{"ops":[{"insert":"I started playing MTG in 2013 where I used a Black/White Khans of Tarkir Warrior/Human deck, but I didn't start playing Commander until college in 2018-2019 up through about 2021 with a Simic Landfall deck that I named my Gyarados deck. It's only recently that I got back into MTG a bit more seriously. Because I'm now out of college and have much more income coming in than I used to, I've been able to finally get into the game and enjoy it quite a bit!\n\nMy favorite deck to play is D&D Ur Dragon, as I've always been a much heavier D&D 5e Player than an MTG one. When I used to play, Red/Green dragon decks were always what I had wanted to play, but with college in the way, I never could afford much more than my stupid Blue/Green Pre-Con haha. Nowadays, D&D Ur Dragon is by far my favorite deck to play, as it takes a lot of my love for D&D and my love for anything dragons when it comes to fantasy, my writing and gaming as a whole. In D&D, I almost always play the Dragonborn race who are strictly allied to their clan and dragon ancestors before anything else, which is sort of what inspired the themes behind the tribal D&D Ur Dragon deck. With Dungeon effects and Initiative as well, it makes for a pretty cool cross between my D&D group and my MTG ones, while getting to play the deck I've always wanted to play!\n\nMarrow-Gnawer comes from my 2013 days, where in that old Standard deck I used a lot of Black cards and enjoyed the Recursion aspect of MTG and use of the Graveyard. In that Standard deck is when I started playing the cards Plague Rats and Relentless Rats, and a Rat deck was something I've always wanted to at least try. I had built Marrow-Gnawer and Ur Dragon at the same time, becoming my two main decks I typically play these days either with friends IRL or through Tabletop Simulator. Marrow-Gnawer has been the deck I've played the most, basically becoming my go-to signature deck for having fun matches or if we're playing in public with randoms.\n\nSnow Foxes were interesting, as I had no idea MTG had fox cards until I was setting tags for Marrow-Gnawer. I had thought that a snow deck would be pretty fun and foxes are my favorite animals, but foxes themselves were pretty weak in MTG. I was struggling to think of ways for them to win. It started as a +1/+1 deck, although that too didn't ever seem to do much on Tabletop Games. That's when I discovered the different combo's of MTG, as well as cards like Winter Orb and Winter Moon which have become a quickly hated set of cards in my MTG group because of them lmao. Other combos with foxes came with them, often giving into cheesy mechanics for easier wins that were much more realistic for the foxes to achieve. However, because of how angry it made other players, the lack of Counterspells seemed necessary for them, as they were not fun at all for that group to play against when those combos and infinites were in place. They're in a much tamer place now that I've removed cards like Winter Orb from their IRL version, but in public groups especially, foxes would get plenty of eye rolls and grumbling from many groups lol. I enjoy playing them a lot, but they were a cheesy deck that not everybody will enjoy playing against, prompting me to update them into a more honest+1/+1 snow deck that uses Kenrith as the Commander instead.\n\nFrenzy Spiders come from D&D, more specifically, a pretty well-received campaign I had DM'd for another of my friend groups where it used anger-inducing spores generated by a Drider Queen's weavers to terrorize and conquer a port city. They weakened the port before she and her brood moved in to assault it and steal a relic needed to resurrect her mate, the Lich King. She then handed the city to Belial by the time the party had arrived, that universe's God of Sin and Infernals. They had to fight through a toxic city of spiders, demons and Undead to find the Dragonborn clan still holding out in the inner city, and were the ones responsible for keeping the Lich King's ring hidden from the rest of the world. In MTG, their Spiders seemed to be very defensively focused, and goading was a mechanic that I hadn't ever really played around with, so it's why I built the deck for those groups of friends to play against and reminisce about that campaign. Frenzy Spiders have been a ton of fun, making games very interesting due to the extremely aggressive nature of their Goading abilities. They do not allow for passive or defensive play, which has made for plenty of hysterical moments with my MTG group lmao.\n\nSlivers came from a casual conversation between that group after a match, as the others are far more heavily involved with MTG than I've been. Slivers sounded cool to play, so I looked into them. While my deck is certainly not a meta build, it has been able to create some huge board states and borderline unwinnable situations for the other players when they really get going. Token Generation from Marrow-Gnawer and my experimentation with Miirym decks made the Grave-Mother sound super cool to me, almost playing into a sort of Xenomorph Queen/Halo Gravemind type of identity for the deck. While Ur Dragon is my strongest deck, Slivers would genuinely be my 2nd place for raw power and their current number of wins.\n\nNashi is another experimental deck that I've been thinking about for a couple months, using my experience from Marrow-Gnawer and my other decks for a new take on a Rat deck using different mechanics and a different playstyle. While it hasn't performed as well as I've hoped it would on Tabletop Simulator, it has had some very close games that were only one or two turns away from a guaranteed win. But against the decks my other groups play, Nashi has struggled to get online and stay online, which has been pretty unfortunate. It's one I'm still toying around with a lot, trying to figure out what works and what doesn't until it can start getting a few more consistent wins under its belt.\n\nCheap Gyarados was my first Commander deck from college. It was a Pre-Con, and because of that, the cards were certainly less than optimal. While most Pre-Cons today can actually be quite strong out of the box, Gyarados back then was certainly not as lucky lol. He struggled a lot against the stronger decks used by my group, and because I couldn't afford to upgrade it or get a new deck altogether, it had killed my love for MTG entirely as I continued with D&D instead. Nowadays, having access to decks I've built myself and all of us having a better understanding of deck power and just overall player enjoyment has helped me get back into the game now that I'm done with college and have a decently paying job to afford upgrades and new decks from time to time. While I've never really upgraded Gary in particular, he has gotten a lot of leftover cards from my other decks that were cut or simply couldn't fit in the deck when I sat down to play them for one reason or another. He's my cheapest deck by a landslide, but he's been a lot more fun for me to break out as a bit of a nostalgic, casual deck for the group after a rougher match against Ur Dragon, Slivers or Snow Foxes haha.\n\nFat Crocodiles was more of an IRL pet project as I've been working on collecting cards for Nashi. After building Spiders and with Dinosaurs, Slivers and Nashi all being on the expensive side, I built Crocodiles as a much cheaper deck to help the bank account a bit lol. Similar to Foxes, Alligators and Crocodiles are among my top 3 favorite animals, so I figured I'd make a deck for them to help show that! While they're not at all my strongest deck, they're quite fun to play around with in lower power matches and have pulled off some pretty sneaky wins!\n\nSpellweave Dinosaurs is a deck I'm actively testing and adjusting as I'm building Nashi, Crocodiles and Miirym IRL. It doesn't have much for experience yet, but on paper it seems like it will be a pretty dangerous deck to face off against once it gets going. I've always loved dinosaurs, with Spinosaurus being a big-time favorite of mine lol. But with Nashi and Slivers both being similarly priced decks to Dinosaurs, it's likely to be a Tabletop Sim deck for quite awhile until I finish these other decks clogging up in my IRL backlog. With Crocodiles and Nashi taking my priority and Slivers/Miirym coming after them, it's going to be awhile before Dino's see a lot of IRL play.\n\nAs far as future projects go, I'm currently working on a Miirym deck and possibly a cheaper Spellslinger deck with Livhaan or one of the other Player Character Dragonborn cards. Eventually, I think that a White/Black human or Zombie Warrior deck could be fun too, as it was what I had started playing MTG with in high school back before Commander really took off as the main IRL format. An Elf deck, Wolf deck, or a White/Black/Green cat deck has seemed pretty interesting to me to maybe toy around with as well someday! And if they ever make a set with Gnolls as a more prominent creature type, a Gnoll/Barbarian deck would be another that I'd love to try out due to my love for D&D and some of my more professional work as a fantasy writer.\n"}]}