Mayael the Anima

by Derekthegamer on 28 November 2014

Main Deck (99 cards)

Sideboard (1 card)

Creatures (1)

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Deck Tags

  • Commander
  • EDH
  • Big Creatures

Deck at a Glance

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This deck has been viewed 760 times.

Mana Curve

Mana Symbol Occurrence

30001661

Card Legality

  • Not Legal in Standard
  • Not Legal in Modern
  • Legal in Vintage
  • Not Legal in Legacy

Deck discussion for Mayael the Anima

Looks pretty good. The thing with Mayael is I don't really know how to exploit her. Her ability just helps you pump out a lot of individually powerful cards. So the most important thing in optimizing is probably making sure that the creatures you include are the most powerful, or that they're the correct choices for your playgroup.

The two major things I would consider when optimizing this deck are

1) is 35 lands enough? I usually run closer to 40, especially in a deck with a "big creatures" theme. Mayael will help you cheat out some crazy big ones, but her ability still costs 6. You probably want to be playing a land every turn and also ramping early. I don't think this deck can have too much mana available. If you can activate Mayael for 6 AND cast a spell, that's pretty much where you want to be in the mid to late game.

2) Make sure that you have a critical mass of creatures with power >=5. You have a lot but many of them are small ramp or utility creatures. Basically the worst thing that can ever happen would be Mayael whiffing on her ability (which used to happen in my friend's Marath deck). 6 mana for nothing is pretty backbreaking. So basically I think the deck should be almost entirely land, ramp and huge creatures. There's not a lot of room for much else unless it's so insanely powerful that it demands to be played. You can use creatures that have powerful ETB effects to make up for your lack of flex slots for spells (you do this pretty well with some of the angels you picked).

It basically looks good though, and there's a lot of cards in here that will wreck face if they're cheated in or remain unchecked for long. If you want to dig through my bulk rares and see if there's anything you could use let me know. I'm also around to test, and I have a few decks of varying competetiveness.

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Posted 05 December 2014 at 19:18

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alright thanks for the input. i only run the 35 lands because i have the artifact mana producers and land searchers. im already running 23 things that mayael can hit, originally i planned on running more but then realized having so many big things can be bad because if i draw them its gonna be hard to dump them onto the battlefield from my hand. i also threw in the quicksilver amulet to try and help with that problem. and yeah id appreciate it if i could take a look through your bulks.

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Posted 09 December 2014 at 02:51

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23 cards out of 99 is a little bit better than 1 out of 5, so at a glance you might think that she should hit every time. Unfortunately, due to variance she will still miss a good chunk of the time at that percentage. My calculations, which are probably wrong but are certainly optimistic (assuming 93 cards in deck when you activate her on turn 6 off of 6 land, leaving 23/93 threats in-deck) still has you whiffing over 20% of the time. You also would have drawn and played some number of cards so of course that will introduce some more variance, and you can also activate her earlier than turn 6 using ramp which will actually increase the likelihood of whiffing. If you really want to get into odds we can sit down and do this but the good news is I don't think you'll have to up your threat count TOO much to virtually guarantee (say 95%) the likelihood of hitting a threat her ability. Also, if you're running ramp to get her online faster you will be able to hard cast them often as a pleasant side effect.

I haven't read this yet but here's TCGPlayer's resident commander expert Cassidy Silver on Mayael for more info:

http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/article.asp?ID=10421

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Posted 15 December 2014 at 02:11

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yeah we should get together some time soon and see what we can do. ive already started getting some cards for the deck. im planning on maybe using rith the awakener as a backup commander

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Posted 21 December 2014 at 04:38

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