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Raff Capashen, Ship's Mage is an absolutely unique Azorius commander. Put simply, he's a Vedalken Orrery with legs, if you built the deck right. Which I sure hope I did! The goal of the deck is to embrace the politics aspect of EDH by always, ALWAYS having mana available whenever anything happens, just so you can slip a deal in with a "see my untapped lands here? Would be a shame if your creature disappeared if it ever swung my way, right?"

Of course, you won't Always have the answers you need for every situation, but when you do have them, it's absolutely game changing. AEtherspoutsing someone's entire board because they had the balls to come at you will more often then not ruin their next few turns. And Raff allows us to always have those responses up and available because our entire deck (with the exception of a very few cards) can be cast at instant speed as long as Raff is in play!

This deck relies on 2 things to win ;

  1. Make everyone else swing at eachother by fear of you having a response to their attacks

  2. Building up a a small army of evasive creatures, like thopters and such, or massive flashy artifact monsters, to be able to make the killing blow on your opponents.

The first goal is surprisingly easy to reach ; your opponents will quickly learn that coming your way is more often than not a terrible idea, as the deck is filled up with instants that mess up combat, like Domineering Will and Portal Mage, and also some cards that became instants, thanks to Raff, such as Stuffy Doll and In Bolas's Clutches. You can expect yourself to be relatively unharmed most of the game because of this.

As for the artifacts swinging in for lethal, it's also surprisingly easy, since you will rely on your opponents to win! You not getting attacked means that your opponents are hitting eachother constantly, while you are keeping mana up to flash in your artifacts at their last end step. A lot of creatures in the deck, Raff included, have some form of evasion, which makes it much easier for us to get incidental damage turn after turn and even finish off our opponents out of the blue by flashing an Ancient Stone Idol or even a Parhelion II right before our turn.

Of course, this whole strategy relies on abusing Raff's ability. As the title of the deck says, most of your turns should be "Draw, Land, Go" followed much later by a "In your end step i'll ...". The ability to keep this mana up constantly will strike fear into your opponents, and you will be in a commanding board state in no time!

After all, everyone's scared of the blue player with untapped mana. It just so happens that the blue player Always has untapped mana.

That was it for my Raff Capashen, Ship's Mage commander Deck! I sincerely hope you enjoyed it, and if you have any suggestions for improvements, i'd be glad to hear it!

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