I've tried making a good Minn deck a couple times; one attempt was the general one, where I keep a lot of cards relevant to the deck. Another was a budget one, as a lot of cards that are useful to Minn are virtually useless or just weak in other decks. I realize I've been going about this wrong. I will try to explain exactly why Minn is bonkers besides the obvious.
Let's go over the deck, its general goals and the commander.
THE DECK
This is a mono-blue deck. Generally that means we'll have easy access to card draw and counterspells. Blue decks aren't known for their efficient ramp, but does this deck face the same challenges? We shall see.
Minn, Wily Illusionist is a 1/3 Gnome Wizard that costs 1UU. It will thus be difficult but not impossible to cast her during our second turn. I will not be going for a Gnome or Wizard tribal, but rather Illusions, as is obvious once we go through what she actually does.
Whenever we draw our second card each turn - that's each player's turn - Minn creates a 1/1 illusion that gets +1/+0 for each other illusion we control. That's neat; they're X/1s where X is the number of Illusions we control. They quickly grow in power but cannot take a hit. That's not a problem, though; whenever an Illusion we control dies, we can put a permanent card with mana value less than or equal to that creature's power from our hand onto the battlefield.
What does this mean? Well, there are currently four main types of permanents in Magic: the Gathering; creatures, artifacts, enchantments... and lands. That's correct; lands are permanents, and they have a CMC of 0. This means that blue finally gets a ramp deck; no matter the power of an Illusion we control, if it dies and we have a land in our hand, we get to play it, untapped, for free, completely bypassing the limit of playing lands on sorcery speed and only once during each of our turns. Neat, isn't it?
Now here's the kicker; since the lands are put onto the battlefield by a triggered ability, this can happen anytime; even during our opponents' turns. Minn makes a great commander for an army of powerful tokens to hit our opponents with, but she also makes a great aristocrat commander; producing the creatures we need and the payoff we want for sacrificing them. The only thing she doesn't provide is a sac outlet. There will be a couple in this deck, but what's crazy is if we manage to get a free sac outlet onto the board; this means we can exchange our Illusions at any point in time for a land, granted we have one in our hand. Fancy that; with Phyrexian Altar, we'd actually be able to sacrifice an Illusion for a blue mana, then play an Island and thus be able to cast a counterspell; quite the nifty trick, isn't it?
Furthermore, due to the weird nature of Minn's abilities, we can sacrifice an Illusion during combat and play permanents as combat tricks. This is useful if somebody attempts to wipe the board or we just want to do a little extra damage. If we really want to spice things up and take a player out, we could attack a player with a couple above-10/s, and as long as at least one gets through, and the power stays at 11 or above when damage is dealt to our target, we could sacrifice an Illusion to put Corrupted Conscience onto the battlefield, effectively taking that player out completely. It reminds me a little of all the tricks that Manifest and Morph creatures have.
I know my idea isn't original; I've watched Jumbo Commander's video and found it illuminating, and I've seen other decks on this site allude to a more aristocrat-esque playstyle. However, I've found most of the cards on my own, trying to use clever keyword combinations on Scryfall and looking through my collection. Looking through bulk I received from a friend, I ofund I owned a couple spare copies of Corrupted Conscience and I thought "Why not put one of them to use?".
This deck will be adapted to the cards that I own, and free, unlimited sacrifice outlets aren't cheap unless you are in Black or Red (ref. Viscera Seer, Bloodflow Connoisseur, Bloodthrone Vampire, Cateran Overlord, Carrion Feeder, Dark Privilege, Devouring Strossus, Devouring Swarm, Dimir House Guard, Dross Hopper, Fallen Angel, Falkenrath Torturer, Falkenrath Aristocrat, Fallen Ideal, Fanatical Devotion, Flesh-Eater Imp, Goblin Bombardment, Greater Good, Martyr's Cause, Maw of the Obzedat, Nantuko Husk, Nim Shambler, Phyrexian Ghoul, Scarland Thrinax, Thermopod, Vampire Aristocrat and Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter). Heck, even White and Green get some. Blue is the only one left out :T So we'll have to make due with somewhat expensive artifacts. This makes a difference because it completely ups our game; going from color fixing and paying to put lands onto the battlefield like in Green to actually exhanging creatures for untapped lands; crazy!
I hope to make this deck my own, with my own take on the Illusion tribal thing, doing aristocrat-y things and blowing our opponents away with value. Minn is a cool commander, and I enjoy token decks (perhaps a little too much; most decks I have revolve them). I'll try and use nifty blue cards to do tricks similar to those of the other colors, allowing us to 'bring back' our commander from the graveyard, to power up our army and to hopefully win... at least some of the time :D
Now, there are many things to go into; what cards I'd recommend putting in the deck, its weaknesses, what we can do to cover them, and the different ways in which we might be able to win.
WEAKNESSES
If an opponent plays Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite or any other board wipe for that matter, we might be okay... as long as Minn sees it. With cards in hand, and not having to pay for the permanents we put on the battlefield, there's only one slight problem; what if Minn isn't on the battlefield when our Illusions die? That's probably our biggest fear, so we'll want to safeguard against that. Blue has a lot of counterspells, but we'll want to be able to protect Minn in other ways too. Crystal Shard could be useful here, letting us return Minn to our hand for one blue mana. We could even keep it in our hand for when the need arises and kill off an Illusion to swiftly save Minn from certain doom, whether that is being exiled, stolen, flipped over by Ixidron or turned into a beetle through Darksteel Mutation or Imprisoned in the Moon.
There are other ways we might return Minn to our hand, such as Dispersing Orb, Temporal Adept, Tidespout Tyrant, Tolarian Sentinel, Vedalken Mastermind, Erratic Portal, Flooded Shoreline, Linessa, Zephyr Mage, Seal of Removal, Soratami Mirror-Mage and Waterfront Bouncer.
The free and unlimited sacrifice outlets that we can use are Spawning Pit, Altar of Dementia, Ashnod's Altar, Phyrexian Altar and, as long as we have a lot of Illusions and creatures in hand, Blasting Station. With each of these, it's free to sacrifice a creature or permanent, and we don't have to tap anything, so we're not limited to one sacrifice per outlet per untap step. I will of course include Drowned Rusalka, Carnage Altar and posibly Culling Dais. We are going to want to be able to sacrifice stuff to draw cards. Demonmail Hauberk would've been the cheapest candidate on the list, but equipping happens at sorcery speed (only during our turn), and thus, it's a little subpar.
In the Maybe section, I've listed all the instants I could find that draw two or more cards; these are ideal because casting only one of these cards (twice in some cases) will trigger Minn, giving us an Illusion, and they can be cast at instant speed. We could cast several cards that draw us one card each, and there are ways to increase the number of cards we draw
Horn of Greed does not go together with putting lands on the battlefield as part of an ability.
So how do we win with this deck? Well, there's a lot more to go through before I can publish this, ideally in more order than there is currently, but there really is only one obvious way to win; knocking out our opponents through combat damage. There isn't a lot of pinging in blue (in ways of Fling or Gravitic Punch), so we'll have to actually beat people through combat damage.
In mono-blue and colorless, the win cons are...
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Battle of Wits, which won't do anything in Commander.
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Darksteel Reactor, which is unlikely to reach twenty charge counters in a deck without Proliferate or other charge counter cards.
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Hedron Alignment, which can't win Commander games (or other singleton formats).
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Jace, Wielder of Mysteries and Laboratory Maniac, which both want us to attempt to draw cards from empty libraries. I will not go for these strategies, as we want to draw only enough cards to make Illusions.
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Maze's End, which is useless in our deck as we won't be using ten (or even any) Gates.
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Mechanized Production, which is unlikely to win us any games; we won't be making many copies of artifacts; it plays nicer in a Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer deck.
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There's also Triskaidekaphile. This one fits our strategy well; we'll be drawing lots of cards, and having sufficient space for all of them will come in handy. She can also draw us as many cards as a fourth of the mana we have access to (rounded down). I will be using her if I can acquire a copy.
hm... "ring of removal"???
One important thing I would like to remind the reader of; Skullclamp is awesome and perfect for this deck, but it only works during our turn, and Equip happens t sorcery speed. I was reminded of this during an episode of "I Hate Your Deck" with the Professor of Tolarian Community College. It still slots in, as it essentially lets ut pay one mana to put a permanent card from our hand on the battlefield. But it's important to be aware of the limitations. We can usually only make one X/1 Illusion token during each player's turn. All the token doublers (Adrix and Nev, Twincasters, Anointed Procession, Doubling Season, Parallell Lives and Primal Vigor) are sadly unaccessible to us in this deck. So we can 'only' make one token per turn, but as with any commander whose abilites trigger once each turn - not just during it's controller's turn - this is absolutely insane and this is why drawing a couple cards during each player's turns is so important.
I actually forgot about a huge weakness in this deck specifically; Trample. We can usually block most creatures and be confident the attacking creature will die, but if we're being hit with tramplers, we're in a little bit of ttrouble. Most things that make our creatures difficult or impossible to block will give them Flying, so we should have that covered. But Trample is just nasty. We'll want some cards to protect ourselves with, like Propaganda or Collective Restraint. I only own the former, and it is considerably inexpensive at the time of writing this. Additionally, as long as Minn is out, we should be able to quickly make more Illusions, and creatures are likely to trade, as our Illusions will grow massive in no time. For every Illusion that dies, we get the equivalent of a Braids, Conjurer Adept, which should discourage opponents from attacking us carelessly.
Actually, that is rather important, isn't it; to compare our commander to similar ones. Minn is a combination of Braids, Conjurer Adept and token commanders like Talrand, Sky Summoner, although she wants to draw cards rather than just cast instants and sorceries. But in our deck, most of the time, there will be little difference between the two. We can make at most one Illusion token per player's turn, so we'll want to maximize the value we get from each instance of drawing cards.
Most of the time we won't be winning through commander damage, and that's okay; it tends to be more of Voltron decks' forté anyway.
A thought that crossed my mind; there's nothing wrong with asking from help from above. And due to our colors and what strategies we're going for, what better god's help to enlist than Kefnet? The old Thassa might also be useful, letting our Ilussions dance past the enemies' lines to do hefty amounts of damage.
You know what sucks about being in Blue? There's no way to stop our opponents from gaining life. We can hurt them over time with cards like Ankh of Mishra, but there's no way to make sure everybody's life totals keep decreasing. Backfire is an interesting one; it's cheap, and it hurts one opponent as hard as they hit us with the creature enchanted. Sadly it can't be reused, like Stinging Licid. Psychic Venom works, but there is the quesiton of how well that works. The more people a thing can hurt, the better; that's why the ankh is so good. Another option is Thought Prison, but it costs a bit of mana. I would propose Soul Barrier; inexpensive and effective, and it only hurts our opponents. Most of the stuff that does this is in red, and the rest mostly isn't in blue. Aetherflux Reservoir could work since we'll be casting so many spells, but we could only take out one player anyway.
As mentioned previously, committing stuff to the board isn't a problem for us; with Minn we actually recover, while white decks generally don't. Let's imagine we have an infinite hand size and someone destroys all creatures. We might be able to put all the permanents in our hand on the battlefield after that for free. That's not nothing; in fact that's everyone else will be paying mana to do. So boardwipes that kill and destroy aren't scary to us. Isn't that wizard?
As JLK said, "Playing explosively and having the ability to be explosive, I think, is really important in aggro decks". This is true. And our deck is really good at that. Remember, we can put stuff onto the battlefield as quickly as we (or our opponents) can kill one of our creatures.
We all know Cyclonic Rift, right? It's a pretty neat card. Players don't tend to enjoy seeing this card, I find. So why don't we slap two more into our deck with Scourge of Fleets and Spectral Deluge? They'll never know what hit 'em.
POPULAR AGGRO DECKS AND COMPARISONS
UNTAPPING LANDS
Green has a lot of ways to untap lands. That's kind of neat. We want to do that in Blue too. Sadly Green has most of the tools :( But there are some that are available to us :)
We'll want affordable ones, like Kelpie Guide, Vizier of Tumbling Sands and Fatestitcher. If we can keep putting Peregrine Drake on the battlefield 'for free' (sacrificing an Illusion) and bounce it to our hand for cheap or with the newer Thassa, we might actually be able to cast some spells during our opponents' turns. If we want a little extra help, though, we are going to have to pay up. Reset is actually cheaper than Sword of Feast and Famine if you can believe it. But I own the latter and not the former, and the effect is repeatable, so I believe I'll go with that. Also, if we manage to copy the triggered ablity with Strionic Resonator and maybe even further with Rings of Brighthearth, we're in business. Gemstone Array and Horizon Stone could work.
BOARD WIPES
The ones that fit our deck the best are Scourge of Fleets, Cyclonic Rift, Spectral Deluge and Perplexing Test. Inundate is at sorcery speed, but it's really good for us (seeing as we'll use mostly or only blue creatures).
PLACES TO GO READ
https://edhrec.com/articles/60-to-100-blue-beats-battlestar-galactica/
https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/mono-blue-aggro-what/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrYvJqAuM-k&list=PLyLzs6vB3Xk7u8L3xGBsM5wo8Ms5jUIxh&index=18
and Command Zone Podcast about aggro.
https://scryfall.com/search?q=o%3A%22whenever+you+draw+your+second+card%22
ANOTHER LOOK AT THE COMMANDER
I thought about this a bit, and to try to understand our commander better, I figure it's a good idea to compare her to similar creatures. Seriously, she's really good for being monocolor and a commander for a less popular tribe.
Here are some cards you might've heard of that we can compare to our dear Minn:
- Azusa, Lost but Seeking (alone) lets us play a total of three lands during each of our turns. That's nice. But Minn can do better; since lands have a mana value of 0, whenever an Illusion we control dies, there's always the option of putting a land on the battlefield. So while we technically don't get to play the lands, we can put as many if not more lands on the battlefield with this deck. You could even argue our lands have Flash, and that's neat if we want to surprise people with actual instant spells. Minn rules!
- Braids, Conjurer Adept lets each player put something from their hand on the battlefield for free. If our creatures reach a certain power level, that's basically what Minn does too, but only we get to put out stuff for free, and it happens as often as our Illusions die. We even get individual triggers if someone wipes the borad! Recovery, baby!
- Urza, Lord High Artificer makes Karnstructs; 0/0 tokens that get +1/+1 for each Illusion we control. Minn's Illusion tokens are kind of like that; 1/1 tokens that get +1/+0 for each other Illusion we control. So they're as strong, but they can't take a hit. That's generally seen as a bad thing, but with Minn (and Tetsuko Umezawa, Fugitive), that is quite alright.
- Talrand, Sky Summoner makes lots of tokens. We aren't going to be making as many as he does, and they aren't going to have Flying by themselves, but being able to make a token each turn isn't too shabby; absolutely puts Trynn, Champion of Freedom to shame.
- Leyline of Anticipation lets us cast things at instant speed. That's great! But we can do almost as good as that. Imagine being able to sacrifice stuff and then put things on the battlefield! It's more difficult to counter! Sure, we can't play non-permanents (instants and sorceries), but that's fine. This is our commander's ability; crazy!
- Omniscience or Aether Vial or Kodama of the East Tree; they all let us play things or put them on the battlefield from our hands virtually for free. This is a lot like Minn!
- Yedora, Grave Gardener turns dying creatures into Forests. Technically, they're resurrected, but this doesn't do much unless you can return Forests to your hand, flicker Forests or your resurrected creatures have Morph. So! Minn is a lot like this; worst case scenario, when an Illusion on our side dies (even if it's a token), we get to replace it with an Island. If we're lucky, we might get to play something big instead.
So to sum it up, Minn reminds us a lot of very playable cards. As Jumbo Commander put it; "Minn does it all". Isn't she cool? That's why I wanted to make this deck! And I hope I've been able to give it a little bit of a unique spin. And I hope you'll enjoy playing with this whacky commander!
ON TAPPING FOR CARDS
It's been '2 weeks' since I made the deck and '1 week' since I updated it. Something that struck me today was that if we end up using a lot of creatures that we tap for mana, there are a couple cards we could use; auras that untap!
- Pemmin's Aura: The strongest, but it's a little expensive.
- Freed from the Real: For our purposes, it's as good as the one above, but it'd be nice to be able to protect the enchanted creature.
- Aura of Dominion: The 'worst' blue aura that does this.
- Crab Umbra: It costs the most mana to use this to untap, but we're not dependent on other creatures. It also offers the enchanted creature some protection in the form of graveyard recursion.
- Second Wind: This one is really weird. We tap the aura to untap the creature. It's like when Urza, Lord High Artificer taps equipment; it still works; it's just tapped.
- Staff of Domination isn't an Aura, but it does a lot of stuff.
I feel like Sword of the Paruns should be mentioned, but I feel like the only options here are Crab Umbra, Freed from the Real and Pemmin's Aura, the latter of which is expensive.
We can also use Auras or Equipment that draw us cards. Here are the options I found that let us repeat this during a rotation:
Actually, there are others:
- Psychic Possession could be grand if we have at least one opponent drawing a lot of cardsl
- Ophidian Eye and Curiosity are neat. The former has Flash, but in our deck, everything sort of does. They're killers together with AEthersnipe. If only this deck was Red too.
Lier, Disciple of the Drowned and Sage of the Beyond go well together.
INVESTIGATE - ANOTHER WAY TO DRAW CARDS
Investigate lets us create Clue tokens which we in turn can sacrifice, paying 2 each time, to draw a card. It's not ideal, but it lets us control when we draw cards. Here are the ones I find fitting for this deck:
- Confirm Suspicions: A counterspell that makes Clue tokens. Expensive, but we'll have access to quite a bit of mana.
- Erdwall Illuminator: This one's only recommended if we'll be investigate a lot. It lets us make an additional Clue token the first time we investigate each turn. Does not work with Academy Manufactor.
- Floodhound and Magnifying Glass: Tap and pay mana to investigate.
- Secrets of the Key: Investigate three times for a total of 5 mana. It's cool, but I'd rather use it in a Brudiclad deck.
- Tamiyo's Journal: If we make a lot of Clue tokens, this one's neat. It's a tutor. But we might not need it in this deck.
- Trail of Evidence: This is perhaps the best card of its type, as we'll be casting a lot of instants and sorceries. If we had enough of these types of cards in the deck - that let us draw an extra card when meeting some condition - I might even be willing to include cards that draw only one card.
ON RAMP
Blue doesn't have a ton of ramp. There are some cards that put lands on the battlefield, but they aren't great. Dreamscape Artist is some of the best blue will ever get, I think. Technically speaking, they have one of the craziest ramp cards ever; Patron of the Moon. Imagine paying one to put two lands on the battlefield. Only problem is we might not have lands. In our deck, we should be able to acquire an infinite hand size, we will be able to draw cards after our end step and we should be able to use our lands for additional value, like sacrificing them or bouncing them and discarding them with Moonfolk. I'll look into it.
UTILITY LANDS
Glacial Chasm is a neat card. I figured it'd go great in the deck, letting us attack in full force, then playing this card to prevent others from damaging us. Sadly, I forgot it requires the sacrifice of a land when it enters. I might still use it, but it's nowhere near as insane (and frankly, overpowered) as I thought it'd be for a short while. It did, however, give me an idea, which I will go into in the "Pillow fort" segment.
Mystic Sanctuary and Halimar Depths are lands with ETB effects, which mesh well with Moonfolk that bounce lands.
PILLOW FORT
There are a couple cards, even in Blue, that can protect us from being attacked by our opponents. Collective Restraint is one such card, but it isn't ideal. We will only have Islands; possibly Wastes if we really need them. I would suggest using Propaganda instead.
There's Stormtide Leviathan. It could be quite fun. Web of Inertia. It'll only stop our opponents from attacking when their graveyards are empty. But it does slowly, but surely empty their graveyards otherwise.
War Tax is great if we have a lot of mana. In order to at all inconvenience our oppopnents, we'd need to pay at least two mana during their turns; six in all in a four-playr game. Of course, not everyone might want to attack. This card could - and should - be used sparingly. It's pretty much like a fog effect, but it has to be activated before combat.
