A Happy (Late) Red and Green Christmas!

Hello everyone, Kya here!

I wanted to give a little late gift for Christmas, as well as an interesting concept for our beloved EDH community for the new year! Today we bring some of our favorite EDH commanders to life! Two dimensional Magic is fun, but lets add a third dimension so our poor victims can see our army's full might! There are a numerous methods that allow you to add creative twists to your board state, such as clay figurines, custom token cards, and of course crazy playmats. However for this article we're going to focus on 3D modeling and 3D printing!

Spreading Angry Christmas Cheer

Now I promised I'd eventually write an article featuring a more serious deck. Who's more serious than a very angry Omnath unceremoniously aroused from his slumber? And what better way to pay tribute to our great Land Lord then bringing him and his army to life? We're going to make some 3D printed tokens for Omnath and his elementals!

First thing we got to do is build his basic shape. It's important to try and grab multiple artworks of your target creation to make sure you get their full image. One thing I've learned quickly when making figurines that less detail is better.

Using 3D modeling, we can expand a sphere into his basic shape. Of course, as you might have noticed, Angry Omnath has a round face and slowly shrinking gut. His minions even more so. It looks like they work out more than him! I wouldn't be surprised if one decided to overthrow our beloved Terrain Tyrant. However, as I mentioned before, simple is better for testing. Also for all you new 3D modelers, the basic shape below is easy to replicate. All you need to do after shrinking and stretching your sphere is extruding the arms and legs. You're more then welcome to edit the head and shoulders to make it more accurate though. I like my egg man versions too much <3

After this is done, we can start editing our model's proper poses. Omnath likes to wave his enemies down in fits of raging hellos, but his elemental body guards prefer to stay on their guard. Lets add a silly flexing pose in there as well!

Now that we have our 3D model! It's time to print!!! Using your 3D printer, you can now make your 3D models come to life! If you don't have a 3D printer, you might have a friend who would be interested in helping out! If not, there are still tons of options. Such as buying clay and bringing your tokens to life using your 3D model as a reference point.

And voila! Your tokens are alive! Alive but naked! I don't remember Nommy looking so pale. Maybe he wasn't made to be a Planeswalker after all. No worries though, a fresh bit of paint will do your tokens good! There are waaaay better methods to painting, but for laziness and expense, spray paint with primer will do just fine. Not great for perfect coats, but thanks to the light green of the 3D print material, you can easily get the various layers of green on Nom Nom's body without much work!

After a few layers and a little red spotting for the arms, your Elemental Tokens are done! Are mine on display perfect? Oh lords no. I honestly never liked those how to Martha Stewart videos of perfection and then watching my remake of it look like something Roon continuously chewed up, spit out, flickered and repeated. Here's an honest to goodness example of some quick work for some exposable tokens. After several batches you'll have an army worthy of scooting across the play mat to declare the death of a foe.

Link to Download My Omnath Tokens: Omnath

It's Rage is Over 9000!

Now that we have tokens, we need a deck worthy of them! We need to shoot out as many tokens as we can so we can flood the forest with our burning passion of creativity. How do we do that? Well let's look at Omnath, Locus of Rage again for a second.

The first part is pretty self explanatory. Every time you play a land, you get a 5/5 elemental on the field. That's pretty nutty! The fact that the lands create tokens is the reason Omnath is my favorite token deck, despite the fact you can easily make other decks that spam way more. It's also a favorite for many newer players, as playing lands is something everyone wants to do anyway. It makes it very simple.

Now the second part can be a tad more tricky. Whenever Noms or an elemental dies, you can do 3 damage to target player or creature. This sounds simple enough, but keep in mind a few things about this. The key word here is die. So if you put Omnath, Locus of Rage in the command zone when his magnificent light gets snuffed out, then it doesn't count as dying. One must go to the graveyard to die, which commanders typically avoid. Knowing this, if someone exiles your Elementals, then that also doesn't count! Guess who didn't think about that when originally playing this commander? This girl! So what do we do to avoid this mess?

This is why you should look at EDHREC when deck building! The above are strong recommendations for this commander, and for good reason! If someone is about to mass exile or find a way around killing your elementals, these amazing cards will do them their just cause and give them the glorying end they deserve. I had spares of these and never thought of adding them until I learned the hard way. Someone about to find a way around taking elemental damage to the face? Add to the damage with Goblin Bombardment!

Turning a Green Thumb into a Bloody Stub

There are a lot of cards that allow you to pump lands onto the field. The beauty of our favorite angry Land Man is that ramping, something green wants to do anyway, becomes deadly quick. Having 10 lands fairly quickly isn't unheard of for this deck. Imagine playing Boundless Realms and getting 10 more elementals! Or even more if you have at least one of the below cards...

Double the Friends, Double the Fun!

I know what you're thinking, Eww, Doubling Season. It's now a 60 dollar card! No worries though, Parallel Lives and Primal Vigor are cheaper alternatives. If you happen to have a Double Season though, things get crazy quick. For every land you get two elementals. Play any of the mass land drop cards above and you'll need a lot of token figurines to match your numbers! Just imagine all 3 on the field at once!

They're in the Trees!

I wanted to take a minute to point these three newer cards out. Let's make things absolutely insane by compiling land fall tokens. You have 5 elementals and then cast Harvest Season. Now you get 5 more lands and 5 more elementals! Then lets cast Second Harvest and you now have a total of 20 elementals! Did you have one of the Enchantments from above out? Because if so, you just got yourself many more tokens!

Fetch me more Tokens!

Now the good Fetch Lands are not cheap. I normally avoid them unless I'm playing competitive, but in a landfall deck they are too good to simply ignore. So to ease many worries, I can promise you there are plenty of alternatives! Ghost Town may not be a fetch, but it is just a godsend when your hand is empty and you begin to top deck. Speaking of which, do yourself a favor and put in plenty of cards like Elemental Bond to try and keep your hand refreshed!

Land of the Dead

Now then, the final important inclusion. Nothing says broken then constantly bringing back your fetches and getting a minimum of 2 elementals a turn. I know Crucible of Worlds is as foolishly expensive as Doubling Season. However there is an alternative! A new one at that! Ramunap Excavator works just fine as a replacement! There are plenty of other cards that do wonders in this kind of deck, it's only limited of how cruel you want to be, or how much plastic you have to print out! Below is my particular deck list. Let me know what you think!

Closing Thoughts

I hope everyone enjoyed my deck list. Admittingly it's one of those decks I built from the ground up and have been improving as I go. Honestly it's this sort of deck building that I love the most. Having a weaker version of a card and saving up to replace Mountain Valley with an expensive fetch land is what makes my deck a continuous point of interest among my collection.

If you have any variations of tokens or other creative twists to your EDH game, I'd love to see them. For more of my work, or to show off your own, feel free to to share it on my Facebook Page or leave a comment below!

As a one last spark of inspiration, think about the newer treasure tokens! I know I have...

Look Forward to my next set of tokens!

-Kya