#cycleof5

Honourable mentions to Scry, Lifelink and Double Strike.

1] Flying - Isperia, the Inscrutable No one loves flying like baby Isperia, who really wants you to assemble a toolbox of flyers for all situations. Use bounce flyers to make sure Isperia always hits (Mist Raven, Aven Surveyor), then flyers can do almost anything - land? Pilgrim’s Eye. Removal? Hypnotic Siren. Card Draw? Sphinx of Lost Truths. Creature Protection? Dust Elemental. Counter Spell? Silumgar Sorcerer.

Then use all the Flying tribal - Sprite Noble, Warden of Evos Isle, Thunderclap Wyvern, and Gravitational Shift.

Special Tech - Windreader Sphinx, draws a card whenever a creature with flying attacks. Note that this isn’t just your own creatures! Draw all the cards!

2] Deathtouch - Marath, Will of the Wild There are many ways to build a deathtouch deck, and most of them revolve around pingers aka Tims aka creatures that tap to deal one damage to a target creature. Giving them deathouch can turn your Tims into machine guns. But I wanted a slightly different route and went for the Naya-coloured Marath. When combined with Nightshade Peddler, Bow of Nylea or an equipment like Gorgon Flail, Marath can use his counters to mow down the opposition. Wasteland Viper is good here, as both a defensive creature or an offensive trick to boost Marath with deathtouch.

Build up a board of deathtouchers, and either give them the ability to ping (Power of Fire, Thornbite Staff) or make your opponent attack their creatures into yours (Bullwhip). Deathtouch also works really well with First Strike and Trample, so suit up with Chariot of Victory or the Sword of Vengeance.

Special Tech - Odric, Lunarch Marshal. Any white deck build around keywords would love the ability to share them all. Have a deathoucher and a trampler to give Marath all the keywords an Elemental could dream of.

3] Prowess - Shu Yun, the Silent Tempest While it could almost be a Jeskai theme deck, Prowess has slowly begun to spread throughout Magic, allowing for a greater range of possibilities. Use the best of the Prowess (or prowess-like) creatures - Abbot of Keral Keep, Jhessian Thief, Monastery Mentor, Niblis of Frost, Soulblade Djinn.

Then power them up with cheap cantrips or spells that can be cast more than once - Distortion strike and Centre Soul have rebound, Mystic Speculation has buyback, Crown of Flames can be bounced back to hand for a red mana.

Special Tech - Scroll of the Masters. Each spell you cast puts an extra counter on the scroll, to boost whichever creature can get through. With Shu Yun’s ability to grant double strike, you can deal a huge amount of damage.

4] Indestructible - Nin, the Pain Artist Nin loves to torture people for information, and it turns out there are no better victims than indestructible creatures, who just keep giving you more and more. The darksteel creatures, especially Darksteel Myr, are excellent creatures to shoot over and over, or Nin can shoot herself with Darksteel Plate. Slobad can grant Indestructible to any artifact at the cost of a disposable one, and Soul of New Phyrexia is protection for your whole team.

Follow that up with Red wraths that can’t hurt your team, like Blasphemous Act, and Chain Reaction. To clear the way for indestructible beaters like Colossus of Akros or Ulamog.

Special Tech - Stuffy Doll. Shoot the poor doll in the face, draw that many cards, AND shoot an opponent for that much damage. Good times.

5] Protection - Teysa, Envoy of Ghosts Protection is one of the most powerful keywords you can have, working both offensively (preventing blocking) and defensively (from damage and targeting). But how to spread it around? Before there was Odric, there was Concerted Effort, that among other keywords will also share Protection abilities.

So which protection abilities do we want? Protection from Creatures comes from Teysa herself, or Beloved Chaplain. Pro CMC 3 or more comes from Mistmeadow Skulk. Elite Inquisitor, Akroma, and Baneslayer Angel each come with a bevy of keywords, as well as some important Protections.

Then make a bunch of tokens and get in with your pro-everything army.

Special Tech - Cairn Wanderer. If your Concerted Effort has been exiled, and your creatures killed, Cairn Wanderer can do a decent impression by sharing all the keywords of your dead creatures. In a pinch it gets the job done.

One of my favourite feelings in Commander is playing a card that everyone else has to read because no one has ever heard of it before. All the better if the card is cheap to buy and actually serves a useful function in my deck! Everyone knows Omniscience, and everyone knows how powerful it is - where is the challenge?

So in what I hope will be one of my semi-regular features, here is a cycle of 5 lesser known Blue enchantments and where you might put them:

1] Dismiss into Dreams Turning all your opponents’ creatures into Illusions, Dismiss into Dreams can solve one of Blue’s major weaknesses, removing troublesome creatures. The creature is sacrificed, so it works against indestructible, and because it works whenever anyone targets their creatures, it completely shuts down opposing auras and equipment. I play Dismiss in a Hakim, Loreweaver deck, that is full of creature auras. Dismiss turns these auras into offensive weapons, allowing me to switch from boosting my team to taking down theirs. But any blue commander that targets would be great - Nin the Pain Artist or Gwafa Hazid can become machine guns with some untap abilities, and Niv-Mizzet turns every card drawn into a sacrificed creature.

2] Heightened Awareness Ok, ok, I know that on the face of it this card looks bad. Maybe really bad. It seems like just a poor version of Honden of Seeing Winds, requiring an extra blue, discarding your hand, and only ever giving you one extra card a turn. And admittedly, Heightened Awareness is not fantastic, but the key is to turn the drawback into a bonus - when do you want to discard your hand?

Again, I play Heightened Awareness in Hakim, a deck that wants to dump its hand for Aura reanimation, but can find that quite challenging in mono-Blue. Play Hakim, follow up with Heightened Awareness, and then put up to three auras back on your next upkeep.

3] Mind Unbound My favourite thing in Magic is drawing all the cards, so the potential for Mind Unbound always really excites me, as it just keeps drawing more and more as the game goes on. It starts slowly and fairly innocuously, but the real benefit is that it needs no further investment of mana to keep the cards flowing.

Enchantment based control decks, like Hanna or Oloro, can keep the game going long enough where this just becomes absurd, churning out 5, 6 cards every upkeep. For extra fun, combine with card number 5 below!

4] Eyes of the Watcher The ability to scry regularly and predictably seems quite underrated in our format and Eyes of the Watcher can do a lot of good in spell heavy decks keeping the deck flowing.

But where Eyes of the Watcher really shines is in decks that want to use spells and also wants to stack the top card of the deck. Spell-based Narset decks can set up the free spells she can cast, as can Jeleva. Yidris and Rashmi will want to stack the deck for Cascade, and Melek can churn one cheap spell into a doubled spell off the top.

5] Paradox Haze There are cards that I have an almost inexplicable fondness for, that I will try to jam into everything I can. I’ve loved Paradox Haze since Time Spiral limited, where I was determined to combine it with Thallids (double spore counters) or Suspend (faster spells). Neither of these were good strategies.

In EDH I’d love to play Paradox Haze with all the Thallids, but no decent Sultai Saproling / Fungus lord currently exists. Instead I recommend playing it with generals who care about the upkeep step - which may just be Zedruu, Padeem, Thassa, Blue Braids, Oloro, and the partner Ravos.

But I got frustrated by not being able to just play Paradox Haze as my general, so eventually gave in and built Zur, the Enchanter, and upkeep tribal. I play the three Hondens that I have access to, as well as all the Forces (Baleful Force, Celestial Force and Tidal Force). I try to play extra copies using Copy Enchantment or Clever Impersonator, then double the triggers with Strionic Resonator. Savor the Moment is a 1UU Sorcery that gives you an extra turn but skips your untap step, which, in some tech I got from Tom on MTGRadio, essentially gives you a whole round of extra upkeeps.

Then there is my favourite Paradox Haze combo of all - Mirror-Sigil Sergeant, who puts a copy of himself into play every upkeep if you have a blue permanent. In your first upkeep you get one Sergeant, in your next Upkeep two. The Rhino army is unstoppable.

As I wrote earlier in the week, I’ve been playing MtG for a while, starting around Dissension, and getting into EDH when Ravnica block rotated out of standard. Along the way, I’ve picked up a number of cards that I have a disproportional affection for, cards which I try to cram into as many decks as possible, whether they’re good or not. Here are 5 of them:

1] Maelstrom Archangel One of last standard legal 60 card decks I ever built was a 5 colour Maelstrom Archangel deck, designed to cheat Nicol Bolas Planeswalker onto the battlefield. I’m a Jonny / Timmy player, which means I like combos that give you a rush of exhilaration, and cheating out big monsters certainly counts! I now play the Archangel in my Horde of Notions cascade deck, where her trigger can set off an enormous cascade chain.

2] Dragon Mage Is there any phrase sweeter in Magic than “draws seven cards”? If there is I don’t know it! Dragon Mage has had a home in my Niv-Mizzet deck from the very beginning, but he can do so much more! Nekusar decks want everyone to draw 7, every turn. He can dump cards in the graveyard for reanimation, or give mono-red decks some much needed draw. Apart from Niv, I play Dragon Mage in my Intet, the Dreamer Dragon tribal deck, where he can wheel away cards you don’t need for more fire-breathing monsters.

3] Unexpected Results Seeing a theme? I love the rush of potentially big effects that are random, or semi-random. I love the thrill of playing Unexpected Results and just seeing what happens, and I’m almost never sad with the outcome - unless you flip a useless removal spell. Unexpected results is also in my Intet deck, where it has the most chance to drop a 7+ drop creature onto the table.

4] Elemental Mastery Imagine the following scenario - Elemental Mastery on a Sigil Captain (1GWW 3/3 Rhino Soldier, that if you put a 1/1 into play it gets two +1/+1 counters). Then drop doubling season. Ever since I tapped my Sigil Captain for 6 5/5 elementals with haste, I’ve been in love with the card. It’s great in Omnath, Locus of Rage where each token can deal 5 damage when it dies. It’s very powerful with Zada, Hedron Grinder decks, giving you a huge army to copy spells onto. But currently Elemental Mastery is living in my Anax and Cymede heroic enchantments deck, where it gives a heroic trigger on Anax and Cymede, and then an army to be boosted by other effects later.

5] Deadbridge Chant Another semi-random effect, I love the rush of dropping 10 cards in your graveyard, followed by the game of trying to manipulate which ones you get back. It’s a very powerful enabler in general, and is great with another of my favourite cards, Paradox Haze, which can double the return triggers. I’m currently playing Deadbridge Chant in my Tasigur delve deck, so I can delve away all the chaff and reanimate large demons onto the table.