My wife loved this commander when it released. I'm just now getting the list tuned in.
Ms. Bumbleflower is the best user of modal lands that I've seen. Her ability to essentially turn any modal land into a cycling land by casting it is very powerful and should be utilized. Because of this, this deck utilizes 12 modal lands in addition to the 29 normal lands. A total of 41 cards that can be played as lands means that you will very rarely miss land drops, especially with the amount of card draw in the deck. Simply hitting lands every turn will drastically increase the amount of games that you'll win, especially in bracket 2 where the availability of fast mana and low cost combos is limited.
The value of the average individual card in the deck is pretty low, so the plan is to make up for this in volume. The deck has an average CMC of 2.3, and a lot of the individual cards are spot removal or counter spells or cantrips. Ms. Bumbleflower will draw you a lot of cards if she remains in play, but with a third of the deck being lands, you will run out of spells to cast if you're just relying on Ms. Bumbleflower to keep your hand full. As such, there are several draw engines in this deck as well. The most obvious ones are the cards that draw you more cards when your opponent draws 2 or more cards, which is something that Ms. Bumbleflower will cause to happen. The best two are certainly Faerie Mastermind and The Unagi of Kyoshi Island because they have flash inherently. The means you can concievably play these spells off the back of cantrips and use them to double cast at instant speed, but you can also flash them in on a player's upkeep and gift them a card with Ms. Bumbleflower and they will be in play and trigger when they draw on their draw step, meaning that these cards are secret cantrips even on the turn that you play them. Trouble in Pairs fulfills a similar role but doesn't have flash, but it does trigger on other conditions and is less vulnerable to removal. Smuggler's Share is nearly as good as Trouble in Pairs in this particular deck, but is 1 less mana. The deck also features Wavebreak Hippocamp as an additional repeatable card draw engine that supports the flash-speed theme of the deck.
Additionally, since Ms. Bumbleflower wants to double spell as much as possible, running spells that get you an additional spell is something to consider. And since you want to play on other people's turns as much as possible, you want a large portion of the deck to be instants or have flash, and you also want ways to cheat timing restictions. I did this while also being relatively picky about which cantrips to play. I know some people value surveil and scry, but personally, I've never been impressed with the mechanic. As such, I cut Opt, Brainstorm, and Consider for cards with a higher ceiling like Mission Briefing,= and Veil of Summer. If I'm building a deck where the theme is to create and win a mana-war. I'm not going to spend 1 mana for 1 cantrip with no/minimal additional effects.
As such, a lot the instants do draw an additional card to cantrip into a second spell reliably. Cascade is also a great mechanic for Ms. Bumbleflower since cascade does cast and cause cast triggers, making Forceful Denial a strong option in this deck. Snapcaster Mage and Mission Briefing have an excellent home here as well, as flashback likewise does cast and cause cast triggers. Hitting an opponent's commander with Null Elemental Blast only to flashback the spell when they recast the commander is back-breaking.
Since Ms. Bumbleflower inherently is going to feed your opponents a lot of cards, the best point to attack opponents is on mana/tempo. By removing opponent's key pieces with efficient removal and counter-magic, it puts opponent's in a position where they have a lot of their cards but they can't deploy them due to lack of mana. For this reason, the deck runs a lot of simple bounce spells like Remand Submerge Snap and Reprieve. Even just causing opponents to pay 1 extra mana can completely gumble a turn and throw off tempo. Because this deck is feeding cards while hindering people's mana production through removal, even soft counters can be effective here. Counters like Arcane Denial and Dream Fracture are also playable because of where the deck aims to attack opponents. In most decks, removal is highly valuable and needs to be conserved for key targets. In this deck, removal is another way to cantrip in more spells to grow your board and eventually win. Because flying is your primary form of evasion and you're attacking opponent's tempo, it is critical to remove opposing fliers and flier generating engines and important to remove mana generating permanents. This is also why the deck does not run Swan Song as granting an opponent a free blocker is a considerable downside.
The deck features a high frequency of mana dorks, especially 1 drops. In total, there are 10 mana dorks as well as a Wild Growth and a Sol Ring. Mana dorks are fragile and get taken out by board wipes, but this deck has a lot of boardwipe protection. The deck features several spells that can either counter or bounce a board wipe from the stack and spells that give your creatures various forms of protection such as indestructible. These spells also help protect Ms. Bumbleflower from spot removal.
The primary win condition is to eliminate opponents through combat damage. Ms. Bumbleflower will make your board grow quickly and give your creatures evasion in the form of flying. By prioritizing putting counters on Ms. Bumbleflower herself and by targeting flyers and reach creatures with removal to clear the path, she can become a serious voltron threat. Hardened Scales, Forgotten Ancient, and Dreamtide Whale support this semi-voltron theme while Managorger Hydra can chunk opponents with minimal direct assistance from Ms. Bumbleflower. All of these are 3 CMC or less, making it easy to double spell with them or be played on curve before the commander is in play.
One sided board wipes win games. As such, the deck features Damning Verdict and Wave Goodbye which will wipe the boards of all opponents who aren't also performing a counters-on-creatures strategy while Avatar's Wrath will clear the way for Ms. Bumbleflower while allowing you to recast your other creatures for additional cast/ETB effects. One sided board wipes are a card type that really feels good to cast in your pre-combat main phase, which is ideal for getting Ms. Bumbleflower triggers to give key creatures a pump and evasion to threaten life totals. Borne Upon a Wind, Final-Word Phantom and Quicken also allow you to cast these devestating effects at flash speed, while Snapcaster Mage and Mission Briefing recasting them is extremely powerful. Amphibian Downpour is a psuedo-board-wipe, able to drop flying and reach off a great number of creatures at once to clear a path. It also has flash which makes it flow well into this flash-speed list and plays well into the theme of the deck which is feeding opponents cards and then gaining a benefit from their momentum by using opponents to build up a high storm count. The deck also runs a suite of mass-bounce effects which disrupt tempo even when you aren't able to hit players for lethal. The package includes Raise the Palisade, Zimone's Hypothesis, Baral's Expertise, and Aether Gale.
The mana base for the deck is also a little unique. The deck has 10 green 1 drops and 5 green 2 drops that you want to play on turn 1 and turn 2 respectively. As such, having lands that come in untapped and tap for green mana is very important for the tempo of the deck. Meanwhile, it is a 3 color deck and blue is the most represented color, so having emphasis on blue mana while nearly garaunteeing access to white is quite a lot of restrictions. The deck also has 21 1 CMC spells and several multi-colored 2 drops, many of which need to be sequenced specifically. As such, the mana base took some thought and obviously is not budget. I opted to not run any of the filter lands. Typically I'm a big fan of both the "good filter" and "bad filter" land cycles. When playing at sorcery speed, these lands do a great job at giving you access to your colors and casting your spells. But for these low CMC spells with specific pips to fill at instant speed, the filter lands are just too clunky, and they don't produce green mana on turn 1. As such, they were all cut. I also found that colorless mana just isn't very valuable. Mana Drain is a lot less powerful in this deck than in most, just because colorless mana on your main phase has pretty limited use. But even saving a few mana on your main phase to save for interaction is strong enough to play the card, especially because I have several of them in a binder, but you can definitely cut the card and it will have minimal impact on this particular list. But the deck really needs colored mana, especially green mana on turn 1 and 2, 1 white and 1 blue mana on turn 3, and then a lot of blue mana for the rest of the game. The mana base is specifically tailored to achieve these goals.
