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Jolrael’s Cloud Migration Strategy | DSK

Commander / EDH 12-post GU (Simic) Landfall Locus Primer Theme/Gimmick Tokens

Beebles

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Commander: foil Jolrael, Voice of Zhalfir

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Expensive Cloud consultant Jolrael needs to migrate the entire application landscape to the Cloud. She’s got everything prepared and is ready to set the process in motion.

enter image description here

Hello there and welcome to my Cloudpostfoil-based Jolrael, Voice of Zhalfir build.

The Cloud Migration Assignment

To gain an insurmountable competitive advantage in today's market, our CEO went ahead and hired Jolrael: a Locus©-certified Cloud consultant from the very prestigious Zhalfir™ corporation. Her job is to get everything we've got into the Cloud, increasing scalability, resource access, electricity costs and humidity. However, our application landscape is quite labyrinthine and dated, so the process of getting everything from our local to our Locus environments is going to be a bit tedious...

The Migration Strategy

  • Step 1 - Choose a cloud provider: Of course we want to have access to the best Cloud technology, which is still Cloudpostfoil even after decades of being at the top. If we don't have access to the tech right away, there are several cloud providers available to help us out, including such industry household names as Cloud Rotation and Expedition Cloud.
  • Step 2 - Setup cloud environment: Once we have our tech in house we can deploy it to the production servers and let our expensive Cloud consultant configure the environment to our needs by animating it. Hopefully she’ll have our Cloud up in the air in no time. If our consultant turns out to be all talk an no action though, we do have one actual engineer in the team, Llanowar Cloudspeaker, who can hopefully get the job done.
  • Step 3 - Scale up the environment: Once our Cloud is alive and kicking, we can start the scaling up sequence and build our own Cloud computing cluster. We can run scripts such as Quasiduplicate and Rite of Replication to quickly scale up our resources and provide the required tokens. If we've invested in some Pair Programming and/or other engineering practices beforehand, we can speed up the process.
  • Step 4 - Provide access to all resources: With all the tokens now in place, we can start to make the resources available to our users. We can rapidly scale up depending on their demands, which can be rather heavy given our current business practices. Examples like Awaken the Woods can already be quite taxing, but we also need to be ready when someone down at marketing sends out a ridiculous Doppelgang-query our way (don't tell anyone, but half of the time that one sales "hero" Thrasios really doesn't know what he's doing during customer demos).

enter image description here

The Backup Plan

If all the latest locus-hype is just a big bubble or if the cloud is somehow unavailable, we can repurpose our scale-up scripts to expand local resources. Having multiple instances of Astral Dragon, Risen Reef, Qasali Slingers or Fecund Greenshell might be a bit old-fashioned technology-wise, but it can still serve as a viable alternative to swarm the market and beat our competitors, especially if those instances enter at the same time.

With this approach we believe we can let our consultant succeed. We hope the shareholders will ratify the plan swiftly and with confidence.

//end of pitch

About this deck

This is a mid-powered achievement-type deck all centered around copying Cloudpostfoil. It’s an idea I’ve tried to get functional a couple of times before, but it did not do the thing consistently enough for my taste. However, lately the strategy has received a lot of new pieces: many cards to make or duplicate token copies, like Three Steps Ahead, Season of Weaving, For the Common Good and Rootcast Apprenticeship; some great on-theme mana sinks for all that Cloudpost mana, like Dino DNA, Aggressive Biomancy and Doppelgang; and great other copy targets like Fecund Greenshell and Overlord of the Hauntwoods. Those were a big push for me to revisit the idea.

There were two key insights that helped make the deck function: on the one hand the suite of creature token copy spells, that we need to copy cloudpost, needed to be accompanied by enough creatures that would also make for good copy targets. That way the deck has a decent plan for when we don’t find or stick our Cloudpost. On the other hand the deck needed sufficient colorless mana sinks to make use of all those Cloudposts. Sometimes these different functions are conflicting (e.g. Hydroid Krasis is a good mana sink but a bad copy target) and balancing these categories of cards is an ongoing process

Jolrael is just a way for us to reliably animate our Cloudpost. Outside of that use she still functions well enough to draw a card for one mana once each turn. But since the land creature she makes scales with the size of our hand, she can also create decent pressure or even KO a player when we turn our Cloudpost mana into a large hand. I don’t often run Reliquary Tower, but in a deck like this it can be a vital piece to win. Other than that we aren’t really a man land deck (like most Jolrael decks are). It’s more of a grindy deck that seeks to outvalue our opponents by making increasingly more token copies of our permanents. In that sense it plays more like an Adrix and Nev, Twincasters or Volo, Guide to Monsters deck, but with a focus on copying Cloudpost over creatures.

Finding Our Promised Land

The deck runs a high number of land tutors. We need them to reliably get our Cloudpost, which kinda is our secret commander. I’m also running some other ETB-based tutors. They’re nice for smoothening our the deck and make for good copy targets, but I can see me cutting those when we get some new cards that support the deck.

enter image description here

A problem the deck can face though is not having access to enough colored mana in relation to the colorless mana of our Clouds. A land like Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth, Cascading Cataracts, and to a lesser extent Overflowing Basin and Planar Nexus can help remedy this. It also made me replace most ramp options that only provide colorless mana.

A Fair Playing Field

While the deck's shell would also be excellent for winning through Field of the Dead or Biovisionary, I did not include them here. It did not find it fitting to have a janky plan A with a much more potent and efficient plan B. Leaving Field out also makes this deck play out very differently from my other land decks. Here it's all about stacking those Cloudpost copies and casting silly X spells for silly, but not infinite, amounts of mana to make more token copies of more stuff. Like making 18 copies of Astral Dragon with Aggressive Biomancy, all targeting Cloudpost. It's very slow to get going, very easy to interact with, very fragile because we put our lands into a perilous situation, and just not very good overall. However, it's a lot of fun to play. And finding deck ideas that are suitable for lower powered tables that I also find fun to pilot has been my goal of late.

Combos and key synergies

  • Amulet of Vigor/Spelunking + a Lotus Cobra effect + an animated Cloudpost + Springheart Nantuko + a land drop is infinite Cloudpost token copies.
  • Certain creatures that care about themselves and a similar creature entering, such as Risen Reef, are great targets for spells that create several token copies at the same time, like Rite of Replication. In that scenario, all the tokens will see each other entering, multiplying their ETB effects (e.g. Rite on a Risen Reef is 6 Risen Reef that see 5 Risen Reef enter = 30 triggers).
  • Token doublers can lead to some weird results when you make token copies. For example, when making a token copy of Kura, the Boundless Sky with a token doubler, you get two copies, who both die because of the legend rule and then spawn 4 X/X spirit tokens.
  • Results can get even weirder when we choose to make token copies of Parallel Lives through Astral Dragon or Replication Technique.
  • Landing Avenger of Zendikar with one or more Fecund Greenshell in play is just wonderful, as each plant token entering will trigger the Turtle, who will then trigger the Avenger for each land card we find. Sicarian Infiltrator is also pretty potent with the Greenshell.
  • Mockingbird has a neat interaction with animated lands, which have a mana value of 0.
  • Whenever you make a token copy of an animated land, that token copy is no longer a creature, but only copies the things written on the card it copied.

Intended Power Level

With this deck I was expecting to get a mid powered deck, but in testing it's a bit more swingy in terms of power. If all happens the way we want to (finding and copying Cloudpost early) the deck can generate dominant board state quite early (~turn 6) and start to spiral out of control, but that plan requires a lot of things to go right and are easily interacted with. More often that will happen later (~turn 8). But when we do not find the pieces in the right order, the deck is a lot slower to get going and doesn’t really start to outvalue others until much later in te game. I’m curious to see how this swingy-ness will be received by my playgroup.

Closing Thoughts

I’m still fiddling with this deck to figure out how I can make it work a bit better, but it’s already in a state where playtesting it is putting a smile on my face. If you have any ideas or links to similar decks for inspiration, then feel free to leave a comment.

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GL & HF

Beebles

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90% Casual

Competitive

Revision 23 See all

(2 months ago)

+1 Island main
Top Ranked
Date added 5 months
Last updated 2 months
Legality

This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)

11 - 0 Mythic Rares

56 - 0 Rares

16 - 0 Uncommons

8 - 0 Commons
Cards 100
Avg. CMC 3.38
Tokens Bird 2/2 U, Copy Clone, Everywhere, Food, Forest Dryad 1/1 G, Hydra X/X G, Insect 1/1 G, Octopus 8/8 U, Plant 0/1 G, Rhino Warrior 4/4 G, Sicarian Infiltrator 1/2 U, Spirit */* G, Squirrel 1/1 G, Tender Wildguide 1/1 G, Timeless Witness 4/4 B, Treasure, Zombie 2/2 B
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