Commander Clash S2 Episode 5: Hungry Hungry Hippos
Hello and welcome to Commander Clash, a video series where several MTGGoldfish contributors battle in a four player Commander game for fun and bragging rights. This week, all of us are building decks around everyone's favorite legendary flying hippo, Phelddagrif, but we're all going for different strategies! Here's what we came up with:
- Seth flips the downsides of Phelddagrif's abilities into upsides
- Richard suits up his hippo for war, using its innate flying and trample to go Voltron
- Tom gets aggressive as well, going all-out on +1/+1 counter synergies
- Tomer plays Group Hug, making everyone draw all the cards
This is certainly one of our longer games, but it turned out pretty awesome! Hope you enjoy seeing the mighty hippo's versaility! Also, quick reminder: if you like Commander Clash and other video content here on MTGGoldfish, make sure to subscribe to the MTGGoldfish Youtube Channel to keep up with the latest and greatest.
Seth's Deck
Richard's Deck
Tom's Deck
Tomer's Deck
Closing Thoughts
Everyone's decks were really great this time around. I loved how both Richard and Seth took full advantage of Phelddagrif's abilities in opposite ways; Richard using the hippo's flying and trample to get commander damage through, while Seth using the opponent's lifegain and hippo tokens to fuel his own shenanigans. Tom showed us plenty of unique ways to abuse +1/+1 synergies, and this was the first time I got to see how absurd Managorger Hydra can become for so little investment.
I thought my deck was pretty neat even though it didn't get to "do" much other than draw cards for everyone. I hate Group Hug that has no purpose other than Hugs, so I tried to take advantage of all that card draw: I could either mill the table out with a big Prosperity, mill myself out to win with Laboratory Maniac, crush with giant beats like Psychosis Crawler, or go for lethal commander damage by pumping my Phelddagrif with Inner Calm, Outer Strength. It's janky but it's fun!
Next Week: Superfriends!
For next week, each of us have picked a three-color combination and building decks around the planeswalkers available to us. The focus will be on the planeswalkers but there will also be subthemes going on. To keep things fair, Doubling Season is banned for this clash, but otherwise anything goes!
As always, we encourage you to leave us a comment on this article, on YouTube, or on Twitter @BudgetCommander. Your feedback is greatly appreciated, be it thoughts on the game, ideas on how to improve the series, or suggestions for future themes; we read all of them and bring them up in discussions. Thanks for watching!
