Richard Garfield Ph.D
Commander (EDH) forum
Posted on July 8, 2020, 3 p.m. by kpres
Hi Friends,
I built an EDH deck a couple of years ago with Richard Garfield, Ph.D. as the commander. My deckbuilding challenge was to use the worst blue cards and artifacts -- cards as irrelevant as Balduvian Shaman and Delif's Cone. The idea is that when he is not in play, the deck is completely useless, but as soon as you get him onto the battlefield, suddenly your Dark Sphere becomes Pact of Negation and your Air Elemental becomes Dream Halls.
In theory, the deck was absolutely nuts, but I ended up playing it once, getting frustrated, and taking it apart. The reason was that I wasted too much time during the game on looking up cards in Gatherer and writing things down on sticky notes. It was terrible! No fun for anyone.
Just recently, I had an idea that I could prepare for any game by printing proxies on cards I planned to play. I could have little slips of paper that go in front of the card so that everyone knows my Ornithopter has become a Black Lotus.
Has anyone else built a deck with Richard Garfield and has some thoughts to share? I'm looking forward to putting it back together and getting a proxy-board together.
Thank you,
By the way, I recently learned how to search Gatherer for specific mana costs. This is highly relevant for deck building with this commander. In the "Mana Cost" field, you can type m/3uu/ to search for ; e.g. https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Search/Default.aspx?action=advanced&mana=+=[m/3uu/]
The main thing is to figure out which mana costs you need. Figure out the cards you want to run, the combos, etc.
The biggest benefit of building Garfield is you get to buy the cheapest cards possible, while playing them as something else.
You will of course want to run some good stuff still. Mostly Ramp to get Garfield out faster and turn your deck on.
I would recommend using Scryfall for your card search over the Wizards official page. Scryfall is much better.
July 9, 2020 6:44 p.m.
Don't be afraid to go a bit heavy on 1 mana cards in a garfield deck btw. There's a metric ton of conditionally insane blue counterspells that cost a single blue to cast.
Dispell, Swan Song, Flusterstorm, Annul, Ceremonious Rejection, Blue Elemental Blast, Hydroblast, Nix, Spell Snare, Stifle, and Spell Pierce, just to name the "best of the bunch"
DuTogira says... #2
I'm gonna do my best to help here, but I want to start with a warning:
Any game with a Richard Garfield, Ph.D. deck is going to feel much like that first game. The best case for you, the player, is that you successfully continue to 'conjure' cards all game long until you win, which leaves opponents feeling like they're playing an unfair game (which, if you play right, they are). Worst case is twofold: You lose and feel like you made a mistake and 'conjured' the wrong card(s), or garfield gets removed so thoroughly and consistently that you end up piloting a trash heap. Average case is that you 'conjure' some suboptimal cards, but garfield is forgiving enough that you have a decent, albeit completely mentally exhausting game. Be careful trying to pilot a deck like this: it's inherently draining and unfun, both to play and play against.
Now for making things easier:
Make a bunch of proxies. Use the "base card" that you're going to 'conjure' into others, but replace the art with proxy bubbles like what is seen here:
Put say your top 10 "likely to be conjured" cards in place of where the art would be using that proxy template.
Get a bunch of large penny sleeves so you can put them over each proxy and bubble in which card is being played as you play it OR keep proxies of those 10 in some token-area so you can produce the "real" card being represented. Proxies will be more work to manage, but not using them means you'll have to keep hyper-encyclopedic knowledge of every card that COULD be in your deck. This will at least reduce the time you have to spend thinking about what to 'conjure' when garfield is in play.
Good luck with this. I honestly expect every aspect of this deck to be a literal hell.
July 8, 2020 7:08 p.m. Edited.