Tech Cards for Every Color in cEDH

Ondas • September 28, 2024

cEDH
Culling Ritual Cover Image
Culling Ritual
 by Lorenzo Mastroianni

With the new cards added to the ban list, a lot of people are uncertain about the direction that their decks are going to take. Decks that relied on Dockside combos are severely hurt or outright dead in some cases, and without Mana Crypt

and Jeweled Lotus
 a lot of lower-colour fringe decks are also struggling to find a reason to exist. 

Dorks are going to become a lot more prevalent now that the most broken starts in the format are going to be turn-1 Sol Ring

hands, which will generally push back the most powerful starts from before the ban list by a turn. So what are some options going forward if you want to get ahead of your meta?

In 2024, I believe that all five colours are roughly equal in overall strength, though they each have their own distinct advantages. Most colours have plenty of good removal options, so outside of a few low-colour decks, removal is generally always "good enough. Each colour also has some unique options that usually get overlooked that can impactfully attack your meta.

White - Interacting doesn't have to be bad for you

White has been quietly gaining cards since the days when both it and red were barely used. Even though blue is considered the colour of card advantage, when you're playing against three other people, trading one-for-one means you're going down in cards compared to the rest of the table, but white usually interacts with the table as a whole. White is the best colour at interacting with your opponents if you're concerned about card disadvantage from counterspells.

White gained a lot of decent card advantage engines, like Esper Sentinel

and Trouble in Pairs
, and it has some synergy cards with smaller creatures, like Delney, Streetwise Lookout
, but the biggest thing to look for in most decks that white gives you are Silence
 effects and stax pieces. 

Silence and its variants are the best way to force a win through interaction, and the creature variants are hard for most decks to counter. Slamming a Grand Abolisher

means that most counters can't do anything to stop you, so it's more efficient than a normal counterspell when it comes to protecting your wins.

Ranger-Captain of Eos

is an unholy combination of stax piece and protective Silence. No one wants to commit to forcing you to sacrifice it, so they'll try to make you pop it before it's actually needed, but if the turn gets back to you and it's still on the board then they just gave you a free, uncounterable Silence. If they have multiple ways to win, they can try to force it out, but it's a crazy card that does an incredible job at both preventing wins and protecting your own.

Cards such as Drannith Magistrate

and Aven Mindcensor
 are somewhat popular stax pieces since they interfere with common actions without hurting your own plan. A particularly powerful one-sided hate card against green-based pods is Linvala, Keeper of Silence
 and her Orzhov version Drana and Linvala
. Shutting off creature abilities can be quite strong against a lot of decks, and stealing a Ranger-Captain activated feels incredible.

Lavinia is another niche stax piece that can be an extremely powerful response to fast pods if you're concerned about being able to untap on your second or third turn. She does have a significant drawback in that she turns off other players' free interaction, though, so be careful. While the downside can cost you the game, she is also the best white card that isn't a Rule of Law

to stop turbo players, and she can be played outside of stax decks.

Blue - Drawing cards never goes out of style

Blue has been a broken colour since the game was released, and this remains true in cEDH. It has the strongest individual grind engines, and you can make sure you get the time to enjoy using them. UB decks also have an incredibly powerful one-card win condition in the form of Mnemonic Betrayal

. It has to have a ton of crazy cards, right?

I was surprised by how shallow the pool of blue cards feels when you exclude counterspells. When I built my most recent attempt at Tymna Kraum Naus, I only had about 17 blue cards, and half of them were countermagic. It's not exactly what you would expect when it's normally considered "the best colour of all time," though its list of banned cards helps on that front.

While Rhystic Study

and Mystic Remora
 are two of the most powerful cards in the format, there are also a fair number of more tame grind engines, like Faerie Mastermind
, Ledger Shredder
, and even (hopefully) Pollywog Prodigy
 and Kitsa in some decks. While not game-breaking, these cards are efficient ways to dig through your deck.

Blue has gotten a new niche lately in cards that allow you to play everything at flash speed to allow you to wait to make your plays without tapping out. Borne Upon a Wind

was the first that saw widespread play, but Valley Floodcaller
 gives some really cool lines and gives decks built around Necropotence
 a solid density of cards that turn it into a "delayed Naus." Flash may be gone, but playing at instant speed is still very good.

Finally, blue has some strong options for cheap alternatives to Cyclonic Rift

. Filter Out
, Rushing River
, March of Swirling Mist
, and Dress Down
 all allow you to reset the board or remove stax pieces for a short time. Rift is the face of blue board wipes, but seven mana can be a lot and having the ability to remove multiple problematic pieces for half the mana is very helpful. 

Black - Who said blue has a monopoly on busted cards?

Black has a pool full of staples, but it also has a fairly broad range of effects. Tutors, rituals, and cards that act as one card wincons are the most prominent cards black has, and the consistency of having access to black tutors should not be understated. 

Black is simply the best colour at winning the game. Most decks are able to find a way to win with a single Demonic Tutor

later in the game, and the one-mana tutors are capable of single-handedly making mediocre hands keepable; the difference between playing Izzet and playing Grixis is staggering just based on how much better your hands get.

More than just tutors, though, you also have the most powerful rituals in addition to one-card wincons such as Ad Nauseam

to allow you to put together a win extremely early and efficiently. Black allows you to focus your deck on going fast, and alongside red is 

There's more depth in black's card pool than just trying to slam wins, though. It has cards like Lotho, Corrupt Shirriff

and Ripples of Undeath
 as cheap and efficient engines. In addition to the one-sided stax pieces that give you direct value, like Opposition Agent
 and Dauthi Voidwalker
, it has some more niche cards, like Chains of Mephistopheles
 and Grim Hireling
 if your deck can afford to play them, which mess with your opponents while you to continue to gain value. 

Toxic Deluge

and Fire Covenant
 (if you have red) are incredible board wipes to help fight against the myriad of powerful creatures that have been printed over the past five years, and with more creatures in cEDH than ever before, board wipes are looking better and better. 

A niche in some very slow decks like Talion or Yuriko can be multiplayer edicts such as Sheoldred's Edict

that usually hit at least two opponents for valuable creatures. Card-efficient interaction always interests me, and though edicts definitely aren't something to put everywhere, if you can find the right deck they look strong.

Red - Something from nothing

Red has by far the most shallow pool of staple cards, but it also has some of the most powerful cards in the format that win the game from a board state of absolutely nothing. Dockside was just banned, but Breach is still one of of the most broken cards in the format, and red has a lot of other useful cards for aggressive strategies thanks to its rituals and the Final Fortune

copies. 

Final Fortune effects have obvious synergy with Necropotence

. The play pattern of "refill my hand, next turn draw 30 cards and win," is strong, but extra turns are strong outside that. They serve as rituals that crack topdeck tutors for combo turns, they get around being Silenced, and they give you a bit more freedom in choosing when to actually attempt a win.

However, red actually has a very large pool of cards that fight against midrange decks as well in the form of Pyroclasm

s. These cards can't be used everywhere, but either paying two mana to wipe a board full of mana dorks and Tymna attackers is very useful at tripping up a lot of decks. 

It's a very meta-specific use case, but there are a lot of decks that will rely on their low toughness creatures, and Pyroclasm is cheap enough to be used on turn 1 as a tempo play or be sequenced into a turn without having too much trouble. Tymna Jeska is my favourite deck to play, and I love having permanent access to a mini board wipe in the command zone.

The big winner for red in cEDH with the new bans is land hate. Blood Moon

and its contemporaries were terrible before largely thanks to Dockside being able to come down and make them completely irrelevant. With Dockside leaving the format, they have the ability to breathe and perform their intended function: punishing players for not playing basics. Meltdown
 is also very strong for hitting mana artifacts at X = 2 or just fast mana at X = 0.

Red also has a fair number of combat-centric cards. Professional Face-Breaker and Loyal Apprentice are two cards that dominate grindy games with Tymna, and Inti, Seneschal of the Sun is a card that has seen some success as a grind engine as well. Red isn't a colour that has a huge number of generic staples, but it has a lot more options than what is commonly talked about.

Green - The tech support team of cedh

Finally, green is quite possibly the most underrated colour in cedh at the moment, though that might change with the recent bannings. Because it doesn't have a lot of splashy cards like the other colours do, a lot of people will call it the worst colour, but mana dorks do a lot to help stabilise mulligans and reduce the number of non games that you end up with, and rumours of its death by Orcish Bowmasters were greatly exaggerated. 

In addition to the stable ramp of mana dorks, though, it also has a fair number of rituals to add for aggressive strategies: Elvish Spirit Guide, Tinder Wall, and using Crop Rotation for Ancient Tomb are all nice to have, to say nothing of the Golgari response to Dockside Extortionist that is Culling Ritual.

Though they become a less relevant than they were when Dockside was in the format, green creature tutors are still powerful if you have good targets; they're on par or better than casting Demonic Tutor for the creature, and usually have addition utility. Finale of Devastation doubles as a win condition for some decks, Chord of Calling has convoke and is instant speed, and Neoform and Eldritch Evolution both cheat on mana costs.

Collector Ouphe used to be one of the best cards in the format at stopping your opponents from winning quickly, but with the death of Dockside, its relevance has gone down a lot. Rog Silas is still a powerful deck, and the best decks in the format are still extremely powerful, but it's no longer a necessity for slower decks. It's still quite powerful at what it does, and can be relevant against a pod full of fast decks, but the problems it fixes aren't as common.

Pick Your Poison is also very strong tech that hampers all of your opponents' development or punishes the cards that they power out. Stripping away everyone's mana artifacts or Rhystic Study is a very powerful punish for a single mana.

The colour is also very good at going over the top with cards like Gaea's Cradle and some of the two-mana dorks, like Fanatic of Rhonas, Bloom Tender, and Priest of Titania. Sylvan Safekeeper is an incredibly powerful card to protect a creature-based combo, and playing to the board is a lot safer now than it has been before, so I'm excited to see how these cards shape up in the future.

Green isn't the most explosive colour in the pie, but it makes up for this with tools for players who want to adjust their deck to play at any speed. It fights well against aggressive strategies with cards like Collector Ouphe and Endurance, or it can support these strategies with rituals and using tutors to help find cards like Grand Abolisher.

Innovating Tech Cards

While your commander affects the colours and direction of your deck, there's always some hidden gems that you can find in Magic's long history. Even ignoring Commander-specific cards, like Seedborn Muse, there are plenty of ways to attack an established metagame and give you an advantage over your opponents. Innovation and trying new things has never hurt anyone, and finding niche cards that do what you need them to always feels rewarding.