"Ask not for whom the wolf howls, it howls for you." - not actually a quote by anyone.

Double-faced cards are neat, and I love playing Gruul: something about just resonates with me on an instinctual level (Golgari and Selesnya on the other hand are the flip side, as I'm instinctively repelled by both those combinations; my brain has decided those are wrong and won't brook any arguments on the subject), which is why I love the fact that when Wotc decided to bring back the tribe for Innistrad and finally do them justice, they made them Gruul, instead of putting them in black like the original 3 (extremely terrible) non-transforming sort (now of course we also have the transforming sort in all 5 colors, but they're still almost all Gruul).

One of the first things I did when I jumped into actually collecting/playing Magic was to track down all the Innistrad and Dark Ascension werewolves and throw them all into a 60-card deck together, which I didn't get to play with nearly as often as I'd like because A) at that point it was very much not a standard deck anymore (not that I care about Standard) so the pool of possible opponents was limited and B) if I'm playing Magic it's probably a game of Commander, because Commander is the best format (science fact).

So I decided to combine my affection for werewolves with my love of Commander, and turn that deck into this one, a Wolf/Werewolf Tribal Commander deck, or "Wolfmander" deck as I prefer, which was originally comprised of things I already had in that 60-card werewolf deck and stuff I didn't that seemed "on message" (or just useful) that also wouldn't cost me an arm and a leg to acquire; I believe the first version of the deck could be built for $75 at the extreme high end. Since then I've sunk a bit more into tuning it so the off-tribe stuff mostly also interacts with wolves, along with upgrading various support elements (and with successive return trips to Innistrad, adding a bunch more werewolves to the mix and swapping out the worst ones I'd been playing for lack of options), but there are still only a handful of cards on the list that go for more than $5, with the vast majority priced somewhere under a dollar (non-foil versions of course, I got it into my head to make my Commander decks shiny some while back).

Tovolar, Dire Overlord   is the commander now because of course he is; Ulrich was only ever the commander previously because he was literally the only "on tribe" option, not because he was particularly good in that role (he really wasn't).

As for how the deck performs, well... it's werewolves: there probably still aren't enough genuinely playable members of the tribe even now after 3 trips to Innistrad (at least, not enough for a 100-card singleton format), so like any deck that's running bad cards on purpose, there are glaring weaknesses that often come up (that I'll never ever fix because that would defeat the purpose), not the least of which is that the tribe's central gimmick intrinsically gives opponents the ability to mess with my board state, without even needing to be actively going for that. If the wolf train gets rolling early and nobody has an answer at hand, things can quickly get degenerate fast (but in a fun way), but to say that it "wins infrequently" would be a massive understatement, because of course it doesn't win much: I'm playing werewolves, in Commander.

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As expected, apart from Tovolar - who is amazing, and reads like a direct apology from WotC for having so spectacularly misunderstood why we had wanted a legendary werewolf the last time we went to Innistrad - most of the werewolves from the 2nd return trip to Innistrad (spread across 2 full-size sets) were... well, "draft chaff", that you probably shouldn't put into a constructed deck, or good cards that were rendered unusable by being in the wrong dang colors; most of those bad cards were still marginally better than the bad cards I was already obliged to play for a dearth of better options however, so quite a few of the new Day/Night sort of werewolves wound up replacing the older sort of werewolves (or the eldrazi wolves from Eldritch Moon) on the list.

A handful of the new sort of werewolves though were bonkers good, in the specific context of a deck full of other werewolves and wolves at least (I certainly wasn't expecting to ever get a "Wolfish Piper", let alone one that could chain-activate if you keep dropping werewolves/wolves), and a few of those almost meet the Huntmaster criteria of just being "actually good cards, in a vacuum, that people might want to play in decks that have no other werewolves or wolves", so the average card quality of my dumb tribal deck that is bad has gone up by a surprising amount. A couple more trips back to Innistrad at this rate might be enough to finally get the last of the "french vanilla-ish" 'wolves (that I just put there) off the list.

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92% Casual

Competitive

Date added 10 years
Last updated 3 months
Legality

This deck is Commander / EDH legal.

Rarity (main - side)

21 - 0 Mythic Rares

38 - 0 Rares

18 - 0 Uncommons

9 - 0 Commons

Cards 100
Avg. CMC 3.62
Tokens Day, Emblem Arlinn Kord, Insect 1/1 G, Night, Wolf 2/2 G
Folders Commander decks that exist, EDH, considered decks, cool but not going to get, Deck Ideas, Decks I play, Favorite EDH, favorite decks, EDH Idea Folder, werewolf for sam
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