pie chart

Knights Valiant (Firja EDH)

Commander / EDH Adventure Aggro Bracket 2 Knights Mill Spellslinger WB (Orzhov)

Jokulmorder1

Upvote 0
0

Creature (28)

Land (37)

Artifact (10)

Enchantment (5)

Commander (1)

Commander: Firja, Judge of Valor

Instant (15)

Sorcery (4)

Sideboard

Instant (4)

Creature (3)

  • Major Themes/Archetype: Knight typal
  • Subthemes: Self-mill, Flurry, Anthems
  • Planar Flavor: Eldraine, Alara, Dominaria, Middle-Earth
  • Basic Land Art: Traveled, twilit, liminal

Background

It took a long time for the deck to shape up like this!

I'm a lifelong lover of fantasy and history, and knights in particular have always held a special place in my imagination. But when I started brewing this deck (before Throne of Eldraine, and way before March of the Machine), I ran into two major challenges with the theme:

  • Many knights are small draft chaff creatures

  • Every color had compelling knights, so paring down to two or three colors meant leaving something on the table

In the end I decided white and black were non-negotiable core colors, and tried green for several years for the various Selesnya knights. Abzan also offered +1/+1 counter synergies, which seemed like a good response to the small chaff creature problem. Playtesting would reveal problems with +1/+1 counter-matters, so I stepped that theme back in favor of cards that use counters simply to improve my creatures, rather than as an access point to Ivorytusk Fortress shenanigans.

Building a deck from the bottom-up (a recurring topic on r/jankedh) allowed more freedom of choice for commander. I tried Anafenza, Teneb, Tayam, Morophon, and Colfenor, then heavily theorycrafted Galeafoil voltron. (That last one didn't make a ton of sense for a typal deck, but I gave it a go anyway.)

Finally (?) the deck took shape as an Orzhov knight deck, and I'm pretty happy with it. It's weird; in spite of the truckload of neat white/black knights, several popular interpretations of the color pair are misaligned with the tribe's goals. Orzhov offers reanimator, but knights are mostly small and cheap. Knights want to go on the offensive, Orzhov would rather sacrifice them. Knights say "attack," Orzhov says "stall." But then, I found Firja!

Gameplay

Don't sleep on this angel. She offers superb card selection and puts the low cost of many knights to our advantage. It's trivially easy to cast two spells in a turn and "draw" a card for your next turn. Knights with adventures are two spells in one card.

After building up an army and refining your hand, slam anthems to pump your team of 2/2s into a fearsome force. When you win with this deck, you win with a dozen 10/10s with double-strike keyword salad.

Suggestions

Updates Add

Comments

Attention! Complete Comment Tutorial! This annoying message will go away once you do!

Become a supporter of TappedOut and hide ads for only $3/month!

Important! Formatting tips — Comment Tutorial — markdown syntax

Please login to comment

Revision 13 See all

(3 months ago)

+1 Dark Triumph main
-1 Ghastly Demise main