The Commander’s Chair – Zombie Infestation

The entries are in and a winner has been chosen for The Mimeoplasm’s zombie challenge. Before we get to the winner, I want to cover some ground on zombies in Commander and how to make them good.Whenever you build any Commander deck, you need to choose a path to take for victory. Just making a tribal deck isn’t going to make your deck a force to be rockened with. Before you even start putting the list for your deck together you should have a clear idea of how you want to knock other players out of the game.One of the cards I was really hoping to see decks built around was Rooftop Storm.

[Guest Article] Carlos, Lich Lord

Hey there! My name is Carlos, and I’m pretty excited to be doing a guest piece on Commander for Red Site Wins! I’ve been playing magic for more or less ten years now, and Commander is definitely the most fun I’ve ever had playing the game. If you’ve ever read any of my other articles over on Commandercast or Quiet Speculation, you’ll know that I’m a Johnny and a combo player at heart, and that especially holds true in Commander. The problem is that combo is so easy in this format. There are all kinds of tier one generals and strategies and try to combo off as brutally and efficiently as possible, and that’s not fun. The fun is in finding new and hilarious ways to combo.

So far I’ve published two terribad combo decks: Second Sunrise Zuberas (Tribute to Zhu) and Death Lace Combo (Reap what you Lace). Both were pretty well received by my group the first couple of times that I played them, and then got hated on pretty hard once the gimmick got old. But now I’ve got the itch to build a new bad combo deck, and I’m pretty sure this one is better and more gimmicky than both of the others. Let’s take a look at this week’s combo piece:

The Commander’s Chair – Possibilities of Innistrad

Innistrad has been out for a few weeks now and so far I have seen very few cards from the set that have had an impact on Commander. We are a little too early into the set to have enough flip cards to create a new themed deck. However, if you were a fan of Vampires and Zombies, Innistrad has given us some great new tools to work with.  Today I am going to be reviewing some of the tribal gems from Innistrad.

The Commander’s Chair – The Redemption

Earlier this year I helped a kid at the local store build a Caw-Blade deck. Jace, The Mind Sculptor and Stoneforge Mystic were dominating the format and he was having a tough time getting all the pieces together. I was only able to get him the cards he needed with the help of the online community. As a result, my collection got jostled around in a major way. I ended up losing some value, which was both expected and not a big deal. I did benefit in one way; I ended up staring at a Japanese foil Doubling Season.

This card has been sitting in my I-am-never-going-to-trade-these-cards binder for several months without finding a home. I was talking to a good friend of Red Site Wins, Chas Andres, about his highly impressive cube. You all probably know who Chas is. He is one of the big name financial writers over at Channel Fireball. If you do any sort of trading, I suggest reading his articles. He is also the reason many of you are reading this article today. Chas wrote about my experience with the kid and trade sharks in the shop. As a result, our overall readers doubled overnight. Back to the story, Chas and me made a trade in which I received one of the single coolest cards I have ever seen. This week in the mail I received a Japanese foil Tooth and Nail. Hallelujah!!

The Commander’s Chair – Sabbatical

At the end of March I posted my very first article here at Red Site Wins, Searching for Treasure. Five months and over ten thousand unique page views later, I am hanging up my pen for awhile. I will be looking for someone to take over this article series so that loyal readers will not be left without new Commander Content. As the most viewed author for the site, I believe it is my responsibility to provide an explanation for my departure.

Financial – Gaining Value with Artist Attendance at Events

Today I am going to take a step out of my comfort zone in writing Magic articles. I’ve been playing Magic for a while and writing about playing the game comes naturally to me. What doesn’t come naturally to me is writing about the financial aspects of magic; buying, selling, and trading. This past extended weekend I had to pleasure to attend GenCon 2011. It was my fifth time attending the Best Four Days of Gaming. Normally I go to test new games, find interesting knick-knacks, and feed my girlfriend’s obsession with dice-sets. This year I went almost solely to play Magic. I attempted to grind into Nationals (which I failed to achieve, but thats a story for another day…i.e. tomorrow), played in a Midnight Madness Chaos Draft, and even the m12 Celebration Sealed event.

However, not only did I find myself actually playing magic, but doing a lot of trading as well. While going through my binders I had two specific pages that people kept stopping at and asking about cards in. These weren’t my two pages of Power, or my duals, or my shockland collection. These were a select group of cards that I collected before the event and purposefully put together on those two pages, even though to some people it looked like a random assortment of cards. The cards in question were Foil and Non-Foil versions of Child of Alara, Dhamia, both Ashlings, Ink-Eyes, Marrow-Gnawer, Glissa the Traitor (both normal and Prerelease), and Jenara. Why these cards? What’s so special about them beyond being awesome legends?

The Commanders Chair – Useless Article

Normally, this would be where I would post some sort of Commander tech and give advice about how to make your deck more suitable for your playgroup. Not today! Today, I am just too freaking excited about the face-off that will be going down in the next few hours.

For those of you who do not know, Luis, I play squadron hawks in EVERY format, Acosta will be facing off against Amanda, if I brew it – they will come, Stevens. You might be asking yourself, “Why are they facing off?” Here is the story;

The Commander’s Chair – Dueling Grounds

During the last episode of Red Cast Wins, there was a scuffle that may or may not have been cut from the recording. The result of the altercation is that Luis and Amanda will be battling for the right to ridicule. There will be 3 formats chosen for the face-off. You can vote on which format will be used here:ttp://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=question&id=130331563721132&qa_ref=qd

Votes will be taken until the end of the week. Right now, it looks like Commander will be one of the formats chosen. It will probably end up that neither of them will be allowed to use a list that I generate. They will be forced to build their own unique Commander list. With that feeling of equality in mind, today I will be giving some advice for playing Commander in a two player setting.

The Commander’s Chair – Pauper to Prince

It has only been a few weeks since I wrote my first article on how to upgrade the Commander precons. After several discussions I noted that there was one serious flaw with the way I was approaching both building and upgrading Commander decks. I have not been taking the price of cards into account. As a result, I have been giving advice that not everyone could follow. When @mikelinnemann suggested that I write an article covering upgrades of Commander decks at different price levels, I went to work.

Today I will be covering $5, $10, $50, $100 and higher cost upgrades to the Commander precons. By covering this I hope to not only show cheap and easy ways to improve your Commander decks, but also to show what makes up the difference between the Commander precons and Commander decks that are ready to take on all comers. For the purposes of this demonstration I will use the Counterpunch precon.

The Commander’s Chair – Forums of Doom

“Yes, there is a spirit of EDH, and that’s not it.” – Sheldon on my article The Voltron Matrix

“Now, I’m going to say this: the SwordsToPlow guy who wrote that blog article sounds, to me, like a DREADFUL person to play with, I would have a very hard time having fun playing against the sort of decks he seems to like to build.” – Thaematurge

Do you feel the love?

Sadly, there are more statements like these I could pull from forums.  After getting into several arguments with people online, I had a realization. The only people who were arguing with me were arguing with me based only on theory. The people who were criticizing me had never played with or against the lists I posted on the site. I think the issue may be that I have not written how I think the deck should be played. Today I will be going over the decks I have completely built and how I go about playing with them.