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The Great Wall of Arcades [Primer] [2023]

Commander / EDH* Aggro Defender GWU (Bant) Lifegain Theme/Gimmick

Mitrian

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Creature (31)

Enchantment (5)

Land (35)

Sorcery (7)

Commander (1)

Commander: Arcades, the Strategist

Instant (13)

Artifact (8)

Sideboard

Creature (7)

Instant (4)

Planeswalker (1)

Enchantment (3)

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Instant (26)

Creature (24)

Land (1)

Artifact (9)

Enchantment (7)

Sorcery (4)

Planeswalker (3)

*** Decklist not finalized, still need to cut a couple more cards ***

This dragon prankster basically allows us to completely ignore the power stat on our side of the board. This opens up major value in the form of summoning cheap walls that were never designed to go on the offensive, but… well… here we are!

In fact, I first put this deck together as a joke. "Let's make a deck with all walls, hur hur!" But then it won. And it won again. So I starting taking it seriously, and tweaked it to replace some bland vanilla walls with some "good stuff" I thought would work well… and then it stopped winning. I went back to just being wall focused, and it wins again. It's a weird deck, but it performs surprisingly well! I would classify this is a strong casual deck, and it's very fun to play.

The goal of the deck is simple: play cheap walls, only focusing on value for toughness. The win condition is getting others to zero life. We run a fair amount of control in the deck and look to play on enemy turns to keep opponents off balance and away from their combo wins, and use our wallarmy to defend against aggro decks. With the ramp and draw that's included, we have plenty of fuel to keep the engine going strong and eventually the deck just wears everyone down.

How it's built:

With the main focus of the deck being on the defender keyword, let's start there. However, in our deck, the word defender is very misleading, because these walls are very aggressive. Just imagine their toughness is their attack power, because that's how it plays.

Starting from cheapest to cast:

  • Shield Sphere: (0) for six toughness. Try to never block with this one.
  • Steel Wall: (1) for four toughness. Boring and bland, but rememebr, it's effectively one mana for a 4/4 creature!
  • Perimeter Captain: (1) for four toughness. Comes with some life gain if any of our defenders declare as a blocker.
  • Traproot Kami: (1) for potentially a LOT of toughness, as this one is based on number of forests. We'll have a bunch of those, and this card is also one of the reasons we include Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth in the list.
  • Wall of Tanglecord: (2) for six toughness. It can also block fliers if needed.
  • Overgrown Battlement: (2) for four toughness. Although this is a mana dork and not one that we'll attack with often because it's too valuable to risk losing to combat tricks. This is a tutor target and can generate a ton of mana if not removed quickly by the opponent.
  • Angelic Wall: (2) for four toughness, and flying.
  • Fortified Rampart (2) for six toughness.
  • Stalwart Shield-Bearers: (2) for three toughness, but gives +2 to all other defenders.
  • Sunscape Familiar: (2) for three toughness, but makes all green and blue spells cheaper.
  • Thallid Shell-Dweller: (2) for five toughness. (The token is too slow to be relevant.)
  • Wall of Blossoms: (2) for four toughness, and draws a card. Yay!
  • Wall of Deceit: (2) for five toughness.
  • Wall of Glare: (2) for five toughness, and can block multiple attackers, which is guess is cool?
  • Wall of Junk: (2) for seven toughness! Typically we won't block with this, unless we can to cast it again for life gain.
  • Wall of Kelp: (2) for three toughness. The tokens it create have defender so can benefit Overgrown Battlement and Axebane Guardian.
  • Wall of Omens: (2) for four toughness, and another card draw! Yay!
  • Wall of Roots: (2) for five toughness, and a mana source if desperate.
  • Axebane Guardian: (3) for three toughness, but he's another one we'll probably never attack with, as he's all about tapping for mana.
  • Glacial Wall: (3) for seven toughness.
  • Hover Barrier: (3) for six toughness, and flying.
  • Wall of Air: (3) for five toughness, and flying.
  • Wall of Denial: (3) for 8 toughness, flying, and shroud.
  • Wall of Frost: (3) for seven toughness, and delayed untap for blocked attackers.
  • Wall of Ice: (3) for seven toughness.
  • Weathered Sentinels: (3) for five toughness, vigilance, reach, and trample. Gets +3 when attacking, nice!
  • Charix, the Raging Isle: (4) for SEVENTEEN toughness, with mana tax for self-protection. Holy crap!
  • Wingmantle Chaplain: (4) for three toughness, but enters with 1/1 bird tokens for every defender, and creates birds whenever more defenders enter later.
  • Tree of Redemption: (4) for thirteen toughness, and can also swap toughness with our life total, opening up some fun shenanigans with things like Feed the Pack and Angelic Chorus.

That's 29 walls!! Might have to trim a few away. But before we do, let's review the supporting cast:

To win with combat, we have to interfere with enemy plans, and prevent them from interfering with us, so we run quite a lot of control, starting with TWELVE counterspells:

For things that actually get through all of that, we run some removal as well:

And to protect our own investments, we have:

To boost our army, we have some pump effects:

To stop or slow down opponents:

  • Meekstone is not a problem for us, but usually a big problem for all but weenies decks.
  • Meishin, the Mind Cage is more like anti-pump, to shut down enemy aggression, as we should regularly have cards in hand.

It's probably best to mulligan if you don't have at least one mana rock, ramp spell, or mana dork. Any hand with two of those is ideal. Generally the plan in the early game is to get Arcades in play no later than turn 3, or Turn 2 if you can get lucky, then start playing out defenders for the card draw and early defense and aggression.

Attack whenever you can, unless you want to sit back and play politically, but that's not usually my style. You want to get to a point where you are generating enough mana and card draw to play multiple walls per turn, but still have some mana available to play on enemy turns.

Board presense should establish quickly, and now we're relying on our control elements to keep it in place. We can use our one-sided board wipes to keep others in check, while we still keep hammering away at life totals, and protecting, if not growing our own.

The nice thing is that even if we do get blown out, it's fast to rebuild. Drop the commander again, play walls to generate draw, and by now we have the mana base to drop some bigger threats like Towering Titan or feed our Tree to the Pack for some awesome life gain and potential blast territory.

Or just keep swinging with walls until everyone else is at zero. This may be a case of finishing off the weakest just to eliminate enemies, unless you like to negotiate to join forces against the biggest threat who isn't us.

I had a hard time against Atraxa Superfriends, as I couldn't eliminate their walkers fast enough to prevent some ultimate abilities. Although in that game, I somehow became the archenemy and didn't have much help. The table had seen me win with Arcades a couple times and apparently had enough of that! But when we can't just focus on a player's face and have to target a bunch of walkers, I found I just didn't have an answer for that situation.

Some other hyper-value builds like Ur-Dragon and Rashmi can outpace our wall value as well. I do think this deck has a speed limit, which is around the mana-to-toughness ratio of about 1:4, with no simple ways to increase that. So opponents who can leverage a lot of free casts and ETB, can reach critical mass faster than we can. To consistently combat that, we'd need to negatively impact our theme, which, isn't worth it. So I aim to be political in these matchups, and try to work with others to take them down before they reach their sweet spot.

I'm a veteran player, who started playing Magic back in the days of Alpha -- which means I'm getting pretty old. I once had my own Black Lotus, more than one I believe, and I of course played them unsleeved. Back then, as a kid, I didn't like the card, because I didn't even dream about things like Turn 1 wins. So they were traded away. Not that it matters, because my early collection of cards, which included the moxen, duals, and other craziness (by today's standards anyway) were all heavily played, bent up, and ultimately lost over the course of moves and life transitions.

In my thirties I got back into Magic, spending a lot of time and money playing Standard during the days of Lorwyn, Alara, Zendikar, Mirrodin, and Innistrad. I never won any tournaments, but I played in quite a few. I had full playsets of every card produced during those 5-7 years, so could build any Standard deck I wanted -- man that was a lot of fun. But eventually, I lost the taste for the ultra-competitive scene and switched back to kitchen table Magic where I fell in love with Commander. My first Commander ever built was Maelstrom Wanderer and I still try to keep that deck current and relevant.

I've stopped spending as much money these days, and play mostly with MPC proxies, which means I don't worry about card costs much at all. I feel strongly that people should play with whatever cards they enjoy playing with, not just the ones they can afford to buy. Magic is an expensive hobby, but finances shouldn't be what prevents any participation. I do, however, still support WotC and I buy almost every Commander pre-con deck they make, which lately has gotten crazy with the number being produced.

There are some elements of Magic that I tend to avoid -- including MLD (generally not fun for people to play against), excessive tutors (makes many decks too linear for me, and searching and shuffling often slows things down), and extra turns (often creates "feels bad" moments and more downtime for opponents). I respect the power of these cards and styles, but I'm more interested in games where everyone is having fun, and not just me.

I build and play to win (without those cards, usually), in every game, but ultimately I really don't mind losing -- I just love to play.

Thanks for reading my long-winded primer! I write these not for Internet points, but because it's become part of my process for building and fine-tuning a deck. I find when I have to write out justifications for my card choices, it's easier to be honest and objective about which cards are actually effective, and which are just 'pet' cards. However, please feel free to comment and share thoughts. I welcome alternative opinions!

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Date added 5 years
Last updated 8 months
Legality

This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)

9 - 3 Mythic Rares

41 - 7 Rares

18 - 2 Uncommons

23 - 3 Commons
Cards 100
Avg. CMC 2.74
Tokens Morph 2/2 C, Saproling 1/1 G, Spirit 2/2 U, Treasure
Folders edh
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