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Need help with this please!I've played this deck several times and it just doesn't seem to run right...
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There's two problems with Kaervek. 1. People absolutely hate commanders that discourage then from actually playing Magic. 2. Kaervek himself is pretty expensive to cast. That means you have a commander who is going to more often than not be the number one removal target at the table while simultaneously becoming prohibitively expensive every time someone removes him. That's a bad combination. I would just run someone else myself as I don't think it's worth the headache, plus I generally wouldn't like the idea of sitting down for a game knowing my deck is going to create a gamestate where people are actively discouraged from playing the game they're sitting down to play. That said, if you're madly in love with this commander here's my suggestions:You need more land. 33 is just not enough. I run more than that in mono-green, which is about the perfect situation for a lean mana base with a 3 cost commander who draw me 1-2 cards per turn. I'd get up to at least 36.Get some ramp so you can get your commander out faster and more consistently. Expedition Map and Wayfarer's Bauble gets and extra land into play, as does Myriad Landscape. I'd get more mana rocks, too. Rakdos Signet, Talisman of Indulgence, Gilded Lotus, and Thran Dynamo would be a start, and all are relatively inexpensive. Find a Chaos Warp. It's deals with any threat, and it's your only way to hit enchantments.I'd swap Go for the Throat into Dark Betrayal's slot, put Hero's Downfall in where Fall of the Hammer is, put Dreadbore where Lightning Strike is to start. There's no reason to run spells that get the job done half the time when you can run ones that get it done 100% of the time, and in EDH Lightning Bolt effects just don't get it done.Find a slot for Vandalblast. Destroying every artifact not yours is never not great.Find a slot for Blasphemous Act. 1 mana to wipe the board after some token deck puts 20 zombies down is never not great.On a higher level, you need a plan about how you're going to win. What does this deck do exactly? Not everything needs to be perfectly synchronized and on theme or anything but you should still have an idea about how the deck will win, and I don't see one here. My suggestion would be to run a ton of effects that do damage to everyone to put the entire game on a clock with the notion that Kaervek can do enough damage on top of the global effects to put you ahead. Stuff like Mogis or Pestilence or Pyrohemia or Mana Barbs or Earthquake or Heartless Hidetsugu. Grind everyone's life down simultaneously but grind theirs faster.
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to kind of piggy back off what doc says, everything he mentioned is true. the merciless is a red black control deck, you would have a much better time with olvia valderan who is a beast. but if your committed imagine how the game is going to play out. this game is going long, so tthe amount of threats you need versus the amount of threats you must be able to deal with is low. i always like grave titan, army of the damned, inferno titan, hatred/runechanters pike+inkmoth nexus, chainer dementia master, and let that be it. the rest is all control, draw and ramp.my ratio for a control deck like this would be 38-40 lands, 12-15 mana rocks, 2-4 win cons, 10-15 draw spells,the rest control elements.
You're both right.I'm disappointed in myself, actually, and I think I may have figured out why it doesn't run right: This is exactly the sort of deck I hate playing against. Maybe I sort of set myself up to fail unconsciously because I hate such restrictive gameplay. Thanks. No idea what I was thinking with this. Gonna leave it up though just because.
I ran Merieke Ri Berit for awhile before realizing that it just created games where people didn't want to play creatures just to have them stolen, so it just drug things out forever. Realizing that was a mistake I turned it into a creatureless Sydri Galvanic Genius deck with a ton of creature hate and board wipes with the thought that I could then animate artifacts and attack. And it just created games where people didn't want to play creatures knowing I'd board wipe every other turn. Now a friend is experiencing the same problem with his Ruric Thar deck.If you like these colors maybe try Mogis as a commander and run a ton of unilateral damage cars like I suggested above, or maybe something like Rakdos Lord of Riots and cheat big fatty Eldrazi or artifact creatures into play?
i play in a very cut throat group. We only frown slightly win someone plays lame decks like zur or something. but then we just gang up and kill them.play what you want to play in my opinion. make your play group play better more interesting magic.
Cutthroat vs. not cuthroat isn't really the point though. It's that some deck architectures generate a game state that drags the table to a halt. You don't need to be running a very tuned Derevi list to blindly toss in a Stasis and have it turn into a slog where nobody can actually PLAY the game. Sure, Zur is a trash commander for trash people, but Zur decks at least end games. The Zur guy is gonna kill someone fast and then kill someone else and someone else and you're done and can shuffle up and play another game. The problem is the decks that make it strategically wise to not really actually DO anything. Everyone sits there fucking around on their phones until they can draw-go and get back to reading Twitter.
That said, I'm not sure Kaervek necessarily does that, though in a newer meta with softer decks he might. In a tighter meta he's just gonna be too slow to really impact anything.
So I went and picked up Tsabo Tavoc to replace Kaervek as commander. I'll playtest and get back to you guys.