wickeddarkman

Ah, a victim of the attention economy :)
Forget something and they will make you pay.
Forget to pay your Bills and you get more bills.
I hate it, in Denmark we've got our old transport system exchanged into an attention economy version.
Forget to stamp in and you get a heavy fine, forget to stamp out and get a small fine.

Man is not a machine, so he will forget occasionally.

Oh To be a zombie, an engine of destruction, who stomps and bite and never stamps.

Fetchlands will grow the fledgling.

Nah, I meant all the cloning, there's not a lot of counterspells in here.
I must admit cipher is a very neat strategy to try out in commander format.
I think it would be better on cheap unblockable creatures.

But if you are gonna spam them with spells, why not add [[paranoid delusions]] ?
Sure the mana will need a little work, but it might be doable.

Also, [[whispering madness]]

The two cipher colors are black and blue, and both colors have creatures that like to sneak around unseen

You may also have made a typo when writing "josh lee kwai's deck"
Perhaps you meant "josh Lee's kwain deck"

Feel free to delete this comment if it was a typo :)

I also liked the beautiful zombie tribal engine.

Hymn can be pretty annoying :)

What if one of your group makes "the move" and buys into power 9 ?

Ah, the beauty of death.

I guess you were inspired by user Xqc15gae :)
He has a very similar tribal deck.

Not very subtle :)

Then look up user: dedwards
Cardhybrid3 got his inspiration from dedwards take on the concept XD

That's magic sometimes.

I often find weird combos myself and say "noone else could have thought of this" then I google card a + card b, and there it is. It's a little odd sometimes when it happens with brand new cards... I've never managed to be first guy on the web with a card interaction, and it's not like I'm not trying.

I think I was first with [[children of korlis]] + [[immolating souleater]] + [[horned helm]]
But only because better versions exist.

Yeah, it's a bit of a nuisance :)
Good thing I know the card well.
I had an GR deck once based on what was once called "birdshit"
([[Chalice of the void]] & creatures that couldn't be countered)

I called my brew birdshit painter and had 12 cards that dealt with blue cards.
Later designs were pretty fast but painterless.

Harmless offering is likely to have an odd combo that mimics the old beeble donate.

There are some variants of 93/94 that include the last edition printed that year, so in a few formats you will see stuff like hymn to tourac.

It can be a very fun format except for the prices.
I have a long time habit of proxying the entire meta to play test anything I want to play with.
That way I won't end up buying something that won't work.

Still, sometimes an odd (pun intended) card can fix the problems of a deck by being somewhat different.
I've seen it again and again in my own experiments with evolution. It's rare though, and it takes a hell of a lot of research to find such cards.

Take [[horned helm]] for instance, if it hadn't been because I was searching for trample cards to put into a white deck with immolating souleater + children of korlis, I would never in my life had thought of it in a deck with burn and kiln fiend. Kiln fiend decks usually have numerous other cards to give them trample, but I've found that sometimes having the helm equipped on kiln fiend or festival crasher gives the deck a much needed defensive move. I'd never consider horned helm as being usefull if it wasn't because both decks I'm talking about are halfdecks, meant to shuffle together with another random deck. Never in a million years would I have put that card in a kiln fiend deck myself, but
Using halfdeck designs forces me to rethink cards constantly.

The point here is, you don't really know how a card will shape the way you play out a deck before you actually plays with it. Us humans think were so smart, but it can be a humiliating experience to see something unthinkable improve a deck in a direction you wouldn't have looked otherwise.

On a practical level, most people don't test very extensive, so they never try those odd cards and just wait till someone else have been through that process. It's a smart move, but rogue players will keep them on their toes.

Take a look at some of user: cardhybrid3
He really loved glass of the guildpact builds.

Didn't see the 4cc clause.
The others are clearly better options.

The mimic can copy something in play before you kill stuff, otherwise it's just a land, but 3-4 extra lands shouldn't stop gyruda.
It took me a while to learn not to always see the game as one type of scenarios.
Mimic won't be usefull in that one situation, but on average it will be good in a lot of other situations.

Metamorph isn't arena material unless they reprinted it.

It's a gut reaction from my part :)
People seem to be into copying creatures lately, so I sort of go through a small mental library.
In it I got glasspool mimic and [[phyrexian metamorph]] stored, as they are my favourites to memorize.

Metamorph because it can be in any deck and also copies artifacts
Glasspool mimic because it's also a land.

Some cards are just in the back of my head.
Everytime I see a new creature type I always go through all creatures with changeling to see if there's anything noteworthy.

Each time someone posts a sliver deck with white in it, I cry [[mirror entity]]

one day I'll put it all down on paper to free up some memory space in my head.

Glasspool mimic.

This is better known as the format 93/94

You can find the work of other people by searching for the decktag: 93/94

Here's a list I've been working on for a pro player.
https://www.mtgvault.com/wickeddarkman/decks/9394-esper-playguide/

One of the more important pieces in the list is [[spellskite]]
It's good against burn, good against boogles, good against infect
And can save phenax from stuff that ignores indestructible.

I had an esper version based mostly on draw and cheap walls.
By drawing more cards I could get to cast more walls and get phenax played faster.
All the small walls were played fast enough to hold aggro at bay.
I remember it drew so many cards that I turned to æther vial to be able to cast them all.

Here's a link to how it looked in some early designs.
https://www.mtgvault.com/wickeddarkman/decks/phenax-drawmill-2/

Unfortunately I lost the list to the finished decklist.
I have the deck somewhere but have it stored at a friend with a lot of my collection too.

[[Zealous persecution]] is a minor sweeper that allows for aggression.

White also has [[suture priest]]

Originally my milldeck faced two problems, the need to hate graveyards and protection against discard.
Back in time I used to solve this by having two leyline of sanctuary and two leyline of the void in the mainboard.
Then I discovered that relic of progenitus overs both cards.
A discard becomes negated by the draw the relic provides, and it's one of the few cards that can foil surgical extraction, making it fizzle by removing the card the enemy targets with it.

In some designs I often get to use glint-nest Crane together with relic, so it's a double draw.
(I used those two in my own phenax builds.

Historically relic of progenitus was the card that made snapcaster mage unplayable in mill. It also shuts down other parts of different mill types so try to keep this card in mind often.