A Commander Compulsion #2

A Commander Compulsion

squire1

15 December 2014

3513 views

Hi everyone, and welcome to another edition of Commander Compulsion, where I strive to build creative Commander decks while providing perspective and commentary on the deckbuilding process.

Thank you everyone for the feedback on the first article and keep it coming. I am always looking to improve.

As with the first article, I want to give you all a frame of reference on my deckbuilding style. I am a Johnny at heart and winning in fun ways is way better than just winning to me. My affinity for odd cards of which people are not aware is very well known in my playgroup. I build for a casual multiplayer environment rich with removal and not so much with Counterspells.

Without further ado, let's see what we are building today. The random number generator came up with 525, which according to magiccards.info/ is:

Vela the Night-Clad

Vela is a very cool commander indeed for us to examine. Originally introduced in Planechase, Vela the Night-Clad was the commander of a ninja heavy deck. Her abilities all lend very well toward that type of deck. From the bouncing of your creatures to the evasion, Ninjutsu fits with Vela the Night-Clad all the way. but since WOTC already did that one for us, lets look in other directions. There are many design perspectives from which we can build this deck, so we can have a lot of fun discussing her.

In examining Vela, the first thing we notice about Vela is the colors. I think that when the commander itself does not inspire anything from its abilities, it is important to examine its colors and see what that color combination is good at. In this case, Vela is blue and black. This color combination is good at a great many things including control, discard and mill strategies. So if Vela had nothing else to offer we could follow the colors with one of the aforementioned strategies or just black/blue good stuff. When I begin designing, I do always search for multicolored cards which share the commander's color identity because I have the ability to play them. It doesn't mean they will get much more than a look, but they at least get consideration. Of those cards like Undermine stick out as potential utility for later.

In this case however, Vela is much more interesting than just her colors. Vela's first ability is intimidate, not that interesting, but fine for commander damage type strategies. We could work from a voltron perspective and hope to push her through. Her second ability gives all of your other creatures intimidate, which is a bit more interesting. The second ability could lead to using a lot of creatures that have abilities that trigger when they deal damage like Necropolis Regent or Bident of Thassa type effects. That strategy could be fun but let's take a look at the last ability first. This ability hits all opponents and is repeatable life loss. There must be a way to exploit this (Spoiler!! - There is!). I smell a combo deck; and since we are in dimir colors(), and combo-control build seems like a solid approach. Well, that seems like a fun direction to take, so let's see where it takes us.

NOTE: This deck will likely include infinite combo potential. If your playgroup does not like or allow infinite combo decks you may want to nerf or modify the strategies discussed.

Combo decks typically aim to win via combo of assembly and are less concerned with interaction. They will often have three main components:

• Combo pieces - these are the actual cards that are needed to assemble that create a win condition very soon after assembly.
• Tutors - Tutors are cards that help you look for your combo pieces, just simply facilitators to the overall goal of the deck.
• Control elements - These are cards that protect you or more importantly your combo, so that it can go off. Counterspells, wrath effects, and spot removal thrive here.

Aside from those pieces, combo decks usually just have utility cards. These are cards like Sol Ring they are utilities or tools to help you get where you are going. Let's take a look at each of these categories.

Combo pieces

There are two cards that come to mind when I think of repeatable creature entry or exit triggers, Cloudstone Curio and palinchon. Both can go infinite if done right and both can be very good without going infinite. So let's tackle the curio first.

Cloudstone Curio

Cloudstone Curio is a very common card to using in conjunction with Aluren in green decks for infinite mana. In blue black you have to use other combos. There is only one combo in the deck that relies upon Cloudstone Curio and not Palinchron which is cloudstone curio+cloud of faeries+phantasmal image+vela the night clad - This combo will give us infinite triggers from Vela the Night-Clad which will win the game immediately. Even this gets a whole lot better with Palinchron. Cloudstone Curio may not be doing a lot of combo heavy lifting in this deck, but it can be a very important control and tutor piece by continuously bouncing ETB creatures for reuse.

Palinchron

Now palichron on the other hand is a powerhouse for combo. If you have never dealt with anyone playing Palinchron before, just know that people will not like how good this card is. If you play it, be ready to protect it or win that turn. Palinchron is the king of infinite combo play in Commander. Here are some of the combos that we will be potentially including:

• Cloud of Faeries + Cloudstone Curio + Palinchron - This combo will net you infinite bounces. This would mean with Vela the Night-Clad, infinite damage.
• Palinchron + Phantasmal Image - This will net you infinite mana. With that mana cards like Capsize become win conditions by bouncing all permanents (including lands) your opponents control to their hand. It could also be used to force a player to draw their entire deck +1 with Blue Sun's Zenith or brain geyser.
• Deadeye Navigator + Palinchron - This will also net you infinite mana. This time you end up with infinite mana that you could float to flicker any creatures as much as you want that turn with Deadeye Navigator. Mulldrifter, rune-scared demon, Overseer of the Damned and Diluvian Primordial are some great starters for this and are good with Deadeye Navigator even if you do not assemble the combo. Other creatures to be considered here are: Duplicant, Phyrexian Ingester, Nekrataal, Big Game Hunter, Shriekmaw, Bone Shredder, Shadowborn Demon, Solemn Simulacrum, Sepulchral Primordial, Reiver Demon, Sea Gate Oracle, Frost Titan, Grave Titan and Entomber Exarch.
• High Tide + Palinchron - This combo will also get you to infinite mana. I am not including this in the current deck because there is no real way to exploit High Tide beyond that in this build. But hey Fallen Empire cards FTW right?!

Something to keep in mind with these combos is that each one wins the game immediately if you have Vela the Night-Clad out.

Other combos

Something that you may notice is that any number of creatures can make Vela the Night-Clad go off once you have infinite mana. For example, cards like AEther Adept, AEthersnipe, Dinrova Horror, Man-o'-War, Mist Raven, Venser, Shaper Savant and Voidwielder can be used to bounce each other infinite times for Vela triggers if you have infinite mana. Under non-combo conditions, these creatures multitask as a control element, slowing down the game state so that you have more time to assemble your combo. Other creatures like Cavern Harpy, Dream Stalker, Faerie Impostor, Keymaster Rogue, Marsh Crocodile, Quickling, and Shrieking Drake can be used with infinite mana to set off Vela, but not control the opponents' board. I would recommend these less highly. The only exception might be Shrieking Drake and Faerie Impostor since even with limited mana, they can do some serious damage with Vela out; but even so, they will likely not make the final cut.

Since infinite mana will be easily usable in this deck, having another infinite mana combo may be beneficial. In this case we will really be adding only one card that we might not normally want in the mix, Power Artifact. This combos with Grim Monolith or Basalt Monolith. The monolith brothers are already very good, but with Power Artifact become infinite mana machines. So adding in one card in Power Artifact seems pretty good. While this combo mostly just facilitates other combo usage in the deck, it can make everything easier by drawing an opponent out, casting your whole hand, or drawing yourself some cards with Blue Sun's Zenith or brain geyser.

Control

After looking at all the flashy cool stuff that these combos can do, we also notice how fragile some of them are. In many cases they also take a considerable amount of time to assemble. This is where the control comes in. It is important to note the reason for the control, as the control elements you have are limited, and it is important to use them for the right purposes. In the case of this deck, control should be used only to protect the combo or prevent you from dying. What I mean by this is that just because an opponent has a creature that is doing 3 damage to you each turn, does not mean you should kill it or bounce it. You should only do that if your goal of combo is in jeopardy. There is only one life point that matters in this game, your last. That said, we do want a little bit of proactive control, so that attacking us is more difficult. These are all fine options: Propaganda, Koskun Falls, Ensnaring Bridge, and Collective Restraint. Of them I think that Propaganda and Ensnaring Bridge will serve us best here. Remember that these are only here to give us time to build our combos.

Our reactive control is a bit more extensive. Big threats come out often in commander and we need to be able to deal with them as soon as they come our way. Now some of the combo realated pieces we discussed before like Duplicant, Man-o'-War and Shriekmaw among others, work as creature removal. For the reactive control elements, I would break them into three categories to analyze: sweepers, spot removal and counters.

Sweepers

As you may well know, sweepers are an important part of control strategies and are integral to a wide variety of strategies in commander. The timing of sweepers is very important. The intent of these is to punish players for over-committing to the board, while you can take advantage. Some great options for sweepers exist in black and even some unique ones in blue. Let's first look at sweepers with bodies. Reiver Demon and Kederekt Leviathan are both options, I think the leviathan plays into out bouncing creature shenanigans a lot better than the demon does and may be a better choice in this deck. The great part about both is that they are reusable by flickering or bouncing them. Some good old destruction based sweepers are important too. Our best options here are Damnation, Decree of Pain, Life's Finale, Necromantic Selection, and Crux of Fate. I know how good the low cost ones are, but Necromantic Selection seems really good in this deck. If Vela the Night-Clad is out, just cast this , get triggers from your other creatures and bring her back. I also like Life's Finale here. As a combo deck, getting his one or two creatures that you know might be a problem before they emerge is a great idea. Aside from that I would go with Crux of Fate. The reason being is an odd piece of tech I am going to discuss later (Will it be worth it? Not likely. But super cute if you pull it off).

While [kederekt leviathan]] takes care of indestructible creatures, the rest I selected do not. We have a few options to deal with these. We could go with -X/-X effects using Black Sun's Zenith or Toxic Deluge. Of the two Black Sun's Zenith seems the most appropriate since its reusable and we can pay X into it and I am hoping to not have mana trouble. Now we could also look at exile effects like Perilous Vault, but this is a dangerous spell to use. It is also pretty slow. I would rather have a bounce card that is faster because we are just trying to stifle players until the inevitable. For mass bounce options, the best we have is Cyclonic Rift, Devastation Tide, and Evacuation. Cyclonic Rift is a straight out game changer in commander and if you have blue in your commander's color identity, you run it. I think that Evacuation is the other answer that we want. It too is an instant which is pretty great. This allows us to take advantage of sloppy playing and over-commitment by opponents.

Spot removal

Targeted removal or spot removal is used as either quick reactions to what your opponents are doing or as a scalpel approach to making them less effective in their plans. Previously I mentioned a few creatures that would work with our infinite blink strategy that qualify as spot removal as well, like Duplicant, Phyrexian Ingester, Nekrataal, Overseer of the Damned, Big Game Hunter, Bone Shredder, Shriekmaw, and Shadowborn Demon. Each one of these would be great for removal. If they need to be cut though, I would go with dulicant, phyrexian ingestor first because of the exile rather than destroy. These cards solve more problems than the rest. Overseer of the Damned being flickered, just seems too good not to add. The rest are all a little more questionable due to the various limitations of what creatures they can each handle.

Bouncing creatures or bounce effects in general can be considered spot removal. Generally speaking bounce is only temporary removal; but, if a player has a difficult creature to deal with, bouncing it and then waiting to counter it is a good strategy. The creatures we talked about being able to bounce were: AEther Adept, AEthersnipe, Cavern Harpy, Dinrova Horror, Dream Stalker, Faerie Impostor, Keymaster Rogue, Man-o'-War, Marsh Crocodile, Mist Raven, Quickling, Shrieking Drake, Venser, Shaper Savant, Voidwielder, and Mistblade Shinobi. While all the self bounce ideas sound great on the surface, bouncing my AEther Adept with Quickling and playing it again for another bounce effect is a little too slow and inefficient at a cost of and for a bounce effect respectively. We really want Cloudstone Curio to do that for free. So for the final product we will keep AEthersnipe, AEther Adept, Man-o'-War, Mist Raven, Venser, Shaper Savant and Voidwielder. I know that Voidwielder is a bit loose here and should possibly be something like Mnemonic Wall just for the tech, but I think it is the right choice before playtesting the deck.

Other spot removal to consider does not involve creatures bounce shenanigans. I thought about Evil Twin for copying and destroying multiple creatures by bouncing it back to hand and recasting, but that seems slow and clunky. I am highly considering necropolis field since I have little use of my graveyard so far; this is a nice beater and a consistent source of hard removal. Throat Slitter is certainly in the spirit of this deck and honestly in a budget or non-combo version he makes the cut, but here, I think he is just too slow. I considered Hero's Downfall, Murder, Murderous Cut and Dismember as a removal spell package, but room permitted more slots for the creature-based removal than spell-based so only Hero's Downfall sticks around. I think downfall is the natural choice because it deals with so many threats. Now these are all good spells and given different scenarios and budgeting, I would make very different choices. From some assorted other cards I considered (Gate to Phyrexia, Profane Command, Curse of the Swine and Brittle Effigy) only Profane Command and Curse of the Swine made the cut. I made this decision for two reasons; I think these spells are the most flexible and these spells are X spells, so infinite mana plays very well with them.

Counterspell

One last type of removal to explore. Some people may disagree that this is removal, but the way I see it, removal removes threats. I do not care if the threat is in hand, in the graveyard, on the battlefield, or on the stack. A threat is a threat regardless of location. The idea of Counterspells is that they remove threats on the stack. There are hundreds of Counterspells in this game and at least dozens that are good. For this I looked at the following: Dimir Charm, Draining Whelk, Counterspell, Countersquall, Cryptic Command *list*, Familiar's Ruse, Force of Will, Glen Elendra Archmage, Hinder, Mana Drain, Pact of Negation, Power Sink, Spell Crumple and Undermine. Of these only a few were kept. I kept Mana Drain because it is the best counterspell in the game simply put. I kept Familiar's Ruse over Counterspell (normally blasphemy) because in this deck bouncing a creature can mean value. If that bites me back too much, I would just switch to Counterspell. I also kept the commander staples Hinder and Spell Crumple. These two are just really good in commander against all sorts of replacement effect creatures like commanders and eldrazi. The last one I kept is Draining Whelk. I love this guy and in some cases he can be bounced back for value. The rest got cut for space issues mostly. If there is room, I would like to fit in Glen Elendra Archmage. At worse she is a double Negate, at best she blocks a ton and negates all game by bouncing and recasting her. The other cuts are for a variety of reasons. Let's face it Countersquall and Undermine are both playable, but are really only part of the conversation because we are in those colors. Both Force of Will and Pact of Negation are amazing but not here; I think that we are not hard enough control to justify the risks of these cards. I don't want to be pitching cards from my hand and don't have a ton of card draw, so force becomes less attractive. Pact is too dangerous in many cases or just not useful.

Tutors

While the combo and control portions are what make the deck truly what it is, if we can never find any of those pieces in a singleton format such as this, then they are useless. This is why tutors of all sorts are needed in commander. That said, I am only going to put a few in. Our general strategy is to slow opponent plans enough to draw into what we need. With the overall bounce strategy that we have going on Rune-Scarred Demon seems like a good place to start. With a viable body and a very relevant ability. Since artifact search is so helpful for some of our combo pieces, Tezzeret the Seeker and Fabricate will also go in. The worst case for each is that they ramp us a bit with mana rocks. I considered drift of the phantasms but it seemed like it was really only looking for curio and I needed to cut but under the right conditions is a great tutor. Demonic Tutor is an easy add in any black deck. I also like Increasing Ambition a lot in this build for its reuse ability. I think it's usually a nice piece in Commander. Now I realize how many tutors are in black and how many I did not mention. Part of that is because there is no room in the deck and part is because cards on top of my deck are just not that great in my opinion. I am just not that excited for a lot of the black tutors in MTG.

Ramp

Ramp is a huge part of commander. It allows us to do bigger and better things with our turns than our opponents and earlier. As part of our combos we have already included Basalt Monolith and Grim Monolith. In addition, I think that we can make room for some more mana rocks for our artifact fetchers to grab. I suggest Sol Ring as always. In addition, I think that Dimir Keyrune, Talisman of Dominance, and Dimir Signet seem appropriate. I think that the keyrune might be questionable. Commander sphere or even Dimir Cluestone might be better if our card draw is too week. Speaking of card draw and ramp, Solemn Simulacrum is a great creature that loves to be blinked and bounced and killed, so I think he will do a lot of work.

Random tech

The first thing that I want to address with my tech is timing. Many of the creatures and spells we have get considerably better at instant speed. To facilitate this we have Winding Canyons, Vedalken Orrery and Leyline of Anticipation as options. Winding Canyons is a land, so no problem. I do not have room for both leyline and orrery. They are functionally the same card, but I am going to go with Vedalken Orrery due to the amount of artifact search we have in our deck already.

If you recall earlier, I said that I had a reason for using Crux of Fate, well here it is. This idea is just cute, please feel free to take it out in your versions if you build this, but I love it. Alright, so the plan is to have Vela the Night-Clad and a whole bunch of used up enter the battlefield trigger dudes. Then we play Umbilicus or Blood Clock which are fun on their own with our creatures. The next step is to play Day of the Dragons which gives us a nice army to battle with and it triggers vela when your stuff leaves play. When you are ready, let Umbilicus or Blood Clock send Day of the Dragons to your hand and you get all the ETB triggers again. Rinse repeat. I know it might be cuter than good, but that is what casual commander is in many cases. I also added a few lands with just normally useful tech. Minamo, School at Water's Edge can allow our commander to attack and block. Creeping Tar Pit is better if we go with the ninja non-combo route, otherwise it is just a creature and land, still good. Bojuka Bog and Relic of Progenitus are great against graveyard strategies. Academy Ruins to recover a few artifacts that we might lose. The only other major tech is Consecrated Sphinx. He is just a good creature. He can be a finisher, blocker, a card draw engine. He is all around good in this deck. After building most of the deck i also realized that I had room for one card due to an interaction not working as I wanted it to. This left room for a card that should really be in any deck that can fit it, Sensei's Divining Top. The top is an amazing card that will help smooth the draws in this deck a lot.

The rest of the mana base is a traditional two color commander mana base. I used cycle lands from each color (Barren Moor and Lonely Sandbar), dual lands from these colors including pain lands (Dimir Aqueduct, Dismal Backwater, Drowned Catacomb, Jwar Isle Refuge, Sunken Ruins, Tainted Isle, Watery Grave, Temple of Deceit, Underground River, Underground Sea), a fetch land (Polluted Delta), a couple of maybe useful nonbasics that do not hold us back at all (Oboro, Palace in the Clouds, Shizo, Death's Storehouse, Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth), 9 Islands and 8 Swamps. And with that we have a complete deck. Here is the finished product:

Commander Compulsion #2

Commander / EDH* squire1

SCORE: 10 | 5 COMMENTS | 747 VIEWS | IN 1 FOLDER

Until Next Time

As always, I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoy writing it. I think that this is a really fun deck. After I playtested it a bit, it seems to work really well. If anyone builds a deck using Vela the Night-Clad, please shoot me a line in the comments and tell us about other interactions that you have found to be fun and exciting.

As for all of the comments from the last article about how Commanders will be picked, first i would like to say thank you for all the suggestions. I think that for right now, the random thing is a great idea. in the future as new sets are released, maybe I will work on commander decks using legendary creatures from the new set to explore the potential. in addition, I may even open it up to requests at some point, but not yet.

With that said, I spun the Wheel of Fortune for next time already and landed on Omnath, Locus of Mana. So for next time I can either do Omnath as planned or do Yasova Dragonclaw from our next set, Fate Reforged. Let me know in the comments which you would be more interested in.