Entourage de Marine au Claire de Lune by Aert Van Der Neer (1603-1677). Deadeye Navigator by Tomasz Jedruszek.
In past weeks I've made mention of the great feeling you get when you open up a booster pack, set your eyes on a fantastic and valuable card, and rejoice in the fact that you play a singleton format and you don't need to pick up another three to fill out your playset. It's a great feeling, and last Fall I got it when I cracked open a Conspiracy: Take the Crown and set my eyes on a foil version of this little beauty.
At the time, it was probably one of the most valuable foils I had ever opened. A foil Show & Tell was worth around $70 and as soon as I realized what I had, I decided to build a deck around it.
The Challenge
Show & Tell isn't the best EDH card ever. In Commander you could easily find yourself at a table where every other player has an 8-10 drop bomb in their hand that they would just LOVE to drop onto the battlefield for free. You could literally be giving an opponent an instant win just by resolving this spell.
Play Show & Tell.
Drop a bomb.
An opponent who happens to be mana-screwed drops Blightsteel Colossus.
Pass the turn.
Your opponent plays Rogue's Passage.
You get hit with an unblockable Blightsteel Colossus and you only have yourself to blame.
Naturally, you want to run answers, but you also want to win the game when you play Show & Tell. It's powerful stuff but very obviously a double-edged sword. If you can't deal with what they might drop, you shouldn't even think about running it.
My problem is that I'm stubborn.
I opened it up and I was going to find a way to use it.
The Solution
To properly build a deck where I can abuse Show and Tell, the first step is to figure out what bombs I'm going to run.
Ideally, we're looking at stuff that costs way too much mana, and that my opponents will absolutely have to deal with. Of these kinds of creatures, there are two major types I was considering - Eldrazi and Titans.
I didn't want to go out and buy $100 worth of cards to build this deck, so I looked at what I had available.
I didn't have any Eldrazi, but I did have these guys left over from an old Reaper King build that had more recently made their way into my Mayael deck.
So the process of building up a pile of bombs was off to a good start. I also had Broodstar, Mycosynth Golem, Darksteel Reactor and I was feeling pretty good about what I could play off my Show & Tell.
I still hadn't figured out what I was going to do about the bombs my opponents played.
The easiest way to deal with everyone else's bombs is to play an overloaded Cyclonic Rift, but that's a great way to get the whole table against you. Don't get me wrong, it's a fantastic card and my deck was already going to include blue, but I wasn't about to put all my hopes for surviving my own Show & Tell on a single card.
That's where mind control cards come into play.
If I can't get a Rift lined up with the mana available to overload it, the next best option is to steal the biggest threat that hits the table. It might still make me the number one target at the table, but it was the best option I could think of.
I lined up a few cards to fill out this "slot" in the deck.
This isn't all the mind control effects I put into the deck, but you get the idea. This is where the name - Padeem "Gimme Gimme" - comes from. Play a big creature and I'm going try to take it. I might even help you play that bomb!
So we know we're in blue, and we know we're playing mind control spells, and we know we're playing Artifacts, not Eldrazi.
As fate would have it, I opened up Padeem in Kaladesh and it all started to come together.
Padeem gives us hexproof, which has been one of my favorite abilities since my Narset deck warped my home playgroup's meta. They began to run tons of boardwipes and stuff like Cultural Exchange just to deal with her. Hexproof is fantastic, and putting hexproof on a Blightsteel Colossus was the kind of fun I wanted to get into with this deck. I might not steal another artifact creature from an opponent, but if the main thrust of the deck was going to be colossi and golems, Padeem made a lot of sense. The card draw is also pretty sweet and we will usually have the highest cmc artifact at the table.
If we're going to have hexproof for our artifacts, we might as well load up on some good ones.
The aforementioned Darksteel Forge is worth mentioning again here. Hexproof AND indestructible is a hard combination of effects for opponents to deal with. Sitting a colossus on the Dragon Throne of Tarkhir is going to put us in a good position to do some damage. We can use Proteus Staff to put a little guy like Aspiring Aeronaut or Trinket Mage on the bottom of our library with the chance to replace it with something much bigger. Tamiyo's Journal will help us search out what we need, and Unwinding Clock is just fantastic in a deck that's heavy in artifacts.
There's more, but I think you get the idea.
Of course, we aren't going to rely upon Show and Tell and Proteus Staff as the only way to cheat big creatures into play.
These guys will go a long way towards getting our big robots onto the battlefield without actually paying their full mana cost. Those clue tokens from Tamiyo's Journal may well be incredibly useful if we get the right stuff out at the right time. Turning one into a Blightsteel Colossus is simply never going to get old.
To polish off this build, we want to add a few more threats. These guys should put this deck in a position to win some games.
That Torrential Gearhulk isn't misplaced - we'll be running Cyclonic Rift, a full suite of counterspells, Mystical Tutor and High Tide, so we should have some instants to get back out of the graveyard. We'll also be running sorceries of course. Shrewd Negotiation and Switcheroo fit in nicely, and Energy Tap, Plea for Power and Rite of Replication should all be useful in the right circumstances.
The current decklist is at the link below.
So that's how I built Padeem, but that isn't the end of the story.
Missing In Action
I build way too many decks.
It's my favorite part of EDH, but as a result, I don't play the same deck again and again. I cycle through maybe 6-8 "active" decks and have other ones on the proverbial back burner.
When I built Padeem it was fun and could reliably play a strong game but it didn't win a lot. It won, but it wasn't built with any combos and was basically going to win on the battlefield.
I actually had some memorable losses. I had a game I lost to a Uril deck where I wound up trying to see how ridiculous a boardstate I could develop, rather than taking the object of eliminating my last opponent as seriously as I probably should have. I think I had out multiple colossi, Platinum Emperion, Padeem and Darksteel Reactor, but I was goofing around too much and kept seeing how much more overextended I could get. Uril did what Uril does, and I gave my opponent one turn too many. It really does make me happy to see someone else just astonished and ecstatic at winning a close game, even if it is at my own expense.
It was fun. It was strong. It did win games. It was way more fun than my first mono-blue deck, Talrand Says No, and I expect to keep Padeem together and keep playing it for a long time.
There was one problem.
In all the games I played with it, I never once saw or resolved Show and Tell.
It was in the deck. I checked. I just never drew it.
The deck was still fun, but when you're looking for one card out of a hundred and you aren't going out of your way to tutor for it, variance can rear its ugly head and make you wonder if the card is even still there.
Damnation
I don't own a Damnation.
I've looked for it, but I couldn't see paying what online retailers were asking for it.
I've got a Zurgo deck that I would just love to slot Damnation into.
It's not a great deck, but it's got a ton of boardwipes and it'd make me happy to add the "black wrath" in there.
When Modern Masters 2017 was announced and they let us know Damnation would be in it, I really, really wanted to pick up a box.
When I reminded myself of how much a box would cost, I had second thoughts.
As an EDH player I know buying boxes isn't smart, but cracking packs is a quintessential part of the Magic experience.
It's fun.
It's exciting.
I know it sounds stupid, but I really wanted to pre-order a box and unwrap a Damnation. I just didn't want to spend over $200 for one.
There's another card in my Padeem deck I should mention.
Karn Liberated.
I ran him in my Reaper King deck because I opened one in a booster and Karn looks like a robot. My Reaper King deck was golem tribal, running all the "splicers" and lots of cheap golems. I moved Karn over to my Padeem deck, because he looks like a robot, and because he's good. He's very good.
The problem is - I'm not keen on restarting games.
It's just not my style. Folks get annoyed. I'd rather just plow on to the end, win or lose, and start a new game, than start the current game over.
In a game recently, just after Modern Masters 2017 spoilers had started coming out, I was sitting to the left of a player who just loves to troll other players. He's not a bad guy, but he seems to delight in playing in a way that gets under the skin of his opponents. As fate would have it, he played a Karn Liberated, used it to exile something big on someone else's board, and then passed the turn to me. He was absolutely going to try to get some good stuff and then restart the game.
I had my Karn in my hand and enough mana to play it.
I couldn't resist.
I played my Karn and used it to exile his Karn.
I Karned his Karn!
It was awesome, though I think he wound up winning that particular game anyways.
Later on that night, I reflected upon the play and decided that if the best thing I was going to do with my Karn was to Karn another player's Karn because I found it hilarious, it was possible I didn't really deserve to have a Karn in the first place.
My Karn wasn't a foil but it was about as valuable as my Foil Show & Tell. I also had a Narset Transcendent, Gideon Ally of Zendikar and a Saheeli Rai in a binder not being used.
We have a change jar in our kitchen where we put spare change and every year or two we cash it in and split the money between myself, my wife and my kid. That night I realized the change jar was the answer to my MM17 problem. My son is why I got into Magic in the first place. I suggested we each take our third of the change jar money, I trade in some of my more valuable cards, and we split a Modern Masters box. He was all in.
The change jar yielded $150, so the two of us had $100 to bring the cost of our box down to $115. It's a big jar. We went to our LGS and after selling my Foil Show And Tell and my four planeswalkers along with a few other cards I wound up paying just under $40 out of pocket to pre-order it.
I'm writing this on Tuesday, March 14th. We're hunkered down at home watching Winter Storm Stella drop two feet of snow on the greater Boston area. In a few days we will be cracking open that box.
Will I get my Damnation, or will I be gearing up to build Zur the Enchanter in the coming months?
Will I pop open a bunch of packs with nothing but stuff I've already got in my collection?
I don't know yet, but I'll be finishing this post with the answer to that question...
I had a bad feeling...
I picked up the box over lunch on Friday and grabbed a pack to open that afternoon. We'd be opening the box that evening when I got home from work. The rare in that pack? Boros Reckoner. Definitely not a Damnation, but I had 12 more packs to open up later that day.
I let my son pick the packs he would open. I counted out mine and before I even started to open them, He cracked open a Damnation.
As fate would have it, my gut feeling was spot on. He opened a Goyf as well.
Don't get me wrong. I was happy he opened up a great card, and he was able to sell it for a bunch of stuff the next day. I just really, really wanted to crack that Damnation.
In my packs I got a Scalding Tarn, a Cavern of Souls a Niv-Mizzet, Dracogenius, a Path to Exile and a few other OK cards, but nothing spectacular.
It should go without saying that I was disappointed. He had a deck to slot the Damnation into, and there was no way I was going to try to strong-arm a trade out of him.
The temptation to sell the Tarn and Cavern to buy more boosters to try again to crack open a Damnation for myself was palpable.
Fortunately, I also know that the worst way to get a card is to open booster after booster. The odds are against you, and you'll probably spend many more times the cost of the card before you open one up.
So what did I do?
The next morning I ordered a $25 MM17 Damnation along with a few signets and other cards I needed. They should arrive next week.
I may still pick up some boosters, and I may draft MM17, but the urge to buy pack after pack to get a Damnation has been taken care of.
Final Thoughts
I'm also going to take the Scalding Tarn and Niv-Mizzet as a sign that I need to build that Paradox Engine / Isochron Scepter burn storm deck that I've been thinking about. I've never seriously built an Izzet EDH deck but now that I've got the manabase and enough key pieces I think I'm going to go for it. That Saheeli Rai would be pretty useful for it, but I've got enough other stuff that I think I'll be OK. Casting a kicked Rite of Replication on Guttersnipe, Fire Elemental or Young Pyromancer and then storming a bunch of burn spells just sounds like way too much fun. As always, thanks for reading! This coming April I will be doing another road trip to Pennsylvania over my son's spring break.
If everything goes as planned, we'll be hitting game stores on the way up and on the way back, and will probably play at The Portal in Bethelehem if they are still having their weekly EDH night. If anyone out there wants to meet up for some games, keep an eye on these posts - we'll be planning the trip soon and I'd love a chance to get beat down by you guys or maybe even steal myself a win or two!