Top of the evening to ya, ladies and gents! Welcome back to Konglicker's Premiere Primers, where I take a commander that's never been played before and brew a brand new deck around it, speculating its ideal strategy and playstyle!
My god... Wizards just keeps on giving us the spice. It was less than two weeks after writing a Premiere Primer for
Marisi, Breaker of the Coil
post-Commander 2019 that Throne of Eldraine spoilers started flying left and right.
Syr Konrad, the Grim
was the Premiere Primer I chose to write from among the first batch spoiled because hey, the Uncommon legends need some love too.
But by God, was a monster of a spoiler released today, this 10th of September 2019. It got me so excited that I just had to make myself write another Premiere Primer. Why, you ask? The commander I'm about to introduce you to checks so many of my personal boxes for "what makes a great commander". The flavor, the stats, the abilities, the implications, a depth of deck-building deeper than any mystical lake in a medieval forest!
You saw it here first, ladies and gents: the
Emry, Lurker of the Loch
Premiere Primer!
The General
Holy fish sticks, Batman! This commander is bonkers, and I'll explain why in every detail if a preliminary read doesn't give you a good enough picture already.
Emry, Lurker of the Loch
is a 1/2 Legendary Merfolk Wizard for just . She has affinity for artifacts (without explicitly saying so), costing less to cast for each artifact you control. You mill yourself four cards when she enters the battlefield. Tap her to target an artifact in your graveyard: you can cast it from your graveyard this turn.
When I'm assessing a commander's potential, one of the first things I look at is its casting cost. Emry is cheap and can come out as early as turn two, already a huge plus in my book. Commanders that can influence the board early and often are far better than those that can't come out until turn 5 or 6 with no ramp; the wait is agonizing and those commanders are more easily hated out of the game with removal.
I'm also of the belief that ANY commander that can circumvent commander tax is in its own tier above all the rest, as that rule is one of the defining limitations of the format. By having affinity for artifacts, Emry joins an elite pantheon of commanders that either completely mitigate the downside of paying commander tax or can avoid it completely; the elite group includes
Prossh, Skyraider of Kher
,
Derevi, Empyrial Tactician
,
Squee, the Immortal
,
Squee, Goblin Nabob
, Derigaaz Reincarnated,
Ghalta, Primal Hunger
,
Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow
,
Licia, Sanguine Tribune
,
Zacama, Primal Calamity
and a few others.
The final variable that makes Emry so good is her activated ability: she's free to tap. This makes her far more easy to combo off with, as no mana needs to be netted to pay for that activated ability. Just like activated abilities that cost colorless mana and don't require the creature to tap (infinite mana sinks), her ability puts her in the "high potential to be broken" camp.
So, lets do just that with a mono-blue artifact storm deck.
Deck Strategy and Playstyle
Emry wants a deck filled to the brim with super cheap artifacts so that the most you'll ever have to pay for her is a single blue mana. BUT, they cannot just be any cheap artifact. If we're going to get the most value out of her graveyard casting trigger, they should be EGGS. An "egg" is a cheap artifact that you can sacrifice, or "crack" in Magic lingo, for value. The best ones typically draw you cards, scry, fix your mana, etc. Some do damage but I don't believe mono-blue has access to those. Because we're building a fast combo deck, eggs that draw us cards and can sacrifice themselves are the top tier.
For the cheap artifacts that can't sacrifice themselves, we obviously need artifact sac outlets, the very best of which is obviously
Krark-Clan Ironworks
. KCI is a recurring demon in my favorite artifact builds. Banned in Modern, it can still flex pretty hard in EDH, especially for decks like ours. We include plenty of other sac outlets for redundancy's sake. As we churn through our deck, our goal is to cast one card-drawing egg from our graveyard per turn to beat the table in the card advantage game.
There are four win conditions so far that I can conceive with Emry, and all three can fit in the deck at once:
-
Commander damage: Cheap equipments that automatically attach themselves to Emry when she enters the battlefield allow her to attack and win Voltron-style. We don't care if she's removed, because the number of artifacts we play keep her extremely cheap.
-
Mirrodin Besieged
: Remember that Emry's ETB is to mill you 4 cards. If we can tutor up this enchantment, cast it and select the second mode, our gameplan will shift to blinking and casting Emry repeatedly, then sacrificing all artifacts we control to kill our opponents one by one.
-
Storm: With enough cards that can untap our commander, artifact cost reducers, and sac outlets, we can draw and cast our entire deck to win with
Aetherflux Reservoir
.
-
Mill ourselves, then
Laboratory Maniac
/
Jace, Wielder of Mysteries
.
The deck is pretty straightforward. I will say that this is still a rough draft and I've yet to figure out which utility lands work best in the deck, but I will say that I've had a blast goldfishing this thing and discovering neat little interactions. I will say this: you get a ton of value right from the get-go. While some decks take their time in picking up speed, Emra if built right can floor the gas right out of the gate. I highly encourage you to give her a look. She isn't quite as broken as
Urza, Lord High Artificer
, but she's still pretty damn powerful.
WARNING: Your turns will take a while. Practice heavily by yourself with whatever list you generate to minimize the misery at your local game store.
I'll continue to update the list as I experiment. I hope you enjoyed this preliminary write-up!
