Ask your play group before building this deck, as Nephilim are not technically legal as commanders. However, if they were, this would be the one to build.
The basic idea is as follows: Ramp with a bunch of creatures like
Birds of Paradise
,
Noble Hierarch
,
Faeburrow Elder
, etc. Give your opponents a bunch of creatures with cards like
Forbidden Orchard
,
Hunted Troll
and
Dowsing Dagger
. Play simple creature lands like
Blinkmoth Nexus
,
Mutavault
,
Mishra's Factory
, or
Dryad Arbor
. That way you can guarantee there are at least a small handful of creatures on the board by turn 3-6.
Hopefully by turn 3 or 4 you can cast your commander
Ink-Treader Nephilim
. If you ramped enough, you might even be able to cast it that early and hold up a protection spell to make sure it comes back to you with your commander still around. Once you have Ink-Treader around with a handful of creatures on the board, you can really get going.
The real spice of this deck is to use cards with Splice into Arcane to build-your-own-spells and copy them a million times. For example, lets look at the cards
Candles' Glow
,
Desperate Ritual
and
Evermind
. If you cast
Candles' Glow
targeting
Ink-Treader Nephilim
you can declare on cast that you are splicing
Desperate Ritual
and
Evermind
into
Candles' Glow
's text. This means that
Candles' Glow
will read as:
-Prevent the next 3 damage that would be dealt to any target this turn. You gain life equal to the damage prevented this way.
-Add
-Draw a card.
Since
Candles' Glow
only has one target (slash, since Ink-Treader is the only target of the spell) Ink-Treater's ability will copy
Candles' Glow
with all the spliced wording on it for each creature on the board including creatures your opponents control. If you had six creatures on the board, for example, you will prevent the next 3 damage dealt to each of them, then add a total of 18 , then draw 6 cards, all for . Furthermore, the only card that goes to the graveyard is
Candles' Glow
, so the rest of them are available to be cast or spliced again on your next turn, or even the same turn if you pull more arcane cards to splice into.
And this is all just level 1 for the deck. Things start to get really crazy when you have
Jeskai Ascendancy
on the battlefield. This is the other reason its so important to use creature-based ramp. If you splice a card into arcane that lets you draw cards,
Jeskai Ascendancy
will untap you mana-producing creatures so you can continue casting the spells you draw, hopefully drawing more spells to cast, splice, and untap you creatures again. A similar effect can be had without
Jeskai Ascendancy
if you can splice
Psychic Puppetry
into an arcane spell. Also, if you want to get really crazy, you can cast
Natural Affinity
with either of these cards to go almost-infinite :)
In addition to this, sometimes you cast spells that you don't want to target your own creatures, especially your commander. For example, if you cast
Fractured Identity
on
Ink-Treader Nephilim
, copying it for each creature on the battlefield. But you might not want each opponent to have a copy of
Ink-Treader Nephilim
or some other creature you control, or some other creature your opponents control for that matter. The deck has a few ways to more or less counter spells that you don't want targeting certain creatures. First,
Nivmagus Elemental
. Even though Ink-Treader copies each single-target spell for each creature on the battlefield including your opponents' creatures, you still control each of the copies. That means that you can exile any copy as per
Nivmagus Elemental
's ability while the copy is still on the stack. Another creature that does a similar thing is
Spellskite
. It only works one time, but you can redirect any spell that targets something you don't want to target to
Spellskite
. Other spells that keep your things safe from problematic cards are
Commandeer
and
Narset's Reversal
. They are less effective than
Nivmagus Elemental
or
Spellskite
, but they have the added advantage of being able to blank an opponent's removal spell.
Other cards that get wild with
Ink-Treader Nephilim
include, but are not limited to:
-
Rite of Replication
: get a copy of each creature on the battlefield, unless its kicked. Then get 5 copies of each creature on the battlefield :)
-
Supplant Form
: Similar to
Rite of Replication
, it gives you a copy of each creature on the battlefield, but it also removes all of your opponents creatures at the same time :)
-
Kari Zev's Expertise
: The best
Insurrection
you've ever cast. You steal every creature (and Vehicle I guess) on the board, give it haste and then cast a <=2 drop for each creature stolen this way. And in case you were wondering, yes, you can splice into any arcane spell cast this way, making the stack sometimes absurdly large.
-
Make Mischief
: Often bad for your mana dorks (unless you've got a
Nivmagus Elemental
on the board to keep them safe (: ) but otherwise makes your whole board a mine-field. If someone tries to board-wipe, you blast them for 1 damage/creature on the field before you cast
Make Mischief
.
-
Spawning Breath
: Same thing as
Make Mischief
except it makes a ton of little tokens that make more mana and count as copy targets.
-
Electrodominance
: Instant speed lets you wipe the board or just cast a ton of other spells without paying their mana costs. Speaking of, you can splice into an arcane spell that you cast with
Electrodominance
.
-
Feather, the Redeemed
: One of the biggest weaknesses of this deck is needing both an arcane spell and a spell with Splice into Arcane. Sometimes, if you only have one of each, it can be a huge sacrifice to cast the arcane spell, even if you get a ton of value out of just that one spell. Feather, however, makes it so there is little to no opportunity cost in casting your only arcane spell and splicing some single target spell into it, since you can do that almost every single turn forever.
-
Silverfur Partisan
: Doubles your wolf tokens every time you cast a spell targeting
Ink-Treader Nephilim
.
-
Willbreaker
: This card is hilarious with Ink-Treader. Your opponents probably won't agree, though.
That's basically the deck. If you have any questions about how it works or comments about cards to include, please write them to me in the comments. Thanks so much for reading and upvoting :)