Instead rock rock, ritual Xander is what you really want. Don’t use rituals to ramp faster, the deck doesn’t have the recovery for that. There’s a number of rituals in the deck, but you’re really looking to get a rock out hopefully on turns 2 and 3. Okay, so what’s the first step in the game plan? You could also run Back to Basics in this deck, swap around the lands for more basics, but it struggles at times. If you have a spread of 3 land colors and can get 2 swamps, then don’t tutor for your shock lands, but rather the basics. You’ll want to tutor early for more straight swamps, and mostly avoid non-basic lands. Just for fun the deck is also running Blood Moon and Magus of the Moon, because with the artifact suite and the number of basics, you should be able to get past your mana requirements with lots of mountains, few of the spells cost multiple colored mana, of those that do almost all are black spells. It’s worth noting that Netherborn Altar doesn’t increase commander tax, so even if you cheat him into your hand and reanimate, before you hard cast, if you let Xander go to the commander zone the next time you cast him will still be the first time, and thus he’ll only cost 7. Netherborn Altar and Command Beacon are both potential ways to cheat out Xander early or else to reduce commander tax if he’s blown up en route to the field. The deck also packs a couple of ways to get Xander into your hand, because if you can get him into your hand and into your graveyard early, then you can just reanimate him. Both these cause discard, damage, or life loss and sacrifices.Īs a kind of leveraging source there are reanimation effects:
Helm of the Host will cause everything you want, an ETB, an attack trigger, and then you’ll have a token sitting around, so when it dies it causes another sacrifice.įinally, there are cards that cause damage or let you steal when players mill or sacrifice.įinally, the deck has a couple of similar type effect creators, namely Kroxa, Titan of Death’s Hunger and Archon of Cruelty.Blade of Selves will cause 3 Xanders to come into play and they will die to the state-based legend rule, but you’ll get 3 ETBs and 3 death triggers.There’s also a couple of equipment that will make copies of Xander: You’ll still get an ETB and you’ll get his death trigger: There’s also a group of cards that will die as soon as they copy Xander, but that’s okay. You’ve got your bog-standard copy cards that ignore legendary: So there’s quite a few ways to copy Xander.
If three or more hit the board then you can potentially strip everyone’s nonland permanents at once. If one Xander is scary and threatening, multiple Xanders is terrifying. The basic game plan for the deck is to really, really lean into Xander’s abilities. If your pod does a lot of counterspelling creatures then you might want to grab and add cards like Conqueror’s Flail and Defense Grid. You have to watch out for that, and look for ways to protect him. Between the games theory aspect of it (assume the worst, essentially) and people’s poor threat detection, Xander is a spell that’s liable to be hit with a counter. The problem is, that each of those opponents will think that Xander will be hitting them. If you think through how Xander practically works, he only hits 1 opponent each time. You opponents will be thinking about countering: If Xander does hit the board and then gets killed, someone will be forced to sacrifice half their nonland permanents. Even so you’ll generally know who to force to mill, and the deck runs card to punish people for being milled ( Bloodchief Ascension and Xander’s attack trigger will almost certainly kill someone if the Ascension is charged). Generally, you can tell what decks can profit off their graveyard, though Underworld Breach and Timetwister mean that virtually any deck of any color can get back cards from its yard.
If he’s allowed to attack someone, they will mill half their library. When he enters play someone is going to lose half the cards in their hand.
0 kommentar(er)
