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Accepting Challenges

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Alexi, Zephyr Mage
EDHREC, a fantastic resource that you should be aware of if you’re not already, published a list recently and posted it on reddit. The list was titled “List of unplayed commanders” and it consisted of all of the commanders that had three or fewer entries on EDHREC.com. If you’re not familiar, EDHREC scours databases where people post their Commander decks. It compiles and analyzes the contents to let you know what proportion of players are using certain cards in builds for given commanders and helps make recommendations (hence the “rec” part) to players attempting to build a given deck. If three or fewer total people across multiple websites, like TappedOut and Deckbox, have even submitted a decklist for a given commander, you can bet the commander is pretty weak or ineffective. My first thought, before I even clicked on the link to read the list was “Challenge Accepted!” Building the best possible deck we can build with a commander people aren’t building with, for a reason, as long as we don’t completely abandon our other deck-building guidelines, is going to be an excellent way to approach building a 75% deck. We’ll either get a deck where the commander doesn’t help a ton, and we’ll have to really lean on the cards in the deck, or we’ll get a Commander whose effect isn’t right for Commander at all. Either way, building the best deck we can likely ensures the end result is 75%.

That is, unless we find some hidden gems on the list. Perhaps there is a commander on there that is overlooked because it’s simply a bad version of an existing commander and there’s no reason not to just play the better one. When looking at the list of commanders EDHREC generated (there are a few missing, as pointed out in this reddit post) I noticed Zhuge Jin, Wu Strategist. I started thinking about all of the sweet creatures Blue has which draw cards and have other cool effects when they get through unblocked. My brainstorming session ended about 30 seconds later when I realized I had invented the Sun Quan, Lord of Wu deck where only one of your creatures has “horsemanship” some of the time. Looks like Sun Quan took all of the Dilu horses and left Zhuge Jin with the scraps. So, while I was proud of how much Zhuge Jin excited me for those 30 glorious seconds, it’s likely Zhuge is underplayed because there’s basically no reason not to play Sun Quan, especially when you factor in how cheap Sun Quan got after the FTV printing.

We don’t want to build a bad version of a better deck, nor do we want a deck where our commander will never do anything. As much as I like DImir colors, Riven Turnbull just doesn’t seem worth it to me. Call me crazy, but if I just want an excuse to be in those colors, I could pick a commander that occasionally does something. Sygg, River Cutthroat, for example. So while I could build a deck with Riven Turnbull at the helm, I’m still a worse version of the same deck with an actual commander in the command zone.

Myojin of Life's Web
What I want to find is a commander that takes a bit of work but is ultimately worth it. Make no mistake, the list isn’t all Riven Turnbulls. There are very good cards on the list and there are several reasons for this. Some of them have abilities that don’t apply well to Commander, such as creatures with grandeur like Oriss, Samite Guardian (and don’t have abilities that make up for it like Korlash, Heir to Blackblade does). Others have good but very narrow abilities, like Hivis of the Scale or Major Teroh. Others are cards we desperately want to be cool but which have abilities that were created when they had no idea how to make Magic, cards like Lord Magnus, Lord Magnus being the card that gets my vote for “worst abilities to name and art badassery ratio”, a category I made up. The last category of cards on this list, but are still good cards, is cards that are just too awkward to play in Commander to be worth the trouble, like Myojin of Life's Web. These criteria eliminate a lot of the cards on the list from what we’re looking for, which is “good and somehow overlooked.” It’s going to take some real digging to find something I want to build around, but I think we can do it.

The three I came up with were Myojin of Life's Web, Yuan Shao, the Indicisive, and Alexi, Zephyr Mage. Alexi seems very strong but hard to keep sated given the big cost to using her ability. Mono-Blue should not have any problems keeping the hand full, though. Yuan Shao basically makes all of your creatures unblockable, or at least tough to deal with, and coupled with some combat buffs and Red’s ability to make a bunch of tokens, it could be fun. Myojin was the final finalist. It will take work to get Myojin into your hand and therefore castable since you won’t get the Divinity counter if you cast it from the command zone (that is, unless you use That Which Was Taken!), but being able to dump your whole mitt on the table seems worth it. Ultimately, I think Yuan Shao is a little too weak and Myojin is a little too fraught to be worth it. Sure, there are ways to get Myojin into your hand or get counters on it, and I love the idea of dumping like 4 Eldrazi on the table; but, ultimately, you have to do a ton of work to get your hand full of creatures on top of working to make sure you somehow get a divinity counter on Myojin. I think Alexi is flexible and strong, letting you re-buy your own creatures as well as keeping theirs off of the board. I read the reddit thread later, and they came to basically the same conclusions I did vis-a-vis both Alexi and Green Myojin being good with Alexi being the best to build around, so I knew I was on to something. A few of them like Yuan Shao, also, though not as many as liked Skeleton Ship.

I am basically on my own since the entire reason we’re building around Alexi is it ended up on a list of cards no one else is building around. That means I need to figure out what I want the deck to do. I want to play a decent number of creatures that do things when they come into play so bouncing them to my hand if I need to means I can re-buy their triggers. I think being able to get back lands or spells out of the yard means what I pitch to Alexi’s abilities either gets better in the yard or at the very least, takes some of the sting out of having to pitch two lands. I also want to try and run as many Madness, Flashback and Retrace spells as are actually good in a Mono-Blue deck. This all puts a lot of pressure on my permanents, so I want to use a lot of permanents that can re-usably steal their stuff like Vedalken Shackles, Chamber of Manipulation, Dominating Licid, etc. This actually works out very well, because I just remembered Master Thief was a card and I wanted to write about it before I forgot. So let’s keep their stuff off of the board, steal the rest and try to get there with a political commander that could very well make them think twice about messing with you; unless they want their entire board to vanish, that is.

What would that deck look like?


This seems like it does a lot of work.

I tried to maximize the number of spells that would still be useful if you pitched them by virtue of Retrace (slim pickings in Mono-Blue) or Flashback or Madness. I didn’t have quite enough Flashback to play something like River Kelpie but I did have enough to not feel so bad about those two cards I have to discard, necessarily. Circular Logic and Fervent Denial are likely to make for some pretty surprising plays, for example. It’s not quite a Dralnu, Lich Lord deck, but we’re not going to spend 100% of our commander activations just pitching gas and regretting it.

I included a lot of ways to steal their stuff. I decided to include ways to throw it in the trash and turn it into mana with altars so you can bounce your Sower of Temptation and swipe something else or just reactivate your shackles. Sower is great in this deck because it does its 75% job of swiping their best creature and it also gets better when you return it to your hand, like your commander allows you to do. I like the idea of swiping stuff with Master Thief, also. Being able to sac their stuff and re-buy the creature that swiped it is an appeal of the deck. I’m not trying to bounce my creatures all of the time, but I like having the option open. If you can find room for Equilibrium, Cloudstone Curio or something like that, go nuts. I like being able to re-buy my Fathom Seer so I can turn excess land into trigger fodder.

The deck is pretty straightforward-looking, but it was a little tougher than normal to construct. I am sure it’s not 100%, but I feel that with a little tinkering, we could get this baby purring. We’re trying to keep our hand full enough to be able to activate our commander, steal enough of their stuff to murder them with it, and have enough reasons to want to replay our creatures. This deck does all of that. Is that enough to win? Sleeving it up would go a long way to answering that, but my inclination is that this deck can surprise people and has quite a bit of power in its synergy. I wouldn’t be surprised if this could hang with decent decks. You’re certainly not going to tyrannize casual night, but I bet you win your fair share, provided they furnish you with enough good stuff to steal and don’t play more than you can bounce.

What do we think? Any glaring omissions or questionable inclusions? Would you have picked a different commander from the list or gone a different way with Alexi? Had you never heard of EDHREC before and now you’re running amok over the site like a kid in a candy store? Leave it in the comments section. Thanks for reading!


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