The Wizard of Kraj

Once again, I think I'm far wittier than I actually am when making titles for these posts. And depending on your pronunciation of Kraj, the pun might not even present itself clearly. But enough of that. I came here today to write of another Magic EDH deck that I recently made. This one, as you might expect, involves Experiment Kraj, but its concept began when I looked at two different cards: Vorel of the Hull Clade and Djinn of Wishes. Vorel I already had, but the Djinn I came across online. The combo potential was immediately obvious, and I wondered what other sorts of unique counters I could manipulate to staggering amounts for otherwise unobtainable effects. I didn't open a lot of Simic cards from the latest block, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. I've always wanted to use Kraj in EDH, and so in place of multi-colored cards I mixed in blue wizards and green shamans and druids, or just cards with abilities that I felt had a Simic flavor, which of course can then be stacked on Kraj. Equip a pair of Illusionist's Bracers for extra fun.

Herald of the Machine Age

So, due to the relative popularity of the first deck I posted, I have another, this time for all of you artifact fans out there. Artifacts are one of my favorite card types; their mostly colorless nature means they can be included in just about any deck, whether it be for combos or just fun effects, and I've always had a bit of a soft spot for automatons. So, therefore, the only natural thing for me to do was construct an entire EDH deck based around them. Blue is a color that lends itself easily to this task, but a friend of mine who heard about my plans gave me a Bosh, Iron Golem for free, and I just felt it wouldn't be right not to include him. So, faced with the need for a deck with a blue/red color identity, I turned to the only Dragon Wizard (and only red/blue legendary in my possession at the time) that I knew would be up to the task: Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind. After all, who else would be better suited to lead a mad machine army in the pursuit of science? And so, without further ado, here is the deck list for Niv-Mizzet's Mecha Marvels:

Madness, You Say?

For this blog's inaugural post, I am going to talk about a subject that has grown on me throughout my years in college: Magic: The Gathering. I was introduced to this game during my sophmore year of college and have been playing ever since. I should follow this statement with a disclaimer; I am no tournament player. I much prefer casual play amongst my friends where cards from many different Magic sets can combine in unique, fun, and sometimes, as I will demonstrate later in this post, ridiculous ways. I am a big fan of EDH, or Commander, since it allows many cards that don't normally see a lot of play their chance to shine, and have created four of my own decks following this format, with a fifth in the works. My latest creation, featuring Melek, Izzet Paragon as its illustrious commander, is the focus of the rest of this post.

While hitting random on the Gatherer website one night (a wonderful way to find interesting cards), I came across a card from the original Ravnica set called Eye of the Storm. For those who aren’t familiar with the blue enchantment, the exact wording of the card is as follows: “Whenever a player plays an instant or sorcery card, remove it from the game. Then that player copies each instant or sorcery card removed from the game with Eye of the Storm. For each copy, the player may play the copy without paying its mana cost”. I had also recently picked up a card called Hive Mind, another blue enchantment that says, “Whenever a player casts an instant or sorcery spell, each other player copies that spell. Each of those players may choose new targets for his or her copy”. Since the Izzet are one of my favorite guilds from Ravnica, I immediately began thinking of a spell-focused blue/red deck where my objective wasn’t necessarily to win, but to give everyone the opportunity to “have fun”. Upon doing an advanced search for cards containing spell randomizing effects, I finally ended up with the following build for my “Chaos Deck”: