For the first time in MTG history, WotC has finally given us a Boros commander I would consider good. I love playing Boros in a cEDH environment due to its underdog nature, so to see us finally get our foot in the door at least a little bit is a breath of fresh air. This deck will be taking the torch from a previous deck of mine MAGA (Make Aggro Great Again) as the premier Boros cEDH deck going forward.

This deck is a Stax/Combo hybrid deck, gunning for a very low CMC with explosive mana ramp via lots of mana rocks. It is built with a cEDH enviornment in mind. No real static meta since the decks that go through my playgroup vary massively from different competetive/high tier commanders. Our general gameplan is to empty out our hands as much as possible each turn on the back of Unwinding Clock and Aetherflux Reservoir until we ramp enough life to ping our opponents to death at instant speed. Utilizing Feather, the Redeemed in order to consistently pressure the enemies with card advantage, and life gain every end step. The biggest goal I had when making this list was trying for a 25%+ winrate amongst my playgroup, and had not really considered the deck finished until I had recently hit that threshold.

Strengths

  • Tight Manabase. Being two colors means we are very rarely in a position where we cant cast something because we have the wrong colored mana. We still run cards like Mana Confluence for consistency's sake, but we are far less reliant on cards like that in order to get what we need on the field.

  • Aggressively Costed. From our commander to our decklist, almost everything we want to do in this deck is cheap. Feather, the Redeemed is a very common turn 2 play for us, needing only 1 cheap mana rock of ours on turn one, which we have a lot of. And the rest of our deck averages out at 2.2 CMC (as of writing this) which is WAY lower than almost every other deck in the cEDH enviornment. There should be very few cases where we aren't playing more than 1 card or effect a round.

  • Card Draw. Feather, the Redeemed has built in true card advantage, which we pair with almost a dozen "cantrips" for a very reliable method of card draw. Red also gives us access to the very powerful Wheel of Fortune type effects which when cast properly is more than enough card draw to net us a win more times than not.

  • Recursion. Our deck has a ton of ways to get back into the game after an unfortunate removal spell or board wipe. Mistveil Plains and Sun Titan are our big hitters for this, but we have multiple ways to get back what we need. And even more ways to tutor/draw them over and over again.

Weaknesses

  • Color Combo. Boros is unfortunately the weakest color combo in both cEDH, and EDH as a whole. White definitely gives us the most in our deck with some of the strongest stax pieces in the game. But all in all we simply lack the support to match other deck colors. Our commander may be the first good Boros commander, but until the rest of our card pool reaches her potential than we will remain the underdogs of EDH.

  • Speed. Our deck in a vacuum is slower than who we are geared to beat. cEDH is a 5 turn format, with every other deck in the top tier being able to consistently goldfish a win at the turn 5 mark. Our deck on the other hand goldfishes out at about 5/6-7 turns. In order to counter this, this deck needed as many Stax cards as we could afford in order to give us a fighting chance. An early Linvala, Keeper of Silence or Aven Mindcensor can be more than enough to buy us those 2-3 extra turns we need to even the playing field.

All in all this makes us fairly resistant to hate, but we unfortunately stumble against very fast combo decks when we do not have the right Stax card to hold them back. We are not a top tier deck, but when you know what you're fighting and what to look for in your deck to fight it, you'll find yourself winning a lot more games than the opponents would expect.

  1. What is the objective of the deck? Our deck will win almost every single game off of Aetherflux Reservoir. Unwinding Clock is the decent partner to this card, and we get to these cards off of the back of both Feather, the Redeemed and Sunforger. Most of the tutors in this deck are meant to fish for these cards, or get a card that can fish for these guys.

  2. Does the goal of the deck change based on the matchup? Yes. Our deck has a lot of ways to pull silver bullets out of our deck. Is there a Yisan, the Wanderer Bard on the table about to pop off next turn? Use your Enlightened Tutor to get a Cursed Totem instead of going for the greedy Paradox Engine pick. Lots of blue players on the field? Probably better to get Grand Abolisher with our Recruiter of the Guard instead of Stoneforge Mystic in order to try and combo off with Sunforger.

  3. What do you look for in a mulligan? Cheap mana rocks for the most part. The first thing I looks for is a way to get Feather, the Redeemed on to the field by turn 2. The ideal hand will have 2 lands, 1-2 cheap mana rocks, and a cantrip at the very least. If you have all those then absolutely keep that hand, no reason not to. Mulligan away any hand that can get your commander on the field without anything for her to do. She doesn't do anything on her own and needs cantrips to get the ball rolling. A lot of our tutors can get Sunforger so if you have a way to get that on to the field very fast in your opening hand then that can count for giving our commander "something to do".

  4. What do each of your turns generally look like? Turn 1 is almost always a ramp play, try and cram as mana mana rocks on to the field as possible here. Cards like Land Tax are also very powerful turn 1 plays if the turn order allows it. Turn 2 will see us playing Feather, the Redeemed more times than not. If you cont have a cantrip to play with her, or wont be able to get any value off of her triggered ability with what you have in your hand, then consider playing the Stax cards in your hand. If all else fails, getting our 3 CMC mana rocks on turn 2 is good as well. Turn 3 is usually when we can start drawing cards. By now you should be able to draw 1-2 cards a turn the entire round. If not then I tend to dedicate the entire turn 3 to playing Sunforger and getting it attached to a creature on the field with just enough mana to search for a card that round. Turn 4 is when we want to get our win conditions on the field. Hopefully you've either drawn into them, or into a way to search them. And finally turn 5+ is when we try and win. At this point we are looking to combo out of control, get yourself some protection via Silence and try and close out the game from here on out. This gameplan as a whole is slowed down equal to the number of turn you dedicate to stax cards, which is fine, A slow win is better than a fast loss. So dont feel bad about not hitting these turns exactly, this was in a vacuum and you can never expect to just win a game without having to first interact with the opponents board.

  5. What is your deck's contingency plan? Eventually somebody is going to swing the game in their favor. Perhaps a nasty Vandalblast reset your progress. Well have no fear, our deck packs a LOT of recursion. Mistveil Plains is a card I cannot stress enough with how good it is. This card is a PLAINS, which means it is tutorable, always keep that in the back of your mind. If you have already tutored for our win conditions, yet have more tutors in our hands, please hold on to them. Dont waste them looking for weaker cards just so you can give them something to do. Since you can always tuck your win conditions back into the deck and tutor them back out with cards like Sun Titan, Inventors' Fair, and Buried Ruin as well. We also run a lot of wheel effects. Drawing 7 is probably one of the strongest comebacks we can do, even if it gives the enemy card draw as well.

-Smothering Tithe + Wheel of Fortune/Reforge the Soul/Memory Jar. This is the nastiest swing our deck can pull off. Very very rarely will an opponent be able to pay for the cost of 7 Smothering Tithe triggers, which on a full board nets us 21 mana in order to empty out our fresh new hand of 7 cards! Do not underestimate how well this can shut the game down.

-Sunforger + Magnetic Theft. This tends to be the very first card I will tutor for with my Sunforger if there is no immediate threat I need to deal with on the board. It makes our Sunforger tutoring much much easier to do. And even let's us steal the enemies Swiftfoot Boots if needed.

-Sunforger + Enlightened Tutor. Usually our main way to pull Aetherflux Reservoir from the deck is like this. And if you are worried that Sunforger will shuffle away the card you put on the top of your deck with Enlightened Tutor do not worry, it does not.

-Feather, the Redeemed + Aurelia's Fury + 12 mana. Losing the ability to cast noncreature spells can kill off almost every cEDH deck in the top tier environment. It's a very expensive combo to pull off if you want to shut down the entire table, especially if you want to hit every player, every turn. But just hitting the 1-2 guys that really need to land there combo pieces will turn the game in your favor.

Suggestions

Updates Add

As is tradition, I am super late to updating my deck (sorry about that) Mainly in part of there only being a few changes to make (Boros didn't get a lot of good cEDH cards, go figure) But it is finally up to date once again :D

Just a few changes to our mana rocks and ramp. The first addition is Arcane Signet being added, kind of a no-brainer, this card is an auto inclusion in almost every commander deck on the market. It will be replacing our slowest mana rock Coldsteel Heart as a direct upgrade to a 2 mana mana rock slot. And secondly we will be replacing Thought Vessel with red's newest addition to cEDH, Dockside Extortionist. As stated in an earlier update, our need for maximum hand size removal has been much much less important after the Paradox Engine ban, and as such Thought Vessel had become one of the weaker mana rocks in the deck. Dockside Extortionist produces colored mana as well, which is SO much better in this kind of deck. So although he is more of a burst ramp card, he definitely gets the ball rolling a lot faster than Thought Vessel would.

As always changes are listed below :D

Removing

Adding

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Casual

98% Competitive

Revision 3 See all

(4 years ago)

-1 Coldsteel Heart main
-1 Prismatic Vista maybe
-1 Sunbaked Canyon maybe
-1 Talisman of Conviction maybe
-1 Thought Vessel main
Top Ranked
Date added 4 years
Last updated 4 years
Legality

This deck is Commander / EDH legal.

Rarity (main - side)

12 - 0 Mythic Rares

50 - 0 Rares

16 - 0 Uncommons

17 - 0 Commons

Cards 100
Avg. CMC 2.17
Tokens Treasure
Folders Feather pie raker, Decks to build, Feather, Feather, Good Ideas, commandah, EDH, EDH, Comp, nutz
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