Hello, and welcome to the second part of my "Rainbow Commander" Challenge, where I attempt to make a commander deck for all 32 color combinations possible of decks. For the second part, I have my Feather, the Redeemed Spellslinger deck. Most Boros Commanders fall into one, rather boring, deck type: go wide aggro, usually with a strong focus on Equipments. Commanders like Agrus Kos, Wojek Veteran, Bruenor Battlehammer, Akiri, Line-Slinger, and Anax and Cymede have a focus on aggro, and buff up all creatures a small amount, which lead to a large effect when you have a lot of creatures. In recent times, we have been getting more diverse Boros commanders, however. Firesong and Sunspeaker focuses on spellcasting, Hofri Ghostforge is a strong spirit tribal commander, Osgir, the Reconstructor is amazing in artifact decks, and Zirda, the Dawnwaker is my new second favorite idea for a Boros commander, I can barely wait to make a deck around them. However, this deck's commander is Feather, the Redeemed. Now, Feather may seem kind of weak at a first glance. She can allow you to reuse spells, but only if they target your creatures. However, many cantrips such as Crimson Wisps allow you to target your creatures, and also draw a card. This is my second iteration of the deck, and after playing it a few times I have learned issues with it and have made changes to improve it. This means changing the game plan of the deck, the original you can read below. Also, if you're curious, below is also the lists of cards I cut and cards I added, with notes for why for each.
The plan is simple:
1. play
Feather, the Redeemed.
-
Play cards such as Balefire Liege and Sentinel Tower, which deal damage for playing spells.
-
play cantrips and draw cards, dealing damage in the process.
-
At the end of the turn, get the spells back.
-
Repeat steps 3-4 until all opponents are dead.
Now, my game plan has evolved. Sure, beating people down with incremental damage may sound like an effective plan when just looking at it, but it's really slow and the original cards I picked for it are really bad. Balefire Liege may be reasonable in a standard deck, but it's slow and clunky. First of all, it costs way too much, 5 mana seriously cuts down on the number of spells you can cast per turn. Secondly, it deals the same amount of damage as a Firebrand Archer, but it deals it directly to one player instead of split up between three opponents. Also, it only does stuff for red spells, because unless you're specifically building for it lifegain is pretty useless in commander. Also what was I thinking with Manaform Hellkite? Yeah, it's a great idea to pay 4 mana so you can cast cantrips and get one drops that last one turn. Sentinel Tower and Aetherflux Reservoir seem cool, but are too complicated. It incentivizes you to cast all of your spells on one turn, which might work for a Zada, Hedron Grinder deck but doesn't work in feather, where you at most cast two cantrips each turn. Glint-Horn Buccaneer is good in wheel decks, but is bad in a deck about drawing cards because it adds the expectation that you will discard at the end of turn. I would rather just have no maximum hand size, and cut the card.
Now my new game plan is to run a few pingers, like Guttersnipe or Kessig Flamebreather, but to have most of my focus on buffing spells, such as Unleash Fury or Temur Battle Rage, and go for a commander damage victory. The cantrips will fuel that engine and get the more important cards into my hand. Many cantrips in the deck are instants, allowing you to draw cards and fuel your engine on your opponent's turns. To support this, I cut many of the cantrips that were sorceries and added in generic card draw to get to the instant speed ones. The more cards you draw, the more cantrips you will draw, which means you can draw more cards and continue the cycle. Once this engine gets started, there's very little your opponents can do. Do they really want to waste an important counterspell on your tiny little Expedite? It doesn't matter, you have 4 more like it.
Last time I wrote about this deck, I talked about some fun interactions I had discovered. However, a few of my ideas were not as good as I thought they were. if you want you can read them, even though I cut most of the cards involved in them. Maybe you can make them work in your own deck.
Finally, at this point, you've probably drawn attention from the other players at your table, who aren't happy about how good you're doing. They might be attacking you, or casting burn spells, or attempting to board wipe (if they try to kill your creatures, simply play
Feat of Resistance or
Sheltering Light, hopefully on
Zada, Hedron Grinder or
Mirrorwing Dragon and enjoy the look of horror on their face as they kill all of their creatures and none of yours). Alternatively, in my favorite piece of jank, take a look at
Fell the Mighty. It may look like a normal board wipe, but oops: it targets a creature, which means you can exile it and return it to your hand with
Feather, the Redeemed, and play it on each of your turns. This destroys any go tall decks or any decks that rely on big creatures. Or, you could give each of your creatures indestructible with
Ajani's Presence and cast it targeting, oh, I don't know, what about the 0/1 eldrazi produced by
Spawning Breath. Every turn you board wipe, destroying all of their creatures, and destroying their attempts to stop you.
Finally, there's mana ramp. Braid of Fire is very good, as on each of your turns it lets you cast more and more of your cantrips without paying for them. Most of the other ones are solid, but not many of them really stand out. Also, graveyard recursion is important, the best of which being Past in Flames, because after you cast cards from your graveyard, they are supposed to be exiled. However, Feather, the Redeemed will also exile them at the same time. As the active player, you get to pick the order that happens in, and if the spell is already exiled with Feather, the flashback exile will have nothing to target, leading to the ability not working. Then you can flashback Past in Flames if they try and counter any important cantrips and return it again. Radiant Scrollwielder is similarly good, though not nearly as flashy as playing your entire graveyard.
Some ideas did end up working, however. First of all, Storm-Kiln Artist is broken in this deck. First, you play your Bandage for one mana, creating a treasure token, which you immediately use to cast Defiant Strike, which gets you another treasure token... and so on and so on. He allows you to play every cantrip in your hand every turn.
Secondly, Zada, Hedron Grinder. Zada is the fuel that supercharges the deck. Every turn, you draw a card for each creature you control for each cantrip in your hand. If you get lucky and have enough creatures on the battlefield (I think at least 10, not taking into account the cards you already drew), you could potentially draw every card in your deck (and lose the game if you aren't careful) in one turn. Mirrorwing Dragon does something similar, although they don't stack infinity, as their abilities only trigger if a spell is cast not copied.
Those are just a few of the cool tricks in this decok. Feather, the Redeemed is really strong in the right deck, and when combined with certain other cards it provides haymaker after haymaker. Most of the time, my write up about the deck will not be this long, but there was a lot of fun parts that I wanted to talk about with this one. That fills the role of my Boros deck for my Rainbow Commander challenge. Two down, 30 to go. Next time, a Gruul tribal smashy. I'm getting the simplest ones out of the way first.
