(Tergrid, God of Fright | Art by Yongjae Choi)

Pass the Salt

Friendly greetings and welcome to Digital Deckbuilding, the how-to series for building decks with online tools. I'm John Sherwood, and this week I finalize a deck using EDHREC Salt Scores and Compare decks on Archidekt. I used the compare decks feature briefly in a previous article, and I'm excited to give this feature the attention it deserves. Comparing decks on Archidekt is one of my favorite tools for deckbuilding. Most deckbuilding tools are useful at any stage in a deck's lifecycle, but Archidekt's Compare decks is not most deckbuilding tools. The benefit of comparing decks peaks around the final stages of deckbuilding, or when changing a complete deck. In a similar vein, the EDHREC Salt Scores are really just a fun community thought experiment until we shuffle salty cards into a finished deck. With that in mind, this week's demonstration focuses on a deck's finishing touches.

What does salt taste like?

We need to discuss salinity before diving into this week's deck. Every year EDHREC polls the community to rate cards on a scale of 0 (not salty at all) to 4 (super salty.) There is no fixed criteria; participants respond based on how they feel about a card. The data from salt polling creates a snapshot of community attitudes toward cards, mechanics and strategies. From a participant standpoint, this outlet for feedback on cards is simply satisfying. Personally, I savor every opportunity to express my distaste for a Thoughtseize variant.

For this week's deck, I wanted to shake the salt off a card that ranks near the top of the EDHREC Salt Scores. Tergrid, God of Fright is a controversial commander that uses edicts and discard effects to steal permanents. Tergrid's Salt Score is 2.52, about half a point less than the saltiest card: Winter Orb.

Similar to Winter Orb, Tergrid's salt score stems from play patterns that deprive opponents of opportunities to participate in the game. However, I'm willing to bet all that salt is directed at the creature on the front side of the card, not the artifact on the back: Tergrid's Lantern.

Whether drafting Kaldheim, grinding Standard, or playing Commander, I've never seen a player cast Tergrid's Lantern. Admittedly, the lantern is not an efficient artifact, but it is a novelty in EDH. Tergrid's Lantern is on a short list of non-creature artifacts in the command zone. I built a deck around Tergrid's Lantern with the intent to avoid Tergrid's infamous salt-inducing play patterns.

How to Compare Decks

There are two ways to navigate to the deck comparison tool on Archidekt. You can access the Compare decks feature directly through Archidekt's main menu, or you can click the Compare Decks button at the top of any deck screen. I prefer the second route, because it automatically loads the deck I want to compare into the Deck A slot. When selecting a deck to compare, the dropdown box will populate with your own most recently changed decks, or you can enter the web address for another deck on Archidekt.

Archidekt allows you to compare any two decks you have access to.

Comparing Two Tergrid's Lantern Decks

My first draft of the deck gathered a mix of cycling, madness, threshold and hellbent effects. I also included some reanimation effects and reanimation targets. After tossing in some other essentials and trimming the fat, I stopped at 96 cards before doing my first deck comparison.

During the development stage for this article, I reached out to the Space Cow Media team for their experiences with Tergrid, God of Fright decks. Don Miner, Space Cow Media CEO and founder of EDHREC, responded with his own Tergrid's Lantern deck. I don't know where to read a horoscope for the Space Cow astrological sign, but this felt like fate. The great Space Cow himself graciously allowed me to use his deck for a comparison in this article. Tergrid's Lantern appealed to Don because it offers some choice, but the deck fell from favor because it didn't impact the board state enough. In Don's own words, "The ratio between how much I annoyed people versus actually did anything useful was out of balance."

Special thanks to Don Miner for sharing a solid basis for a deck comparison in this article. The initial results of that comparison are in the next screenshot.

Don Miner's deck and mine had nine cards in common.

Deck comparison results include an overview, displayed as a percentage. The results may be filtered, and the details are divided into four sections. The first two sections are called In A, not B and In B, not A; featuring cards unique to either deck. The third and fourth categories, Exact Match and Similar, show where the two decks overlap.

Comparing Don Miner's deck to my first draft for Tergrid's Lantern, 9.18% of the cards were the same. The sixty-nine cards in the "In A, Not B" section included some awesome candidates to fill the last slots in my deck. Clicking on the three dots over a card opens a menu, including the option to add the card directly to your deck.

I added Dark Ritual directly to my deck from the deck comparison screen.

Contrasting Tergrid, God of Fright and Tergrid's Lantern

The top of the deck page on Archidekt features a Salt Sum, or total of the Salt Scores for the cards in the deck. Clicking on the Salt Sum displays a graph of the deck's Salt Sum compared to Commander decks on Archidekt.

Tergrid's average deck has a Salt Sum of 53.56

The average Tergrid, God of Fright deck has a Salt Sum of 53.56, nearly double the salt sum of 27.73 for my Tergrid's Lantern deck. For context, the average salt score for an EDH deck is 36.26 and the median salt score is 33.57. Based on those numbers, I'm optimistic that other players would respond more positively to this Tergrid's Lantern deck than a typical Tergrid, God of Fright deck. Tergrid's Average deck might exceed the daily recommended sodium content, but that didn't stop me from looking for value in a deck comparison.

The 41.5% Matching rate initially concerned me.

At this stage I was looking for two things. First, I wanted to make sure my deck avoided Tergrid's oppressive reputation. Second, I wanted to make sure I didn't miss any good picks in the process of avoiding salty ones. Initially, my reaction to the 41.5% match rate was a mix of bad feeling and never tell me the odds. A quick glance at the Exact Match and Similar sections of the results revealed there was nothing to worry about.

See? Nothing to worry about.

Looking at the cards found in both decks, I considered whether there was enough salt to raise my opponents' blood pressure. Those results included lands, mana rocks, Dark Ritual and Sign in Blood. Of those cards, none of them could trigger Tergrid, God of Fright, so I felt like the objective of avoiding Tergrid's salty reputation was easily within my grasp.

To meet the second goal of finding overlooked cards, I (cautiously) examined the cards in Tergrid's average deck that were not in mine. Of the 62 cards in the In A, not B section, the overwhelming majority were cards that trigger Tergrid's ability. In other words, cards that don't conform to my deck concept. Feed the Swarm was the only card from Tergrid's average deck that I added to my deck. As enchantment removal in mono black, I probably should have included Feed the Swarm from the beginning.

Saltwater (Gold)fish

After the comparison to Tergrid's Average deck, I felt like the Tergrid's Lantern deck was complete enough to playtest. I goldfished the deck a few times on Archidekt's Playtester. The playtester often saves me money, because virtually goldfishing a deck exposes cards that don't belong, and sometimes indicates the entire deck is bad idea. Typically, I would leave a deck list at the end of an article, but I'm inserting it here so you can see what I was working with before I talk about the playtest results.

 

 

I recommend a rule of ten for goldfishing a new deck before passing judgment. Play ten hands for ten turns each to identify any obvious shortfalls and make sure the deck functions. Here's a few screenshots of playtest hands at the point when I cast Tergrid's Lantern:

This playtest produced a good setup to draw and discard cards, with an available payoff for discarding.

During the second playtest, I felt like playing out the hand would have been a better choice than casting Tergrid's Lantern.

The third playtest was more like the first, a good setup with available payoffs.

Before playtesting this deck, I was seriously contemplating buying the deck. After goldfishing this Tergrid's Lantern deck, I decided it's going to remain a theory craft for me. I wouldn't actually buy this deck because the lines of play are far too solitaire for my taste. I like interactive decks, and none of the hands I goldfished presented the level of interaction I prefer. That being said, I would recommend this deck to players who like a low level of interaction. The deck subverts expectations for Tergrid, it takes a lot of game actions, and all the hands I played felt like they had a clear direction.

Salt Solution

There were two parts to this article, kind of like a solute and solvent. The Salt Scores and Salt Sums have their uses for encouraging player communication and engagement, but ultimately, their application depends on player tastes. On the other hand, comparing decks is like a quality solvent for deck building. It's a great way to dissolve two decks and come to a solution for a deckbuilding problem. One of my favorite things to do on Archidekt is searching for decks with the same commanders and tags as my personal decks and compare them. While I've found some great cards this way, it's also just plain fun to see how my deckbuilding choices compare to other players. What are your thoughts on salt scores and deck comparisons? Do you have any experience with subverting expectations for salty cards? Tell us in the comments below.

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