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Welcome back to another week of Unsung Heroes of EDH.  If you are just joining me, this column is where I take a look at Legendary Creatures that no one on Mtgsalvation.com OR mtgcommander.net will admit to having piloted as a general for an EDH deck and offer up anything from suggestions, to decklists to insults depending on the crapitude of the legend.  This week, since there are no legends that start with Q, we are heading on out to legends begining with Arrrrr!

Obviously a metagame choice, there are usually dragons around at the EDH table, and they usually attack.  Not much to say about Rashida other than that.  Generally, unless you have a [card]Karrthus[/card], [card]Scion of the Ur-Dragon[/card], and [card]Zirilan of the Claw[/card] decks all sitting at your table, Rashida will likely kill around 1-2 dudes and otherwise be a vanilla creature.

A 3/3 Reach for 5 with a conditional pump for blocking...and only if she is blocking black creatures?  No thanks.  Rashka is never the best chice for a white deck.  [card]Major Teroh[/card] is better in Rashka's stead, still hozin' black and more efficiently to boot.  At least she isn't [card]Morinfen[/card] or [card]Jedit Ojanen[/card]

This card sucks a big one.  The only cool thing I can think of about Reveka is Mono-Blue Tim tribal.  Here is the start of a deck:
[card]Prodigal Sorcerer[/card]
[card]Zuran Spellcaster[/card]
[card]Pirate Ship[/card]
[card]Mawcor[/card]
[card]Fledgling Mawcor[/card]
[card]Rootwater Hunter[/card]
[card]Thornwind Faeries[/card]
[card]Stinging Barrier[/card]
[card]Apprentice Sorcerer[/card]
[card]Capricious Sorcerer[/card]
[card]Suq'ata Firewalker[/card]
[card]Wu Longbowman[/card]
...etc, and then go to town.  It won't be "good" or "win games" but it is a fun concept.

[card]Princess Lucrezia[/card]'s brother Riven is basically the same card.  For 1 more mana, but less of a color commitment, you get a +0/+3 and tapping for the other color of mana.  Still, he is a fat dude with a tap ability that you will never use.  Better than Vanilla Abominations, but only because a huge [card]Elves of Deep Shadow[/card] in blue/black is funny.

God I wish this card were even moderately playable, but Rohgahh is NOT a Kobold lord...read it again...he is a [card]Kobolds of Kher Keep[/card] lord.  Even with the printing of [card]Kher Keep[/card] would you REALLY want to donate your general to an opponent to pump one card in your deck, and tokens made by another?  I guess you could try and find ways to trick [card]Sculpting Steel[/card] into becoming a [card]Kobolds of Kher Keep[/card] with [card]Liquimetal Coating[/card] if you arent' looking to win...or even stand a chance, but instead you could be, you know...HAVING FUN!

Another Kamigawa dragon that is victim to the format rules, if you want to recur Ryusei, he does not make it to the graveyard, so he is just a vanilla dude, or a one time use dude.  Red is the worst color at recursion, you basically have [card]Triassic Egg[/card] and [card]Phyrexian Grimoire[/card]....did I miss anything? 

One of the major take-aways that I am getting from doing this series is that a TON of legends are getting little-to-no face time because of Cast/Played-from-your-hand/goes to the graveyard from the battlefield triggers.  Makes me wish that the rules committee would do something so the Myojins and Kami-Dragons worked better as generals.  Oh well...

That's all we have for this week, join me next week where I post another article about stuff AND junk!

-Shoe

As most of my regular readers know, I have 3 daughters under 4 years old.  This image comes off of a Polly Pocket toy, and is one of the funniest things I have ever seen:

That's right...Bear+Taco=WTF!?!?!  And yes, one of her accessories was a BEARTACO!  WTF is wrong with people

And we're back after a small hiatus to bring you more Legends that aren't seeing any play as generals in EDH/Commander.  This week we are looking with creatures that aren't OP (over powered if you didn't know already), but start with O and P.  The video below is a clip from the movie "A Mighty Wind", which was hilarious, and inspired the title of this article.  The "I don't think so!" part made us laugh so hard when we saw this mocumentary.

Interestingly, the first 5/10 of the dudes we are looking at today are white or black...interesting, I wonder if there is some strange pattern that makes names starting with O seem like white creatures and names starting with P black creatures.  

Anyway, on to the next installment of...

THE UNSUNG HEROES OF EDH!

Orim isn't a bad card...she just isn't a great card, or a build-around-me card.  She is 3 times as good as [card]Samite Healer[/card], but Samite Healer isn't a good card.  I think she could be ok in maybe a tribal clerics damage prevention themed deck, but her daughter seems better for that in most cases. (See below)
*on a side note, an unnamed [card]Master Healer[/card] is better at his job than a named character, Orim.

Orim and her daughter here are both not seeing much EDH action.  Oriss here looks like Slave Girl Leia but she plays like a generic cleric.  Saving your dudes from damage is OK, but she can't do anything for players.  Grandeur is worthless in EDH without crazy [card]Mirror Gallery[/card]/[card]Clone[/card]/Bounce Shenanigans.  All-in-All, the apple didn't fall far from the tree, leaving Oriss in the "OK in cleric tribal or damage prevention themed decks" camp as well.

Oyobi here is another victim of SSS...Spiritcraft Sucks Syndrome.  His ability would rock the house with some better spirits.  Now that Innistrad is out, Maybe Oyobi here could helm a decent mono-white spirit tribal deck...something worth checking out.  [card]Twilight Drover[/card], [card]Spirit of the Hearth[/card] and [card]Windborn Muse[/card] are all decent spirits for a deck like this...makes me want to try it out.  Maybe Spiritcraft Sucks Syndrom is curable in mono-white.

The epic suckage of Pang Tong here is only redeemed by his official title of "the-only-card-with-"-in-the-title."  A tiny general that can't get there with General Damage and has a weak effect with a timing restriction that makes it even worse...no thanks.  I can't decide where this steaming pile fits into the better-or-worse-than-[card]Morinfen[/card]-and/or-the-Vanilla-Abominations group, but he is around there with the worst of the worst legends.

Why is no one playing with this card?!  A 5/6 for 6 seems like a decent body, but gaining a life whenever ANY CREATURE attacks, that seems like quite a nice life buffer.  You don't have to even be the one getting attacked!  This card punishes opponents for being aggressive, rewards you for winning and keeps you alive.
I have been looking to trade for one of these for a while, and next time I order cards from somewhere, this dude will be in the order.  
It's sad that he has no evasion, and that Fox offering is all but worthless ([card]Silverchase Fox[/card] FTW!)

Another of the patrons seeing no love!?  And a good card to boot!  Patron of the Nezumi was even in the recently released commander products from WOTC.  His ability is pretty brutal, stuff goes to the graveyard A LOT in EDH and the patron punishes people for that.  [card]Sakura-Tribe Elder[/card]s and [card]Glen Elendra Archmage[/card]s will all start Timming their masters.  Once again, the offering ability is all but useless, but there have to be SOME playable rats...[card]Ink-Eyes[/card]?

Big brother of the Vanilla Abominations, Pavel here got an ability when he grew up.  Shitty-Firebreathing is nothing super fancy, but at least he isn't [card]Barktooth Warbeard[/card]

One of the biggest mana dorks of all time, Princess Lucrezia makes you make a decision that all but negates her ability.  She is a decent sized beat-stick that wants to tap for mana...?  Most of the time, if you can pay her mana cost you don't need one blue mana enough to not swing with the Princess...but who knows...it could be ....useful....right?

Purraj here is one that is much more hard to read.  She rewards you for casting your stuff, punishes other black opponents, but eats a lot of mana while doing so.  I currently have a deck in the works for her, but it is far from finished and I am not sure if she is good or not.  First Strike is OK, getting fatter is OK, but she has no built in card advantage, doesn't protect herself and has no evasion...however, [card]Whispersilk Cloak[/card] exists for a reason.

Well, that's all we have time for today,  I hope this series is still interesting to people.  It didn't SEEM like there would be this many unused legends with untapped potential, but it seems there are a lot of decent choices (and even more crappy ones) still out there.

Until next time...
Use YOUR shoes as counters!

-Shoe

After listening to the latest Commandercast, I was disappointed and enlightened to hear them talking about how commander is no longer the "Fatty Format".  
The upside to this, is that Godzilla has a niche to fill again!  I tweaked the rules to be further from "EDH 2" and made sure that everything was up to date and not broken.
I removed as many cards as I thought were safe from the B&R lists, and I even introduced some optional rules for [card]Command Tower[/card]!

I urge you to check it out.  I aim for Godzilla to try and be everything that people wish EDH were/still was but isn't.

[card]Library of Alexandria[/card] and [card]Kokusho[/card]...LEGAL!
Format full of mandatory fatties...CHECK!
Faster games that aren't too short...CHECK!

Achievements built into the format itself...CHECK!
Rewards for doing goofy things and playing with bad cards...CHECK!

I was recently introduced to a fun, if not all that balanced format called Horde Magic that was featured on Quiet Speculation recently. The format has a TON of potential and I wanted to share some of my thoughts with my readers.  
First of all, I have written my own slight variation on the rules to make the game more balanced.  We STEAMROLLED the Zombie Horde almost every time we played, and while it was still fun, a little more of a chance that the zombies will win would have increased the amount of fun that was had.
Secondly, the horde deck that we played against tended to have less-than-epic turns as far as the amount of zombie tokens that flipped each turn.  It tended to only flip 1-2 cards, and those cards were not so much more powerful than a token that they made the zombies' board state increase in power to any significant degree.  

Some tips for making a good Horde deck:

Make sure all non-token cards are SIGNIFICANTLY more powerful than the average token:  [card]Rotting Fensnake[/card] didn't make the cut in my horde deck.  I left those spaces open for things like [card]Gluttonous Zombie[/card] or [card]Tresserhorn Skyknight[/card].

Needs more card advantage/recursion/answers:  When the opponent cannot make decisions, finding good answers is tough.  [card]Fleshbag Marauder[/card] was in the sample Horde deck and makes the deck-without-a-pilot make a decision of which creature to sacrifice.  I used cards like [card]Living Death[/card] and [card]Plague Wind[/card] to try and give the zombies more of an advantage.  They effectively cannot do anything that is considered "the best" to do in magic.  No card drawing, no "mana ramping"...[card]Ghoulraiser[/card] is an important addition, because it gives the Horde a little recursion without targeting/causing a decision.  I also considered [card]Empty the Catacombs[/card] and may still add it at a later time.

You can see both the sample Horde deck and my horde deck on the Hoard Magic page here, don't get this format confused however with the Horde format from the Magic .  People often name formats the same thing as others that haven't seen much play over the years and it makes cataloging them quite hard.

I got an interesting email last week from a guy named Kamil Beer.  It had a couple of links in it and mentioned a Magic movie that he had in the works called TAP: Max’s Game.  My first thought, was that it was spam (whose last name is as awesome as Beer!?), and that no one would actually contact little old me to do anything with a movie release.  The second thing I thought of was this old thread on Magic Salvation, mentioning the selling of the rights for a Magic movie to some major production studio, and I got excited.  I took a wager and clicked on the youtube link for the teaser, I have a background in computers and the URL seemed legit enough.

Here is what I saw:

This got me interested.  When I have time, I love to watch the Magic Show, and listed to Commandercast or the Mana Pool podcast.  Other forms of Magic related media are something I, and I think most casual player enjoy to some extent even if it is geared toward a more competitive crowd.  I did a little more digging on their website: http://maxovahra.com/?lang=en and it seems quite exciting.  
While it was not the major production mentioned on MTG Salvation, Kamil Beer was a real guy making a real movie based around Magic.  TAP: Max’s Game seems poised to be a movie about Magic, the way that Remember the Titans was a movie about football.  You won’t see [card]Chandra Nalaar[/card] hopping around, and the special effects budget is likely non-exsistant, but the movie is likely to portray an interesting story about the social interactions of a gaming group/team.  The prospect seems pretty cool and I encourage anyone who has a little time to watch the trailer.  

The idea of a “sports epic” for those of us who are less athletic seems like a pretty good idea, and if done well, could fill a niche in a media that has few empty niches left.  My only worry is the characters feeling too forced.  “Five friends, five colors.” Seems to be the movie’s tagline, and while epic sounding and cool, each friend has the potential to be a cool and interesting character, or a hokey forced stereotype.  Hopefully though, that will not be the case.  I am hopeful for a movie along the lines of awesome with Press Start, and less like Sharktopus.  I know I will be keeping an eye out for the website.