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Lucea Kane: Tempo Magus

Commander / EDH Bracket 3 Hydra RUG (Temur) Spellslinger Tempo

MNEzia

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Creature (25)

Instant (9)

Land (32)

Artifact (8)

Commander (1)

Commander: Magus Lucea Kane

Sorcery (18)

Enchantment (7)

edit: my local metagame has power spiked. expect an update.

This deck conforms completely to Bracket 3 and tends toward high-power games. Your meta may vary.

UPDATE 5/11-12/25: Minor changes to accelerate early-game. Goodbye Tyranid Prime! You're a Caryatid now. Other edits: Animar, my OG, was the biggest disappointment in the deck. She seems extremely useful, but I ended up cutting her for Ochre Jelly, an underappreciated critter who provides us staying power throughout the game and synergizes extremely well with Magus Kane's effects. Other minor changes were mostly in line with these; removing pieces that simply didn't do what they were supposed to, and replacing them with more streamlined picks. I think this deck is in a wonderful spot, and won't change it much in the future.

Magus Lucea Kane's baseline is a 4-cost mana dork that gives us a +1/+1 counter every turn. That's not very exciting, but it does, at the very least, allow us ramp while utilizing our Hardened Scales effects. Her real power comes from her lingering Psychic Stimulus effect: After we tap the Magus for mana, our next X-cost spell or ability gets copied. Of course, you're not obligated to use this mana on an X-cost spell, and you don't lose the effect if you spend mana on something else before your X-cost spell or ability. Kane was released in the same deck that keyworded Ravenous, we can assume Psychic Stimulus was intended as a simple creature multiplier that helps us refill our hand in our cute little Tribal deck. We definitely use Ravenous creatures like this, although we don't play tribal. We play Tempo.

As is the nature of arithmetic, increasing the value of (X) is fine, but multiplying it is better. Additionally, we can increase the overall value of our equation (and therefore our Mawloc) by adding more operations. Nexos slaps a 2x multiplier on our basics. Pir, Imaginative Rascal slaps a +1 onto every +1/+1 counter function. Electrodominance is an example of a spell that can take these calculations to extreme levels. X=5 deals ten damage for seven mana and grants the ability to force-play two chunky 5-cost spells. If you successfully untap Magus Kane with Instill Energy or Patriar's Seal, then increase that value by x1.5.

Because she enables such absurd number bombing, Magus Kane is a high-threat target. We put a lot of effort into protecting her, but she's awfully squishy as a 4-mana 1/1. When she dies, cast your spells anyway. If we've set up properly, assuming we've gotten at least one Psychic Stimulus off with Kane, we should consider ourselves in a comfortable spot. Bearing in mind that we play heavy ramp, recasting Kane for six mana is an option. We can also exploit our natural mana lead (again, assuming setup) to focus on a defensive spell-slinging playstyle, waiting on a proper rebuild until threats have been abated. Unlike most builds, which can't necessarily exploit the mana flood of lategame 4-pod Commander, we instead gain increasing value from it at a per-card level. The longer we have to build, the more tempo we can generate. When ramped and multiplied, a single Zoanthrope or Drown in Dreams in mid-lategame can completely delete an otherwise healthy player, or, in some cases, win the game outright.

While a Storm build would seek to exploit a mana flood by casting its entire deck in a single turn, we instead want to dump an efficient quantity of mana into One Big Spell, while keeping a comfortable amount of mana pocketed to protect our board and advance our lead. The Tempo gameplan centralizes around maximizing the value of each spell we cast, while attempting to cast spells that net us multiple vectors of value. Hugs, Grisly Guardian is an excellent example of this: he's a great body on the board, he builds our mana lead, and he also grants us a big, two-turn Impulse X.

Without access to restricted cards like Jeweled Lotus and Dockside Extortionist, we instead turn to our low-cost Green ramp package for mana generation. This is fine, because it slots cleanly in with our simic counters package. We want to ramp on turns 1-2, untap with Kane, and begin building value.

Value grinding alone isn't enough to win a game. Happily, our kill-threat increases beautifully with every bit of value we're able to gain. We cast big spells. We conquer worlds. We play tempo. I hope you like the build.

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