wants creatures to be able to mana creatures to be able to play out things quickly and has haste enablers take advantage of the smooth and such. Also a three drop.
Rachel Weeks
So they're great. But specifically, exploration is like, oh, I'm drawing a bunch of extra cards. It means I'm drawing more land so I can play more lands per turn. And that is the only deck of all of my decks that contains the card exploration. But it's the very specific thing, as you mentioned, that it draws a lot of cards, right?
So, yeah, and you're not running like exploration and burgeoning and Dryden group just playing exploration. And the exploration in that deck is taking advantage of the card advantage, not necessarily ramping. It is ramping, but it's more just making sure you're using all of the. Value you're getting, you don't want to let the cards you're drawing go to waste and you want to be able to play out more of them. So you want to be able to both play out those lands as well as just be able to play more things on future turns.
Brian Kibler
Cause you're playing more lands. Yeah. It's less about explosive ramp and more about actually taking advantage of all the extra cards you're drawing. Right. Yeah.
Rachel Weeks
And I think that's a really interesting thing that if you're playing a lot of green decks, take a look at your ramp packages very specifically and be like, am I mixing ramp and gross with llanowar elves with explorations? And what does your deck actually want? Does your commander actually want creatures? Does it want more lands on the battlefield? Am I drawing a ton of cards?
Because if you just want ramp and you're not necessarily interested in the fixing that land ramp provides, then probably you want landowar elves and elvish mystics. If you're drawing a ton of cards and you need to get cards out of your hand, then you look at the explorations and maybe the more of the landfall packages, the enchantment lands can sort of mix in there as well. It's a tough puzzle to figure out. It's also even worth if you play with a regular group. Right.
Brian Kibler
And your group, say your group tends to play a lot of sweeper effects, a lot of wrath effects. You probably don't want to play all mana creatures because once you get wrath, they're gone. Right. So there's interesting puzzles of both your own deck as well as the environment that you play in that kind of informs your decision for which of these cards you want to play. Yeah, be intentional about your ramp.
Rachel Weeks
Don't just throw a bunch of ramp cards in there because you need them. Kodama's reach and cultivator are an interesting question that we haven't really answered either. Cause those are more expensive and they give you card advantage and they give you fixing, but they don't necessarily give you more ramp. So there's another question in like how good is drawing that second lance? And there's also the question of, you know, does your deck have enough basics to play stuff like cultivate and Kadama's reach?
Brian Kibler
Because I had my ur dragon deck when I was first building my, er, Dragon deck, I had cultivate in Kadama's reach because I was like, oh, I'm a multi colored deck. Then I'm like, wait, I don't have enough room for basics for these to actually be any good, so I ended up taking them out very quickly. Yeah, there's a lot of questions to answer when you're talking about mana acceleration and finding out what is best for you. But the next thing that green is good at is protection, which goes very well, of course, with any strategy that just wants to keep a board intact to win the game. I think the most famous for commander is heroic intervention.
Rachel Weeks
Gives hexproof an indestructible. But Green's also good at just, like, static protection. Like, I always think of Seraph, the viper's fang, as your untapped creatures hex proof. So it's not gonna protect you against a board wipe, but it will keep your big, scary creatures like Mowoo safe before they go to combat, and then even in combat, if you keep Sereth untapped. Beyond that, Green has targeted protection for protecting one really important piece, like a snakeskin veil or a tamiyo.
Safekeeping usually gives hexproof and indestructible, sometimes just one or the other, depending on how many of these type effects that you want. The more important one piece is, the more important your commander is or something. The more of these you can feel comfortable running. But green creatures also have natural protection. I think green has the most iconically protected creature of all time.
Brian Kibler
Oh, yes. Thrun, the last troll. He's so safe, you will not touch him. Can't be countered, can regenerate, can't be targeted. He cannot be killed.
Rachel Weeks
But, yeah, like, green has ward and has hexproof and has, like, even I think of the werewolf they made in midnight hunt. That gives, like, it's hexproof, and then it flips over, and your whole board's hexproof. Oh, jeez. It gives counters. I can't think of the name of it.
Ava Brooke, caretaker. Yeah, like, those kind of cards are so green. Cause it's like, we're big, and you're not gonna touch us, so you better figure something out. Ideally, a board wipe. But protection is important, especially if you're like, if I just untap with this board, I can win.
So make sure that you have a plan for what happens. I mean, green is very much, as we talked about between ramp and creatures and buff. It's very much about building to things, right? And that's one of the things that it can kind of struggle with, too, is because you build to something, and then you have to say, go, and then your opponent kills your things. It's one of the reasons that something like, heroic intervention is so important.
Brian Kibler
Right? Like, heroic intervention might be the most played card across all of my decks because all of them are trying to build to something, and that's the best way to protect them. If you have heroic intervention in your hand, how often do you hold it up? It really depends on the stage of the game. Yeah, yeah.
Cause at a certain point, it's like, is this board worth protecting? Do I have ways to rebuild? And does it look like other people are in the market to clear the board? Right. So it's very often it's like, okay.
Rachel Weeks
Would I wipe the board if I was in that seat? Exactly. The next thing that green is good at is artifact and enchantment. Hate removal, punishment. Green do not like non creature magic, so it's got great removal.
Naturalize nature's claim, but also reclamation, sage and foundation breaker on creatures. I think see even more play in commander than something like naturalize. And then, of course, posseiju, who endures, is an absolutely absurd card that is also ingrained. I recently was at a game shop, and I was like, how many beseiju do you have? Because I want all of them.
Brian Kibler
The answer was, sadly, one no, but I got it. That card is just. If you have one, it's in a deck. Oh, yeah. There's no, like, I found an adawara in my binder and was like, what are you doing here?
Rachel Weeks
How did you get to this place? Are you too good for your home?
The next thing Greene's good at, like, mass removal of artifacts and enchantments. So bane of progress is a big answer, but something like pest infestation, I still think think is underplayed in commander. It's bananas. You can kill any number of artifacts and enchantments, and then you make twice that tokens on the board. So again, filling two parts of the equation, giving you a threatening board and answering things that you're afraid of.
Brian Kibler
And these different types of effects also give you options depending on what your own deck is doing. Like, something like bane of progress. Probably don't want to play on your own deck with a bunch of artifact mana, but pest infestation, even if you're playing an enchantress deck, right. It's like, hey, here's a great way to blow up all my opponent's stuff. And especially if you're playing a token deck, right, where you really care about the one one s that you're getting as well.
Rachel Weeks
Even a big mana deck. This can also be a mana sink. It can answer. It can fill a lot of roles in a green deck. You just have to know what kind of roles you need to fill.
Brian Kibler
It is also worth noting that is an up to x. You can spend as much as you want on that and make that many tokens. And you don't have to kill artifacts. Enchantments for all of them. Yeah.
Rachel Weeks
If x is like 15 and you put 31 mana into this thing, I'll. Kill your arcane signet, make ten one ones. More than that, you make 30. Right? It's twice x.
Brian Kibler
Yeah, well, I'm just saying. Oh, yeah. You weren't doing the math. Yeah, I wasn't doing the math. You're such a green player.
It's big enough. Okay. The other thing is green's good at, like, artifact enchantment, hate viridian revel. Is like whenever an artifact an opponent controls goes to the graveyard, you draw a card, or, like, in a collector. Oof.
Rachel Weeks
Is a bit of a nuclear option. It's artifact abilities of artifacts can't be activated. No equipment, no mana rocks, no artifacts. And it's worth noting that that is a card that will potentially lose you some friends. If your opponents play their equipment deck against you and you play a collector roof, they're gonna look at you forlornly and then walk out of the room when the game's over.
It also, I used to play collector roof in my Sidisi deck, which has, like, 60 creatures in it, and none of them are artifacts with activated abilities. So I was like, this is great. I'm gonna run it. You play it, and then people are like, well, you need to die. Yep.
And you're like, wait, what? Unless you. While you're here, I can't play. So three people just try and kill you. It's worth the sort of social contract of commander discussing these things with your friends, and you sit down for a table.
Brian Kibler
For instance, if I play my roark Thar deck or my kibo deck, they both include lots of things that kill artifacts. And I'll sit down and be like, hey, probably shouldn't play your brea deck if I'm gonna play this right. Is a hard counter for your strategy. I'm not gonna play Dragon's approach into your Roark Thardech. Although everyone's taking a lot of damage.
Rachel Weeks
Yeah, I'll take the damage game took 15 minutes.
The next section is card draw. Green is good at card draw. Sometimes. Sometimes. Sometimes.
Yeah. Green really depends on having creatures to draw cards. You need something like a tosky. You need creatures to deal combat damage, like the great henge or a beast whisperer. You need creatures to follow that up with good news.
Brian Kibler
I always have creatures. There's always more. There's always creatures in the banana stamp. My brain went to the exact same place. Yes.
Rachel Weeks
Even something like a shamanic revelation. You need creatures on the board for that card to do anything or like a rich card's expertise. You need a big creature for that to draw cards. All of these have the potential to draw you a huge amount of cards if you've built around it. Yeah.
Brian Kibler
I've had probably more games where I'm sitting there with Return of the wild beaker in my hand. Like, I wish this drew more than two because I have a mana creature or whatever. Then I have had games where return of this Ryo speaker drew me 20 or whatever. Right? Yeah.
Rachel Weeks
I mean, that's the thing with Green is I feel like Commander players really remember the turn where the green player drew 30 cards and don't remember the turn where the green players out of cards because there was a poor way. Yeah. And it's also something, it's very obvious and in your face when the big thing happens, it's much less obvious when your opponent is sitting with a card that isn't doing anything in their hand. Hand. Yeah.
You're not afraid of the green player when they don't have anything going on. Green's card advantage is varied, but it really does depend on a lot of deck building restriction. Right. Because a lot of these cards are very powerful if you have a lot of creatures. So the more non creature effects.
A lot of these are non creatures that we listed. The more of these that you include in your deck, the less powerful they are because you're just watering down the number of creatures you have. Yep. So you do have to be careful in balancing the great henges of the world with just having enough creatures to make sure that you can trigger this reliably. That's why I really like Tosuki and even beast whisperer because they're naturally creatures and they go with the synergies of the deck.
Brian Kibler
My work, Thor deck I was discussing, it has Toski. It has beast whisper. It even has primordial sage. So it's an augur of autumn. All these things.
Rachel Weeks
Corneal sage is the big one, right? Nice. Big beast whisperer. That deck is two planeswalkers, xenoghost reveler and Domi raid. Nice.
Brian Kibler
It has sol ring, it has primal surge, and it has like 64 creatures and then some lands. Right. That's it. That's how all my decks are, it's like lands and creatures and some stuff that I'm recording. If you have like augur of autumn, beast wisp or whatever, it's just like.
All right, well, here we go. As long as I have mana, I'm just gonna keep drawing stuff. Cause everything, everything is. Yeah, I mean, that's a piece of card advantage we didn't even talk about is like augur of autumn. The effects that let you play lands and sometimes creatures off the top of your library is something that's pretty unique to green.
So powerful oracle of Moldia is in my Erdregon deck, which is my most powerful deck by a wild. I love that. Wow. Well. Cause that deck uses a ton of mana dragon.
It's a commander. It has a ton of mana ramp. But I specifically didn't want to play a lot of mana creatures because I wanted the deck to be resilient to wrath effect. So it's mostly land ramp. And the deck has ten duels, ten fetches.
So you have a lot. How many lands do you run ish? I wanna say it's like 38, but it has six, seven signets. And then I think it has bird of paradise delighted halfling as the only mana creatures. But specifically, you wanna land ramp a lot.
And oracle is just very good at that. When you have a very land dense deck that wants to accelerate to a lot of. I also really like. I really like four drops when I include a lot of land ramp. Yeah.
Rachel Weeks
Like if you're running rampant growths in nature's lores and farseeks, then next turn you have four mana. So it's great to be able to slam an impactful four mana spell. Yeah. And that's another thing with Oracle specifically. Right.
Brian Kibler
Like being able to, like, either signet or rampant growth into it and then, like, sometimes just get a free card on top of your deck. Yeah. And even if you don't, you have. You very often have a land to play from your hand. Yeah.
Rachel Weeks
Being able to draw play stuff off the top of your library is so powerful because it's like you could just draw one card with the beast whisperer, but this draws you this card and then this card off the top. And if that's a land, then this card underneath that, you can draw so many cards as long as you get a little lucky. Green also has a ways to play creatures off the top. Like we mentioned, elven Chorus lets you play creatures off the top, or there's a Vivian that does it. I believe you just have to make sure that you're not putting in a ton of these non creature effects, really prioritizing the ones that are best for the deck so that the synergy isn't broken up as much as possible.
Brian Kibler
And I think that specifically just sort of broadly speaking, for green card draw, you really need to build your direct in a certain way to maximize it. Right. Whereas blue card draws just like, yeah, just draw a bunch of cards. Right? Go ahead, do it.
Whatever. Green card draw is much more like, hey, you have to have your deck built in this way. You have to have the appropriate synergies hit. One of my favorite green card draw tools is Duskwatch recruiter. Oh, I love that.
Rachel Weeks
Yes. Duskrock recruiter. Super good in my Agatha deck, specifically. It's very good in Agatha deck. I think it's good if you have a lot of mana.
Brian Kibler
It's just good, period. In a deck that can generate a lot of mana or ways to reduce its own cost, but also has to be very creature dense. It has an activated ability. It's two in a green. You look at the top three cards, you can put a creature from among them into your hand.
Rachel Weeks
The rest go in the graveyard on. The bottom, bottom, bottom, bottom of the sense. Yeah, that would be. And it does flip into a werewolf. That reduces the cost of your creature spells by one very frequently.
Brian Kibler
It'll rarely be flipped because you're playing commander and, like, it's hard to have it flipped for your turn on your turn, which is the only time that matters, basically, unless you have a flash thing or whatever. But yeah, that card in the right deck can be bananas powerful in terms of just giving you repeatable card draw at a very reasonable cost if you have mana to spare. I had an eve progenitor ooze deck that was really built around Nykthos and like, green devotions. So it was like Kira Metra's acolyte and that kind of thing to make just huge amounts of mana, cartoonish amounts of mana. And this little werewolf was so powerful because you're like, I have 40 mana and two cards.
All right, let's go. It answers that problem. Well, I mean, we're talking about wraths, right? And protection from wraths. One of the protections from wraths is just, I have the ability to rebuild very quickly because I can play out my stuff and then generate a bunch more stuff to play.
Rachel Weeks
Right. The next category here is recursion, specifically from your graveyard to your hand. It doesn't do as much reanimating, although there's a vorin Klux that mills and puts stuff into your graveyard. Now it's kind of a green thing has been like, mill this many more. Reanimation and more of like a, you know, like a cheat into play.
Brian Kibler
Yeah. Cause you're not like, filling your graveyard and then reanimating those things with the. Horn collects, like, put some among them onto the battlefield. Yeah, I have milled myself out with that. It's really sweet.
Rachel Weeks
If you haven't played with that one, it's really cool. It's nice. I do think the iconic one here is going to be eternal witness as the three mana creature that comes into play. And I mentioned eternal witness to you, and you were like, or timeless witness, which is four mana, eternal witness that has eternalize. So you can make a token copy of it from your graveyard.
And I play timeless witness, too. This card is great. And it's because it builds around itself kind of. Right. It's synergistic with the cards that are synergistic with it.
Brian Kibler
Yeah, exactly. Because eternal witness, or rather timeless witness, with eternalize, you're gonna be wanting to play a bunch of self mill type cards. Whether you're playing mulch effects or whatever things that can put it into the graveyard where you can then eternalize it. So you are building up synergy with itself, with the rest of your deck. Naturally.
The deck that would want this effect, I still think eternal witness index that have bounce effects, whether it's the old school crystal shard style stuff or like team or saber tooth or whatever, you. Can copy it or something like that. Yeah. Things that can give you that bounce effect. The efficiency of eternal witness costing a little bit less is going to be better.
But I think in a lot of decks that are doing more sort of graveyard rated stuff, like my old stick finger deck. Old stick finger, just mills yourself, right? The rest of the cards mill yourself. That's the whole point of what I'm trying to do. I'd much rather have timeless witness because I can just internalize it from the graveyard.
Similarly, I have timeless witness in my girad deck because geared populates and the timeless witness makes token copies. And you can just like, well, I'll get everything in my graveyard back because I populated all of them. The other effect that's like, this is bollyged recovery. This is the sorcery on the front, front, land on the back. And this is another thing that you can kind of build around.
Rachel Weeks
Like, whether you're picking eternal witness or timeless witness or Bollygard recovery, like Bollygad recovery can be really good. In lands decks. Cause you can cast the recovery side and then play the land side from the graveyard or off the top of your library with oracle of Moldia. And it kind of gives you both a land and a spell, which those decks often want. It also sort of sneaks it in in a recursion piece where in a land slot.
So if you're not dedicated to the recursion plan, but you want that kind of effect, incidentally. But you also need to not be super punished by the fact that it's a tapped land was something that you mentioned. Yeah. In a deck that really cares about getting out on the board quickly, like for instance, a Samut deck, or if. You want to play turn one mana.
Brian Kibler
Forgery, those decks really don't want to have, have lands that come into play tapped if they can avoid it. There's really high value tap lands like the new surveil lands, those. You might still play in some of those decks with fetch lands because the incidental value is very high of being able to fetch them. When it's not a high cost, but battleground recovery, it's always gonna come into play tapped. And there's no additional utility of the game, basically, where you don't draw it or where the surveillance are at their best, weirdly enough, whereas this only has utility in the games, but you actually draw it and then you're just like, okay, well, the tap land is just such a drawback in those decks that care about getting on the board quickly.
Rachel Weeks
For sure. There's other forms of recursion in green. There's creeping renaissance, which gets all of the cards of one type from your graveyard to your hand. I don't tend to play these as often as I used to, but if you are really dedicated to one creature type, or you're really or one sorry card type, usually with lands, I think creeping Renaissance is like, I'm going to get six lands from my graveyard into my hand, and that's pretty good. I played it in borborygmas, enraged for a while, which makes a lot of sense.
Brian Kibler
That guard is also in my saboot deck. Cause you get a bunch of extra lands.
Rachel Weeks
There's also splendid reclamation, which takes all the lands in your graveyard and puts. Them right on the battlefield. If you don't want them in your hand, just get them into play. Or the new aftermath analyst. This card so bananas, it's so busted.
Brian Kibler
It is a centerpiece of one of those powerful standard decks. And that's a much faster format than most commander situations. This one enters the battlefield and mills three cards and then has an activated ability. That's three in a green sack. At return all lands from your graveyard to the battlefield.
Rachel Weeks
So it's splendid reclamation on a creature that fuels the reclamation. It does the thing. It's like a bristly bill situation. Exactly. It's the card that is synergistic with itself.
Brian Kibler
It's like, okay, here's my enabler, here's my payoff. They're the same card. I can't believe it's only three in a green. To activate, it feels like it should be four in a green or three green, green. It's also an elf, so you find it with Nyssa.
Rachel Weeks
It's a really, really powerful effect in any mil deck, in any lands deck. A deck that has a lot of fetches. There's great ways to use this kind of effect. We mentioned it before. But if you're playing a lot of graveyard recursion, it's nice to run green's self mill cards.
Cause it is good with mulch and winding ways. And there's the gather the pack these. Look at the top four. You get a card out of them and put the rest in your graveyard. It's card advantage.
As long as you have enough of the recursion or you're using your graveyard enough. Winding way is such an upgrade. Winding way. It's so good. I honestly think if you're playing mostly green or even like green, red winding way is a really good cantrip.
It's a non creature, so it's tough to find those slots. But if you're filling up your graveyard, it's really good. Green has a lot of those kind of self mill cards. And then there's repeatable self mill, like a splinter fright or a life from the loam. That kind of dredge is a green mechanic.
Brian Kibler
Splinter fright is the reason I built my old naboin. Or not. Old nabon, old stick finger deck. I keep saying old nabon. It's just sucking a whole lot of.
Rachel Weeks
Old boys, old ruts. Dean. They're all old. They're all green. Yeah.
There's old fogey is the green silver border card. That was my invitational card. It wasn't, but I'm just referring to the fact that plays since the dawn of time. It is a green creature, though. The final thing we're gonna talk about is resilience.
Green can play an aggressive strategy, but like you said, it's kinda mid rangy. So it does have some endgame strategies to protect itself. It's got incidental life gain on cards, like shamanic revelation, which is a card draw spell, also gives you life gain. It also has really powerful life gain effects, like fangren Marauder. It's such a weird card, but it's.
A six man, a beast that says whenever an artifact is put into a graveyard from the battlefield, you gain five lives. Any artifact from any player into the battlefield, you crack three treasure tokens. I gain 15 life. And I think that this is so. I think that newer players will often overvalue life gain.
Brian Kibler
Right. They're like, oh, I can get to 100 life. No one can kill me. Spoiler. They can, they can.
Rachel Weeks
They'll figure it out. If you're dedicating, like, a lot of stuff to gaining life, unless you have a very good payoff for that, like a commander that cares about that, you're generally gonna be disappointed by it in the long run. But there's enough incidental damage that goes around in commander games that life gain can be valuable when it is an individual card that has incidental effect, like shamanic revelation, like you mentioned, or something that's just really powerful, like a fangar marauder, if it's synergistic. Again with your commander and what your deck is doing. I have fangar Marauder in my cibo deck, which makes sense, not only like, gives people artifacts, but also kills artifacts all over the place.
Brian Kibler
So, like, I've had Faker Marauder gave me 100 life in a game. Yeah, right. Like, you can have other people who have their treasures and their clues and bloods and maps and whatever other tokens. Rather, and they're usually gonna crack them. Yeah, they're not gonna not crack them.
Exactly. So, you know, you can gain just a lot of life from that. So if you have like, a single big powerful payoff like that, again, like, if it's synergistic with commander, you probably don't want to put finger martyr into, like, any random Green deck, right. You wanna make sure that there's artifacts on the board and you to make sure they're going to the graveyard. Yeah.
And because it triggers off your own artifacts too, it doesn't have to be something like kibo that's giving your opponent's artifacts. It could be something that's making your own artifact. Tokens ad has it in his Guillaume deck, which makes food and sacks food. Yeah. Green also has fogs.
Rachel Weeks
So if you're playing like a hyper aggressive deck, if you have a fog, not really fear for your life. If you just send all of your attackers. Green has some vigilance but I feel like it's not as prioritized as trample and all that. So having an a fog in a. Deck that you on questing beasts doesn't mean it's a green ability.
They've made it one. It's also on the other one with three abilities. The one we were elder garbage. Yeah. Having some protection for like, oh, I didn't expect them to Alpha strike me at this point.
I have some protection up. If you know that you're often gonna flag as the threat. So something like an obscuring haze is the nice free one. It's also one sided. So if a block goes wrong or if an attack goes wrong somehow, you can save your creatures in combat.
Brian Kibler
I talked quite a few times about my simoot deck. That's one of the cards in Simoot, because you just want to attack every turn, and it's great for not only, hey, I'm making people mad cause I'm attacking them every turn and they're gonna attack me, but also I just want to attack with all my stuff, and you're gonna block, and it's like, okay, well, I can protect my guys with obscuring haze and similar to life gain, I do think that fog effects are often over overvalued by less experienced players because they're like, oh, this can just save me if someone asks me for any number. But much like life gain, unless you're drawing a ton of cards, your fog effects are gonna run out eventually. And the people who are playing things that are playing to the board and have these resources they've developed, they're gonna keep attacking you unless you're building up to something. They're just gonna eventually get through your fogs.
They give me some, like, constant myths, but that's just gonna make you some enemies, because when you're playing your creature deck, they're gonna constantly, and that's not really fun for anyone involved. Trust me, you don't want to be in a constant mists meta. It's not ideal. That's where questing beast comes in. Yay.
Stomping the 7th line of text. But if you are playing some incidental life gain, a fog effect, especially something like obscuring haze that's free, that can be really valuable. In particular because of the surprise factor, people aren't necessarily expecting your aggressive gruel creature deck to suddenly fog. Yeah. Or even just to gain 15 life.
Yeah. Like, if you gain 15 life, sometimes a deck goes from being able to kill you to not being able to kill you. You buy yourself an additional turn. It's as good as te various protection, basically.
Rachel Weeks
Before we go, I want to talk about the green creature types that green really supports. And I think the iconic one is elves. If you're playing a lot of elves in your deck, incidentally, it can be nice to include some elf typal support in the deck just because you have a lot. Mander's an elf. Priest of Titania can be good in your deck with a bunch of mana creatures.
Brian Kibler
Cause a bunch of them are elves. A bunch of them are elf like. I'm not intentionally building an elf deck, but priest Titania taps for four mana. Yeah. And that is enough for me.
Rachel Weeks
Green's also good at supporting a lot of things. I mean, dinosaurs, werewolves, worms. Had to include worms. Baru. Yeah.
Cats, elementals, merfolk, snakes, saprelinks, bears. Oozes, insects, hydras, spiders, wolves, even druids. Green's really good at supporting, kind of incidentally, and I think it's worth looking up the creature types of your commander and seeing if there's any typal support that actually is just sort of good in your deck because you have a guaranteed one in the command zone. I think that's not something people do enough if they're not building a typo strategy. They just don't look at typal cards at all.
But sometimes you, incidentally have a lot of creature types, like 20 in a deck, and it's enough to throw a card like Priest of Titania in your deck. We usually talk about generic typal support as well, like cards that support any creature type. And I think the best one for green is realm Walker. Oh, yeah. That card's incredible.
Does the thing you can play stuff off the top of your library of a specific creature type that's really good in low CMC type of decks. So like cats or even, I guess, insects aren't particularly low mana value. Elves. Elves. Yeah.
And then there's like, kindred summons, which cheats a bunch of things of the same type into play. That's better for your higher end creatures. Dinosaurs, dragons, worms. Worms. Kindred summons, all the worms, even for the ancestors, is a new one.
It's a nice draw spell for if you're really, really dedicated to one creature type or another. Can be good if you're in green. That's everything. That's all the things that green is good at. I know you were like, that's a lot.
It is. But that doesn't necessarily mean that green is infallible. It does have weaknesses. It does have certain strategies that can really support these things. And we're gonna talk about all of those weaknesses and how to shore those up after a few words from our sponsors.
Brian Kibler
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All right, my new deck list is complete. Now let's see which cards I don't already own and buy them. Wait, how'd you do that without going through a million boxes? Oh, I just use architect. They make it super easy to upload and manage your collection.
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Architect is the best place to browse, brew and playtest commander decks. Just go to architect.com commandzone to get started. That's archidium. All right. We are talking about Green.
Rachel Weeks
We've said everything that green is good at so far, all the specific things. Green's got other things, but we want to talk about what green struggles with because I don't think Commander players are particularly good at spotting where green doesn't have the support. And it's important when you're building mono green or you're building mostly green. I think if you're playing two colors, as green is one of the color, green is usually very dominant. You have to understand what holes green has in its strategy and how to either play around those or build around those.
And the first one, I think the most obvious is just creature removal in general. Green does have some ways to handle creatures, but it's very reliant on you already. Having creatures most of the time, like bite or fight spells, are the most efficient way to you just delete a creature from the board. Otherwise, green tends to morph it into something else, or it has some weird exceptions with beast within that can destroy anything, but is often used on creatures. Cause it's the only destroy effect for creatures.
Or song of the dryads turns it into a forest. Kenra's transformation turns it into an elk, and even lignify turns it into a tree. There are some removals, but there's a lot of problems with a lot of these creature removal spells. Like they give your opponent's value in some way, or you have to have a creature in play, or their sorcery speed, even, which is not ideal for creature removal. In particular in commander.
So what do you do with that? How do you plan to remove creatures in green? So I do have a lot of fight effects in like for instance, my mower deck, mono green. Cause you're playing mono green, you don't wanna kill some things. And because you're playing a deck that tends to have the biggest thing around.
Hard to beat mo in a fight. Fight effects are quite good. A lot of times I don't bother. Right. And I think that the way that I build most of my green decks is probably very different than a lot of people build their decks.
Brian Kibler
In that I don't actually play very much removal, because I recognize that the nature of green is that you're going to be playing out stuff to the board, at least the nature of a green creature deck. You're going to be playing a lot of stuff, and you're very obviously the threat to a lot of people. So you want to just have more things to help you rebuild when they kill your own stuff, rather than things that are focused on dealing with their stuff. I'd rather my plan work well than I have answers to everything my opponents can do. I think is an important thing to keep in mind when you're a green player, because you don't remove things well, you gotta someday accept, well, I can't kill that.
Rachel Weeks
Play to your strong suits. Yeah. It's like, if green isn't good at killing creatures, don't do it. Don't kill creatures. An interesting thing I noticed about playing against you in your decks is you don't have targeted creature removal, but with the amount of pressure that your decks apply, they have to start chomping with creatures that they do not want to jump with.
They're not gonna lose their best creatures, but they're gonna lose some of them. Yeah. And I think that some of it is sort of a philosophical thing and like a kind of psychological thing, because I think that in many cases, people, and I see this not just in commander, but in standard, across games, when I'm streaming other games, people will see like, oh, you lost to a thing. So now you have to have a way to deal with that thing in your deck. And you'd be like, well, maybe.
Brian Kibler
Or I can just try and win first. I can beat that thing, right? A lot of people are like, well, how do you beat x card? How do you beat, I don't know, moat. It's like all the time.
I hope my phone doesn't have mote. I don't. I hope there's a mote in play. Like torment of Hailfire. Yeah, yeah.
Okay, that'll do. You win. We'll play again, maybe next game. You won't do that, right. And there certainly are things that's like, they are generally like creatures or enchantments and artifacts.
And you'll have something that can be sage, you kind of effect, or you. Can probably interrupt part of the flaw. I think that people often will get really focused on being able to answer anything their opponents can do. And if you're playing green, that's really hard to do. And if you build your deck too reactively, then a lot of your good cards get worse.
We were talking earlier during the card draw section about how having a certain density of creatures is really important to a lot of defects being good. So a lot of times when I build my green decks, I'm looking to make my deck better when it's doing the good thing and pay less attention to what my opponents are doing. And you kind of have to do that when you're playing green sometimes, yeah. I mean, I think Commander players are not great at accepting that there are weaknesses in a deck and you'll play a card that doesn't get played in any other format because it is a color pie break or it does something a color doesn't necessarily do well. So that's why how chaos warp becomes a staple in commander, that's how beast with him becomes a staple in commander is because it removes things in a way that green's not supposed to be able to remove things.
Rachel Weeks
But beast within is not like, it's not like a competitive level card. It can kill a lot of different things. But is that important in green? It just doesn't feel like it. It is.
Brian Kibler
I mean, it can be, right? Obviously, especially if you're playing at higher power levels. There can be individual things. It's like, okay, well, if I don't kill this, they win, right? And if I'm building decks to compete at those higher power levels and I'm playing a green deck.
I'd probably include more beasts within my decks, but I'm willing to accept when something happens, it's like, okay, I can't beat that. I lose. Except the things you cannot change in the grace to, you know, I mean. Yeah, yeah. The green player's mantra.
Rachel Weeks
Yeah. Except the things you cannot change, which is the fact that you have a ghostly prison. Ghostly prison. You just make more mana. Right.
Brian Kibler
Attack with a big thing. Yeah. You can remove a ghostly prison. Yeah. You need like a.
Rachel Weeks
Yeah. Anyway, green's good at mana. Works with that. Yeah, to kill like a. I'm trying to think of a white archon that says creatures can't attack.
Brian Kibler
Oh, blazing archon. Blazing archon. Blazing archon. There you go. Oh, yeah.
Some games, like, your part is blazing archon. You're like, oh, I can't kill that. Well, okay, we'll figure something out. Or we won't. Maybe there'll be a board wipe.
But I do think that finding alternate elements, for instance, one of my favorite removal type effects that I play in my mood deck, for instance, is ram through, because that is not just in my deck. To remove a creature that could be in my deck. To remove your creature. Remove your creature and kill you. Just explode you.
And that is the sort of card that I like to play to beat something like a blazing archon. Because it's not just removal. Right. Inscription of abundance. The, like, you know, make my guy giant fight something.
It's great because it's doing. It's the fight effect, but it's also all this other stuff, too. It's one of those cards that I also like is the incidental life gain, you know, where you're not playing something that's dedicated to gaining life, but it can be great in the circumstance where you're getting, like, you know, burned out and you're like, okay, well, actually, I'm gonna gain a ton of life, so I'm not dead. Yeah. That's why modality is so, so good.
Rachel Weeks
I mean, I was thinking of something like a squall line I used to run, and it deals x damage to each player and all flying creatures. And in eve, it was a mana sink. It was like, I can put 30 mana into this, I can deal 30 damage to each player, or I can do enough to not kill me and then hit you with my creatures for the rest of the way. But it also just killed flyers, which I was really bad at dealing with. So it had that modality, even though it wasn't technically a modal spell.
And I think that's a really interesting. I don't think commander players play enough bites when they're in commander. I think they just lean on stuff like Beast within or Kenra's transformation. I wanna talk about the downside of being a green player and giving a player a disposable creature. Oh, I hate it.
It's a bit of a nightmare. I'm actually trying to think. I don't think I have beast within in any deck currently. I don't think I have it in any of my decks because most of my decks are looking to attack. And me giving you a three, three.
That you don't care about, that sucks. That can block. Yeah, I wanna attack. That's in the way. Yeah.
This isn't necessarily serving the deck, it's answering a threat, but it's going against the plan of the deck. Right. I run beast within in one deck right now, and it's Feldergraf because I need, like I play with Karuga and there's a three mana stipulation. So it's not gonna be cheaper than three anyway. And if I can kill a lot of stuff and give them a creature, which I'm gonna punish them for later.
Brian Kibler
Right. But it's not exactly the interaction spell that you want in an aggressive deck that wants stuff out of the way. Because three threes wear swords, they wear counters, they attack back. There's a lot of downsides to giving your opponent a creature that can block your game plan. Another thing I wanted to mention that's kind of incidental is, I don't know necessarily if you do this, but if you want your deck to be able to deal with creatures a little bit more, something like a liquid metal torque is a great option for green decks that have a lot of interaction with artifacts in general.
Rachel Weeks
So you run it in Kibo because there's obvious synergies there. But even if you're running just a green red deck where you're like, I'm not going to be able to kill most big creatures, this will turn my naturalizes into creature removal. Maybe you do that if two mana artifacts aren't directly against your plan, it gives you a little bit of incidental extra interaction. And that's the sort of thing that can, that can give you the ability to deal with problematic things that don't necessarily come up a lot in those instances where they do, without dedicating a lot to those specific things that can be really nice to have. And it's also just a meta rock, right.
Brian Kibler
It's giving you, because one of the problems with a lot of removal effects in proactive decks is when you have a draw that's a bunch of reactive cards, and you're like, my deck is. It doesn't necessarily go huge. It's like trying to play a aggressive to mid range type of game. And if I don't get a good start, I'm just gonna be way behind everyone else who's doing more powerful things or has better ways to react to my things if they get more time. Yeah, for sure.
Rachel Weeks
The next category is related. It's board wipes. Green has none. Yeah, basically. Everybody always goes, it is Azuri's predation.
And you're like, yeah, I don't know if that's like a board wipe. It's more of a synergy piece that, incidentally, kills other things, like apex altosor. Good against those scoot swarms, it's gay. If a card can kill scoot swarms, it goes up. In my book, the more answers I have to scootworm, the better.
Or like an apex altosaur is sort of the closest thing I can think of. It comes in, it fights one thing. When it takes damage, it can fight another thing, and it can keep fighting until it either dies or you stop. So it has ways to kill a lot of creatures, but there's no ways to clear the board in mono green, unless you're leaning on colorless effects like Ugin, the spirit dragon, or like nveneral's disk. I guess we're digging deep.
Brian Kibler
We're digging real deep. That would be wild. In your mono green decks. Do you run board wipes at all? No.
Yeah, well, my baru deck is the one that's inspired by my first ever deck that was just lammre elves, wild growths, forest, and crawlworm. And that's it. And it only has mana creatures, mana enchantments, and worms and forests. It doesn't have any interaction at all, which is very green. That's fun.
But the moab deck, it has just fight effects, basically for removal. I'm trying to think if it even has really that much in the way of artifact enchant removal. Again, I feel like a lot of people really get into the mindset of I need to have answers down everything, and the reality is you don't. I gotta have two board wipes, I gotta have seven piece of removal. Yeah.
There's this kind of like formulaic mentality, and I think that can be a good guideline, but I think that for lots of decks, you'd rather do your own thing better than be able to react to your opponent's things. Especially because you have three opponents, right? Like, you can't have answers to all of them all the time, right? Yeah. Control is not a great strategy in commander.
Rachel Weeks
Because going one for one against one player and o for one against two other players is not a good strategy. Your deck is just full of wraths. No one wants to play with you. Nobody wants to play that. That's brutal.
Yeah, it's very interesting. And I love the idea. Like, I have a mono green deck and I have two effects that kill multiple creatures. One of them is Nylia's intervention, which we'll talk about for a second, which tutors a bunch of lands to your hand or it deals damage to flyers. Cause it's mono green deck.
It does struggle against flyers. I guess we might as well move on to this next section, which is flyers. Green will die in flyers a lot of the time. It has some reach. But not Nylia.
But not yet. But for some reason. Okay, this is a serious peppy of mine. Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Kibler
So Nylia is a God? Yes. Who in her art is towering over the trees, peers over the horizon with a bow pointed at the sky. Can't block a bird. She does not have reach.
Rachel Weeks
Can't block a bird. Nylia's intervention kills a bunch of flyers. It does not her, though. How did she intervene? She can't shoot them.
Brian Kibler
I don't understand. They just go through the string. They added a new UI element to MDG arena that is basically to avoid sneaky reach, which is just a giant bow to her bowl has reach and the leah does not have reach. It's because indestructible and reach is really gross. Come on.
She should at least be shorter then. Yeah. She's the only point her airboat to the ground. She's the tiniest. God, Nylia's just human sized.
Rachel Weeks
I don't know. And her bow doesn't work. That's for show.
It's an interesting problem because it could be that thing that you're just like flyers are. I mean, you could just be like, I died of flyers. And if somebody has enough flyers, that'll happen. I like having Nylia's intervention. It has that modality where most of the time I'm using it to tutor for lands.
But sometimes I can pick off a board full of spirits or thopters or something like that.
But lately I have kind of liked some of these little reach deathtouchers that they've been introducing into green. The newest one is tower winder, which I think is an awesome card. So this is like a two mana worm. It comes in, it has reached, it has death touch, and it searches for a command touch and then it just sits there and says, back off. Drew you the land which you need for your fixing?
Anyway, I'm not gonna run it in mono green probably, but if I'm in gruul or something like that, finds me a great land and then is a little ghostly prison that is really annoying to remove or even poison dart frog is the two mana dork that you can pay two to give a deathtouch. And it has reach naturally so it can chump a flyer at the worst. And then if you have the two mana available, can keep flyers at a distance entirely. Having a little bit of rattlesnakes is nice, but I feel like I'm not gonna run these unless I feel like I can get away with running two mana dorks or two mana land effects in some way. So have some utility.
There's the green creature that you can channel and deal damage to all the flyers. I've seen that in green decks recently, which is kinda cool. No idea what it's called though. Can't think of it. Editors will get it, but it's like.
And then when it's on the board, you can pay x into it and it can just deal damage to flyers. So if you're a very defensive deck, then that's an option. But this also could be a fact that you're like, look, I'm going to die to this deck, so I'm going to hit them the hardest and just hope that's enough.
The next category is instant speed stuff. Green tends to be very sorcery speed. Commit to board, hope bored survive. There are ways to play around it. Like there's spells that give your green creatures flash.
Do you think there's a lot of value to that as a green player, being able to play those at instant speed? Somewhat. I think that Yeva, nature's herald, is an interesting one. I don't actually have that in any of my decks currently. Because you have to pay to play the yeva and then you have to pay to play your other things at instant speed.
Brian Kibler
And that's kind of a lot, right? So I'd rather than that have things like heroic intervention to protect my stuff once I've actually played it. But yeah, it is. We talked a bit before about how Green is very much about. I am very obviously building stuff up.
Green's advantage is largely manifested on the board, whether it's I'm getting a bunch of extra lands, I'm playing a bunch of creatures, I'm making my creatures big. So it's hard to be sneaky with green, both in the sense that your advantages are on the board and in the sense that your instant speed options are not great. Right. So I do think that that's probably the biggest kind of even. Not necessarily in terms of like the stuff you do disadvantage of green.
Like it's not that you can't do these things. It's that people always know when you're doing your powerful thing. And for those of you who watch commander at home, you probably see like, oh, Brian's the threat. Brian's the threat. And it's not necessarily just that, like my decks are like particularly powerful or anything like that.
I don't think I tend to bring decks that are significantly more powerful than the table or anything on a regular basis. But like they are always decks that are obviously when they're doing their thing, that they're powerful. And that I think is kind of fundamental to the green experience that it is hard to hide when you are. The threat, when you're the creator who's in the trees. Exactly.
Right. There's blue decks. Their power is in their hand. Yeah. It is a lot less obvious when a bluedeck is getting to the point in the game where, okay, they're scary now.
It's like, well, they just drew a bunch of cards. Well, they're all in their hand. Right. The cards that I drew, they're on the board. You can see them about to attack you next turn.
Rachel Weeks
You know what the problem is. Yeah, exactly. Is here. You don't know what that problem. Exactly.
You don't know if you can handle that problem. Yeah, I think that's probably why I struggle with green so much is because it's all so it's bold faced where like I tend to play reactively, I tend to try and hide for a few turns and then be like, WHOOP, I actually had it. But it's really difficult to do that because you're committing to the board on turn one. Yep. Like you're building your board, you're building your resources immediately.
So everybody thinks that you're out to the super far, but you're developing your resources in the same way that a blue player is casting a charter course or is casting a ponder. They're developing their resources as well. It's just not quite as rectangular. And it's funny because I think that people coming from competitive backgrounds, they see people drawing a bunch of cards like, oh, no, that's terrifying. Whereas I think that is less obvious to a lot of commander players that, oh, you know, Josh has drawn a bunch of cards from his rhystic study.
Brian Kibler
That's a problem. Yeah, we know that now. We figured that out. It just took a few years. But I think that you do playing green especially as much as I do, and the kind of green decks that I do, you kind of have to accept a certain percentage of games.
You're going to be archenemy because it is obvious that what you're doing is the scariest thing right now. Even if it's. There's a lot of. Again, Commander Hope, viewers will probably see the games where Olivia's like, oh, you gotta get Brian. He's doing this.
I'm like, you're doing this other thing, which is equally, if not more powerful. It's just less obvious to everyone else. But I also know you're gonna be. I know playing with your partner so hard because ad does the same thing. He's like, she's gonna win next turn.
Rachel Weeks
I can tell right now, you're like, no, I'm not. I am. I'm gonna win next turn.
I think the most powerful thing about being able to cast your creatures at flash speed is that they kind of give your creatures haste a little. They give your creatures haste because that's another thing that green is not very good at. It has some ways to come out swinging, and some creatures naturally have haste, but it doesn't do a red dot. Concordant crossroads gives everyone. That's the sort of crime that someone plays in turn one.
Brian Kibler
You're like, oh, it's gonna be that kind of game on turn one. I haven't seen a Gordon crossroads on turn one in years. I did one, like, a couple weeks ago. Like, I got manador. Cause I want him to get it to be fast.
Rachel Weeks
Concordant crossroads gives everybody haste, which obviously is great when you're the aggressor. You can use it a lot more effectively. Concordant crossroads, I found, tends to be like a one turn kind of effect where you're like, I have the big board. I cast a big genesis wave, and now I cast my concordant crossroads, and I will attack you. So it sort of solves that problem a little bit.
But green is so good with haste, and having to wait through three turns is a little bit of Green's thing where they know you're the problem for. One of the reasons I have so many grill decks. Yeah, it solves that. Do you play crashing drawbridge in any of your monograms? Yeah, I mean, most of my mono green decks, I mean, like, borrow kind of doesn't count because of the deck building restrictions I gave myself.
Brian Kibler
But with Mowoo, mow is much more about building up to stuff. Right. So my guy having haste isn't that big a deal. Sure. Right.
So like, giving mow haste, like, cool, take three, you know, but it's a turn or two later when it's take 500 that it's the big issue. Right. It's an interesting thing because heist is so powerful in green, and that's what makes so fast and explosive. But being able to, I think that Greene's version of haste is kind of putting out a bunch of little things that aren't necessarily scary and then casting an overrun so that taking a board that doesn't look lethal and transitioning it to be like, now there's a problem. It's interesting because I think creator of behemoth, obviously, is kind of the classic example of that.
And I actually try to. I think I've creator Hoof in one deck right now, which is my royal Thor deck. I like to try and have more diverse ways that I win games across my decks. So I don't really play crater hoof in a lot of other decks, which also means that my decks are more obviously threatening. Cause they're not just a bunch of little dudes when you have.
And that's kind of the sort of dichotomy there of like, well, all I have are these little creatures. It's like, creator Hoof, kill everyone. It's again, one of the reasons that the big buff effects, whether they're crater hoof or overwhelming stampede or triumph of the hordes, that those are effective at kind of playing the political game of commander in addition to the onboard game of commander. Right. So it's difficult.
Rachel Weeks
I mean, you have to. One of those is trying to not be the threat until they are. And one of them is like, understanding that you're the threat and managing, saying deal with it. Yeah. And just figuring out how to not die to that and how to protect your board from when people try and interact with it.
Brian Kibler
And part of it is also just emotionally accepting. Emotionally accepting is a big part. I think that it's kind of a joke and kind of not because I think that a lot of people, they just get annoyed when they do stuff and people are like, oh, that's scary, I'm gonna kill it. So they stop doing that stuff and it's like, okay, but if you are fine with that, if you just recognize, yes, if I do powerful things, people will use their removal to stop me from doing powerful things. I'm gonna do another removal.
Then you can just do another powerful thing. Exactly. You got another removal spell. Yes. Okay.
Rachel Weeks
Yeah. I mean, being able to diversify your threats, being able to attack people on multiple axes and have multiple threats is the benefit of playing threatening creatures early rather than playing all of these dorks and then casting one thing. You can be like, if you didn't, you may have answered this, but I still have this, and you're still getting pressure on another axis. And I will say, going back to when we were talking about what ramp do you play? Kind of thing, the decks that land ramp are a lot better at just continuously presenting individual large threats because when their board gets swept, they don't lose their mana.
Brian Kibler
Right. Yeah. And that's kind of it. I mean, those are the things that green really, really struggles with. But I think the difference between what green struggles with and, for example, what white struggles with is white sort of has ways to do things it struggles with poorly.
Rachel Weeks
The stuff that green can't do, it cannot do. It cannot remove creatures very well. And white's like, oh, I can kind of limp along on this ramp or this car. Draw is actually very good now, but it's like, I think part of having holes in the green strategy is just being like, yeah, they might get through there and we'll play another one. Or knowing who the problem is going to be at the table, anticipating that you're not going to be able to interact with that very well, like an enchantress deck or, you know, a big mana black deck that, you know, is going to go into an exanguinate or something like that and just applying the pressure as early as you can, because that's usually not when they're ready to fight on that axis.
Cool. So the next thing we're going to do, we've talked a lot about mono green. We want to talk about what happens when you combine green with other colors, because that is usually how we play command. I don't know. I'm colorblind.
Brian Kibler
Are you? Yes. I'm actually red green colorblind, which also explains all the girls. It's all green to me.
Rachel Weeks
My dad is colorblind as well, and I have a memory of going through a crayon box, and he was trying to find a green crayon, and he kept pulling out brown crayons, and he was like, is this green? I'm like, that is not green. That is brown. Is this green? I was like, read the crayon.
Brian Kibler
They didn't find out that I was colorblind until I was two and I was in kindergarten. I don't know, preschool, whatever. Definitely not kindergarten yet. But I could read at a very young age. Apparently no one thought it was weird that there was a small child asking, would you please pass the magenta?
Cause I was just reading the crayons. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I couldn't tell colors. It worked.
Rachel Weeks
I gave my dad flashcards for Christmas when I was really young. Cause I just thought he just didn't know em.
It's like he hasn't taken the time to learn. I'll make him flashcards, teach him what yellow is.
So green has things that it's good at and things that it's bad at. We spent a lot of time talking about just those green things, but so we talked a lot about mono green. I want to talk about green as a support color, specifically, just in a two color type of deck, because that's definitely when you start shoring up those weaknesses with the other colors. So you can use red to add haste, to add evasion, like flying or something like that. Red is really good at that.
If you add blue, you add just easy card advantage or even stack interaction to protect your board. I don't know if you lose heroic intervention, but maybe you lose some of the Tamiya safe keepings and those kind of things for negates. I play a lot of stubborn denial and swan song to protect my green creatures. Those are some favorites. Super efficient interaction, and they're great defensive.
Brian Kibler
You should probably be playing more stubborn denial in your creature deck. Cause it's so good. Stubborn denial is busted. That was the kind of card I started seeing when I played timeless. And I was like, why isn't this a lot of white is good for adding removal, but also for board wipes.
Rachel Weeks
So that gives all of your creature interaction stuff. You gotta stop giving people three. Three ape tokens to block with and start giving them a single land, I guess. And then I think black gives you resilience, gives you graveyard synergies and a lot more card selection because you can start taking advantage of your graveyard recursion and black self mill and really powerful reanimates. I think an important thing to talk about here is to not fall back on green staples when you have another color that can do it better.
If you're playing gruul, do you play concordant crossroads? Oh, no. Yeah. You got rhythm of the wild. Yeah.
Red's so much better at it. Hammer of purphoros. Yeah. You start seeing other colors that you could play. The Nia Sam is so much utility, and it's doing it well because it's something that the color is designed to do.
Like, if you're playing selesnia, you certainly don't play beast within. Yeah, yeah, I do think that's one in particular that people fall back on a lot. They're like, oh, I play beast within. Beast within is good card. I'll put beast within in my deck.
Brian Kibler
Cause it has green. And it's like, well, the reason that people play beast within is cause they don't have access to the other options most of the time. I mean, granted, like, beast within can. Can hit anything. So there is some additional utility compared to, say, a swords to plowshares there.
But usually the additional mana cost and the additional drawback mean that it's going to be a worse option than what you can potentially get in other colors. Yeah, and I mean white, like, if you combine green with black, now you can basically remove anything. Golgari is an excellent removal color because black's great at removing creatures, green's great at removing artifacts and enchantments. So now, now you just run a hybrid card, and that removal becomes so much better because you're combining two things that colors are good at. I think having people reevaluate what kind of staples they just throw in when they're playing red or when they're playing any color.
Rachel Weeks
But even blasphemous act is such an efficient board wipe in red is really good. But if you're playing white or if you're playing black, maybe the blasphemous act that only kills 13 power stuff and less isn't quite good enough, especially if you're playing Brian a lot. Cause his stuff's always too big for that. I have had many creatures survive blastoisex. That's made me very happy.
I was looking. I was playing Octavia recently. I was looking at a board wipe that only got stuff with toughness. Less than the number of islands I controlled was like, well, this kills nothing. This is nothing.
But, yeah, like beast whisperer. I think if you're playing blue, you probably just have more efficient ramp or draw that doesn't require you to play pay four mana and then a mana for a creature. If you're playing a lot of creatures, you probably play it anyway. But, like, just look a little bit closer about the staples that you're using in your deck and making sure that you're doing something that the color is naturally gifted at, especially when you start adding a third color or a fourth color, because now the more colors you have, the more you're just using the colors for what they're really good at and what they're really designed to do. For instance, I mentioned my, er, dragon deck earlier.
Brian Kibler
It is like the core of the mana in the deck is green because all the mana ramp is green and nothing else is green. Yeah, that's what I'm there for. Right. We use the farseeks and nature's lords and whatever to get to the big dragons, and then we're done with green. Other than old Nabo and basically mocha.
Rachel Weeks
Whatever, you've got white, black for removal, you've got white for board protection, you've got red for threats. When you build that way, you start to recognize what are good cards and what are cards that you have to play because you're dealing with weaknesses or you feel like you have to play because you're dealing with weaknesses, maybe not even have to play. It's commander. Nobody's making you do anything. You can play whole worms and landwar elves if you want.
Brian Kibler
Absolutely. So let's talk about those color combinations and just especially when you combine them with green and talk about what you can really get excited about. We've mentioned a little bit, but Golgari, great at Removal Assassin's trophy, will kill anything and give them a land. It's incredibly mana efficient. But you also get into the cool graveyard stuff.
Rachel Weeks
Now you get gitrog monsters. Both gitrog monsters. New Gitrog Mountains, wild. That guy's scary. Really powerful.
You're like, I can fling a big thing. Yeah, speaking of haste. But yeah, this combines green's great use of creatures with black's great reanimation of dead creatures. I think the most exciting thing to me, which is probably unsurprising, considering my one green black deck is old stick finger is the graveyard and creature interactions. Right.
Brian Kibler
You get a lot of access to your graveyard as an additional zone. That's effectively a resource. And you have the reanimation effects. You have just the ability to have the creatures in your graveyard matter, because you have stuff like lurgwifes and things. Like that, having that amount of card selection and that amount of card utility, it's also a lot to build around.
Rachel Weeks
It's very exciting to play. Like graveyard decks. It's a ton, a ton of value. If you dip into Selesnia, it shifts a little bit. Green and white are good at working together, but they do a lot of the same things.
Well, we talked about Marauri's wake already. It's the power of mana doubling with the anthem of white. I mentioned farmer cotton on here because green and white are both good at making a lot of stuff, and farmer cotton's good at making a lot of stuff. A lot of the amount of stuff. So that's what I think of when I think of green and white is like super protection of your board, really committed to what's happening.
Brian Kibler
So the one green white deck that I have that I actively play is my Samwise deck, which it makes a ton of stuff, and it's incredibly hard to get rid of myself because Samwise itself is like a recursion engine for all of your threats. So you're just like, okay, I'll make a food. You killed these things. Okay, I'll sacrifice my food. I'll get my things back.
It's like, oh, you killed my. You wrapped my board. It's like, okay, well, I'll play samwise, sacrifice some food, get back my farmer cotton. And now it's all done. I have all the foods that I just sacked.
Rachel Weeks
We're feeling good. Yeah. It's so, so resilient. It's good at protecting itself. It's good at fighting through board wipes.
It probably plays more board wipes because it's just like, eh, I can regenerate. That's what I like about white is the resilience. And it's like, you can come for me, but I've got plans for that. The simic is sort of cartoonishly similar. They're like, it's lands, it's lands.
But it's about converting the card advantage of blue into the value and the mana sinks of green and the mana producing so everything you can make with green, all of the mana, and then turning that mana into cards into more things. It's very snowbally. I think the simic deck that I played the most these days is probably my Izuri deck, which is like a proliferate deck, and lo and behold, plus one plus encounters. I actually very specifically didn't want it to just be plus one pulse encounters. I'm like, I have mowoo for that.
Brian Kibler
But it's like being able to proliferate and all sorts of things. The counter manipulation and doubling that exists within green with the counter effects as well as the proliferate effects that exist within blue really overlap very well as well. If you don't want to just be in the simic value engine with no real Wincon ramp strategy, you can do stuff like that as well. Yeah. My simic deck right now is hawkball, which is Merfolk based, but it's also turns a ton of card advantage into a ton of land advantage, which in its way, sort of protects my silly strategy of merfolk, but converts it into the bigness of green.
Rachel Weeks
So it's like the small sort of trickiness of blue with greens just over the top ness is the other side of that, I think. And stubborn denial. And stubborn denial. And your favorite gruel. Yeah.
This is your rhythm of the wilds. This is xenogos. This is haste. This is fast. You're dead before you knew it.
It also does sort of punishy things like cinder vines and Rurikthar. But I think the most powerful combination is the threats of Kryn and the heist of. Yeah, for sure. I mean, the rhythm of the wild is in, I think, all of my. Gruul decks, which is all of your decks.
Brian Kibler
No, which is like, 20% of my decks. Most. It's definitely the most common color combination that I have built. And I find it interesting because there are so many different ways that you can just overlap. Like I said, olivia will frequently say, oh, you're just building the same deck again, because it's like, I just have green manoramp of some kind, and it's like, well, no, because all of these, they take this core of stuff, and some of them don't even necessarily play that core of stuff, but they do a vastly different thing with it.
Right. Like samut versus agatha versus kibo. Those all play so differently, despite being greenery. Creature decks. Yeah, they have a lot of similar aspects, but you could be prioritizing haste.
Rachel Weeks
You could be prioritizing trample. You could be leaning into dinosaurs. You could be prioritizing apes. Yeah. Apes activated abilities.
Brian Kibler
Yeah. Agatha's so cool. Agatha. Yeah. It's so, so fun.
Rachel Weeks
Yeah. When you start to combine colors and when you start to add more colors to that, the dynamics change slightly each time. But you have to recognize what that color's role is in there. Right. The strengths of blue is card advantage.
So what does green add to cart advantage? That makes both of those super powerful. And we're used to seeing a commander and building around a commander. But I think recognizing that the color pie is a huge part of commander deck building as well, will make you a better deck builder long term. And then anytime you look at a commander, you know exactly how to build it.
Finally, we're going to talk about winning with green. So this is just any tips that you have for piloting Green successfully.
Brian Kibler
Because. Green'S great at just winning. It has overrun effects like we talked about, big anthem effects. It makes huge boards. Green's great at actually closing the game, but they're not necessarily easy to protect or even to execute or to build.
Rachel Weeks
So how would you recommend taking those board wipes, or the board wipes the overruns and actually converting wins out of them? So I would say that probably one of the most important skills in trying to win with green decks, and specifically green creature decks, is identifying when to bother playing around things. And this is something that I think translates very well from playing one v one magic to commander. Obviously you have additional opponents to worry about, but the philosophy is the same is I think a lot of people will be like, well, I can't play this. They might have a wrath or someone might board wipe.
Brian Kibler
And in many cases you're in a position where it's like, okay, well, if someone wipes the board now, it's very hard for me to rebuild anyway, with certain am I going to be able to win the game? And identifying, okay, can I even bother holding back if I can't protect my board? Because if I lose my board now, I'm just buried too far behind. You'll lose to a board wipe, but you'll also lose to not progressing your board. Yeah.
And if your goal is to win games, oftentimes you have to keep in mind that player removal is the best way to protect your board sometimes. Yeah, right. If that person has a bunch of board wipes in your deck, you should probably be attacking that person so that they don't get to cast their board wipes over and over. Because you're playing a creature deck, and a lot of times you don't necessarily play strategically optimally because you don't want to just take your friend out of the game because that's not fun for them. But again, if your goal is to win, right, you need to recognize that you can't just be like, I'll attack each of you for two damage.
When you're playing an aggressive creature deck, you will need to focus on taking players out of the game to close the window that they have to do their thing or to clear your board before you kind of get outpaced. Yeah, I mean, recognizing what your bad matchups are is really important when you're playing a creature duck like knowing who's going to be able to effectively, most effectively interact with what you're doing, who's gonna be most effectively will be able to defend against you either by board wipes or ghostly prisons or just single targeted removal. So just zeroing in on somebody and being like, look, if I kill a player, I eliminate all of the interaction spells in their hand, in their deck, in their heart. And that's. Yeah.
Rachel Weeks
It isn't always encouraged in social situations to just take somebody out of nowhere. But even if you can put their life total in a place where you can deal with them at some point, where you're like, I've put you to 18, and I'm not gonna eliminate you from the game, but I'm gonna put you in a position where I could at a marginal place where I don't need an overrun to take you out, just to kind of control certain strategies that you're really concerned about. The other thing you mentioned is knowing what kind of green deck you are in deck building and in playing. And what do you mean by that? So there are very different types of green decks that you can play.
Brian Kibler
You can play a deck that is a just very aggressive green creature deck, like Sumoot, for instance, where you're just like, okay, clearly what I want to do is just play creatures and attack every turn. And that informs both your deck building decisions as well as your play decisions. You could also be a simic ramp deck. The way that those two decks approach both deck building and gameplay are vastly different in the case of one, like I said, sometimes you just gotta eliminate players to ensure that they don't eliminate your stuff. And the other you're like, well, I'm gonna do something really big once I build up to it.
So, like, the way that I approach the actual gameplay is fundamentally very different. Right? So I mostly, like, I can fly a little bit more under the radar. I think people are more used to identifying, hey, you're playing a bunch of lands. You're gonna do crazy things as being a threat than they are just drawing cards, for instance.
But it is less obvious than, well, you have 20 creatures in play. Yeah, I'm gonna die if I don't deal with this. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, knowing what's important to your deck and how your deck converts a win is a really big deal.
Rachel Weeks
Being like, okay, my deck wins with Commander damage. So the most important thing is my commander. And anything that can make it more of a threat and, like, evasion, those are priorities, because all of those serve the one which is getting Mowoo to connect with a face. For instance, my mowoo deck has snakeskin veil because snakeskin veil is great at protecting Mowoo because Mowoo will kill someone. That's the plan.
Brian Kibler
And lo and behold, it also gives plus and puzzle counters, which is synergistic with the rest of my stuff. Nice. But I clearly don't play snakeskin veil in Samut because an individual thing on my board matters far less. Or Roarkthar, because, well, then he'd hit me in the face. Yeah.
Rachel Weeks
Then he'd be mad. Yeah, I don't need that. Don't make him mad.
Yeah, it's really easy. Like you said, a big problem with Green is it's really easy to know when Green's ahead is the whole table will be like, ah. So we've talked about some ways to mitigate that, and some of it is just knowing that you're ahead. But I think the other thing is, people try and make every deck a simic deck. They try.
Like, every commander deck gets played like a simic deck, where you're trying to be sneaky and you're trying to accrue value that you're trying to win in one big, explosive way. But I think if you're playing green, if you're playing gruul and your deck just isn't inherently sneaky, don't be sneaky. Yeah, don't worry about playing at instant speed. Like, have your protection up, but you don't have to surprise people if your deck isn't designed to surprise people or it isn't designed to snowball out of control. So know what exactly your deck is doing and try and play cards that service that, like, five mana instants aren't very valuable in Greece, they can be, but you're like, when am I gonna have five mana up?
I need to cast my four mana creature. But, like, maybe a five mana sorcery that's incredibly powerful in your deck doesn't have that same downside as a sorcery in a blue deck, which really wants to move at instant speed. So understanding what your priorities are and where your synergy is, prioritizing knowing if you're a creature deck, you need creatures. If you're a lands deck, you need cards. But also Lance.
More lance. More Lance is a huge part of actually winning commander games is just knowing how you win and building toward that. Before we go, I wanna talk about the Green's sort of the boogeyman of Commander right now, which is sort of a casual commander. Of course, it's not really in Cedh at all, but except for you, Kinon players, I see you. And I think that a lot of players will tell you that green's the easiest deck to pilot.
And it's also the easiest deck to just win win with. Cause it's just the most powerful. Do you think that's true in command or just generally? I guess you sort of already had the caveat of not at the highest power levels. The higher the power level gets, I think the weaker green is.
Brian Kibler
Because green is bad at dealing with stack interaction. And that's where as you get to higher power levels, that's where a lot of things happen. Right? Like the number of games where I've sat there with my green deck and someone is like, infinite combo, do off with something, or just really big combo with something. I'm like, yep, can't do anything about that.
Rachel Weeks
That's y'all's problem. It's like, okay, yep, I'm dead. And that happens a lot when you're playing a deck that is largely like, on the board and in your face, as opposed to setting up and having all these fiddly bits and counter magic and whatnot. So I do think that, like, at low to mid power levels, green is great because it is the best color at getting ahead of the curve in terms of mana, basically. And that lets you do more stuff.
Brian Kibler
I do think that other colors do have access to comparable things with signets and talismans and stuff. I think that people probably should be playing more of those if they're trying to have more powerful decks of other colors. I built a Jeskai deck recently, and it has twelve significant endowments or stuff, because it's also an artifact based deck. So it really was that too. If you're gonna get to the big stuff, you need the ramp to get there.
So I think that there are facsimiles for a lot of what green does that other colors have available that are a bit weaker? Cause those are weaker than actually just getting lan into play. Especially given that people get mad at me when I play Armageddon. Rightly so. But yeah, I think that it's the most obvious, again, when it's powerful.
So I think that it also gets that reputation because it is clear when the green player is the problem and they're able to do it faster than other people. Because they can just play cards faster. Cause they ramp. Yeah, I think ramp is a very big determining factor in power level. At lower, absolutely lower power levels in particular.
Rachel Weeks
Cause it just means you just win faster. Cause you made more mana and you created a threat faster. So if you're the green deck of the table and people are like, that deck's too powerful, it probably is too fast is what it means is there's so many things. You're dedicating so many cards to playing the game faster. It's not that your deck is doing something that's inherently more powerful.
It's just doing it a turn earlier than people are prepared to deal with it or are expecting to have to deal with it. So I think that there's a lot of green players that are like, it's not that good. Green isn't that good. I have to have things to do things. But where the frustration comes from is that it's just faster.
So obviously, ramp makes your deck more powerful, and green can do it on a budget. Cause Elvish mystic doesn't cost anything. So that's great. Costs one green mana. Excuse me.
That's true. Free Elvish mystic. Oh, busted. It's called a box. Mox.
Elf. Elf. Yeah. No, it's called dryadarber. There we go.
Yeah. So I think if you're a green player and you're frustrated where people are like, everybody gets mad at me for when I play my green deck because they think it's too powerful. It's not that it's doing crazy powerful things, it's that it's just ahead. So understand, green operates on a faster scale, which means that it probably tips up the power scale on the lower. But obviously, as things get more powerful, as creatures mean less, ramp means less, stack interaction means more, then green gets less powerful.
All right, any final tips for people who are getting into green or are trying to play green well, trying to improve their green decks? We talked about a lot. We did talk about a lot. Yeah. I don't know.
Brian Kibler
Play your landwear elves and your elvish mystics and your birds of paradise and your arbore elves and your noble hierarchs. And your slowly ignoble hierarchs. Like I said, I want that achievement list termina creature. I want to know. We're going to do Spotify wrapped in to the listeners.
Rachel Weeks
What is your favorite thing about playing green? If you're a green mage, do we miss any of the colors, pitfalls that you're like, ah, I really struggle with this. Maybe we'll get in the comments and help you out with that. We are always reading the comments. Want to make sure that we know what you're talking about and what's important to you.
What's your favorite tech to shore up some of those weaknesses or not, or just to make your creature bigger and kill somebody. And how do you recommend people pilot their green decks to victory? We talked about a lot of magic cards today. You can pick up all of them up. Over@cardkingdom.com.
Command they have a ton of green cards. They have all the other colors, too, and all the green blue cards and green black cards, green white cards. And they're going to put all of them in one safe package and ship it professionally to you. My favorite thing about shopping at card Kingdom is I know if I order a near mint card, it's going to arrive in the mail near mint because they've packaged it in a way that I know that card is going to be safe. And if I'm buying a new deck, I can buy a ton of the cards I'm looking for in one place so that deck shows up on my door and I can get sleeved up and building right away.
You can support the show and pick up some sweet new green cards. Over@cardkingdom.com. Command and once those cards are in your hand, you're going to need to protect them. Go to ultapro.com command to pick up your green sleeves. Play the green sleeves music here for your green decks, Ultra Pro has a huge selection of magic accessories and other gaming accessories.
You can get sleeves and deck boxes, binders, card sorters, dice, everything that you need to represent your board state well. Or just have a cool looking board state. If you have a commander that you're really into. I love going on Ultra Pro and going back through the old arts to see if there's anything I've built recently, then you can have the whole thing. You can have the Mirko Playmat with your Mirko deck with the mirko sleeves with the blue dice and really dedicate to a certain commander that you're building again.
You can support the show and support your collection. Keep it safe, keep it organized, keep it beautiful@ultpro.com. Command all right, before we go, let's do some plugs. Where can people find you? Where are you on the Internet?
Brian Kibler
I'm BM Kibbler on all forms of social media. And then commander at home. Yeah, the commander gameplay channel that I have with Olivia. We have a lot of fun over there. You've been a guest.
Rachel Weeks
I have several times. It's a ton of fun. It's a ton of fun. Fun. And go check out Brian and follow on all of those socials.
Thank you so much for watching. Before we go, we're going to say a big thank you here to our amazing team at the command zone. Thank you to Damon Lentz, Eric Lem, megan. Yep. Garav Galadi, Jordan Pridgen.
Dreamy block, Arthur Meadowcroft, Manson Long, Josh Murphy, Jake Boss, Sam Waldo, Evan Limberger, Katie Cole, Mitch Trafford, Josh Lee Kwai, Jimmy Wong. And of course, to Brian Kibler for taking the time to talk green with me today. See you next time. All we have left is how to play blue, so go check out the other colors. If you're interested in expanding your magic, acknowledge.
Bye bye.
Thank you for your attention. For further inquiries, send an email to. Commandcastrocketjump.Com or ask us on Twitter at Josh Lee Kwai. See you later, alligator. Greetings, human.
Angie
Greetings, human.
Rachel Weeks
Greetings, human.
Angie
Greetings, human.