Fall League 2023 - Battlecruiser
In 2023, we started an EDH league for the power levels Battlecruiser, Low Power, and Mid Power. It didn’t seem logistically doable to make a tournament with time constraints for these power levels due to the slower nature of the decks being played there, and we were looking for a replacement for our monthly ‘Patreon Game Day’ and landed on the idea of a league.
This League is divided into three seasons per year, three months of League games and one month for the top 16 invitationals, where eventually a finals match decides on that League’s winner, one for each power level. The League prizes will vary from season to season. The winners of the Fall League receive a set of 100 PlayEDH sleeves. In addition, everyone who made it to the top 4 in each power level receives a set of PlayEDH dice!
A link to the full deck be found here on our Moxfield Hub. The deck is also embedded at the bottom of this article.
Exxaxl: Congratulations on taking the win in our Fall League finals, Creeperhunter788. You played Kagha, Shadow Archdruid. I’m not familiar with this commander as I’ve never played with or against it, though I have seen her while playing Baldur’s Gate 3. From an outsider point of view this seems like a more limited Muldrotha. Is this how she actually plays out? What makes you play Kagha over any of the large number of staple Golgari choices like Meren or Grist?
Creeperhunter788: Kagha was the fourth or fifth iteration of face commander that this deck had. Another player on the server used to have a similar deck which had Storrev, Devkarin Lich at the helm, which is still in the 99. I was going through potential commanders that interact with the graveyard in black and green, literally just as a Scryfall search, and Kagha showed up and she seemed perfect for what I wanted my deck to do.
Storrev has to connect to work, and is quite easily blocked. She also only puts creatures and planeswalkers back into your hand. Kagha just has to attack to mill, whether she actually hits doesn’t matter, and has access to all lands and permanent cards in your graveyard that you milled this turn, so you have a bigger choice depending on how many cards you mill. She feels less restricted than Storrev
Exxaxl: I notice you run strong singular effects I expect to see in more powerful decks like Animate Dead, Conjurer’s Closet, and Songs of the Damned. Those cards are way less scary when some of your best targets are Titan of Industry or Lotleth Giant over some more impactful game-finishers. Was your original goal to slot in what we’ll just call ‘strong cards’ in EDH in general and still have the deck be Battlecruiser or is this something that just happened over time?
Creeperhunter788: Most of those just found their way into the deck naturally because I liked the cards. A lot of them got added because I get more than one use out of them. Cards like Reclamation Sage and Sakura-Tribe Elder and other similar cards can get reused several times per game if I can play them from my graveyard, or add them back to my hand. In the end I had a lot of enters the battlefield (ETB) effects which is why Conjurer’s Closet got added.
Exxaxl: I see you originally named your deck ‘The Golgari Limited Archetype’. Is there a set or block that led you to build this deck or name it that way?
Creeperhunter788: I initially started to build it thanks to Dominaria United Limited all-star Urborg Repossession. When drafting, I noticed they keep making the black green archetype have a graveyard manipulation playstyle, but you basically need to have a perfect draft in order to have that playstyle work, otherwise you just have a pile of black and green cards with low synergy.
Some of these cards just don’t feel as powerful in Limited as they do in Commander. Rhizome Lurcher often gets to be a 14/14 or bigger, that’s just not something you can commonly expect to happen in Limited. Molderhulk is probably too expensive to cast in Limited.
In Commander, due to the larger deck size, it’s usually cheap to cast and allows me to keep reusing lands like Myriad Landscape or Takenuma, Abandoned Mire. There’s a lot of cards that just won't work well in Limited unless you get lucky with your draft picks that I felt would be perfect to build a coherent deck around.
Exxaxl: Are there cards you didn’t initially have in your deck that found their way into the 99 after you noticed someone else played them, or new cards that came out after your deck was already ‘finished’ that were a perfect fit for your deck?
Creeperhunter788: Grist, the Hunger Tide got added quite late. I have another black green deck that cares more about tokens and aristocrat effects, and initially I didn’t think about Grist, until you start noticing Grist mills and can sacrifice my creatures which means I can recast them again for double use of my ETB effects.
Titan of Industry also found a spot quite late into the building process. ETB with a choice of either growing my board, destroying an artifact or enchantment or putting some protection on key pieces, with the option to potentially reuse the card several times in a game, the ‘choose two’ really starts to add up.
Exxaxl: If I forced you to cut some cards and find room for new cards in your deck, which cards would you take out and what would you replace them with?
Creeperhunter788: I run both Circle of the Land Druid and Satyr Wayfinder and when you whiff with Satyr Wayfinder, it sort of just does nothing, so it’s been on my ‘to cut’ list for a while. With a sacrifice outlet or simply blocking to make it go to the graveyard, Circle of the Land Druid will close to always do something. Lands will find their way into the graveyard naturally from milling by different sources.
Grave Strength doesn’t feel all that great. Most of my creatures can easily be blocked so the +1/+1 counters don’t seem too significant. One of the high cost reanimate spells can likely go, like Bond of Revival, just to make room for some cheaper reanimation. Songs of the Damned isn’t that good in a deck that plays at Battlecruiser speed. Sure, it’s a staple in some competitive lists, but I don’t dump my deck into my graveyard quickly enough for it to be all that good.
As for new cards, I really like Conduit of Worlds. It’s limited to one activation per turn rotation and it does something similar to what Kagha does, so it’d be nice to have if Kagha gets removed often and is too expensive to cast. I also feel I don’t go overboard with fetchlands or utility lands I can sacrifice for big value to make what I consider a strong effect ‘too strong’ for the power level. The biggest value I can get would be Myriad Landscape maybe?
Chupacabra Echo would help me deal with indestructible creatures like some of the older Theros Gods. It’d also be a nice card for its flavor because I already run Ravenous Chupacabra. Getting two copies of Incarnation Technique so I can mill ten cards and reanimate two creatures seems nice.
Exxaxl: Are there pet cards in your deck you know could be replaced with something better but you’re attached to in some way or another so you refuse to let it go?
Creeperhunter788: Bladed Pinions probably. Battlecruiser is very combat focused so it’s kind of not the worst card? A few of my larger bodies like Kogla, the Titan Ape or Rhizome Lurcher are also easily blocked. The flying and first strike on one piece of equipment goes a long way. In a vacuum, the card doesn’t seem all that good but the situations where it has been game changing for me prevent me from taking it out.
Exxaxl: Stepping away from your deck specifically, let’s move on to some League-related questions. What’s the coolest deck you played against during this League’s Invitational?
Creeperhunter788: Scryl’s (another long time patron) Muldrotha Skeleton deck. If it weren’t for him being mana-screwed for a large portion of our game during the finals, I think he would have outpaced me. Funnily enough, I resolved a turn 5 Skeletal Swarming so I was the one playing Skeletons instead and proceeded to make them for the rest of the game.
We both reached this League’s finals and we both had decks we were excited to talk about. It turned the game into an “I hope you win but I would also like to talk about my deck in the interview” situation which was quite funny.
Exxaxl: I’ve added a link so people can at least check his deck out. What’s the most memorable play you’ve managed to pull off with your deck, be that in a League match or otherwise?
Creeperhunter788: Kagha and Conjurer’s Closet were in play, I had both Crawling Infestation and Crawling Sensation out, milling four to six cards a turn, filling my graveyard and I milled a Baloth Null. I cast Young Necromancer from hand, reanimated Baloth Null, which got back Cemetery Desecrator and Acolyte of Affliction to my hand. In my end step, flicker Young Necromancer to do it all again.
I was able to set up a chain of getting several of my creatures back to the battlefield and to my hand in one turn rotation, and with the amount of cards I’m milling each turn, once you get late enough into the game to have a sizeable mana pool and graveyard, the deck just keeps this engine going turn after turn.
Exxaxl: What would you tell people who have access to the Weekend League but haven’t participated in it yet to entice them to give it a try?
Creeperhunter788: Honestly, just queue up for the next League game and try it out once. If it’s not your thing, the extra deck check just from participating in one game is already nice to have. I try to participate in every League, and those extra deck checks do stack up. If you happen to do well in the and you end up in the finals, that’s just a nice bonus to have on top.
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