Thursday, June 7, 2012

My Generals

Time for you to see the decks I play!  I've got 15 Commander decks, and that's going to be a hard limit for me.  I've got friends who are engaged in a contest to make a deck of every possible color combination, but that feels impersonal to me.  These decks are ideas I wanted to play with, or generals I wanted to build around.

I'll give you a blurb about each, but no decklists, as 1500 cards is just too much for me to do and too much for you to read.

One of the first things people find out when I play EDH is that in the past year, I've learned how to make custom foil generals, thanks to my girlfriend, Elizabeth.  These are thicker than regular cards, so they are not tournament legal.  A little research will guide you to the process.  I am an active member of MTGSalvation's forums, notably the Digital Rendering Thread, and I'm going to follow their guidelines and not talk about how to make these cards.

I would suggest that if you dig these, that you learn just a little photoshop/GIMP (I'm self-taught on GIMP) and go from there.  It's going to be a process, and not an easy one.  My first attempts were godawful, and even the ones I'm posting aren't perfect.  Some have shadows, some don't. 

In alphabetical order:



Notable for: Adun has just five noncreature spells: Green Sun's Zenith, Lurking Predators, Fires of Yavimaya, Primal Surge, and Genesis Wave. (all foil, no less! :D )

Favorite Card: Diamond Valley.  I traded a stack of rares and mythics I opened at Worlds to get this.  Couldn't be happier, as it's a free sacrifice outlet, gains me a lot of life, and combines well with my general to re-use the creatures.




Notable for: Playing Eldrazi for free if the silly thing levels up enough!

Favorite Card: Hands down, Guided Passage.  There are no correct decisions.





Notable for: Wizard card draw shenanigans, leading to the stealing of your stuff.

Favorite Card: A tie between Braids, Conjurer Adept and an rk post-altered Fatespinner where she's holding a STOP sign.




Notable for: Zombies!  More Zombies!

Favorite Card: Walking Dead.  Not a strong zombie, but such great art and flavorful name!




Notable for: Being the Soldier King, possibly the most synergistic tribe around

Favorite Card: Kjeldoran Outpost.  Known for a long while as 'the dude ranch' it's been a favorite forever.




Notable for: Foil Vampire goodness!  This is the only deck I'm making an attempt to pimp out, as I've got lots of the foil vampires and accessories.  Foiling the lands out will take a lot longer.

Favorite Card: The general is amazing, with hasty draw-a-card goodness, but my foil, signed Bloodline Keeper just makes me happy to gaze upon.




Notable for: Artifact and proliferate shenanigans ahoy!

Favorite Card: Darksteel Reactor.  It's great to have alternate routes to victory, even if I get attacked like mad for it.




Notable for: Being my most 'competitive' deck, it's all about the general and cheating huge things into play.  I'm giving serious thought to pursuing the dual lands and fetchlands for these colors.

Favorite Card: Quicksilver Amulet.  A friend of mine swears by Sneak Attack in his Kaalia build, but if I have the amulet, I'll skip on playing the general we all love to hate.




Notable for: Serious Voltron potential. (Meaning that a lot of things come together to make a supercharged machine of massive destruction)

Favorite Card: Ley Line.  Sure, there's all sorts of sweet abilities to give my general, but watching people hestitate to put counters on their awesome creatures just makes me giggle.




Notable for: Cleric tribal, heavy humans too. This will likely be the deck I take apart when the next idea strikes me.

Favorite Card: Gallows at Willow Hill.  A terrible card, but repeatable creature kill when all this deck does is prevent damage...super-useful.




Notable for: This is my 'problem solver' deck.  It's lacking counterspells, but if it's a permanent or in a graveyard, this deck will take care of that.

Favorite Card: Stonecloaker.  No one seems to remember this card exists, but 2W to exile any graveyard card in response to targeting that card is so good!




Notable for: Big Green Spells.  Card after card. BOOM BOOM FATTY RAWR

Favorite Card: Gaea's Liege.  He gets dead a lot, but in a deck that's mostly forests he answers a lot of problem lands.  Bonus points for when I have Hidden Path handy.




Notable for: Pinging anything and everything!

Favorite Card: Repercussion.  The only thing better than killing creatures is making their controllers feel it too.


Sliver Queen (WUBRG)


Notable for: Token Madness!

Favorite Card: Cathar's Crusade.  Now this is a card that takes a lot of counters/dice/whatever keeps track but the payoff is tremendous!




Notable for: Gaining life.  Lots and lots of lifelink and gain and getting attacked because I have double someone's life.

Favorite Card: Kuro, Pitlord.  Insanely good when I've got lots of extra life, and still good if I need just a little of what he offers.



So there you have it.  All of my generals.  I rarely bring all 15 with me somewhere, I'll usually have 6 on me.

In case you're wondering, I like using fat pack boxes to hold my decks, as they fit three decks at a time, but we'll get to the storage later.

See you next time!


8 comments:

  1. You said you make foil proxies. Can you e-mail me at ben-knight@bluebottle.com with the products you use for your blanking process and printing etc? I have started doing the same recently, but my results have been less than I'd like, what with air bubbles and such.

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  2. Mr. CD, my most hated deck from you is your damned Wizards deck. Makes me swallow a bug every time. I'm dismantling my Bant life gain deck like I said because your BW life gain puts it to shame, and I'm building a RG Thromok in its place because he's just awesome.

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  3. Shadowknight, I'll send you what I know.

    Unknown (Kenny), I'm glad I can inspire you to greatness. :D

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  4. Wow those are some really nice pieces of art :) I've just read your tutorial on making the cards; will have a go at that and then will bug you about actually getting it onto a card when I've got one that I think is worth printing!

    Given I have a colour inkjet and a Black and White laser printer (and no knowledge whatsoever) I don't rate my chances highly ;)

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  5. Can I buy the vish kal. I know it's not for sale. But Vish kal is my competitive deck, and your design is inspiring. Or can I convince you to make a different style of fvish kal?. Email please and Azoriansea@icloud.com

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  6. I love the altered arts! I would love to get a "Nin, the Pain Artist" altered from you.

    But would you sell me a custom altered card? Perhaps.

    Please email @ hendersonjohn1995@yahoo.com if you decide to make one or two or even three.

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  7. I do believe your art for Hanna is based heavily on (if not directly modeled after) Miss Fortune from League of Legends.

    Also, as a fellow Garza Zol player- dat plague queen alter. Her original printed art is sooo ugly though! My friend is going to paint a paper bag on her head for me XD

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  8. Please let me know how you dod the sliver queen! This old dog needs to learn some new tricks!

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