Stolen Goods: Road to Recovery, Part 2

This is part two of my two part series on how I came back to the game of Magic after getting my collection stolen last summer. This part of the article is going to focus heavily on the EDH deck I built which allowed me to once again enjoy the game. To read the backstory, please see Stolen Goods: Road to Recovery, Part 1.

Welcome back loyal readers! So at the end for the first part, I was about to tell you about my new EDH deck featuring my favorite angelic host, Jenara, Asura of War. Check out the deck HERE!

First things first, let's take a look at why I chose this beautiful angel as my Commander. I knew that I wanted to play Bant (U/W/G). Not only are Blue and White my favorite colors, but the Bant colors allow me to: run counter-magic, draw cards, take extra turns, ramp mana, tutor for creatures, wrath the board, run diverse removal and recur permanents all in one deck! Together, these three colors are extremely powerful and give the deck very little in the way of weaknesses to any particular strategy that my opponents may be using. Since we know what colors we want to be playing, let's next take a look at some of the Legendary creatures that we could use to head our deck.

• Rafiq of the Many: I find him to the most common Bant general that I have had to face off against. Rafiq wants to run in a more aggro/voltron-style of deck than the one I am running.
• Derevi, Empyrial Tactician: No doubt, a great choice for a Bant general. He seems to want to be built as a control or heavy token commander. Not a great choice for the ETB (Enters the Battlefield) deck that I'm looking to build here.
• Roon of the Hidden Realm: A very interesting creature from the Commander 2013 product. Originally, I had planned to use him as my Commander for my rebuild Bant deck. he is a value engine for sure, if he survives long enough to untap. I found him too slow in playing with him and he requires a more 'build around me approach' to ETB effects. His awkwardly high mana cost means that recasting him can become difficult.

These are the main 3, besides Jenara that I considered when building a Bant deck. Of course you have other choices like Treva, the Renewer, Rubinia Soulsinger, and Angus Mackenzie. However, I believe Jenara to the best candidate to be leading this deck forward to victory, she gives us an early, very powerful beater, who can stop other aggressive generals in their tracks. Just ask Javier how much he likes seeing a turn 3 Jenara! A 3/3 flyer for U/W/G gives her amazing power for her cost, and the fact is that her ability to add +1/+1 counters remains relevant for the entire game. Your opponents have to worry about her whether she comes out on turn 3 or as late as turn 15! That's the kind of power that I'm looking for in a general! Another great thing about her is that she doesn't require other cards to work. She is not a build around me general, which makes her great for the leader of an ETB/good stuff/control deck like the one that I am planning on building; the other 99 cards can all have more use when you don't have to use multiple cards to turn on your commander.

The way that I usually like to play this deck is with an attrition style. Throughout the game I poke at my opponents' resources, including life totals! Weakening them until it is hard for them to put up a fight. I generally try to control my opponents, using my ETB effects, until they run out of things to do and then go in for the kill with my utility creatures and the queen of them all, Jenara! ETB effects and the engines which help them be effective are the keys to this kind of play-style. I like to consider these kinds of cards as my 'renewable resources' as they can often times be blinked or recurred to give me more incremental advantage over my opponents; this is especially important in larger Free-For-All style games where I have multiple adversaries. This slow, methodical buildup of resources usually allows me to take over the game later on, resulting in most times a huge Jenara or a combo-kill of some kind. Good stuff cards do have a place in this deck; however, sometimes you just need value cards like Path to Exile or Wrath of God. These cards have the least synergy with the rest of the deck, but sometimes when things are going south they will be the cards that will save you.

I feel like a major portion of this deck is how it uses value engines that, while powerful, are not really degenerate. Sure, sometimes I can do 'mean' things like bounce a Woodfall Primus or Acidic Slime a bunch of times to blow up lands; but quite honestly those kinds of plays don't happen very often with the deck. Most of the time those cards are going to come in and blow up a problem non-creatures card (or 2) and then give me a valuable creature on the field to do something with; you definitely sometimes have the option to do degenerate things sometimes, but overall you are just trying to gain incremental value while keeping your opponents in check. Jenara is used mainly to plug any and every hole that there might be with the deck. She gives us a very good play, and response to almost anything after turn 3. Opponents plays Kaalia? Go ahead and drop your blocker. You had a nice board position that was just Wrath-ed away? Add an instant threat to the board. Need that Solemn Simulacrum to get your ramp going? Use Birthing Pod and offer her up as sacrifice to find it. She really allows us to always have a play that your opponent needs to answer, but that's not to say that she has no synergy with the deck though, far from it in fact! The ability for the deck to gain incremental advantages over time plays right into her ability to be a mana sink in the late game. Pump her up with a Mirari's Wake on the field or a Prophet of Kruphix and go to town!

Speaking of the Prophet, she is an all-star in the deck. The ability to untap your creatures and lands at the end of each player's turn is killer! Not to mention, with her giving creatures the Flash ability you can cast basically anything you want.. at any point you want! The deck obviously works much better with her on the field, which makes her a top target for opponents' spot removal.

Well there you are! A look into the deck that made me enjoy playing Magic again. I fell in love with Jenara when I first played her and I can only see that love growing stronger as time goes on. 

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-Evan Forster

Stolen Goods: Road to Recovery, Part 1

[Today's article comes from guest writer Evan Forster and is part one of a two-part series. Enjoy!]

"Wounded soldiers looked up, grateful for her appearance. But she passed over them, her eyes firmly on their foe."

My story begins during the summer of 2013. I had finished playing in the Modern PTQ season with my friends and teammates of CasualNet Gaming and I was getting ready to go on a fabulous vacation to Europe! When I got back from the trip, I had to get something from my car and noticed that my car was messier than it had been before I left; compartments were emptied of their contents which were scattered around in the general area from which they came. My jetlagged brain brushed this off as no big deal, "maybe my dad had to grab something from my car right before we left and couldn't find it," I thought. It was until that weekend when I was at my good friend Javier Remy's house and getting ready to play a game of commander that I realized something was amiss. Previously, I always left my Magic cards in my car. Since I used them so much, it seemed only natural to always have them with me. This time, when I went out to grab my bag of cards, I realized that they weren't there. My mind flashed back to the disheveled state of my car when I got back from my trip and I automatically knew what had happened: my collection had been stolen. I went back inside and told my friends that it appeared that I had left my cards at home and I borrowed Jav's Grimgrin, Corpse-Born deck for the game. We played a pretty long and enjoyable game, but I just couldn't get into it.

As far as collections go, mine wasn't extremely valuable from a collector's point of view, I would say roughly $1500-$2000. The thing that hit me hardest was the loss of my commander decks, specifically my Jenara, Asura of War deck, which I had been working on for about 3 years. The deck was my baby, my first real EDH deck. A deck that had grown from a collection of cards and an idea thrown together for a quick EDH game, to a force to be reckoned with at the table. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the loss of that deck was what crushed me the most. I stopped going to the card store for a while and stopped playing Magic in general. Realizing that I couldn't play a deck I created anymore in my favorite format of Magic made me question whether it was worth it to continue playing the game at all.

However, later that summer, the Grand Prix tour was coming to Miami, FL, a mere 4-5 hours' drive from my hometown of Orlando. I figured attending this was possibly a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I decided that if I was ever going to get back into Magic, this was the time. I built the deck that I thought was best, Bant Enchantments, because it allowed me to play my favorite colors: blue and white. I began playing the deck at FNMs in the Orlando area and enjoyed playing it for the most part. It had a solid matchup against most of the field and had a pretty straightforward plan. So I went to the GP and figured that if I could put up a decent showing, I'd enjoy playing Magic again. I was expecting a lot of aggro, which I could easily race. My only downfall was against control decks, which were getting pushed out of the format by aggressive Burning-Tree Emissary decks and attrition-based Junk reanimator decks, as far as I knew, so I shouldn't be seeing a lot of them. I considered picking up a Cavern of Souls to put into the deck, just so I could stick that Geist of Saint Traft which spelled doom for control decks. However, again, I wasn't expecting a lot of those decks, so against my better judgment, I passed it by (It was a Korean Cavern of Souls, WHAT WAS I THINKING!?!?). Nevertheless, we spent the first day at the GP prattling around, looking at the vendors, getting cards signed by artists and generally just hanging out having a good time. Aside from a slight hotel mix-up that evening, everything was going great. Going into the first day of play, I was feeling confident.

I saw 3 control decks in the first 4 rounds and scrubbed out hard.

Needless to say, I was not happy. I came to the GP to prove to myself that Magic was still worty my time; that I could rebuild; that things would be ok. They weren't. During the PTQ season, when I scrubbed out of a tournament, it turned into a fun day of "hang out with friends, meet new people, and play EDH." This time I had no such EDH decks, so it turned into a long two days of "sit around and try not to be bored." During these two days, I began to seriously think about giving up the game that had been a pretty big part of my life for the past five or so years, and a major force in the development of some of the best friendships I have today. "Is this worth it?" I thought to myself, "can I keep doing this?" After thinking about it, I realized that I wasn't having fun playing the deck that I built for the GP or, to be honest, playing Magic in general at that point. Competitive Magic has never had a very big draw for me. I mostly play in events because I get to hang out with friends. I know some of you are asking why I didn't build a new EDH deck, and the honest answer was that I had no desire to. I didn't want to invest so much time and money into a deck again. To me, when you build a commander deck, it has part of your personality in it and I didn't want to invest so heavily into something that could be stripped away at the whim of a stranger. I also knew how much time and effort went into building a truly fun deck and since my local EDH metagame is filled with very powerful decks and great deckbuilders, I didn't feel I had the resources to rebuild a decent EDH deck that I would enjoy playing.

Quitting looked more and more likely. I looked into selling off my little collection (which consisted mainly of my Standard deck), quietly asking a few of my friends how much they would value some of the more expensive cards. But in my heart I knew that if anything could get me back into Magic, it was commander. I decided to wait until the Commander 2013 product came out in November to decide if I wanted to play the game again or not.

Fast forward to November. I hadn't really been playing a lot of Magic in the previous months, skipping the Theros pre-release and release parties (which used to be some of my favorite events), and generally not hanging out at the card store. I managed to find the Commander pre-cons at a local Target and picked up the Bant one. The theme of the deck was similar to the Jenara deck that I had loved so much previously, so maybe--just maybe--this would be the deck to get me back into the game. I took it home and made a few changes with the cards that I had. The next day, I headed down to UCF to meet up with a few of my friends to play with my new commander deck. After the first couple turns, I was hooked again. I forgot how fun commander games were! I was playing a deck that I owned again. I decided to remake Jenara, but this time it would be different. This time I would have new tricks.

This was Jenara 2.0

Continues in Thursday's installment of Stolen Goods: The Road to Recovery, Part 2

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-Evan F.