Spring 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 — PlayMAX has a 70-minute round timer — 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 4 seasons per year, with Spring League starting in February and ending in April. At the end of the season, players move to a top 16 within their power level and battle it out in a final match where one player per power level would be considered that season’s winner.
The winners of the league received a Commander Legends Extended Art Foil Sol Ring and Arcane Signet.
In addition, everyone who made it to the top 4 in each powerlevel gets one of each Mystical Archive Swords to Plowshares, Counterspell, Dark Ritual, Chaos Warp and Krosan Grip!
Exxaxl: Hey TwentySevenPennies, congratulations on winning our Spring League for the Battlecruiser power level. I see you picked a Volo, Guide to Monsters deck for our event. What made you brew a deck with Volo at the helm when Simic has such powerful often used staple commanders like Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy and Koma, Cosmos Serpent?
TwentySevenPennies: It’s very easy in those colors to throw together a pile of cards you own and suddenly you have a crazy value deck going. I have been playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) for seven or eight years now and wanted to make a D&D themed deck. I really love the art style of the D&D Magic cards that came out, but most of them aren’t that powerful.
Exxaxl: I get what you mean. I like how they went out of their way to make cards like Owlbear and Purple Worm over simply reprinting a card like Sakura-Tribe Elder and putting a D&D name on top of an already existing card, though.
TwentySevenPennies: The flavor is there for most of them! I’m a big fan of cards like Displacer Beast. The goal of the deck was to shove as much of the D&D art in there while still having a defined wincon and having a deck that would still be fun for both me and everyone I play the deck against.
Volo is such a value commander though. I’m actually also building a Volo deck for Low and Mid power. In the current BC deck, even if the creatures aren’t very optimized, if Volo is out I do get two of each creature.
Exxaxl: Four mana doesn’t give you one Undermountain Adventurer, you now have two. I can see how double dipping into effects like that is good, even though some of the singular cards in a vacuum might not be all that strong.
TwentySevenPennies: That and being able to double up on overrun effects on creatures, which is something that will happen while playing. Two End-Raze Forerunners usually means GG on an already established board.
Exxaxl: A lot of your cards have the ‘Showcase Storybook’ art cards in them. For the sake of making the deck more functional, you had to break the theme a little bit. If we ever return to a Forgotten Realms set, are you looking to replace your current off theme cards? I see you play Cankerbloom and Solemn Simulacrum for example, which don’t strike me as D&D cards.
TwentySevenPennies: Absolutely. I’m always looking for new cards or art for my deck, especially this one. I did play around with the overrun effect they printed in the Battle for Baldur's Gate set, ‘You Meet in a Tavern’. It just wasn’t working well in the deck. End-Raze Forerunners was also reprinted in the Exit from Exile precon deck from the Baldur’s Gate cycle. The benefit with End-Raze in my deck is I get two bodies. So now the board gets +4/+4, vigilance and trample. Cankerbloom is just so strong, and the fact it’s on a body means I can copy my removal as well.
Exxaxl: Haywire Mite is a great card they made recently and arguably ‘better’ outside of the option to proliferate.
TwentySevenPennies: That was originally in the list as I made it but it did end up getting cut. It being an insect got in the way of me being able to copy Hornet Queen with Volo, so it got replaced in the end.
Exxaxl: I noticed most of your creature types in the deck are unique, but you have a few repeat ones, like Human, Wizard and Halfling. Is there a reason you’re not running a 100% unique creature type list?
TwentySevenPennies: Mainly because Volo is almost always out, and the ones I do have more than one of in the deck are legendary creatures, so the copy wouldn’t be useful. I had to have the other Volo card in there — Volo, Itinerant Scholar. One thing that did end up being stronger than I originally anticipated were the ‘enter the dungeon’ and ‘initiative’ cards. Varis, Silverymoon Ranger is a Human, Elf, and Ranger, but he’s just very good at making sure I get enough value out of my dungeons.
Exxaxl: Dungeons work well because they operate in a space of the game that’s hard to interrupt or capitalize on when you’re not the one playing around in them. Once you’re in a dungeon, there is no forced game mechanic that’s going to pull you out of the dungeon, you’re in there and you get to play around in your own little private space of benefits where others can’t realistically prevent you from progressing. I think we’ll see the same happen with ‘The Ring Tempts You’ in the upcoming Lords of the Rings set.
TwentySevenPennies: I’m very excited about that. It seems different enough from the initiative, which I also have in this deck. One thing this deck does very well is once you’re in a dungeon, and you ‘take the initiative’, it just progresses you through the dungeon you’re currently in. You don’t have to be in The Undercity for the mechanic to give you benefits. If I can get double triggers of the initiative, the deck really gets going. I really like my Volo deck. Most of the cost of it is in the landbase.
Exxaxl: It’s always a small jumpscare watching the overall price of your deck double or triple when inputting cards in Moxfield prior to adding a non-budget landbase.
TwentySevenPennies: I just had to add some gates to the deck, mainly because of Baldur’s Gate. And you don’t just run that card with no other gates. Basilisk Gate is actually pretty good, especially with Gond Gate which makes all the gates enter untapped. The main cost of the lands in the deck are the D&D Dungeon module lands. I haven’t really used Treasure Vault often yet. The one time I sacrificed it for Treasure tokens, I got Vandalblasted shortly after.
Exxaxl: I do feel oftentimes people don’t slot enough singular land destruction in their decks. Or they make the deck have 36 lands of which 30+ are basic lands. There’s a lot of unused potential in some of the landbases we see in the decks people submit for a deck check.
TwentySevenPennies: I love drafting, so my drawer and collection are filled with so many odd lands that might be good in decks. Especially the recently printed Demolition Field is especially good to just slot in any deck. In the higher up power levels people run a lot of high value lands like Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx which will run away with the game, and people don’t have an answer for it. It’s why Terastodon is in the deck as well, lands sometimes just have to be removed. Here, take this 3/3 Elephant instead.
Exxaxl: Did you make this deck specifically for Battlecruiser and/or specifically to play in our spring league or did you just make the deck you wanted to make and it ended up being BC in the end?
TwentySevenPennies: I initially made this deck to go toe to toe with my friends who play minorly upgraded precons. At first I brought my homebrew Council of Four Low Power deck to the store and it just completely took over the table. I built this D&D deck thinking ‘It’s either BC as is or barely gets into Low with more changes’.
It got checked for BC but I personally felt a few cards might not be great or appreciated in that environment, so the version as it got played in the league was adapted and changed over time to fit more comfortably into that powerlevel. I also really like BC, it’s just a shame not that many people seem to want to play the lowest available powerlevel, be that on the PlayEDH Discord or just casually at a game store.
Exxaxl: The lowest baseline on our server is BC. If we look at player behavior and statistics in regards to how often people play in that environment, it almost seems like several players just see the power level system as a ‘linear progression ladder that I must climb!’. If their deck is Battlecruiser as is, they over time keep adding and adapting to it with the goal of reaching Low power. They don’t see their deck as a finished project, rather something they wish to add to and build on. Once they get to Low Power, they do the same and want to carry over their deck for Mid Power. I think most people don’t want to play ‘slower magic’ all the time.
TwentySevenPennies: It’s great to have a place to play with and against precons. You can’t do that everywhere. The Dihada precon out of the box feels so strong. Dihada, Binder of Wills is a card you have to deal with or she gets out of hand. She makes your board hard to deal with. I played that precon in the first League match prior, and it quickly drew a lot of attention from the table.
Editor’s note: Due to the unique nature of the Battlecruiser power level, stock precons can be played in this league by default, which means you have a lot of options in regards to what deck you can bring to this event without the deck needing to get ‘pre approved’ for a power level as opposed to the league matches at our other power levels.
Exxaxl: The ability being ‘until your next turn’ for vigilance, lifelink and indestructible and not just ‘until the end of your turn’ really made that card quite powerful. I assume people don’t have you on their radar as much when Volo just makes you have 2 Gnoll Hunters or 2 Pixie Guides.
TwentySevenPennies: ‘I have two Neverwinter Dryads’ “What does that do?” ‘I have to pay and sacrifice it to find a basic card’. It’s not quite good, but it is on theme!
Exxaxl: Has your deck allowed you to make a memorable line of play during a league or regular game that’s stuck with you?
TwentySevenPennies: Most cool plays I’ve played with this deck happened when everybody was still alive. It’s not often in a situation where you’re up 1v1 or 1v2. We had a game where the boards were quite stalled out. This was a matchup against the Dihara precon and a minorly upgraded Abaddon the Despoiler deck and a third deck I can’t truly remember.
I had an okay boardstate, Volo had been removed, and I had End-Raze Forerunners in my hand. I was trying to play around removal, and I had to decide what to do. I ended not attacking at all, even though I might take out a single player that turn? But it would leave me vulnerable and I’d have to be dealing with the Abaddon player with the Dihada player no longer there, which might have been an issue.
The board wipe happened, Blasphemous Act I think, which killed everyone’s creatures. The turn after the wipe I was able to rebuild with Volo and several other creatures and I got to double up on the End-Raze forerunners the turn after that. If I had cast it into potential removal I likely wouldn’t have won that game.
Exxaxl: It’s important to know when to and when not to play your cards. A thing I often see newer players do is ‘I drew the card, so I’m playing the card’, whether it’s the correct thing to do at that moment or not. ‘I got to 6 mana and it’s 6 mana so here’s a 6 mana spell that might have been better next turn’.
TwentySevenPennies: If I had taken out the Dihada player, Abaddon's board would have still been intact and they would have cascaded into who knows what. Me holding back my overrun and waiting for another player to play the boardwipe I was in a better position than anyone else after the boardwipe.
Topiary Stomper and other ramp cards I played that turn like Cultivate, instead of casting my mana-intensive overrun anticipating a boardwipe got me ahead for the next two turns and won me the game over me taking out one player and then failing to rebuild. I sometimes struggle with that thought though. ‘Do I take out this one person because that’s one less person to worry about’. Sometimes you need to bite your tongue a little bit and hold back.
Exxaxl: Thinking a turn or two ahead is something that comes with experience, mostly. Proper threat assessment and knowing when not to cast certain effects and cards is definitely something you learn by doing. In my own pods at the local game store, I notice people who don’t ‘only play EDH’ but also play Limited and other formats tend to have more restraint in regards to dropping their entire hand on the table as quickly as possible.
TwentySevenPennies: I’ve been playing EDH for a few years now and before that I mainly played 60-card formats. Threat assessment is really important to me. One of the things I dislike is people who go ‘but why are you attacking me, I’m not doing anything’ and you just see them put out massive threats or engine pieces that others are just not aware of or haven’t experienced before.
It’s something I think about when I play chess. One of the things I try to understand is ‘what are they trying to do? What do they want from this interaction?’. In chess, an equal exchange of pieces can mean the position of the game is shifting. ‘Why would this player want to play a boardwipe right now?’ Probably because they have good cards in hand and need a turn of uninterrupted play where they can rebuild faster than anyone else.
Exxaxl: Are there cards, interactions or synergy lines in your deckIist that you have yet to see played out but would love to happen?
TwentySevenPennies: It’s kind of more of a meme, but I have The Deck of Many Things in my list, which most of the time just puts a random card from my graveyard back into my hand. Drawing two cards is also always fine for 2 mana. The fact you have to subtract the number of cards in your hand realistically means it’s quite hard to ever get a 20 as a result, you can only do that with an empty hand and by rolling 20. The final ability, grabbing any creature from any graveyard and ‘when this creature dies, the original owner loses the game’ sounds hilarious.
Exxaxl: Has that ever happened before?
TwentySevenPennies: No, and it’s not for a lack of trying. Making sure the hand is empty and rolling 20 will eventually happen I guess. I do have cards like Gretchen Titchwillow to refill my hand if I end up rolling 0. Pixie Guide is mainly here for advantage of my rolls to try and help get that line of play at some point, but it also works in favor of Vexing Puzzlebox and Treasure Chest.
Exxaxl: Were the cards that you had in the deck originally but got removed over time? And are there cards you’re considering adding in the future?
TwentySevenPennies: Initially I had Rimeshield Frost Giant in the 99 because it was a nice rulebook showcase card. Turns out a 4/5 with ward 3 and no keywords just isn’t very good for 5 mana. I replaced the card with Phantom Steed which then allows me to capitalize more on the initiative and dungeon cards in the deck.
I also fiddled with the removal suite a lot. It was not easy to gauge how much of a threat I’d be when I originally made the deck. I have access to blue, so it’s not easy not going overboard with your interaction and removal package. The first deck I ever built was an Azami deck which I actually pulled apart and stopped playing because it wasn’t fun for me or the table. It interacted too much and had most counterspells you could think of.
As a self limitation here I was actively not trying to be ‘the guy with all the counterspells’ and I went out of my way to only slot original Counterspell, the 3 mana You Find the Villains’ Lair and Gale’s Redirection.
Exxaxl: Gale’s Redirection feels like a pseudo Narset’s Reversal.
TwentySevenPennies: It’s still removal. The best kind of removal, removal before something bad happens! I am a blue player at heart for sure. I might add some ‘real’ removal over time. A Beast Within definitely wouldn’t hurt. In another powerlevel I’d probably slot Cyclonic Rift, but that card just doesn’t feel like it’s a poor fit for BC. One sided wipes tend to not feel great there.
Exxaxl: My final question: If you had one message you could share to the entire EDH community, what would it be?
TwentySevenPennies: Play more themed decks! People build really cool decks but I love seeing thematic decks. Self-expression makes for the coolest memories. That, and always pay your taxes, especially in-game.
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