HELLO ALL
today i will be talking to you about one of my more recent decks that has very quickly become one of my favorites!!
it is...
GANDALF THE WHITE POLYARMORY
now, this deck name might sound confusing. but its really quite simple. this is a mono white grouphug deck with the sole purpose of copying the etb of wedding ring to give one to the whole table and marry every player. the goal of the deck is to put everyone in the game into a polyamorous relationship!!
the rest of the deck is a mixture of typical group hug elements, such as shared card draw (secret rendezvous, howling mine, font of mythos) and general etb abuse (elesh norn mother of machines, panharmonicon) and when you combine these two aspects the deck helps out all players but can also effectively control the board by triple copying a meteor golem or loran of the third path!!
i havent had the chance to play this deck all that often but when i have played it it has some real killing power surprisingly. the main thing i realized playing this deck is that doubling or tripling your etbs gets out of hand fast. like obviously it does, but youll be surprised if you decide to play with it.
this deck is rather weighted on the artifact side. i couldnt find a large amount of legendary creatures that copy with gandalf so artifacts were the obvious choice. most of them draw cards on etb or add mana, while the rest copy etbs and are just general group hug cards. this deck could easily be changed to be much more competitive if you removed some of the group hug elements and added more interaction (most of my decks have an emphasis on fun and therefore the interaction might be lacking in some of them).
there are a few cards in this deck id like to talk about as overperformers. this deck does some silly things and these cards felt especially strong from my games with the deck-
eriette's charmed apple: this card when doubled with a panharmonicon type effect (aka your commander 👀) is disgusting. nobody expects the mono white deck to untap and steal their creatures for a turn, which results in turns where you steal the biggest creatures on board and swing for lethal on someone. i nearly killed my girlfriend this way out of nowhere in her life gain deck and it doesn't seem far fetched to do that most games. there is also some graveyard artifact recursion in this deck which allows you to loop this which, in the late game, really adds up.
master of ceremonies: this one is probably obvious to anyone who has played the card before, but this was my first time. if you stick this and no one kills it (which they aren't initially inclined to do) it just spits out so much value. you get three things every one of your upkeeps, whether that be three treasures (broken), three cards (broken) or three creature tokens (yay blockers!!) or some combination of the three. this adds up so fast and gives you a huge advantage for the small price of helping your opponents a bit.
tenuous truce: this card single handedly kept me in the gane by enchanting the player with the biggest board. its crazy what people will do when they get an extra card every turn. obviously gets worse the more people know about your deck cause one card a turn wont stop your average player from swinging at who they deem a threat, but still. its still really good and much better then it seems!!
as for how to play the the deck, its mostly stay alive till its you and one other player. you can do this by killing key targets with your etbs (this deck deals with artifacts and enchantments especially well) or getting people to believe you are not a threat cause you are feeding their card draw. this deck can very easily be ran over if you don't pull a board wipe for the creature decks or if you lose to something that you couldnt interact with cause you are mono white. thats just kinda the brakes. but this deck has more staying power then i ever gave it credit for when i built it.
in closing, this deck is probably around a 6 or so in power level and i wouldnt play this at a high power table but if you and your friends want to have fun then you should give it a try!! i got to marry most of the table in my first game with the deck and it was so satisfying, plus when everyone has a wedding ring the amount of card draw and life gain going around gets out of hand fast. especially if you have extra card draw effects out everyone can be drawing upwards of two cards every single turn lmao
(also dont tell anyone but this deck has another thing in it thats fun to do with your transfem friends, and that is jinxed choker. this is an artifact that is in the deck purely to joke about how whoever has control of it at any given time is collared up. you can marry and collar your friends with this deck and both will make your gay friends go nuts at the edh table lmao)
Gandalf the White - Commander / EDH deck (1) Commander • (23) Artifact • (22) Creature • (4) Enchantment • (8) Instant • (37) Land • (1)
