by Judson AKA GUDoug

A few years ago I caught the Gladiator bug pretty bad, so I did what any devout EDHer would do and built a Gladiator themed deck.  I tried to jam pack the deck with as many flavorful elements as I could and combined more subjective criteria for picking the creatures with more thematic criteria for the other spells.  I was pleased with how it turned out for the most part but it was a little slow and durdlely in a lot of aspects.  High CMC creatures and spells mixed with no ramp and limited card draw is not the perfect recipe for a deck.  I made changes constantly trying to get the deck to perform the best I could but in the end it just wasn’t suited for the group that I was playing with at the time.  Everyone was rushing to combo out as fast as possible and a red zone deck just wasn’t fun to play against that type of strategy.  When turn five “game is over” is the norm, with a good hand I was lucky to have 6-7 permanents on the board representing my non-interactive contribution to the game.  Even online the deck was hit or miss and I felt I was making a lot of concessions to the theme in my card changes in order to have a more playable and competitive deck.  Sometime in the summer of 2011 having not played the deck in months, I had lost hope in it, gutted its cards, and used its sleeves for a better purpose.  I still have fond memories of the deck and I liked many of the ideas it had, so maybe it is time to take a second look at it, freshen up the list, and breath new life into a memorable fallen warrior. Read the rest of this entry »