Bad Advice [EDH]

[Oversoul]

I am on a mission to complete my checklist of EDH decks helmed by every one of the original 55 Legends legends before the end of 2025. I'd already covered most of them starting in 2019, but this is the year that I complete the project. Up first is a deck that I've been procrastinating on for a while: Advisor Tribal helmed by the oldest advisor in the game (tied with Riven Turnbull).

This is one of the jankiest decks I've built in a while. It's legitimately bad enough that I worry it might never win any games. I don't usually dial the power down quite this far. But hey, maybe I needed this. I don't know.

With this deck, I have now built decks helmed by 42 out of the original 55 legendary creatures.

Moxfield link: https://moxfield.com/decks/lf4pWvaxUU6BFG0l92TMmw

Commander:
1 Tobias Andrion

1 Ancient Tomb
1 Arcane Denial
1 Arid Mesa
1 Aura of Silence
1 Aysen Bureaucrats
1 Bellowing Crier
1 Brainstorm
1 Branch of Vitu-Ghazi
1 Browse
1 Bruvac the Grandiloquent
1 Buried Ruin
1 Capture of Jingzhou
1 Cavern of Souls
1 Codex Shredder
1 Conjurer's Bauble
1 Counterspell
1 Cyclonic Rift
1 Dig Through Time
1 Duelist of the Mind
1 Evacuation
1 Flooded Strand
1 Force of Will
1 Glistener Seer
1 Hallowed Fountain
11 Island
1 Jace, Wielder of Mysteries
1 Ledger Shredder
1 Mana Drain
1 Marsh Flats
1 Mikokoro, Center of the Sea
1 Otawara, Soaring City
30 Persistent Petitioners
8 Plains
1 Polluted Delta
1 Reliquary Tower
1 Scalding Tarn
1 Season of Weaving
1 Sensei's Divining Top
1 Sevinne's Reclamation
1 Soldevi Digger
1 Solitary Confinement
1 Storm of Souls
1 Strip Mine
1 Supreme Verdict
1 Swords to Plowshares
1 Temporal Manipulation
1 Thousand-Year Elixir
1 Thrumming Stone
1 Time Warp
1 Treasure Cruise
1 Tundra
1 Winds of Abandon
1 Windswept Heath

 

[Oversoul]

I threw this deck together on Tuesday night, then played it twice on Wednesday and once yesterday. Yikes, it's bad. I will need to exercise some patience in finding a game where this deck is actually appropriate, because the power level of most casual pods these days is just too high for it. I'd had the thought that my Legends legends decks should be jank, but I might rethink that notion. We'll see.

As a pod came together, I found myself seated next to the guy who only ever uses his Inalla combo deck and his Ashling the Pilgrim lands deck. He was going to use Ashling and I pointed out that my deck was Advisor Tribal with my 4/4 commander being the biggest advisor in the deck, so the whole deck would effectively be shut down as a side effect of his normal activities if he played Ashling. He switched to Inalla and proceeded to start assembling an engine to draw ludicrous amounts of cards. I really didn't have much going on at first and simply milled myself with Persistent Petitioners for a while. The other players presented bigger threats, so people were attacking each other instead of me, at least mostly.

On the cusp of me finally being able to maybe do something other than just mill myself, the Inalla player Bojuka Bogged me. So I conceded. That's my rule. If I am playing a graveyard-based deck and don't have some threatening board state in a casual game and someone Bogs me, I scoop. You want a win? Enjoy your win. This is casual Magic. I'm here to have fun. Losing all of my cards isn't fun. So I'm out. If I was about to do something scary or if I have a lot to work with on the battlefield, then I'll stick around and work with what I've got. But if you're kicking me while I'm down and it's in a way that just permanently robs me of access to the mediocre cards I was desperately trying to squeeze value out of, then you can play with someone else. Not me. No thanks.

I thought that the Inalla player was probably going to win soon anyway, but that pod kept going with that game for a long time after I was dead, so I guess that the other two players found some sort of answer. Impressive. Didn't see what the answer was, nor the final outcome. I got stuck waiting around for over an hour, then eventually played 1-on-1 against another player before getting a chance to play in another 4-player pod. I tried this deck a second time, and this time I got to see it actually kind of function as intended, at least kind of. I played some disruption, milled myself, and kept the game slowed down as I worked on gradually building up resources. Two of my opponents were both playing very explosive loops and it looked like either of them would win very soon. Eventually, they both went infinite. Seriously. One player had an infinite loop with Food Chain + Squee, the Immortal. He was able to use his commander (Faldorn, Dread Wolf Herald) to make infinite wolf tokens. He didn't have a haste-enabler yet, so he had to pass the turn. The next player used multiple cards for loops based around Brenard, Ginger Sculptor and food tokens to do a bunch of stuff. The stuff included drawing through his whole deck. He left 13 cards in his library so that I couldn't mill him out with four advisors. He also had enough creatures to swing for the win, but I cast Cyclonic Rift to stop that. He responded with Teferi's Protection.

I was able to kingmake by helping the Faldorn player get Anger into his graveyard. He used Etali, Primal Conquerer to grab a Persistent Petitioners from the top of my library. With Tobias Andrion and 3 Persistent Petitioners, I milled the Brenard player for 12 and the Faldorn player used the Persistent Petitioners that he stole from me to mill the 13th card, causing the Brenard player to deck himself. Although I had both Season of Weaving and Winds of Abandon available, neither of those stopped the Food Chain combo from working to produce infinite (hasty) wolves, so there was now no way to stop the Faldorn player from winning. Still, kind of a good game and strong performance from this deck. I helped kill someone! That's not nothing.

Yesterday's game, unfortunately, was especially bad for me. I kept a two-land hand and never, ever saw a third land. The only cards I ever cast were Persistent Petitioners. So I milled myself. And that was it. I had no flying blockers and died with no recourse while horribly manascrewed.