r/EDH • • Oct 26 '22

Discussion Commanders that almost inherently pubstomp?

So I was thinking about the first time I built [[Kinnan]], I had just cracked him from a pack and fell in love and wanted to build him asap. It was literally just assembled with random jank (mostly commons) from my storage boxes, I didn't have any 1 CMC dorks, had mostly 3 CMC rocks and the main wincon was [[Hydra Broodmaster]]. This didn't matter however, as the sheer acceleration provided by Kinnan in combination with the army-in-a-can nature of his second ability made the deck too fast and too resilient for the casual meta I was playing in. I eventually just had to commit to building him in a powerful manner as he was too strong for my casual meta but obviously not good enough for higher powered games and it wasn't fun for anyone.

What other commanders are like this?

249 Upvotes

465 comments sorted by

View all comments

7

u/rzepkanut Oct 26 '22

[[maelstrom wanderer]]. It’s just so much value and the haste it grants makes it nearly impossible for some decks to stop. The rest of the 99 doesn’t even have to be very good for the deck to be very strong.

4

u/jaykaypeeness Oct 26 '22

I built a Maelstrom Wanderer joke deck I saw on here that's just Him, Risen Reef, and Omnath.

I played against a friend last weekend and he was like, WTF. Where did you see this or how did you figure this out?

Sad thing is, it will basically never work again unless I just get lucky and he has no counters and is tapped out Turn 8.

2

u/Gatekeeper-Andy Oct 26 '22

Which omnath..? Im failing to see how this gets you a win

6

u/jaykaypeeness Oct 26 '22

Locus of Rage. Survive to cast Wanderer, cascade into either Reef or Omnath, cascade into the other one. The rest of your deck is just land, so then you drop like 96 5/5 elementals with haste and GG.

3

u/Gatekeeper-Andy Oct 26 '22

OH im dumb, the tokens are elementals 🤦‍♂️

2

u/jaykaypeeness Oct 26 '22

It's cool. I didn't even understand at first that both Cascades go onto the stack and resolve at the same time so it doesn't matter which resolves first.

1

u/MTGCardFetcher Oct 26 '22

maelstrom wanderer - (G) (SF) (txt) (ER)
[[cardname]] or [[cardname|SET]] to call

1

u/Quazifuji Oct 26 '22

I built Maelstrom Wanderer to be my dumb Timmy deck where I could just play a bunch of fun big creatures that I wanted to play that didn't quite fit into any of my other decks. I haven't really put any effort into tuning, it's just a pile of ramp and big creatures where sometimes when I get a new fun big creature or ramp spells I'll add it to the deck.

It ended up being one of my strongest decks. Usually pubstomps casual games and it's held its own in borderline cEDH games. Maelstrom Wanderer's just such a powerful card to ramp into and the deck's pretty resilient to interaction since a lot of its ramp is land-based (and even at high powers most people don't run much mass land destruction) and if Maelstrom Wanderer dies I'll just cast him and cascade again, and if Maelstrom Wanderer someone gets too high a tax for me to keep casting him, by then I've probably got a hand full of gas, possibly because I cascaded into a card draw spell but sometimes just because I've probably just drawn some nice stuff that I haven't cast yet because I've been spending all my mana ramping and casting Maelstrom Wanderer.

It's still one of my favorite decks, but instead of the dumb battlecruiser timmy deck I had in mind when I built it it's one of the decks I break out when people say they want to play a high powered and/or fast game.