We all know that feeling of hoping for a new, fun commander to play. Such has the boredom been in the past couple of months that I spent a good couple of nights hitting the 'random commander' button on EDHREC over and over to find something that just felt... different. However, one night I had to go back a couple pages after this one caught my eye: Gerrard Capashen. One night of alcohol-induced deck building and a Michael Celani article later, this abomination was born.
At the core of this deck is a group hug strategy. You want to be drawing everyone a whole lot of cards to reap the benefits off of Gerrard's first ability and obtain a staggeringly high life total over a course of several turns. This deck is chock full of artifacts and creatures that can benefit both yourself and your opponents, ensuring that everyone keeps a full grip and you can consistently gain a decent chunk of life off of someone with Gerrard in play.
Of course, the major downside of this is that your opponents will be able to splash out with an abundance of creatures, lands, and other assorted nightmares in their hands, so the next step is turning their own hand size against them and keeping their boards in check. Viseling and Sword of War and Peace are stars in this case, each capable of turning your opponents' hands against them and doing a reasonable amount of damage at a time. Limit the number of spells they cast with Rule of Law and Eidolon of Rhetoric. Pump up a Psychosis Crawler and a Kiyomaro, First to Stand to ungodly proportions and smack some face. Or just wipe the board several times over.
But there are three stand-outs in this deck that have won me games a good few times. The first is Hallowed Moonlight - I do not see this card getting played enough in white decks. For a one-turn instant effect, it can hose a single spell that churns out tokens, triggers a mass reanimation, or grabs a creature and slams it into play. They don't even get a chance to see play; just straight into exile. For such a cheap spell, it does a lot of work against a lot of different strategies.
The second is Smothering Tithe, which is a given for any deck running white, but when everyone is drawing more cards than there are particles in the universe, you're going to be able to probably just swing out and tap everything down with Gerrard's second ability by saccing a bunch of treasures.
But the third is even funnier: Happily Ever After. You'll often get confused looks when you throw it down during a game in a mono white deck, but with Mascot Exhibition and Generous Gift existing in the deck it is very possible to win off of its effect. The one thing to watch out for is its trigger: the entire clause is a long 'if' statement, and will only trigger during your upkeep if all conditions are already met. Since you won't have a chance to do anything before your upkeep, you'll want to keep mana open to cast the Generous Gift on one of your own permanents during someone else's turn to attempt to secure the victory this way.
