The Commander 2017 pre-constructed decks for Magic the Gathering have introduced more than a few very strong cards for the Commander format. One of these is a one-mana Equipment called Bloodforged Battle-Axe. It's like an improved version of Bonesplitter, except that this axe can actually copy itself!

At only 1 mana to cast and 2 mana to equip, Bloodforged Battle-Axe gives the equipped creature +2/+0. Also, whenever that creature deals combat damage to a player, you create a token that's a copy of Bloodforged Battle-Axe! That's a pretty awesome way to stack up Equipment in a hurry!

This Axe offers a very minor initial investment that can copy itself many, many times over. Also, the tokens then can copy themselves. So if a creature has multiple Bloodforged Battle-Axes equipped, it can create a whole token of Axe tokens in a hurry.

Another great thing about the way Bloodforged Battle-Axe is worded, a creature with double strike that successfully deals damage to a player can cause this Equipment to be copied twice! On the second trigger, you can end up with three total Axe tokens, because the first token will copy itself, as well! If you have something like Parallel Lives or Doubling Season in play, it becomes all the more ridiculous.

Plus, there's another Equipment in  Commander 2017 called Hammer of Nazahn. This legendary artifact allows you to immediately attach an Equipment that comes into play to a creature. That means all of those tokens can be equipped right away for free! It also doesn't hurt to play something like Puresteel Paladin to make equip costs cost zero mana instead, allowing you to use these tokens quickly.

Imagine a deck that plays Hellkite Tyrant having a card like this. With the Tyrant's instant win condition of having 20 artifacts in play, you may be able to automatically win a lot of games just having a bunch of copies of this Axe in play!

There are many advantages to having a card like this, especially in decks that care about how many artifacts you have in play. There will be plenty of Commander decks that will find a slot for this one-mana artifact, even some that may not be 100 percent Equipment based. Any deck that benefits by having a lot of artifacts in play can find a home for this unique Equipment.

How would you use Bloodforged Battle-Axe?

On April 27, 2017, Felidar Guardian was Emergency Banned in Standard effective 4/28/17 as the Saheeli Rai & Felidar Guardian Infinite combo - also known as the Copy Cat combo - was overrunning Standard. I saw this coming, as did many other people. Of course, you can still try Copy Cat Combo in Modern, if you'd like. But for reasons I'll outline below, the combo isn't nearly as potent as it proved to be in Standard

On the initial spoiling of the combo, my reasoning was that it would become a bit too powerful for Standard. Initially, I received some backlash for this opinion, whereas I expect more support. Of course, there would be an eventual realization that Felidar Guardian was ruining the format. As it turned out, those who thought it would be a disaster were completely correct. It was nice to be vindicated. But at the same time, it was a bit depressing that Wizards so clearly overlooked a design blunder.

The Origins of the Saheeli Rai & Felidar Guardian Combo

Saheeli Rai was way too cheap at $5 for the longest time. The planeswalker was already part of a couple of infinite combos in Modern with Liquimetal Coating and Altar of the Brood or Disciple of the Vault. But a competitive list never came out of it. Still, sooner or later, players knew that a card would be released that would make the 3-mana planeswalker part of something broken, right?

  This happened!

REALLY, WIZARDS!? You just brought back Splinter Twin combo... in STANDARD!

Or is it?

Splinter Twin & Deceiver Exarch proved to be such a ridiculously powerful combination in Standard that me and a good many other players left competitive Magic for awhile because of it. Two card combos are absurd when they are as easy to perform on turn four on a consistent basis.

The combo was quite simple. You'd play Deceiver Exarch at the end of an opponent's turn since it had flash. Then the next turn, while an opponent is tapped out, you drop the 4-mana Enchantment Splinter Twin. This enchantment allows you to tap a creature to make a copy. However, because you're copying Deceiver Exarch, which has the ability to tap or untap a permanent, each of the copies can untap the original Exarch. This means you can tap and untap the Exarch an infinite number of times to make as many copies as you'd like. You just make enough copies to deal lethal damage to your opponent, and you can attack with them immediately since those copies have haste.

Sure, there are ways to disrupt the combo, but it proved consistent enough to spawn its own archetype. The only reason it stopped in Standard was that Rise of the Eldrazi, and thus Splinter Twin, left Standard at rotation in October.

Many players, myself included, refused to play Modern competitively as long as the combo was the heart of a powerful deck archetype there, too.  Modern also had Pestermite, which is a similar card to Deceiver Exarch, giving you two creatures that could create the combo. Wizards finally banned Splinter Twin after deciding it was finally time for that combo not to be a deck anymore While Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker still does the same thing as Twin, it's harder to cast. Kiki-Jiki can still work as a win condition, but it's not the main condition of any deck anymore.

So is the Saheeli Rai & Felidar Guardian combo just as good, or even worse?

Ordinarily, Felidar Guardian is just a good card on its own. But alongside Saheeli Rai, you can create infinite madness. You use Saheeli's -2 ability to make a token of the Felidar Guardian. That token uses its ability to "blink" Saheeli Rai. This means she comes back with full loyalty counters on her. Then you get to use the -2 ability again to continue the process. You rinse and repeat until you have enough Guardians to swing in for lethal damage. Yes, those tokens have haste.

What makes this combo better in some ways is that even if it’s disrupted, either Saheeli Rai or Felidar Guardian can find other targets to make good on their abilities. The Guardian can blink any permanent you control. This means even lands! You can blink a tapped land and tap it again for extra mana! Yes, using the Exarch's flash ability to enter on an opponent's end step can be better.  A lot of times you'd tap down an opponent's land to make responding to your combo with counter magic more difficult.

In Modern, you can play Exarch in this deck, too! In fact, you can build a really, really good Jeskai Control deck with these two cards! Saheeli Rai can even Scry 1 for you and deal 1 damage to each opponent! Then you get to play all the counter magic and burn spells your typical Jeskai deck would already play! Saheeli can also copy other creatures and artifacts you control. So you can still get value from either half of the combo even if the other half becomes somehow  unavailable.

Fortunately, as good as the interaction between these cards are, it's not going to be as dominant as the combination of Splinter Twin & Deceiver Exarch became. There are instant speed ways to deal with the Guardian, like Fatal Push with Revolt active. There is Declaration in Stone in Standard, and potentially Fatal Push, as well. But the Declaration is still Sorcery speed, so it could still be too late of an answer. It’s also possible to burn away Saheeli before the Guardian can copy her, which is fairly easy to do since she brings herself down to a single loyalty. So it’s a bit easier to disrupt than Deceiver Exarch and its 4 toughness was during its Standard days.

In Modern, you can stop the combo from resolving with Abrupt Decay targeting Saheeli Rai, particularly if you use it in response to the planeswalker’s ability. Even though the -2 ability would take priority, by the time the copy of the Guardian  resolves, there will be no Saheeli Rai to blink. Saheeli Rai can be dealt with quite quickly with Lightning Bolt, as well. Path to Exile and Dismember will do the trick, too, just as they always did for dealing with Deceiver Exarch.  So this combo is also a bit easier to stop in Modern than Twin was.

Still, this combo was still a strong one to build around in Standard. Many players are shocked that no one at Wizards R&D caught this very obvious combination. Some people called for an emergency ban of Felidar Guardian. One Twitter user also demanded an apology from Wizards for their oversight. It seemed that Wizards committed an extremely obvious design blunder. Aether Revolt was already considered an overpowered set as it is, so creating a new infinite condition seems just absurd.

Is the Saheeli Rai & Felidar Guardian Really Broken?

As good as this combo is on paper,  many people thought it was more of a "fixed" Splinter Twin combo if anything. The argument was that there wasn't a lot of card selection spells in Standard right then. This meant that consistent Turn 4 wins are a lot less likely than they were years back. However, while the Saheeli Rai/Felidar Guardian deck wasn't quite as consistent as Splinter Twin combo decks were, it proved to be an effective win condition.

Did one or both cards actually need to be banned? There was the sentiment that it would likely take the printing of other cards to bring this deck to a dangerously over-powered level. However,  with Wizards now making banned and restricted list announcements more often, players decided that if it did become too busted, it would be dealt with.

In the early going of Aether Revolt being legal in Standard, Saheeli Rai & Felidar Guardian combo decks performed quite well. Jeskai Saheeli was the most successful build at the outset. A Jeskai Saheeli deck placed 7th at SCG Columbus. There are also four-color Saheeli decks that are performing well, and are also often known at Copy Cat Combo. Even in Modern, Copy Cat Combo has also seen some success, at least on Magic Online.

In paper Magic, the deck quickly won at least one major Standard event. Dylan Donegan of MTG Card Market took down SCG Richmond with his Jeskai Saheeli deck! So while the archetype hadn't broken the format just yet, it quickly became clear that the combo was definitely a good one to build around. As a deck that can win, players battled to find the best version of this deck!

By late April 2017, so many Saheeli Rai & Felidar Guardian combo decks (affectionately known as Copy Cat Combo) had won an unbelievable number of events. It finally became clear to Wizards that the Copy Cat combo had actually become almost just as bad as Splinter Twin had been. It was announced that Felidar Guardian would be emergency banned in Standard as of 4/28/2017, as to not ruin a brand new Standard format featuring the widely praised Amonkhet set.

Was the Copy Cat combo a design blunder on the part of Wizards? Clearly, this particular interaction was overlooked. It was definitely a strong enough combo to be at the core of a Standard deck from the get-go - and perhaps a solid Modern build will still be found in the long run.  Fortunately, Wizards recognized that Copy Cat combo was becoming oppressive in the format, before it became the Splinter Twin combo in Standard all over again.

Of course, another deck would take Copy Cat Combo's place in needing the banhammer. But that was for a much different reason, and that's a whole different story altogether.

by ElspethFTW, Gaming Successfully Staff

Void Winnower is quite an odd Eldrazi. All “can’t even” and other “odd” jokes aside, the Winnower is pretty unique in its abilities. 9 mana for an 11/9 is already pretty good. Being unable to be blocked by creatures with even converted mana costs gives it a rather unusual form of evasion. But Void Winnower goes even beyond that, preventing opponents from casting spells with even converted mana costs. Obviously, this is a Limited bomb that you can likely drop before turn nine, but how good is it in Constructed?

For starters, tokens can’t block Void Winnower, due to tokens having a 0 CMC. According to a ruling from Wizards, 0 is considered even. Mathematical debates aside, it’s going to be fairly tough to chump block this guy. Then again, plenty of removal is at odd converted mana costs, so there are definitely ways to deal with this behemoth.

What Void Winnower seems best at is being a metagame answer to the big even converted mana cost spells in Standard. At the time of Void Winnower's release, these were Ugin, the Spirit Dragon at 8 mana and Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger at 10 mana being the chief concerns. With Eldrazi Ramp a legitimate deck archetype, especially in Modern, Void Winnower is certainly a legitimate candidate for sideboard play. It can randomly hose a number of decks if their key cards have even converted mana costs.

In EDH, Void Winnower is a “just say no” card that will lock some Commanders out of the game. It’s a pretty mean card in the format. While someone will probably find an answer to it in a multiplayer game, it will wreak havoc while it remains in play. It may come down to using Swords to Plowshares on it and gaining the owning player 11 life. The fact that it can help your team get through for extra damage is also another big consideration. Because it's colorless, Void Winnower can be included in a wide variety of decks.

Naturally, the Commanders that will want to use Void Winnower the most are those that can sometimes cast him for free (Rakdos, Lord of Riots and Animar, Soul of Elements) or cheat him into play (Mayael the Anima and Jhoira of the Ghitu). But pretty much any deck can make use of Void Winnower if you can somehow get him into play on the cheap. Because he doesn't have an on-cast trigger, he's actually a big threat and always worth putting into play no matter how you do it.

While he may only be a $2 card for most of his life in Standard, there's so much demand from casual Eldrazi deckbuilders and both kitchen table and competitive EDH players that Void Winnower won't stay cheap forever. He's definitely a keeper.

How would you use Void Winnower?

I happened to be browsing MTGGoldfish for some budget Commander decklists, and came across this Isperia the Inscrutible Flying Tribal Commander deck brewed by none other than the legendary SaffronOlive!

At the time, that I found this decklist, it hadn't yet been played on MTGGoldfish's Commander Clash video series. It would be featured on the Penny Dreadful episode of Commander Clash. In this episode, SaffronOlive would play this deck against four other decks that cost around 1 event ticket to build on Magic Online! (This Isperia deck costs about $30 to build in paper, which is still mega cheap!)

"Penny Dreadful" is a variant of Commander similar to 1DH in paper. In 1DH, you build a deck with cards that cost $1 or less each. In Penny Dreadful, you're looking to build an entire 100 card Commander deck - including the Commander - for 1 event ticket or less. This means spending only 0.01 tix - roughly a penny - on each card. While card values fluctuate, there's an official Penny Dreadful list that changes with each set release, so this is what you should build from. You can also use the Scryfall search engine, which has a filter for Penny Dreadful.

If you ever wanted to play Sphinx Tribal, or Flying Tribal in general, this is a nice cheap way to do so! There are three other "Penny Dreadful" decks featured in this Commander Clash video, led by Hazezon Tamar, Brago, the Eternal, and Shu Yun, the Tempest.

Here's the Penny Dreadful episode. The original episode page with the Penny Dreadful deck lists can be found here.

Kazandu Refuge and Akoum Refuge are two of the top traded cards on PucaTrade this past week. What's that about?
 
Originally printed in Zendikar, the Allied-color Refuge lands come into play tapped. However, when they do, you gain 1 life. For a long time, they were decent dual lands for players on a budget.
 
But with Khans of Tarkir came what players have come to call the “gainlands” at common. They come in all 10 color combinations as well. Still, the Refuges see play in EDH, since you can only play one of each nonbasic land in your deck.
 
What's interesting is that there seems to be sudden interest in these two Refuges, but not the other three (although Sejiri Refuge is in the top 50 top traded PucaTrade cards). Kazandu Refuge has 7 other printings and Akoum Refuge has 5. Albeit, those are limited printings as they appear only in preconstructed decks.
 
According to EDHREC, Akoum Refuge is the second most played of the three Refuges, with Kazandu coming in 4th. Jwar Isle Refuge, which is Blue/Black, comes in 1st. Sejiri Refuge, which is white/blue, comes in 3rd. The Green/White Refuge, Graypelt Refuge, comes in last. The Green/White Refuge, Graypelt Refuge, comes in last. It seems that someone had a pile of these they just wanted to unload.

 Perhaps the reason we haven’t seen much price movement on the Refuges is that they simply have a good amount of supply. Akoum and Kazandu Refuges have the most supply, so it makes sense that they would be among the most traded. So if you have copies of these or any of the five Refuges you're looking to unload, it seems shipping them out on PucaTrade is better than just getting getting a nickel or so from your local buylist.
 
PucaTrade is the best way to trade Magic the Gathering and MTGO cards (plus event tickets and packs!) online. Join the PucaTrade fun today!
 

There’s a lot of things to like about Asylum Visitor from Shadows Over Innistrad. Not only is she a vampire, but she has the Madness ability. This means if you happen to discard her, you can pay 1B to cast her! Having a 3/1 for 2 mana is good enough. But she also has an ability that may remind you of a poor man’s Dark Confidant and Phyrexian Arena rolled into one. At the beginning of each player’s upkeep, if that player has no cards in hand, you lose 1 life and draw a card. The beauty of this ability is that it’s a pure bonus

While people have built plenty a Madness deck and taken them to their Local Game Store, the Madness mechanic hasn’t quite broken through as a major contender in competitive play. Quite a few of these Madness creatures have made noise on Magic Online, though, so it seems that Asylum Visitor and friends have been a bit underappreciated. But with Asylum Visitor leaving Standard in October 2017, it seems that her time to shine is over… or is it?

It turns out that one clever deckbuilder found a way to work Asylum Visitor into a Modern deck! This Mardu Madcap Experiment list came in 8th place at SCG Modern IQ Ludlow, and it’s a cool one! Like Asylum Visitor, Madcap Experiment is a card that plenty of deck builders have brewed around, but it hasn’t found a consistent build just yet. Fortunately for Madcap Experiment, its drawback of potentially burning you to death is negated by the emblem of Gideon of the Trials, which prevents you from losing the game if you control a Gideon planeswalker.

So how do three copies of Asylum Visitor made it into this deck. Well, this deck has two planeswalkers that will require you to discard a card on occasion, Liliana of the Veil and Nahiri, the Harbinger. Ticking these gals up and essentially getting a free creature puts you ahead on tempo. Faithless Looting also requires you to discard a card, so the Visitor can come down in that case, too. Asylum Visitor is also nice as a choice to discard when an opponent activates his or her Liliana’s discard ability. The potential card advantage from her conditional Phyrexian Arena type ability is just gray.

The best part about Asylum Visitor is her price. On Magic Online, she’s often been available for a mere penny. In paper, she’s hung around $0.50, and has been under a dollar since June of 2016. If you’re looking for a penny stock to invest in from a set rotating from Standard, Asylum Visitor is definitely a good target. Beyond simply being a good Vampire for casual players to eat up, the Visitor could find a home in this Mardu Madcap archetype going forward. You really can’t lose much either way, especially on MODO.

P.S. While you’re at it, you may want to take a look at Madcap Experiment, which is around the same price or lower.

Start // Finish is an uncommon card from Magic: the Gathering's Amonkhet set. It features the Aftermath mechanic, meaning that it has one half that you can cast from your hand, and another half that can only be cast from your graveyard. While it hasn't been much Standard play, Start // Finish does have some decent effects. As it turns out, one Dredge deck in Modern played a single copy in the main deck. Is this Aftermath card going to become a fixture in Modern Dredge decks?

Paying 2W to get two 1/1 tokens with vigilance at instant speed is a decent effect. But that's not really the best part about this card. It's Finish that people like most about this card. Paying 2B and the sacrifice of a creature allows you to destroy a target creature. Dredge decks have plenty of expendable creatures, so having this card end up in the graveyard is actually a sneaky way to kill a problem creature should the need arise.

Start // Finish is a solid card and it wouldn't be a surprise to see this card show up in more Dredge decks in the future. Really, any deck that plays off of the graveyard could find a way to use this card.