Dear Azami – I’d Radha Not

It’s like people can read my mind sometimes. I’ve been thinking about new decks to build, and I latched onto Radha, Heir to Keld specifically because it allowed me to play a strategy where the commander as “eighth card in hand” would be very relevant, letting me consistently play Radha on turn 2, a big ramp spell on turn 3, and then start dropping massive plays on my opponents for the rest of the game… And here you are with the same overarching vision, looking to play what might as well amount to Quirion Elves as your commander just for the fact that she taps for green on turn 3. (She can do other things too, but that’s not seeming like it is built into the deck so much.)

Of course, I’ve been thinking about this deck for a month rather than building and playing it for a month because I’m neck-deep in September 17th planning for Occupy Wall Street here in New York City and free time is nonexistent at present. So I’ve been looking forward to rewarding myself with a sweet new deck and even promising I’ll make time to get to play it (and other things that resemble ‘having a life,’ like finding time for hobbies!) after September 18th.

Okay, that’s a bald-faced lie because after Election Day, I’m helping kick off a massive scrimmage of discussions around “what the hell is up with our politics these days?” that is going to keep me preoccupied. But I’ve promised myself the first Thursday after the one-year anniversary is Play A Lot Of Commander Day, for which I am contemplating arming myself with the Heir to Keld.

I usually like to sequence how I build decks in card-type chunks. Fix the lands, fix the artifact support base, work on the spells, and straighten out the creatures. It has a sensible flow to it, but recent emails and comments to me and Cassidy, my partner in deck-redesign, have suggested we might want to revise the flow of these things because what is straightforward to us is not necessarily the easiest way for others to grasp it.

This is also why I picked Radha: it allowed me to think in dependencies, a different way to sort the deck as I worked on figuring it out. Radha has nested packages that sit together: four-drop ramp spell, six- or seven-drop fatty, and so on. So I suppose you could say it was kismet that saw this email hit our inbox, because it was both on my mind (as the reward for political involvement well-done) and lets us dig deep into this alternative way of looking at and sorting things, to give that a try and see how it works out.

So instead of digging right into the lands, which to many is the boring part that is easily glossed over, let’s start with the part most critical to Radha: the four-drop accelerants. I’m very glad you added Kodama’s Reach and Cultivate here, because the fact of the matter is you won’t always have the third land in hand to go with the hefty four-drop so having something juicy to help out in those cases is still awesome. They’ll also help buff the numbers on how you get to six on turn 4, even if you don’t get to seven. I don’t see seven as being that critical of a number anyway; plenty of good things fit in the six-drop slot, so there’s going to be some flexibility regardless and we might as well plan around it and enjoy it.

Including the expectation you have that Bloodbraid Elf will cascade into something relevant enough to count as an accelerant, you have the following cards in this slot:

Oracle of Mul Daya
Stone-Seeder Hierophant
Bloodbraid Elf
Solemn Simulacrum
Garruk Wildspeaker
Green Sun’s Zenith
Sol Ring
Hunting Wilds
Skyshroud Claim
Explosive Vegetation
Ranger’s Path
Kodama’s Reach
Cultivate

Personally I do not share your optimism, and thus one of the very first things I want to do here is cut Bloodbraid Elf. You’re not going to cut enough things to reasonably guarantee this working as you want it to, and it’s adding other dependencies that I don’t think are good here (such as Dryad Arbor when you shouldn’t want so fragile a land in here) while also adding restrictions (like “cannot play Comet Storm”).

Bloodbraid Elf is awesome—playing it in Animar, Soul of the Elements literally led me to taking the deck apart the first time I played Animar then cascaded Bloodbraid Elf into Shardless Agent into Coiling Oracle, hit a land off the top and cast Oracle of Mul-Daya, played an extra land, and, and, and… When it’s part of your effective plan it’s an awesome card. When it’s not, it’s just a bit of a value added, and I can see way better ways to do what you want and way better ways to get the value you seek. Likewise, I just can’t get myself to commit to Stone-Seeder Hierophant, cute though it may be.

Out: Stone-Seeder Hierophant, Bloodbraid Elf, Dryad Arbor

Instead, I am going to reach for two more concrete additions and leave the land slot for later fixing so I can do it all at once when it’s clear what the remainder of the deck will look like. First of those two additions is very simple: Thran Dynamo. While I tend to shy away from this card in general principle, seeing it as an inevitable casualty in the risk-versus-reward game, in this deck it’s fine as an inevitable casualty so long as it is not an immediate one. Losing that three mana after you’ve played a few other ramp spells isn’t going to hurt you, so I’m going to not sweat the issue and take the high-power card… After all, this one can let you skip seven and go directly to eight on turn 4, which is an absurdly sweet spot to be in during a game of Magic.

The second addition is Reap and Sow, which at four mana can simply fetch a land into play, and given you have both Temple of the False God and Gruul Turf in your deck there are two highly contextual good ways to use that to hit six (or more!) mana on turn 4. Gruul Turf gives you a land drop next turn with which to get to six, if that is your trouble, while Temple of the False God plays nicely with another land in hand to be played next turn to get you directly to seven.

You also have special lands that have later utility for the in-between games, ones where you need to make it to six (but don’t care enough right now about seven to have to get a colorless source) and can take advantage of the land search to get Mosswort Bridge and a free spell for later. Later in the game, it is bonus time since it both finds a special land and kills an opposing problem like a Maze of Ith or Cabal Coffers.

In: Thran Dynamo, Reap and Sow, +1 land.

What are you going to do on turn 4, having deployed these accelerative means in order to reach this pinnacle in the first place? You have a fair chunk of cards that now say “double your mana again,” and I think that’s entirely the wrong tactic to take when you should be aiming to immediately start making relevant plays and controlling the flow of aggression at the table. In your own words this was meant to ramp, ramp, and then deploy, so things that get in the way of that tempo are things we should be talking about cutting in order to streamline the deck. I specifically was thinking of the following cards:

Out: Wild Pair, Mana Reflection, Rage Reflection, Boundless Realms

Wild Pair doesn’t excite me because there is not a lot of clean overlap going on here; you have a not streamlined mix of power and toughness going on, and you don’t want to play a card that will only maybe help you get started next turn instead of definitely lead immediately to meaningful plays. Likewise, Rage Reflection doubles the efficacy of your creatures at attacking, but that’s not a resource that does anything according to your set up plan and again goes with the problem of needing to have forward pressure in the first place before doubling it can be a possibility.

Meanwhile, Boundless Realm and Mana Reflection both commit the cardinal sin of trying to go with doubling your mana as the first thing you do, when you don’t really need to do that in the first place and it will only draw a giant bulls-eye on your head for trying to anyway. If seven is your sweet spot for deploying threats and Wraths are your problem, playing a card so that you can deploy two sevens on turn 5 isn’t actually going to be beneficial—we want cards that will help you power through Wraths, not just play into them (which is another strike against Wild Pair, while we’re at it).

Looking at the six- and seven-drop creatures, those also need a hard look to see if they’re filling the needs of the deck, and frankly it seemed a few of them weren’t pulling their weight. You want cards that do when you’re putting in several turns of investment into being able to play these fatties (including a weak body as your commander) when you could have something big and nasty instead to accommodate this plan. Once you start rolling, you had better be moving with purpose, and not all of these do that.

Out: Faultgrinder, Borborygmos, Brutalizer Exarch, Tornado Elemental, Moonveil Dragon, Hornet Queen, Hellkite Charger, Myr Battlesphere

You can do better. Let’s start looking at how:

Panglacial Wurm – This is a solid-sized body, but we’re cutting a few of those so it’s not impressive. It is also a free creature in that stalled portion of the middle of the game where you have ten mana and a fetchland not doing anything because yet another wrath has been fired off in your general direction and wiped the board. Crack the fetchland, and hey look—surprise fatty! The ability to recover after a Wrath is something you noted as critical, so while this may not be impressive from the hand, it’s very good from the inside of your deck since it’ll be a free card sooner or later and you can bank on that.

Wolfbriar Elemental – A good card for scaling mana availability since on seven mana (or as you call it, “turn 4”) this is ten power for that seven mana, and later on it can be even more impactful all for the one piece of cardboard. While it isn’t naturally a seven, it fits in that slot well and fits the Wrath defense plan by being a massive army in a can.

Apocalypse Hydra – Another not-actually-seven-mana seven-drop in that the seven-mana mark is a very sweet spot for this creature, as that is where it transitions to double-sized. Again, seven mana (“turn 4”) equals ten power, and in this case that is in the form of counters that can be spent to ping things at a reasonable rate.

Rimescale Dragon – Seven mana gets you ‘only’ a 5/5, which is half the going rate for the last few dudes. It also comes with massive dependencies—your basic lands are all going to have to morph over to Snow basics. Hopefully this isn’t too big of a pain in the butt, since you only need just over a dozen or so and they aren’t especially expensive, just a little hard to lay hands on easily.

At the same time, it’s not like people carry them in their trade binders; they’re the kind of thing you tend to have exactly enough of for whatever purpose you specifically needed them for. Coldsnap was sort of a weak set, and Ice Age was a long long time ago in a galaxy far away at this point. The upside of this critter is that it puts enemy creatures on lockdown and thus plays very good at stalling early attacks OR getting through defenders.

Thornling – Not a seven. Seven mana, however, lets you cast a Thornling, attack with haste on it, and keep open indestructibility if there’s a problem…and like Spearbreaker Behemoths it is going to be a card you can thoroughly rely on being in play once it’s deployed. It’s a real pain in the butt to kill, and that will help with your weakness to Wrath effects.

We’ve got seven slots left unfilled so far, and not all of them are going to be sevens. Eight mana is a good spot for you too, even if it is not “something you can play on turn 4.” They’re more late game cards for you with those turn 5 or turn 6 plays. Big cardboard that swings the game in a big way is not to be hated, nor are support cards that make an impact on what your plan is and how you’re going to be able to put it into effect.

Eternal Witness – Cheap, sure, but still good. What I like better than ramp, ramp, double is ramp, ramp, Regrow… I have no qualms with the possibility of playing an Eternal Witness and recasting that Explosive Vegetation all over again instead of dropping Mana Reflection or casting Boundless Realms. The possibilities past turn 4 only get better, as you can buy back anything (not just your spent ramp spell), but since we’re talking about a specific bundle and how it interacts here, that’s what I wanted to mention.

Craterhoof Behemoth – An eight, but man, what an eight you get for the wait. Craterhoof Behemoth kills people dead following at the heels of any sizable army, and sometimes just sometimes you’ll play the following game:

Turn 2 Radha, turn 3 Ranger’s Path, turn 4 Avenger of Zendikar (seven Plants!), turn 5 land (+1/+1 to all Plants!) and Craterhoof Behemoth. Radha’s tapped, but you still have ten creatures passing around +10/+10 and trample, so seven 11/12 Plants and two 15/15s ready to attack on turn 5. If 100+ damage isn’t something you can put to good and immediate use, what is?

While that specific draw will be highly uncommon for that early in the game, it is still the kind of thing that will close the gap between your aggressive opponents and your delayed start with aggressive follow-through.

Scourge of Kher Ridges – Like Rimescale Dragon, this is a big fat flier that plays board control very nicely, and thus is an excellent piece of cardboard for the price. One of the most important things when playing a deck that spends its early turns and first few cards to solely developing its board is that the pieces of cardboard it lands as threats have to really matter and potentially have a massive impact on the opponents’ ability to play their game the way they want to. Scourge does exactly that, so long as the opponents are relying on creatures staying in play.

Magmatic Force – While not quite as effective at board control, Magmatic Force has a very potent threat attached to it thanks to the fact that it possesses the ability to deal up to twelve damage between one turn and the next, pointed directly at an opponent’s head outside of the attack phase. It can also pass around Lightning Bolts to deal with creatures in play, and both sides of this card are very threatening—you just pick the aspect that suits your needs right now and run with it.

Genesis – Again, “not a seven,” this time being a low cost creature (oh how skinny fives look in your deck!) that doesn’t even have any immediate impact on the board since it’s vanilla when it’s in play. What it does do, and does very well, is face down Wrath effects.

Like Eternal Witness there are recursive elements at play here, though in the case of Genesis those are intended to let you eke out an incremental advantage over the course of a long game and prevents you from running out of threats in the face of opponents that are very oriented on board control. While your usual regulars aren’t highly focused at that, all it takes is an unexpected passerby to take your game plan from a comfort zone to an uncomfortable handicap, so we’ll address that here in a way that also works with your Plan A of “play with friends.”

Masked Admirers – Another non-fatty, and another card that assists with Wrath backup. Masked Admirers isn’t a big piece of cardboard, but it is an option on a free card every time you play a creature, as well as a nontrivial body that you can do something with in the meantime. Sometimes you have to grind, and for those times Masked Admirers will do very nicely to keep you moving forward in a game rather than stuck at the whim of your draw phase to recover.

Woodfall Primus – A little bit Wrath-proof and a little bit of extra utility. Cutting Faultgrinder but adding back in Woodfall Primus means you can still hit that land if you want to but can also take out an artifact or enchantment as need be and get to do so twice if that is what’s required.

Garruk, Primal Hunter – This fancy little planeswalker doesn’t get used much since planeswalkers don’t necessarily have the easiest time surviving in Commander, but the ability to play it early and make some Beasts makes it the right level of impact for what your plan is. With both a card draw aspect and the ability to churn out 3/3s in a way that traditional board control spells have a hard time taking out while they do their work, this particular card hits the sweet spot of Wrath defense and pure power that will help this deck straighten out its initial investment in the early game and take advantage of the ramp effects.

Where we stand right now, that’s sixteen cards in and fifteen cards out, and we need to find another slot somewhere. I’m going to look at the other support type cards and see what’s going on, because I think you can use some better defensive measures while we’re at it and have a few additions that will increase the deck’s power and flexibility.

There’s the option for a higher-powered version that I am going to shy away from. You’ve suggested that price is not necessarily a major turn-off, but the version I’m working on has the advantage that there are a couple of choice $20 cards already sitting in my Commander deckbuilding box, ones you seem to not have ready access to. As good as your deck would be with both Tooth and Nail and Survival of the Fittest added, we’re going to be looking at more budget-conscious options, and you can all put an asterisk next to the invisible copies not listed in the decklist and know they want to be there very badly indeed.

Moving on to the support and board control aspects of the deck, I’m going to pull out a few cards I don’t think are quite fitting in. Alpha Brawl is great fun—I tend to think of it as “Target player gets their stuff all messed up!”—but given the general high cost of creatures in your deck you can have a greater impact overall by playing Disaster Radius in that slot. It is effectively the same card except it targets all of your opponents instead, which means you trade the ability to do massive amounts of damage to one oversized threat for the ability to deal six to eight damage to every opposing creature…which will frequently be able to kill every opposing piece of cardboard, if you plan it properly.

Search for Tomorrow is just an odd duckling in your deck, and it looks to me like it is the last lingering straggler from when Borborygmos was your commander back before the mana costs and ramp plan got effectively streamlined. We had a slot that needed emptying to fill those threats back in, and this is the cut which will become that replacement.

Worldly Tutor costs you a card just to find the right creature with your next draw step. It’s an attractive deal when that card can make up for the price to find it, but since it is limited in use and your ability to get cards back out of the deal is something that is important and deserves attention, I don’t think this card is actually going to pull its weight as much as a consistent draw effect would. You don’t need specific cards nearly as much as you need access to plenty of cards, so swapping this out for something that fills that role will be much improved.

In this case, the card swapped out for is Greater Good, which is a bit of a boring green staple but nonetheless fills the proper role for letting you grind out games against Wrath effects. There are no ridiculous combos built into the deck to abuse this with or abuse digging for, so it’s just a really good card doing good work for you.

Swiftfoot Boots is a good addition, but not really a critical one. Shroud or hexproof from your choice of Boots is more useful when you have a commander worth protecting with it, and as far as the haste goes you shouldn’t need it that much all things considered. You’re already getting a jump on the opponent via acceleration and have built in additional ways to weather Wrath effects that make the haste more important to you, so this just isn’t as critical to you.

One thing you clearly lack however is pinpoint removal spells, specifically cheap ones so that you can deploy a threat and play an answer in the same turn, and with the shift to Snow lands you can get a lot of benefit out of playing Skred. While no more than half of your lands will count as Snow, every land-searcher will include the ability to find not one but two snow permanents to count for Skred, meaning this is a downside that will quickly prove irrelevant as in the middle of the game this should easily be five or six damage for a single mana even though less than half of your lands count towards its requirements.

Inkmoth Nexus is clearly there just to go with the Kessig Wolf Run, and a couple of questions come to mind for me. Is it going to come up often enough that this is necessary, instead of merely convenient, to have to poison someone out? Is this going to be the two lands you always get with Primeval Titan, and is that correct? Will the negativity of getting one-shotted outweigh the positive side of being able to do this, when you have to play with the same people over and over again?

Ultimately, I look at it this way: without the Wolf Run, this card is just a bad land. With the Wolf Run, you make yourself a target and potentially the maker of grudges, as people will remember an unfairly early exit if it’s done out of simple convenience. Looking at it from those perspectives, it’s pretty evenly balanced and just neutral, but then asking if it’s the right two lands to get off Primeval Titan the answer is simply, “No.” 

The sequence you’ll want will involve Hideaway lands or powerful ramp effects (since Temple of the False God is like getting three lands, not two). It’ll involve defensive measures to prevent the opponent from eroding your board, like Homeward Path or Yavimaya Hollow. Nexus plus Wolf Run isn’t too high on the list for me, which means Nexus is worth cutting from the deck. An opponent at infinite life can be taken down by Radha with a Kessig Wolf Run too, just not as cheaply and easily as with a Nexus, so the strategic element isn’t needed. Room for another “+1 land.”

Indrik Stomphowler is a good stuff critter, but we want better stuff, not just good stuff. You need to be able to answer impossible questions once in a while, and while the Stomphowler is a great deal—a 4/4 body with a Disenchant stapled to it—the lack of instant speed and the inability to target a creature means it’s not the one I’m most interested in from a tactical standpoint.

In cutting it, to fit the card I really wanted, there’s a bit of a tear…but Acidic Slime and Woodfall Primus will be able to handle its jobs still, and we’ve added the Primus to the deck so it’s more like this got upgraded to a bigger, meaner, nastier version anyway. In making room for a solution that operates at instant speed, we get to add Chaos Warp to the deck, which gets around even indestructible problems and can tuck a commander away for good for a while, making it the right answer to whatever the problem is (with the off chance of accidentally getting them something awesome in trade for their dangerous card).

Krosan Tusker is a good card, but not a fantastic one. A dash of card advantage, a hint of color-fixing, it’s added as the always-present two-for-one that can be reused with Genesis or even just made to be a fatty once in a while when that’s the right mode for the card. It’s not going to be reused enough to matter, and the simple fact is that as a fatty it’s kind of boring and dull, so even if you get to the point where you can cast it chances are good it’s going to feel correct still to cycle it and get a land and a random draw. What’s most wanted is the draw effect, and to my mind that means this card wants to be Harmonize to smooth the deck’s draw out nicely.

The last cut was the deepest. (Nope, not the first, the song got it wrong.) I knew I wanted to add that pesky Comet Storm since it is so very, very awesome at board control and opponent removal. I had to go down the list of impressive creatures and well-loved cards to find the one that was most underperforming.

Inevitably I settled on the Dragonlair Spider. The 1/1s won’t really matter enough and the body isn’t fancy enough to impress, so while I know it was added for good reason and Jon Becker will be very cross at me for cutting the only Spider from your deck, it was underperforming and Comet Storm will overperform in its stead. We’re looking for support spells and board control elements, and a critter with reach to block smallish Dragons and a source of tokens that you’re not really built to capitalize upon is just not really where the deck’s going.

This leaves us with just the lands, and there is some streamlining to do there as well. You have just enough effects that like landfall to make it important to add a few more fetchlands, which will help find the Taiga and Stomping Ground and fix your early mana to ensure that Radha’s requirement of both colors of mana by turn 2 isn’t hindered by an awkward draw of too many basic Forests. There are two slots free to add, but also room can be made by cutting into the basics count since you have fifteen but don’t necessarily need exactly all of them.

I do know I want to add in Winding Canyons, though I’m a broken record as I say it. You have noticed that combating Wrath effects is critical to your continued success and happiness, and while Swiftfoot Boots helped with that it cost a spell slot, Winding Canyons can offer the same basic concept of altering the rhythm of the game to make sure you get to hit at least once with your creature before a sweeper hits but not cost a spell slot.

That leaves one land slot untouched for adding back in, and I see you only have the one Hideaway land, so that second addition is a Spinerock Knoll to help amp up your draws with a bit of free-spell action. Card advantage is important, and the combination of red and green is very attractive for its ability to get a little bit of extra out of its manabase very easily, which helps make up for how many of your cards just put lands into play.

There’s some slight concern to me as to how many of your lands come into play tapped, and my version of the deck didn’t even include a Raging Ravine, so as we add another land that comes in tapped I have to wonder whether it starts to hit that too-many cost. If price were not an option or card availability was easy, I would be cutting Raging Ravine, Mountain Valley, one Forest, and one Mountain for Scalding Tarn, Arid Mesa, Misty Rainforest, and Verdant Catacomb. Price does seem as if it is a highly relevant concern, however, so I will leave the mana base as it is instead of incurring an extra $40 in swaps for what will often be an invisible switch to the deck.

It’s easy for me to not worry as those are all in the Commander deckbuilding box I’ve got squirreled away, but it didn’t sound like the same easy option existed for you from your letter. The Panglacial Wurm is better with the extra fetchlands, not close, but they aren’t required to make it a worthwhile addition—it’ll still come up as a free card with a late game ramp spell drawn, just not quite as easily and casually as I may have thought at first.

Which means we need just one last straightforward swap: -9 Forest, +9 Snow-Covered Forest, -6 Mountain, +6 Snow-Covered Mountain. Those Skreds sure aren’t going to power themselves, and a Rimescale Dragon without Snow lands is not a very happy Dragon at all.

Putting it all together, we then have the following decklist:

Radha, Heir to Keld

Sean McKeown

Test deck on 09-09-2012

Commander

Creatures (37)

• 1 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Godo, Bandit Warlord
• 1 Genesis
• 1 Anger
• 1 Silvos, Rogue Elemental
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Yavimaya Elder
• 1 Duplicant
• 1 Flametongue Kavu
• 1 Stalking Vengeance
• 1 Panglacial Wurm
• 1 Rimescale Dragon
• 1 Deadwood Treefolk
• 1 Radha, Heir to Keld
• 1 Scourge of Kher Ridges
• 1 Cloudthresher
• 1 Masked Admirers
• 1 Vigor
• 1 Woodfall Primus
• 1 Regal Force
• 1 Spearbreaker Behemoth
• 1 Thornling
• 1 Apocalypse Hydra
• 1 Acidic Slime
• 1 Oracle of Mul Daya
• 1 Rampaging Baloths
• 1 Avenger of Zendikar
• 1 Wolfbriar Elemental
• 1 Inferno Titan
• 1 Primeval Titan
• 1 Wurmcoil Engine
• 1 Garruk's Horde
• 1 Hydra Omnivore
• 1 Magmatic Force
• 1 Balefire Dragon
• 1 Craterhoof Behemoth
• 1 Soul of the Harvest

Planeswalkers (2)

• 1 Garruk Wildspeaker
• 1 Garruk, Primal Hunter

Lands (36)

• 1 Strip Mine
• 1 Wooded Foothills
• 1 Wasteland
• 1 Taiga
• 1 Mossfire Valley
• 1 Temple of the False God
• 1 Yavimaya Hollow
• 6 Snow-Covered Mountain
• 9 Snow-Covered Forest
• 1 Mountain Valley
• 1 Winding Canyons
• 1 Gruul Turf
• 1 Stomping Ground
• 1 Grove of the Burnwillows
• 1 Mosswort Bridge
• 1 Spinerock Knoll
• 1 Fire-Lit Thicket
• 1 Rootbound Crag
• 1 Raging Ravine
• 1 Copperline Gorge
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Homeward Path
• 1 Kessig Wolf Run

Spells (25)

• 1 Sylvan Library
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Reap and Sow
• 1 Insurrection
• 1 Explosive Vegetation
• 1 Defense of the Heart
• 1 Greater Good
• 1 Thran Dynamo
• 1 Skyshroud Claim
• 1 Skred
• 1 Harmonize
• 1 Hunting Wilds
• 1 Lurking Predators
• 1 Comet Storm
• 1 Disaster Radius
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Genesis Wave
• 1 Green Sun's Zenith
• 1 Sword of Feast and Famine
• 1 Praetor's Counsel
• 1 Batterskull
• 1 Chaos Warp
• 1 Blasphemous Act
• 1 Ranger's Path

As always, for your participation in this week’s edition of “Dear Azami” you will receive a $20 coupon to StarCityGames.com, which should help make some of these additions possible (and will hopefully be able to make up for the inconvenience of needing to find Snow basics—they aren’t exactly the most popular card to find just lying around). Hopefully some of these cards will be realistically findable without needing to rely on a coupon, like the in print or at least recently printed cards, and you can bank on finding the weirdoes like Apocalypse Hydra at an attractive price instead. Here are the additions with their associated prices at the online store:

— Sean McKeown

Want to submit a deck for consideration to Dear Azami? We’re always accepting deck submissions to consider for use in a future article, like Tyler’s Vaevictus Asmadi deck or Tucker’s Talrand, Sky Summoner deck. Only one deck submission will be chosen per article, but being selected for the next edition of Dear Azami includes not just deck advice but also a $20 coupon to the StarCityGames.com!

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