I’m going to give some love to what many would consider the underdog of the Lands Matter deck type!
Now typically when you think of a deck with a land based strategy Azorious isn’t exactly what jumps to mind, lacking the obvious benefits of green and its land shenanigans. While it’s true that of the available options Noyan Dar is by far one of the least threatening I think he still has some really Interesting synergy and tech that makes him a quirky, yet surprisingly fun Commander to build around. Examples being:
Able to function as a spellslinger landfall hybrid Noyan Dar is defiantly under appreciated and in my opinion worth a second glance!
was gonna try to take a longer break between adopting pets but oops I have bad impulse control. anyway here’s Gisela (girl red velvet raccoon), Noyan Dar (boy blue ribbon cow) and Tiro (gay boy cloud lion, boyf of Kynaios)
Hey guys! I just recently got around to updating the online decklist (thanks to @anxiety-cannon) for my Noyan Dar, Roil Shaper deck. I posted the decklist before but thought I’d share the new build with the major changes.
Tappedout
The most notable changes are likely the addition of Venser, Shaper Savant, Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir, and a Force of Will.
New Additions also include:
Sensei’s Divining Top
Cryptic Command
Temporal Mastery
Time Stretch
I don’t particularly feel like typing out a full article on this deck like I did the first time, but I might later if people are interested in my thoughts on specific cards. If you have a question about one just let me know.
@sarkhan-volkswagen, @island-delver-go, @imperialseal, @commandtower-solring-go etc the edh crew
I’ve been thinking about my Noyan Dar deck, and like I love it and it’s a fun deck to play, but I really need to make it stronger. As in, he needs a win-con other than “giant lands hit people to death” and just ways to win that don’t rely on Noyan being on the ‘field in order for the win-con to work (basically something that works best if Noyan is around, but can manage just fine if he’s stuck in the command zone). So uh, help?
When nobody rose to her bait, Nissa stepped away from the fire again and wandered off onto an adjoining branch. What am I doing here? She asked herself, and not for the first time. Here, as in on this expedition with a lunatic vampire; here, as in this whole godforsaken plane; here, as in by herself sitting on the edge of a branch, two hundred feet in the air, legs dangling, alone.
For just a moment she though of leaving. Of going out into that nothingness she knew encircled her home, and landing at random on one of the endless multitude of planes. But that other world would be no better than this one, she knew. Actually, it stood a fair chance of being markedly worse. They might not have elves. They might not even have trees. At least here she knew the danger. At least here she had Hiba, useless as he was. At least here--
“This guy bothering you?” her chosen asked, stepping out of thin air above and behind her. Nissa turned just in time to watch Sorin shove him off the edge of the branch. The vampire planeswalker craned his head to watch him as he fell, straining his ears to catch the inevitable thud.
“You know,” Sorin said, settling down beside Nissa. “I think if I had one of those it would solve a lot of my problems.”
“Go away,” Nissa said, looking up the arm of the branch.
“Do you do that on purpose or is it a defense mechanism?” Sorin asked, unfazed. Nissa wheeled on him, bringing to bear the full extent of the day’s frustrations.
“MAYBE I JUST DON’T WANT TO TALK TO YOU!” she screamed. “Maybe I like being out here by myself! Maybe I’d rather be anywhere but next to you! Did you think about that? Or were you too busy being wrapped up in your own stupid vampire life with your stupid vampire campfire stories to consider that I might not want anything to do with you!”
“Are they, like, involved?” Noyan Dar asked. None of them had missed a single word of Nissa’s tirade.
“We’ve been with them for three days,” Azl answered.
“Well, he doesn’t waste any time, does he?” Noyan said, grinning.
“She’s got a lot on her mind,” Hiba said, trying to speak up and only succeeding in squeaking.
Mudro shook his head. “Why you always bending over backwards for this girl?”
“I meant the elf guy,” Sorin said, miming his previous push. “Does he show up whenever anybody gets close or am I special?”
“ ‘Gets close?’ You’re such a creep,” Nissa said, shoving Sorin. He bent like wheat in wind, straightening as soon as the gust passed.
“I don’t know if you meant to offend me, but you’ve really only succeeded in paying me a compliment,” he said. “I’m flattered, really. But believe it or not, I didn’t come here to indulge your vampire obsession or fulfill your schoolhouse crush.”
Nissa’s face flushed about as much as an elf is capable of flushing, which is to say, not very much. She coiled in anticipation of another livid outburst, but Sorin stopped her with a wave of his finger. She felt the anger drain out of her, felt the tension leave her muscles. Instead of screaming, as she had very much intended to do, she let out a long, deflated sigh.
“There,” Sorin said. “Isn’t that better?”
“What...“ Nissa started to say, and found herself unable to finish.
“I just want to have a conversation with you. Is that too much to ask?”
“Why?” Nissa managed to say. She felt vigor returning slowly to her limbs, her lungs, her face, but it was a slow drip rather than a cascade.
Sorin shrugged and looked out into the dark canopy. “Being a planeswalker sucks, if you’ll pardon the expression. I mean, it’s great. You get to go to lots of new interesting places, get to meet a lot of interesting people. But every now and again you meet another planeswalker, and it’s never ‘hey, how’s it going, what’s your name,’ it’s always ‘get the hell away from me or I’ll murder you.’ Us meeting, you and me? That’s a rare thing. Us not killing each other? That’s even rarer. I just want to talk to you.”
Nissa shook her head. She couldn’t let herself be suckered into talking to him. If she avoided him, if she refused to speak with him, maybe he’d leave, and maybe what he’d said about the hedrons and the plane-devouring monsters wouldn’t be true, and maybe if it wasn’t true she could forget about the mountain, what she’d seen inside the mountain when...
“Where was your first walk?” Sorin asked. “Mine was Serra’s Realm. Angels everywhere. Amazing place, really, except that they wanted to kill me. But like I said, that’s pretty common.”
Nissa gave him the strongest look of disgust she could assemble. But he didn’t move. Just sat there, expectantly. She hadn’t known him long enough to realize that patience was chief among his scant virtues. But she had realized what he’d been trying to tell her. He was lonely. The big, scary, ancient vampire planeswalker was lonely, and he was here, talking to her, because he had nobody else to talk to.
She held up her fist, extending one finger at a time. “One: don’t ever do that thing you just did to me again. Two: when your business here is finished, leave and don’t ever come back. Three: make a move on me and I’ll obliterate you. Okay?”
Sorin shrugged again. “Sure. Whatever.”
“Lorwyn,” Nissa said.
“What?”
“Lor-wyn. The plane. That was my first walk.”
Sorin nodded, stroking his chin. “Elves,” he said.
“Elves,” she replied. “At first it was... it was wonderful. Nothing like the way things are here. Everyone was so nice and so beautiful and they treated me like I was their sister. They told me how pretty I was, and how gifted, and how strong. They... they even made me a pair of horns, so I would feel at home.”
“But...” Sorin said.
“But then it got weird. It was dirty looks and whispers at first. Then little things started happening, like bugs in my food, thorns in my bed, spiders in my hair.”
“Agreed. And my friend, Dwynen, told me it was the work of these little goblin things called boggarts. And I believed her, because everyone had been so kind to me. Dwynen took me out on a hunt with the rest of the pack--tribe, the rest of the tribe. I thought we’d be hunting deer or aurochs or something. I didn’t want them to think I wasn’t part of the tribe, so I went along. But they weren’t hunting for meat. They weren’t killing for food. They were killing for sport. Boggarts, and kithkin, and flamekin. Anyone who wasn’t an elf. Cut them down, cut them up, left them maimed and disfigured. So I ran. Planeswalked away. Went to this place where everything was just one giant city--”
“Ravnica,” Sorin said.
“--and it was awful, so I planeswalked somewhere else, this place where everything was metal--”
“Argentum,” Sorin said.
“--and it was so awful so I planeswalked somewhere else. And every place was worse than the last. Every plane was just another bead in an endless strand of hellish garbage. So I thought, ‘I’m going home. I’m going home and I’m going to do my best to make sure Zendikar never ever ever gets as bad as any of these places.’ There. That’s it. That’s the whole story. Okay? Will you leave me alone now?”
“That sounds--” Sorin began to say, and Nissa saw the twitches in his face that precede something conciliatory and totally insincere.
“Just save it,” Nissa said, cutting him off.
Sorin sighed. “I’ll get out of your hair,” he said with a wink, getting to his feet. “Early start tomorrow? Any chance I can convince you to let me and the crew sleep it off?”
“Absolutely not,” Nissa said, stifling a smile.
“Alright. I’ll go back and tell them the bad news.”
A thought struck her, accompanied by a sinking in her gut. “Sorin?”
“Yeah?” he said over his shoulder.
“Is that why you wanted to talk to me?”
“Nah,” said Sorin, stopping and turning around. The firelight behind him gave his silver hair an angelic glow. “I can’t stand talking to these jokers.” He jerked his thumb to indicate the allies. “Not a good listener among them. Hopeless audience for storytelling. I don’t know who raised them, but they’re complete savages.”
Nissa screwed up her mouth. As lies went, it was passable. She gave him the benefit of the doubt. “I’m afraid I haven’t been a very good listener, either.”
“It’s fine,” Sorin said. “Just hope it means you’ll return the favor.”
“Was it true?” Nissa asked. “About Nahiri and Ula?”
Sorin smiled. “More or less.”
“What happened to her?” Nissa asked. That had been the first thing he’d said to her. Where can I find Nahiri the Lithomancer? “Do you think she’s alright?”
Sorin’s expression darkened. “I don’t know. I hope so. But seeing this place... I fear something must have happened to her.”
Nissa nodded, to show him she’d heard, and then looked away, down into the darkness of the forest below. She didn’t watch him turn, didn’t watch him walk back to the campfire. She closed her eyes, and reached out, expanding her awareness into the invisible realm of mana, letting herself feel the twisting and shuddering roil surge all around her. Tell me, she thought. Speak.
A ways away, farther than she could see, a branch bent too far and snapped, exploding into splinters. Below, the earth beneath roots of the forest strained against itself, contorting to the brink of quake. Above the forest, blades of air cut through a flock of passing tern, leaving nothing but gore and feathers behind.
Pain, Nissa thought. Rage.
And behind it something worse. A low thrum, almost imperceptible, emanating from somewhere out of reach. The Mountain, she thought. And there it was, almost too slight to catch, a vacillation in the thrumming, a beat, a pulse. A signal.
Nissa shivered and got up to find her tent.
[This is fanfiction. I don’t own these characters. They belong to Wizards of the Coast. I write this because I think the official stuff takes itself too seriously, and misses some of the absurdity of the planeswalker lifestyle. The purpose of this blog is fun. If you aren’t having fun I encourage you to seek it elsewhere.]
