The added green really pays off for Kydele, too. For the life of me I'll never understand why Forgotten Creation is only in 23% of Kydele + Vial Smasher decks, because it too grants you an enormous mana boost before your turn even begins. Nekusar likes Brainstorm just fine, but Kydele turns it into a Dark Ritual. This opens her up to several cards Nekusar doesn't really want, such as Arjun, the Shifting Flame and Ancient Excavation. She doesn't use wheel effects to ping opponents, she uses them because they're inexpensive cards that net her a lot of mana. Unlike Nekusar, Kydele doesn't care about the cards your opponents draw, just the cards you draw. However, there's some extra zest in there too: On Kydele and Vial Smasher's EDHREC page, we see a lot of the same cards from Nekusar Teferi's Puzzle Box, Psychosis Crawler, lots of wheels, etc. ![]() That kind of popularity probably illuminates how effective Kydele is at her job. If so, might I propose a popular pair of powerful partners from the Entropic Uprising precon? Kydele and Vial Smasher are almost the most popular partner duo on EDHREC, second only to Kydele's combination with Thrasios, Triton Hero. Perhaps Nekusar isn't quite your style, or you'd like to hang onto the green in Leovold's color identity. Ol' Leo didn't let your opponents draw cards, but Nekusar makes them afraid of doing so, which makes for a different but still pleasantly cruel experience. (My personal favorite is Phyrexian Tyranny, which should absolutely be in more than just 37% of Nekusar decks.) When every card your opponents draw is like a Lightning Bolt to the face, all those wheel spells start to look just as unfriendly as they did in Leovold's deck. It's also Underworld Dreams, Psychosis Crawler, Kederekt Parasite, and many, many more. It's not just Nekusar that slowly pings opponents. The most dangerous aspect of a Nekusar deck is its redundancy. So a Leovold deck transitioning into a Nekusar deck would need to pick up more than just the wheel spells. It doesn't draw you any cards at all, but it's in over half of Nekusar decks. While Leovold uses Howling Mine to selfishly draw cards just for himself, Nekusar would probably play the Mine even if it didn't draw him any cards at all. Unlike Leovold, he actually wants your opponents to draw cards. His strategy is quite a bit different, of course. He has eleven different wheel effects in his Top and Signature Cards alone, including many red cards Leovold didn't have access to, such as Winds of Change and Molten Psyche. You don't need me to tell you how powerfully he synergizes with Windfall and friends. Nekusar, the Mindrazer is presently the fifth most popular commander of all time, with over 1,500 decks to his name. So where else can these kinds of cards find a home? Thankfully, we've seen wheel effects before, in many other decks, so we don't have to go far to find them a new home. His Top Cards, meanwhile, include a few tutor spells, to find the Box, not to mention a few choice counterspells to keep Leovold safe. Unsurprisingly, we see these kinds of spells littered all over Leovold's Signature Cards. Since it technically triggers after players have drawn their card during the draw phase, the Puzzle Box could keep your opponents permanently handless. However, the worst culprit was easily Teferi's Puzzle Box. Casting a pseudo- Cabal Conditioning for only three mana is pretty insane. This, Whispering Madness, and Dark Deal can bring your opponents down to only one card in hand. Windfall and other blue or black wheel spells are certainly the most famous. Since your opponents can't draw more than one card per turn, mass draw and 'wheel' effects were enormously powerful. What were Leovold's most popular cards? Signature CardsĪs we can see, a typical Leovold, Emissary of Trest deck's strategy was fairly straightforward. This time around, we're going to take a look at the most popular cards from Leovold's deck and compare them to several other commanders, to help find those cards a new home. Therefore, for this Commander Showdown, we're going to do something a little different. This series is all about comparison and contrast, but not just between two commanders. ![]() It'd be a shame to just scrap the deck entirely! Due to demand in Legacy, he's not exactly a cheap commander, and neither are the cards in his deck. Since Leovold had over 700 decks here on EDHREC, this probably stings for quite a few folks. (If you'd like to read the full announcement, you can do so here.) If you haven't already heard, EDH had a bit of a shakeup this past Monday: Leovold, Emissary of Trest is now banned in Commander.
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