#robert burrows

I’ve dabbled in building tribal decks in the past (my Gisa and Geralf Zombie Tribal deck stands out as the prime example), but Tribal decks have generally felt a little too narrow in scope for my liking. The more popular tribes tend to have a strict mechanical focus which dictates the direction the deck should be built in. Take Elves, for example. Elves like to make mana, pump each other up, and swing in for the win. A lot of Elf decks end up looking pretty similar because the Elf lords all reinforce those mechanical focuses. Goblins like swarming, attacking, and blowing things up regardless of the consequences. Zombies are entirely focused on attrition and graveyard recursion. You get the idea. Popular tribes are hard to innovate with due to how focused they are. However, there is room to play around with some of the tribes that have fallen by the wayside.

Today, I want to go south for the winter and build a deck around a tribe that once enjoyed some decent support back in the days of Odyssey. This Cryptic Commander is for the Birds.

I used to have a version of this deck back from before Commander 2013 brought us Derevi, Empyreal Tactician. The deck was fun, taking to the skies and beating people down in the air with an aerial army. I had to include some less than stellar cards in order to maintain as pure a bird tribal experience as possible, and that ultimately led me away from the deck, ultimately retiring it. In recent years, Wizards has printed some birds that have slowly rekindled my desire to play the deck, and the time has finally come to join the flock once again. Derevi, Empyreal Tactician shall once again take the helm of Bird Tribal, and we shall spread the good word of bird once more. With Kangee, Aerie Keeper and Aven Brigadier as seconds-in-command, these fleet-feathered fowl are ready to deliver a Grade A aerial assault.

Decklist for The Word

So, let’s address the non-birds in the room. Emeria Angel, Soraya the Falconer, Windreader Sphinx, Jotun Owl Keeper, and Kefnet the Mindful. Soraya the Falconer’s Oracle Text states that it gives all birds +1/+1, not just Falcons… and we’re gonna ignore that second piece of text about banding (now is not the time or the place for that). Emeria Angel and Jotun Owl Keeper make a bunch of birds, so that’s enough to garner their inclusion in the brood. Kefnet the Mindful may have creature type God, but he’s a bird in spirit. Look at that head! And then there’s Windreader Sphinx. Look, Sphinxes are kind of like big birds; and, in the canon of this deck, the birds learned their mastery of the sky from the Windreader Sphinx! He is their teacher! The Big Bird to their Sesame Street! There’s a story here, and each card has its own justification for inclusion.

Now, let’s move on to the birds proper. Birds have played in some interesting mechanical space during their time as a tribe. Unlike some of the more established tribes, there isn’t anything that really holds the birds together mechanically other than Flying. There’s plenty to work with there, and we’ll get to it later, but I think the lack of a focus for the tribe makes some interesting things possible. I’m gonna break my choices down into categories and go over each one by one to explain the reasoning.

Card Advantage

There are a surprising number of birds that deal in card selection and card filtering, I’ve found. As the newest bird, and Magic: The Amateuring approved cutest card from Hour of Devastation, River Hoopoe was a shoo-in for inclusion in the deck. Having a good outlet for mana when you’re running low on cards is invaluable, and River Hoopoe is happy to help you stock back up and gain a little life. Raven Familiar does a decent Impulse impression and has done good work for me in the past. There are quite a few birds that like to loot, like Murder of Crows and relative newcomer Messenger Jays. Even Sawtooth Loon has a form of looting, as well as letting you re-buy any ETB effects you might be interested in using. Of course, the most swingy form of card advantage in the deck comes in the form of Airborne Aid, letting you draw a card for each bird in play. Sometimes, you’ll draw 2-3 cards off this, and other times… well, the sky’s the limit. Not to mention Beck // Call, letting you net four birds and four cards for one card. Honorary birds Windreader Sphinx and Kefnet also help out on the card advantage front.

Utility

I mentioned how diverse the mechanics that appear on Birds are. This is just a sampling. Nimble Obstructionist is a Stifle on a stick, Keeper of the Nine Gales is a repeatable bounce effect for permanents, and Aerie Mystics gives your birds Shroud so they can’t be picked off by targeted removal. Coveted Peacock goads your opponents into attacking someone else. Celestial Gatekeeper brings back two birds when it dies. Cloudchaser Kestrel destroys an enchantment when it enters the battlefield. We have bounce effects from Mist Raven and Icefeather Aven, we can manipulate the top of our library with Aven Fateshaper, we can save our creatures from combat damage with Gustcloak Savior. There are so many options. While none of these abilities points us in a direction, it gives us a lot of flexibility to react to the current board state and mood of the game. Diversity is good in this case!

Tricks

I know what you’re thinking. You’re just playing Cyclonic Rift because it’s a good card. Well, you’re not wrong. However, I do have a flavor justification for including it, along with Aetherspouts. You see, when all the birds work together, they can do some pretty powerful things, things like using their mastery of the wind and sky to create vortexes that sweep up everything except them and remove them from the picture. Also, I needed board wipes that left my birds alone…

Flurry of Wings does some interesting double duty as both a pseudo-fog effect as well as a way to buff up our army unexpectedly. If the player before you attacks someone else with a large force, your forces can swell to an overwhelming size in response. Cloud Cover gives our birds some protection, allowing us to return them to our hand instead of having them be killed. Then we have some small instant-speed tricks in the form of Swan Song and Path to Exile. I headcanon Path to Exile as the birds picking something up and carrying it away, a la James and the Giant Peach. Swan Song speaks for itself.

Flavor and Combos

There is some fun synergy in the deck beyond just making a bunch of birds and attacking in the air. Kangee, Aerie Keeper and Aven Mimeomancer do a fun dance to power up your whole army. Kangee has kicker for X2 to put feather counters on it. For each feather counter on Kangee, all birds get +1/+1. With Aven Mimeomancer in play, you may place a feather counter on target creature at the beginning of your upkeep. You can continue to place the feather counters from Mimeomancer on Kangee to increase the buff from Kangee’s ability. Both are good birds on their own, but the cute synergy between them can be powerful. They’re good birbs, Bront.

Then there’s the Dovescape/Portcullis combo. Dovescape is a nice little insurance policy against board wipes for our deck. We’re pretty vulnerable to mass removal, so having a way to keep that from resolving seems like a good idea. Plus, every once and a while we’ll be able to drop Portcullis as well, which does some interesting things with Dovescape. Dovescape will counter all noncreature spells and give that spell’s controller 1/1 bird tokens equal to its converted mana cost. Portcullis exiles creatures when they enter the battlefield if there are two or more creatures in play already. Those creatures come back if Portcullis leaves; but, if those creatures are 1/1 bird tokens, they never come back. With both in play, you end up with a soft lock situation which benefits you greatly if you’re ahead on board. A good every-once-and-a-while way to secure your boardstate.

We have some flavor considerations as well! The deck needed some ramp, so I’ve included the aptly named Peregrination, Cultivate, and Sol Ring along with Birds of Paradise. Some birds do like shiny objects, and what’s shinier than a Sol Ring? Birds are also a force for spreading plant seeds, eating berries and fruits and dropping the seeds elsewhere. Thus, Cultivate felt like a good include via flavor justifications. And what self-respecting bird deck would be incomplete without perches and fountains for your birds to roost on? Akroma’s Memorial and Eldrazi Monument are here and ready to be covered in bird droppings and feathers (as well as making our birds indestructible or generally hard to deal with). And, I really wanted to include Tamiyo, Field Researcher in this deck because her abilities work real well with evasive creatures. Bet you didn’t know Tamiyo was an avid Ornithologist, huh?

Wrapping Up

Add in some anthem effects for fliers, like Favorable Winds, Gravitational Shift, and Serra Aviary, and you’ve got yourself a deck! How good is it? That’s an excellent question. You’ve got quite an airforce going for you in this deck, and flying has always been a good way to poke damage through. The deck is vulnerable to mass removal, has little direct interaction, and could be very inconsistent (though, there is a decent amount of card advantage/filtering). It has weak points, sure, but that’s a sacrifice I made for theme. This is a thematic tribal deck! We make some sacrifices in this house!

I look forward to reconstructing the deck and putting it through its paces. It’ll be nice having a low-key deck to play for fun every once and a while. That’s the nice thing about themed decks: they’re just kind of fun to play and get in the spirit of. And I leave you with that!

What sort of weird tribal decks have you thought about building? With Commander 2017 coming up, what tribes are you hoping get more support? What sort of cards would fit in a bird themed Commander deck that I didn’t include? Leave comments, and I’ll see you next time!

“Once again, we send off our army of lazotep-coated eternals to do the bidding of your all-powerful God-Pharaoh, and crush the people of Amonkhet! Once again, I salute my Old Gods, and I salute my perfect army, who will ride with me eternal through the planar portal to conquer the multiverse! I AM YOUR CONQUERER! It is by my hand the multiverse will fall and I will rise to the former height of my power!”  - Nicol Bolas… probably.

So, I’ve always had a bit of an issue with Red in Commander (Sorry, Jimmy Wong). Red’s playstyle and casual impermanence has always struck me, a diehard lover of value and more tangible card advantage, as lacking. I admit, it’s mostly personal preference that turns me away from Red when I’m building new commander decks, but there will be a card that draws my attention every once and a while, a card that tempts me venture to the other side of the color pie. Daretti, Scrap Savant was the first card to make me consider building Mono-Red, throwing a bunch of busted artifacts into the deck and recurring them with the Planeswalker general himself. That ended up being more of a Brown deck with a Red splash, though. The next option came with Conspiracy: Take the Crown in the form of Grenzo, Havoc Raiser. I even wrote an article about him! I loved the idea of turning other peoples’ cards against them while doing what Red wants to do anyway: Beat down! I ended up making a budget version of the deck from my article for a Budget Commander League, and it was fun but lacked some punch and the mana to really capitalize on the cards you were exiling. You would spend mana pre-combat on something to help get your squad through, but then your options would be limited when it came time to actually cast the spoils…

Then I saw what, to me, seemed like the perfect solution. Neheb the Eternal.

Oh yes. This is good. I can hear Red calling to me, begging me to iterate on Grenzo with the addition of a certain Zombie Minotaur Warrior. Let’s start by breaking down the card before we launch into the myriad of ways I plan to abuse it going forward.

1) Neheb is a 4/6 for 3RR. Four power and six toughness is certainly nothing to scoff at for five mana. He doesn’t have a built-in form of evasion, per se, but that won’t stop Neheb from getting in the red zone anyway because…

2)Neheb has Afflict 3. Afflict is a new mechanic from Hour of Devastation that appears on creatures. If a creature with Afflict is blocked, a trigger will go on the stack for the defending player to lose life equal to whatever the Afflict value is. In Neheb’s case, the defending player will lose 3 life for blocking your minotaur. So, they either take 4 by not blocking, or take 3 by blocking. Either way, they’re taking damage, which feeds into Neheb’s main draw…

3)Filling your postcombat mana pool with sweet, sweet mana. Neheb gives you a Red mana for each 1 life your opponents lost this turn, which, as we just established, will be 3 minimum if they don’t get rid of him before blocking. If you have other creatures... that number will start to go up pretty fast. There’s a lot Red can do with copious amounts of mana, so strap in as we ride on Neheb’s Fury Road!

We Ride Eternal, Shiny and Chrome!

WITNESS ME!

I think it’s pretty obvious that the card is very good in a Grenzo, Havoc Raiser deck. You have Grenzo and a small army of tokens or evasive dudes to help you get through, and then you drop Neheb pre-combat. Normally, playing something like Eldrazi Monument or Pyreheart Wolf before combat to get the team through leaves you with too little mana to take advantage of the cards you exiled. Neheb kind of fixes that problem by providing you with the mana to cast those cards post-combat. Of course, nothing is stopping you from casting your own big spells with that mana.

X spells are a good place to start, as they get exponentially better the more mana you have. Getting in for a bunch of damage (any type of damage, Neheb doesn’t specify combat damage) and then burning out a player or two with a super-charged Comet Storm on the back of Neheb seems like a good way to end the game. Or, you could just funnel all of that mana into making more tokens with Hangarback Walker or Goblin Offensive. More bodies means more mana from Neheb, which means you can cast more things on future turns. You could empty your hand, cast Reforge the Soul or another Wheel of Fortune effect to refill, and then you still might be able to cast more stuff after that. That kind of mana production is something only Gauntlet of Might or Caged Sun has been able to provide for Red before, so it’s very exciting to think about what having a third mana fountain for Red will do for the color.

Large amounts of mana are also very good for casting some very large threats. I’m not usually one for running the Eldrazi Titans in my Commander decks (I think they’re so good that they’re boring and safe at this point), but I would definitely consider running Kozilek, Butcher of Truth with Neheb around. You’ve got some more interesting options, though, in Red. I’ve always thought about giving Molten Primordial a shot, and it seems like it would do good work alongside Grenzo and Neheb, letting you exile more cards and get in for more damage. Of course, there’s no shortage of big dragons to cast in Red, and I’ve been looking for an easier way to cast my Scourge of the Throne and Skyline Despot for a while now. Giant Colorless beaters also abound, with Myr Battlesphere pulling double duty as a mana sink and generator of bodies to ramp Neheb’s mana production.

I want to take a second to reiterate that Neheb doesn’t care where damage came from. You could throw down Purphoros, God of the Forge, make a bunch of tokens with Goblin Offensive, deal a bunch of damage with the ETB triggers from Purphoros, and then figure out something to do with the massive amount of mana you will have generated after combat from Neheb… That is just so much mana. “I guess I Tempt with Vengeance and kill people at that point? Probably.” We can figure something out.

I’ve only scratched the surface of what you can do with Neheb the Eternal in Commander. There’s a lot of potential for this card, and I’m excited to retool my Grenzo, Havoc Raiser deck to take advantage of the copious amounts of mana Neheb will invariably produce. So, what powerful things do you want to do with Neheb? Am I overblowing his ability? Let me know! But, I take my leave for now with one more Fury Road reference.

Neheb was awaited, and I will carry him to the gates of Valhalla myself!

Don’t you just love it when a new Legendary Creature gets spoiled and you know it was meant to be? I got to experience that yesterday when a certain Commander-to-be got spoiled over Twitter, and man am I head-over-heels for this card. Let’s cut to the chase:

(You see what I did there? The card was spoiled by Elaine Chase over on Twitter. You know what? It isn’t funny anymore. I had to explain it. Forget I said anything.)

So, brief personal aside on my experience with BG in Commander. I’ve tried to build a couple of different decks with the color combo, and I ultimately end up with what feels like the same deck. Graveyard Shenanigans.dek. There’s nothing wrong with graveyard decks, I’m just really tired of how the BG ones play out. Jarad and Meren did their best, but I could not be convinced to play BG after I finally took them apart. None of the other BG generals really appealed to me, from Nath of the Gilt Leaf to Sapling of Colfenor. Then they spoiled Hapatra, and the gears started turning immediately. I started playing Magic just before Scars of Mirrodin came out, so -1/-1 counters were part of my formative Magic experience. It has been too long since we had -1/-1 counters, and now they’re giving us a Commander in BG that cares about -1/-1 counters. Thank you based Wizards for bestowing this gift upon me and all the other lovers of -1/-1 counters in this game. We are truly #blessed.

So, what sort of things can you do with Hapatra? I suppose you could attack with her, suiting her up with a Whispersilk Cloak so she can get in unopposed and slowly build up counters and snakes for you. You could do that, and it’s probably a decent thing to include in whatever deck you build, just to have a back-up plan; but, I like to dream big. There are a handful of very playable Commander cards that like to throw -1/-1 counters around to every creature. Thanks to the wording on Hapatra, you won’t be rewarded for placing a bunch of -1/-1 counters on a single creature as part of the same affect (see “Whenever one or more” wording), but putting one counter on a bunch creatures means an army of snakes in the making. The following are some of the best at this:

Black Sun’s Zenith for one has never been so rewarding! Paying three mana to weaken the entire board and make a bunch of snakes seems like a great plan. You could also just wrath the board and be the only one left with creatures at the end of it. Even if Hapatra dies in the process, you’ll still get all the snakes because she’ll see the counters placed on everything before hitting the bin. Carnifex Demon gives you another good, recurring source of -1/-1 counters. If you have a way to get counters on it besides the ones it comes into play with (like Hapatra’s ability or something like Gnarled Effigy), the demon can be a real problem. Contagion Engine kind of speaks for itself. Putting a counter on each of an opponent’s creatures and then proliferating twice will get you three separate triggers from Hapatra for three times the snakes. But, this is just the tip of the iceberg, the most obvious thing you can do.

Alright, we’re starting to get somewhere now. Crumbling Ashes insures that you never have to commit too many counters to the same creature. It’ll die sooner or later anyway. Blowfly Infestation lets you recycle some of the counters from dying creatures for another Hapatra trigger and more value. Necroskitter makes those sweet creatures your opponents have work for you after they die with a counter on them. It’s finally time for Necroskitter’s day in the sun! However, you don’t just have to put counters on your opponents’ creatures. Have you considered putting counters on your own creatures?

There are a couple of creatures that like to have -1/-1 counters on them for utility purposes. Blow up more artifacts by keeping your Wickerbough Elder fully stocked. Beat down hard with a resilient threat in the form of Deity of Scars. Grim Poppet lets you pinpoint the counters you want to disseminate and take out problematic creatures. You also have the option of throwing Quillspike into the deck for what can only be described as shenanigans. Quillspike will let you remove counters from any of your creatures, which means Persist creatures are gonna get to come back for multiple go-arounds. Puppeteer Clique and Woodfall Primus say hi! And that’s only the fair thing you can do with Quillspike. Turns out Quillspike goes infinite with Devoted Druid. Put a counter on Devoted Druid to untap it, tap it for a Green mana, use the Green mana to remove the counter with Quillspike’s ability, repeat ad infinitum. If you have Hapatra in play, this means infinite snakes. Seems pretty good to me, but treat infinite combos with care. It isn’t fun to lose to them, or win with them, all the time. Be nice about, huh?

Considering how few sets have featured -1/-1 counters in the history of Magic, there are certainly a lot of cool things you can do with them. There’s even an Enchantment that basically has Hapatra’s ability, except it makes Elves instead. Flourishing Defenses. There’s all sorts of things you can do with a Hapatra deck, and I am really excited to try them out!

So, what do you think of the newest BG Legendary? New hotness or soon to be forgotten? Let me know what you think! Any cool interactions I might not have noticed? I would love to see them! Until then, enjoy the rest of spoiler season for Amonkhet and hopefully there will be even more Commander goodies to discuss.

When it comes to Commander decks, I imagine the most common starting point for deck-building is to pick a Commander that lets you play the cards you want. For some people, the Commander isn’t as important as the colors and cards it lets them play. Of course, this is a perfectly reasonable way to build decks. Playing the cards you want to play is how a lot of people have fun, so why rain on their parade? No, in this article I really want to highlight another way to build Commander decks that can lead to some pretty interesting results. I’m talking about building around a theme.

When I say theme, I’m not talking about an archetype. Tokens, Voltron, and Prison decks aren’t themed so much as they are mechanically focused. That is not to say that mechanically focused decks can’t be themed, because they certainly can be(as my example for this article will point out). A themed Commander deck requires that card choices be made to adhere to some sort of flavor standard. For instance, building a deck with Jaya Ballard, Task Mage at the helm and filling it with pyromantic instants, sorceries, and creatures. Or you could build a deck full of nothing but fungus with Ghave, Guru of Spores as the Commander. Which brings us to the deck I’ll be talking about for the rest of the article. Tumblr user @sarkhan-volkswagen has graciously allowed me to feature his Temporal Themed Rashmi, Eternities Crafter decklist, a list that manages to lean heavily on theme without sacrificing power. So, check out the link below and let’s dive in!

Link: Don’t Rashmi, I’ve Still Got Five Turns Left!

I talked to Zach briefly about his deck’s themes and how the deck came to be. He described it like this: “The deck is filled with cards that focus on history and researching the flow of time. Some cards, like the extra turn effects, are pretty self explanatory. Future Sight and Vedalken Orrery peer into the future, Dig Through Time, Eternal Witness, and Scroll Rack remember the past. Rewind turns back the clock while Time Stop brings it to a screeching halt. Teferi, Temporal Archmage culminates these effects together, accessing what is yet to come while rewinding resources to their unexploited state.” Zach then goes on to explain the reason for the deck’s theming: “The deck came to be themed this way after reading a line in one of the Aether Revolt stories where Rashmi's assistant Mitul suggests that the two of them research the progression of aether through time, so it just seemed perfect.”

Taking one look at the deck will show you just how true this statement is. Many of the cards focus on timing, gaining knowledge of things to come, and manipulating that knowledge for personal gain. Even some of the staples that hold the deck up can be argued to be on theme. Ramp spells like Rampant Growth and Explosive Vegetation push your gameplan forward, effectively transporting you a turn or two into the future in terms of mana availability. The idea of accelerated growth also fits into the overall theme of the deck as well. The mechanical intertwining with the thematic is on full display in this list.

Of course, not everything in the deck completely lines up with this theme, which is totally fine. A deck doesn’t have to be 100% on theme in order for it to be an effective example of a themed Commander deck. Cards like Disallow, Birds of Paradise, Beast Within, and many of the Eldrazi are explicitly present for power level and flexibility reasons. Even still, many of those cards are adjacent to the overall themes of the deck. For example, Jace, Unraveler of Secrets can be thought of as someone solving the mysteries of the flow of time and revealing some of what is to come. Torrential Gearhulk and Snapcaster Mage dig up spells from the past to cast them again. Treasure Cruise makes use of the past to push you into the future by drawing you further into your library. Hell, even the Eldrazi can be thought of as temporal aberrations, since they normally exist in the space between planes. We don’t know what goes on in there, or how time flows in the Blind Eternities. It’s a mystery!

That’s the thing I really like about Zach’s deck. He keeps on theme without sacrificing power level in a format where being able to keep up with the rest of the table is crucial. This may be due to the fact temporal themed cards are inherently powerful and have a lot of support. That is definitely true. However, with as many cards as there are in the game at this point, there will almost always be appropriate on-theme answers for whatever you decide to build your deck around. So, take Zach’s deck as an example of what is possible when it comes to theming your Commander deck, get out there, and make your own!

Robert Burrows

The very first Cryptic Commander talked about Insidious Will; and, at the time, I mentioned that I was interested in doing a piece focused entirely on using counterspells in Commander. Well, the time has come. Let’s talk about Counterspells.

Counterspells can be a bit of a sore subject in Commander. There are a good number of people who think they’re boring, that they’re against the spirit of the format (a bit of a non-argument in my opinion since Commander isn’t just one thing), or, the age old argument, they’re just plain not fun to play against. I could get into the merits of these individual arguments, but I feel like that wouldn’t get to the heart of the issue people seem to have with counterspells: Counterspells keep people from doing what they want to do. It’s true, that’s how they’re designed. It’s a part of the game, and I think that’s fine in moderation. Having answers available in a color that doesn’t have certain removal options (ie. artifacts, enchantments…basically anything that isn’t a creature) is valuable for the game…but there is a bit of a problem. What happens when people take things too far?

A good number of you have probably played against the deck I’m about to describe. The commander is Talrand, Sky Summoner. Your opponent resolves their general and then passes the turn with mana up for the rest of the game. You attempt to cast a spell on your turn and they counter it, making a drake. They untap, draw, attack for two air, and pass the turn with all of their mana untapped. Rinse and repeat until you can finally resolve something to help you win the game or you die to a swarm of flying drakes. Alternate scenario in which you’re playing with multiple people. The Talrand player sits back and strategically counters the things that will disrupt their game plan of building up a flying army and picking players to death. You try to bide your time and resolve something to turn the tides in your favor, only to be surprised by a Pact of Negation or Force of Will that puts them over the edge and firmly in control of the game. This won’t always happen, but even when the Talrand player doesn’t end up winning, the structure of their deck is capable of shaping the flow of the game. People tend to shy away from casting their spells if they think it’ll just be countered, and if your deck contains a lot of Counterspells, then that fear is usually pretty legitimate. So, how do we play counterspells without ruining other people’s fun?

I don’t think the answer is to just never play counterspells and let people do whatever they want. A healthy amount of fear is good for keeping other players off your back long enough to put your game plan together. Similarly, the other players at the table may look to you as the Blue player to keep someone who has gotten too far ahead from dominating the table. Counterspells have their uses and it is worth including some number of them if you are playing Blue. But, normal old counterspells run the risk of being straight up boring, not to mention they can end up stuck in your hand as another player goes off on the board. So, what types of counterspells do we include. When I wrote the piece on Insidious Will, @sarpadianempiresvol-viii pointed out that flexibility is key. Cards like Cryptic Command, Insidious Will, Izzet Charm, and Ojutai’s Command (by no means an exhaustive list but a good enough start) are usually not dead in your hand because they do more than just counter a spell. Building a deck with counters like these allows you to take their other modes into account and use them for more than just protecting a combo or ensuring your victory. They give you options, and that is one of my favorite things to have in Commander. Yes, they do counter spells, but they are capable of doing so much more than that. Ojutai’s Command gives you the option of focusing your build on smaller value creatures while still giving you an Essence Scatter should you need to counter that pesky Craterhoof Behemoth. Izzet Charm can always be a double loot if the other modes aren’t useful. Cryptic Command kind of speaks for itself, really. You get the idea. There are Counterspells that give you options outside of countering spells.

Like a lot of issues in Commander, the problem with Counterspells often rests squarely on the shoulders of the players who abuse them. On average, I include about 3-5 counterspells in my Blue decks. That varies based on the focus of the deck. For instance, I think Gisa  and Geralf only has 2 (Insidious Will and Soul Manipulation) while Melek, Izzet Paragon has 7 (Most of them being more conventional Counterspells, but Melek kind of needs them to function). Sometimes the counters fit the theme of the deck, like Mystic Snake and Draining Whelk in Roon of the Hidden Realms. And, it is perfectly fine to play no counterspells whatsoever. I’m not going to make you put counterspells in your Blue deck, but hopefully introducing some more interesting options will get you to rethink your stance a bit. That’s all I ask.

And there we have it. A very abridged conversation on playing Counterspells in Commander. I’m pretty pro-Counterspell in moderation, so I can appreciate that mileage may vary for the rest of you. So, where do you fall on the ongoing Counterspell debate? Are they an abomination that has no place in Commander? Are they an essential part of a healthy metagame? Are they fine in moderation? Talk about it, and let me know!

So, I don’t think this will come as a surprise to many of you. White is the absolute worst color in Commander when it comes to card advantage. I’ve said it before, briefly touching on it when I talked about Sunforger, and it remains true today. Even Red is better at drawing cards than White thanks to Wheel of Fortune effects and the recent retinue of temporary card draw effects like Outpost Siege, Grenzo, Havoc Raiser, and Chandra, Torch of Defiance (just to name a few). The best White gets is stuff like Sram, Senior Edificer, Bygone Bishop, and my personal favorite, Puresteel Paladin…Not that impressive when compared to the juggernauts of card advantage the format has to offer. White does have access to colorless forms of card advantage, but those can only get you so far because colorless card advantage can only be so good. Well, fear no more, White mages. Wizards has opened up their secret vault and released unto you a card advantage machine the likes of which you have not seen for some time. Behold…

Now, don’t be shy. The people want to see you!

There you go. Let that sink in for a moment. Really let it permeate the membrane of your mind and implant itself deep into your subconscious desire for card advantage. Let’s crack this thing open and see what it can do.

First and foremost, Oracle’s Vault is colorless, so it can go in any deck your heart desires. It immediately reminds me of a certain six mana artifact that ends up in way less decks than it should, Staff of Nin. For two less mana, you get an artifact that can’t pick off small creatures or peck opponents to death, and it is much worse at giving you real card advantage since the cards it provides you only stick around until the end of the turn. However, that second ability makes a world of difference. Once you have three brick counters on your Vault, by whatever means you put brick counters on your Vault, that’s when the real fun starts. Once you’ve finished constructing the Oracle’s Vault, you get to start casting cards off of the top of your library for free, and that is some incredible value. Being able to cast an extra spell for free every turn is certainly powerful, as are most things that let you cheat costs. Even if you flip a land, you still have the option to lay it on the table since Oracle’s Vault specifies you can play the card, not cast it.

Having an artifact that gets you free value every turn seems pretty good on its own, but how can we take advantage and really crack this thing wide open? I see a couple courses of action here. 1) You could try to take advantage of proliferate to put brick counters on the Vault faster than normal, but that seems a little unnecessary. Three is such a small number of counters to get on the Vault that I don’t think we need to play around with trying to get extra counters on it. It doesn’t do more if you have more than three, so maybe consider looking elsewhere. For instance… 2) Untap the Vault for fun and profit! There are a lot of ways to untap permanents in Magic, especially if those permanents are artifacts. Using untap mechanics can help you get to three brick counters faster, but the real power comes in once you get to cast multiple spells for free. Tap the Vault to exile a card, untap the Vault with something like a Voltaic Key, tap it again to exile another card. Cast those cards for free. 3) You can even go crazy if you involve Paradox Engine (though, that card is already crazy by itself). Tap the Vault, cast the spell, untap the Vault, tap the Vault, cast the spell, untap the Vault…it could go on forever, especially if you have a Sensei’s Divining top in play and a mana rock to activate it between Vault triggers. The thought makes me sick to my stomach because of how much you can abuse Oracle’s Vault with Paradox Engine. *Shudder*

Today we’ve learned that Paradox Engine is just an absurdly powerful Magic card in Commander. Though, in all seriousness, Oracle’s Vault doesn’t need to cast you more than one free spell a turn to be an insane value engine for decks that lack card advantage. White decks everywhere rejoice for another artifact that can help them keep up with the other, more card draw heavy colors.

And there you have it! What do you think of Oracle’s Vault? Future Commander all star or roleplayer in card advantage-lite decks? Is it unplayable jank? Let me know what you think and keep the conversation going below!

There’s been some talk recently in the Commander community about card choice for everyone’s favorite 100-card format. When it comes to a format like Commander, players have thousands upon thousands of cards to choose from when building their decks, but there are some cards that see play more often than not. These cards are the format staples, cards that general consensus says are auto-includes in any deck that can run them. For Commander, this includes cards like Sol Ring, Solemn Simulacrum, Cyclonic Rift, Chaos Warp, Sylvan Library, Cryptic Command…the list goes on. These are the cards that are just too powerful or versatile to ignore when building your 100-card singleton deck. Or, that’s the conventional wisdom anyway. Recently, there have been a couple of big voices calling for Commander players to move away from some of these staples in favor of lesser known alternatives or more customized options for your deck’s strategy.

Adam Styborski: Five Commander Cards to Stop Playing in Every Single Deck

Jimmy Wong, Josh Lee-Kwai, and Sam Gaglio: Straying From Staples with TheMagicManSam

Above are two links to some content that goes over the arguments in more detail than I can cover in an introduction, so go check out the content from Adam and The Command Zone for a more nuanced look at what we’re talking about here. (Yes, I realize I’m giving you homework, but this stuff is quality so it won’t really feel like it. Go support other Magic content creators!)

I love the sentiment. Let me start by saying that. I can definitely appreciate the idea that people should try and make more interesting card choices in their Commander deck-building process. Magic is a truly massive game, with thousands of moving pieces, so it would be a shame to ignore all the hidden gems waiting for you in favor of playing the same universally powerful cards in every deck. I get it, and I try to incorporate it to some extent in my deck-building process. Things like playing Dark Salvation as a removal spell in my Gisa and Geralf Zombies list are a good example of the straying from staples line of thinking. Get creative.

It’s a great sentiment, and I do honestly believe Commander is more fun when we do truly unique and unexpected things. However, there are some potential issues with suggesting people should drop some of the most powerful cards in the format in favor of less powerful but more interesting or flavorful options (depending on how you approach deck-building).

1: People Love Playing with Power

This is as close to a universal truth for Magic as it gets. Due to the number of ways in which Magic players enjoy and experience the game, universal truths are hard to come by. This gets pretty close, though. People like doing things that make them feel powerful. They like affecting the boardstate. They like to present threats that feel like they have to be answered urgently. Powerful spells let people feel powerful. This argument doesn’t necessarily apply to stuff like Solemn Simulacrum or Chaos Warp. Good, solid answers and utility are kind of in their own category and they serve the purpose of shoring up weaknesses a color or colors might otherwise have. This more applies to things like Craterhoof Behemoth in Green (#hoofem) or Cyclonic Rift in Blue. These cards are clearly powerful, and will often result in whoever cast them winning the game. Of course people want to play these spells.

The problem really comes in when you ask people to actively not play these very powerful and versatile cards. I can really only speak for myself, but I know that choosing not to play Cyclonic Rift in a Blue deck just feels wrong. It feels like you’re worsening your chances of winning to try and do something that is ultimately less powerful. I don’t really have the space to dive into complex dichotomy of playing to win vs. playing to have fun (though I plan to visit it in the future). There are plenty of arguments to be made that sacrificing win percentage shouldn’t matter in Commander, but winning is fun and staples do a good job of helping you get there.

2: If I Don’t Play Them, Other People will just Beat me with Them

This is a argument I’ve seen a lot of in response to the straying from staples idea. And, it definitely has merit. Even if you should decide to begin cutting staples from your decks to make room for more varied and specialized cards, there is no such guarantee that other players will. The argument goes that if you choose to not play Sol Ring, you’ll still have to face it down across the table. Why should you give up that edge when your opponents won’t? You can make all the arguments you want about how Sol Ring isn’t as good as people think it is and that it’s no better than drawing a basic land in the late game; that doesn’t change the fact that it enables some absurdly powerful starts that can be very difficult (insurmountable in some cases) to come back from. If your play group can agree to play without these powerful format staples, more power to you. House rules are valid and important for a primarily casual format. However, straying from outside your circle and playing with people from other metas (playgroups are basically metas for Commander) could result in some clashes in ideology.

Point being, this is really only a problem if you care about potentially giving up an edge against people who choose to play staples. If you aren’t in it solely for the win, this can still result in fun and interesting games of Commander. That is unless your opponents are oppressively beating you down with a deck full of just the most powerful format staples known to Commander.

There are plenty of other angles to look at this from, but I want to close out this foray into the Commander staples discussion by talking about what I see as the middle ground. Jimmy, Josh, and Sam get at this in their discussion, but I feel it is worth expounding on here. I believe it’s possible to make creative deck-building decisions without totally sacrificing power. This may involve leaving some staples on the bench in favor of other more specialized versions of the card. For example: Playing Skullwinder instead of Eternal Witness because you’re building a snake tribal deck. You still get the effect but get to play a card that doesn’t get played as often. Another example: Playing Sakura-Tribe Elder instead of Wood Elves in your Meren of Clan Nel Toth deck because it gives you a sacrifice trigger to generate an experience counter. I know both of those examples are Green, but they work to illustrate the point really well. There are so many cards in the game now that you should be able to find the effect you want in a form that synergizes well with your deck’s strategy and themes. Oreskos Explorer instead of Tithe to ramp in a Flicker Deck.

This has run a little longer than usual, huh? So what do you think? To staple or not to staple? Should Commander players think twice before auto-including powerful format staples in all their decks? Should they forgo the staples in favor of more unique deck-building? Or are we looking at something in between? Keep the discussion going and I look forward to seeing what you all think. This was a bit of a departure from the previous entries, but I plan to do more topic based articles like this in the future, so stay tuned!

I need to start this week’s Cryptic Commander with a question. How do you feel about tutor effects in Commander? Tutors are powerful cards in that they dramatically increase the consistency of a deck by acting as second, third, fourth…(how many tutors are you running?) copies of a card. Tutors make combo decks deadly efficient and reduce a lot of the variance inherent in a 100 card singleton format. Depending on how you view Commander, that may or may not be a good thing. I stand firmly in the middle when it comes to tutors in that I think narrower tutors that can only get certain types of cards are acceptable in the right deck so long as you don’t go overboard. If you’re not using your tutors to do the same thing every time, then where’s the harm in having greater access to the cards in your deck? With that in mind, let me introduce you to today’s spotlight.

Situational Tutor is the name of the game today as we look at this marvelous piece of equipment right here. The equip cost may be high, but the ability to pay WR to unequip and search your deck for a Red or White Instant with CMC 4 or less and cast it for free is a nice kicker. The +4/+0 isn’t too shabby either. So, let’s break this down a little bit. Sunforger does three very specific things for you when you play it.

1)It gives a creature a big ole power boost for to punch in for big damage. One of the places Sunforger fits best is in a Voltron style R/W deck that wants to kill someone in one hit. 4 additional power will get you there a good amount of the time.

2)When you have Sunforger equipped and the mana open to use its ability, you have access to a toolbox of whatever instants you decided to include in your deck to take advantage of the Sunforger. That flexibility alone is probably enough to justify including it in your R/W/x deck.

3)It does both of those things without costing an additional card from your hand. Unlike traditional tutors, Sunforger doesn’t cost you a card or extra mana to search your deck and cast an instant. In fact, Sunforger often lets you cast an instant for less mana than you would have otherwise.

Red and White have historically had issues with card advantage in Commander. It’s been getting a little better recently, but they still fall behind the other colors in terms of card draw. What Sunforger presents is an opportunity for you to make up for the lack of card draw in those colors by giving you access to a carefully curated suite of spells at instant speed. When you can’t draw cards, the next best thing is tutoring for the exact card you need. Sunforger is no Demonic Tutor, but I’d argue that’s what makes it more appealing. Situational tutors require you to build your deck in more specific ways and are more limited in their ability to make games play out in the same way over and over again. I’m sure there are some combos Sunforger enables. How could there not be? However, the amount of flexibility Sunforger represents is too compelling to dismiss. Let’s take a look at some of the options, shall we?

Hmmm...what’s that? You want a comprehensive list of every Red or White instant that could be cast off of Sunforger? Alright, since you asked so nicely.

...

Yeah...that’s too many to cover in one article.You get the idea. You have so many options to choose from. And you aren’t limited to purely white or red spells. As long an instant has a white or red mana symbol in its CMC, you’re golden (as long as you’re conforming to the color identity of your Commander that is). Let your imagination run wild!

With Sunforger in play, you’re never out of cards! You have an entire list of instants to cast from your deck without having to use a card from your hand. That kind of flexibility and value is something a R/W deck should strongly consider if it wants to overcome the card advantage gap. So, I’ll leave you with some of my personal favorite targets for Sunforger before closing out.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. So, does Sunforger get your gears turning? What do you want to cast off it?

Thank you for joining me for another entry of Cryptic Commander! As always, I hope this have been informative for some of you, and that the conversation will continue after it leaves my hands. Sunforger has a lot of potential in Commander, and I’m sure you’re all more than capable of unleashing it.

Thanks!