Tale of Doggo and Birb [UPDATE v5]
Commander / EDH Devotion Enchantment GU (Simic) Tokens Toolbox Value Engine
Creature (42)
- 1x Birds of Paradise
- 1x Elvish Mystic
- 1x Shrieking Drake
- 1x Coiling Oracle
- 1x Dream Stalker
- 1x Fauna Shaman
- 1x Ice-Fang Coatl
- 1x Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy
- 1x Kiora's Follower
- 1x Maraleaf Pixie
- 1x Rootcoil Creeper
- 1x Zameck Guildmage
- 1x Champion of Lambholt
- 1x Circle of Dreams Druid
- 1x Cold-Eyed Selkie
- 1x Edric, Spymaster of Trest
- 1x Eternal Witness
- 1x Fierce Empath
- 1x Gyre Engineer
- 1x Lullmage's Familiar
- 1x Shardless Agent
- 1x Somberwald Sage
- 1x Trygon Predator
- 1x Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath
- 1x Weaver of Currents
- 1x Arixmethes, Slumbering Isle
- 1x Beast Whisperer
- 1x Clever Impersonator
- 1x Inga and Esika
- 1x Master Biomancer
- 1x Master of the Wild Hunt
- 1x Mystic Snake
- 1x Parcelbeast
- 1x Venser, Shaper Savant
- 1x Yeva, Nature's Herald
- 1x Momir Vig, Simic Visionary
- 1x Seedborn Muse
- 1x Silverback Elder
- 1x Ethereal Usher
- 1x Prime Speaker Zegana
- 1x Progenitor Mimic
- 1x Tishana, Voice of Thunder
Land (34)
- 1x Alchemist's Refuge
- 1x Barkchannel Pathway Flip
- 1x Boseiju, Who Endures
- 1x Breeding Pool
- 1x Command Tower
- 1x Dreamroot Cascade
- 1x Dryad Arbor
- 1x Fabled Passage
- 1x Flooded Grove
- 1x Hinterland Harbor
- 1x Khalni Garden
- 1x Misty Rainforest
- 1x Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
- 1x Oran-Rief, the Vastwood
- 1x Otawara, Soaring City
- 1x Prismatic Vista
- 1x Reflecting Pool
- 1x Rejuvenating Springs
- 1x Reliquary Tower
- 1x Rimewood Falls
- 5x Snow-Covered Forest
- 5x Snow-Covered Island
- 1x Temple of Mystery
- 1x Vineglimmer Snarl
- 1x Yavimaya Coast
- 1x Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth
Enchantment (6)
Commander (1)
Instant (11)
- 1x Worldly Tutor
- 1x Decisive Denial
- 1x Double Major
- 1x Growth Spiral
- 1x Heroic Intervention
- 1x Simic Charm
- 1x Fierce Guardianship
- 1x Force of Negation
- 1x Voidslime
- 1x Incubation / Incongruity
- 1x Force of Will
Sorcery (6)
Maybeboard
Instant (1)
This is a deck based on Fable of Wolf and Owl!
I made this deck about 6 years ago and have been working on it on and off ever since. You can read more about it below. Comments and suggestions are welcome! =)
This deck is really about my wife. Her favorite animal is the owl, mine is the wolf. Her favorite color (irl) is green, mine is blue. Hence Fable of Wolf and Owl. I've tried to capture the essence of us in this deck. We've gone through many things together - Overcome every obstacle in our way through sheer Force of Will. She's taught me the importance of balancing Give / Take. She's bestowed upon me an appreciation for nature and animals (Somberwald Sage). She's inspired me to work hard by getting a Double Major while we were at university together. She's also taught me to make things last, and Savor the Moment. But perhaps most importantly, she's helped me step outside of my comfort zone. Which in this instance I'm doing by playing - a color I don't normally find very fun. But she finds a way to make everything fun. Together, we make a Wild Pair.
Simic doesn't have enchantment tutoring. And after experimenting with splashing to fit the tutoring, I found it to be very clunky and expensive. It just didn't fit the original concept. However, one day while browsing Scryfall for an answer, I stumbled upon Ethereal Usher. This card is now the linchpin of the deck. It can transmute to find Fable, since they both have a mana value of 6. And it's tutorable by a plethora of green creature tutors. So the plan is to use any creature tutor to get Ethereal Usher, and transmute Ethereal Usher to find Fable.
The idea beyond that is to just play Fable and cast a bunch of spells. Mirrormade and Clever Impersonator are in the deck to copy Fable. Shrieking Drake and Dream Stalker are in the deck to help you go crazy. After that there are a couple of ways to close out the game - Beastmaster Ascension, Champion of Lambholt, Ezuri, etc. But sometimes just casting more spells than your opponents will do the trick. If you ever have a turn where you're creating lots of tokens but need to attack with them immediately, you can cast Savor the Moment to essentially give them all haste.
There are a few themes in this deck. Explaining them might clear things up before we get into card choices:
1.Most cards in the deck are in their original printing, or use a printing that mimics the old border styling of Magic.
The reason I wanted this look is because my wife collects old books, and looking at old printings of cards, some from multiple decades ago, is like looking at an old book to me. They tell stories of how the world used to be. And even though to some, 2015 isn't that long ago, some of the cards from around this time are beautiful tattered pages of a history book to me.
2.There are no colorless spells in the deck.
You read that right. No Sol Ring. Or Skullclamp for that matter - which I'd argue would be even better in this deck than Sol Ring. My wife is an artist. She likes to show me sunsets and we paint together on occasion. She brings color to my life and so this restriction is just here to say that life is better with color. It's also practical in the sense that every spell in the deck will trigger Fable at least once.
3.There are no foils in the deck.
Lastly, I don't like playing with foils. If the only printing of the card is foil, I simply won't play with the card. This was difficult to part with because I really wanted to play Earthshaker Giant
.
Now that we got that out of the way, let's look at why I chose some of these cards. I'm not going to do a full card-breakdown because I find those are often tedious to digest. But I will go over some of the patterns and a few specific cards at least.
I tended to heavily favor gold cards. If it's a cheap, effective spell that's both and , I'm playing it or at least tried to play it. This kind of throws off the mana curve a bit - with many 2-4 drops and few 1 drops. But there aren't many Slippery Bogle's out there unfortunately, so 2 mana is pretty much the cheapest a Simic card can be while still actually doing something. An exception is Incubation / Incongruity, which is quite an effective 1 mana double-trigger on Fable. There are a lot of 2 mana Simic cards that didn't make the cut, just because there are so many of them. I'll mention a few in the next section.
Another heuristic I followed when building this deck was 'If there are several cards that perform the same function, always choose the one that's a creature.' If it's a choice between Mystic Snake and Plasm Capture, I'm choosing Mystic Snake. Creatures are usually better options because they are searchable by every tutor effect in the deck, they enable a critical mass of creature synergies between Beast Whisperer, Silverback Elder, Guardian Project, overrun effects, etc., and if they have an ETB effect or cast trigger you can recycle it via the numerous bounce effects in the deck.
The reason I am playing clone effects for Fable rather than token-doubling effects is because there are only 3 other cards in the deck that make tokens. So I feel it is better to have copies of Fable rather than various enchantments that might just do nothing if Fable is removed from the battlefield. Redundant copies of Fable make it harder for the opponents to get rid of it altogether. And it's also just more practical to have clones because they can copy your opponents' cards as well. Hence why I'm playing Mirrormade instead of Estrid's Invocation.
The land base is kind of... wonky. It's a lot better than it used to be, but a deck with 131 mana symbols is pretty hard to design a mana base for. If a land is colorless it has to do something major otherwise it won't make the cut. Casting spells is usually fine, but it can be a challenge every once in a while.
I kept Shardless Agent in mind when building this entire deck. There are those that would just take the 'L' on some of its triggers - but not me. I won't look like a fool (most of the time). Most everything she hits with mana value 2 or less is at least castable, albeit some hits are better than others. The exceptions are:
- Neoform without a creature to sacrifice
- Decisive Denial without both fight targets
To keep this section short, I'll just throw down a mutable list of cards that I've strongly considered or were even in the deck at one point:
- Aboleth Spawn
- Agent's Toolkit
- Altered Ego
- Arcane Denial
- Augur of Autumn
- Bala Ged Recovery
- Beast Within
- Botanical Sanctum
- Bounty of the Luxa
- Callaphe, Beloved of the Sea
- Caustic Caterpillar
- Chasm Skulker
- Colossal Skyturtle
- Counterbalance
- Craterhoof Behemoth
- Crookclaw Elder
- Daring Thief
- Defiler of Dreams
- Defiler of Vigor
- Dryad of the Ilysian Grove
- End-Raze Forerunners
- Fathom Mage
- Finale of Devastation
- Frilled Mystic
- Glasspool Mimic
- Glimpse of Nature
- Glinting Creeper
- Golden Ratio
- Gretchen Titchwillow
- Icefeather Aven
- Intruder Alarm
- Intuition
- Jolrael, Mwonvuli Recluse
- Keeper of the Nine Gales
- Ledger Shredder
- Malanthrope
- Moritte of the Frost
- Murkfiend Liege
- Novijen, Heart of Progress
- Nulltread Gargantuan
- Nylea, Keen-Eyed
- Overbeing of Myth
- Pongify
- Priest of Titania
- Quandrix Command
- Quandrix Cultivator
- Rapid Hybridization
- Rashmi, Eternities Crafter
- Reality Shift
- Reclamation Sage
- Repudiate / Replicate
- Ride the Avalanche
- Riftsweeper
- Sages of the Anima
- Saiba Cryptomancer
- Shaman of Forgotten Ways
- Species Gorger
- Tanazir Quandrix
- Tangled Islet
- Temur Sabertooth
- Tyranid Prime
- Urban Evolution
- Vitalize
- Vizier of the Menagerie
- Voracious Hydra
- Waterlogged Grove
- Wavesifter
- Wistful Selkie
- Zimone, Quandrix Prodigy
Also, this deck used to have a different commander! Or rather, commanders. Originally this deck was helmed by Anara, Wolvid Familiar and Esior, Wardwing Familiar. It was incredible flavor, but it was just too mopey gameplay-wise. They just don't do anything and I was spending too much time trying to find Fable and little-to-no time actually casting spells with it in play. I've also used Tishana, Voice of Thunder, Momir Vig, Simic Visionary, Inga and Esika, and Thrasios, Triton Hero + Prava of the Steel Legion in the past.
The most important part about the deck is that it's fun and represents me. That's really what matters in commander; As long as you're having fun and the people around you are having fun, nothing else matters. But that's not a fulfilling statement for this section by itself so I guess we can get more technical:
PROS :)
This deck can go absolutely crazy sometimes. I recently played this deck with Inga and Esika as the commander, but it was simply just too powerful. If I ever got Fable and Inga and Esika in play at the same time it was pretty much game over. I could cast up to a dozen spells a turn - and if Intruder Alarm was in play it was usually infinite from there. But I don't really like infinite combos and started to notice some of my turns were taking 15+ minutes... So I switched to Ezuri, Claw of Progress because I used to love this card and it came out in 2015, the year I met my wife. And Ezuri's ability triggers on Tokens too. So having a win condition as a commander is pretty solid. But the deck is still very strong and has that element of 'I'm not doing anything guys don't hurt me... Oops I won the game.'
This deck also ramps hard. 17 Sources of ramp and a lot of those net you more than one additional mana. Not to mention the commander turns all of your creatures into mana dorks. The curve is still somewhat low, so you can usually afford to cast several spells in a single turn; which is necessary for taking advantage of Fable. The only expensive spells in the deck will either end the game or put you in a position where you will end the game soon.
Another thing that's great about this deck is that it feels different every time I play it. There's so many creatures that do different things. I'm still stumbling upon new interactions between cards to this day. You would probably think that, since it's a theme deck based around a single card, the deck would feel very linear and boring after a while. But that's not the case. Keeping things fresh and fun is necessary to maintaining a long-term relationship, both with your commander deck and your life partner.
CONS :(
The biggest flaw to this deck is that it's kind of slow and can get bullied pretty easily. The plan with this deck is to do some tutoring and set up an engine among several sorcery-speed pieces and is therefor very choreographed and susceptible to removal.
Another issue is that the deck is inherently weak to wraths. With 42 creatures, we are committing a lot of easily-removable pieces to the board. Because of this, I do run some counterspells that are usually dedicated to stopping wraths. I'm not really a fan of free counterspells but I do have a few just because you end up tapping out to set up subsequent turns so frequently.
I've mentioned this before, but the deck does have trouble casting spells from time-to-time. There's just so many mana symbols that it will inevitably line up poorly sometimes. Again, it doesn't happen too often, but it still sucks when it happens.
Thanks for your time!
If you have any comments/suggestions feel free to leave those below. Let me know if you have any issues with readability: that was something I was worried about while making this page. Also let me know what your favorite Simic card is that you think I should be playing! And lastly I'd greatly appreciate it if you upvoted this deck if you liked it (my wife would think I'm popular ^_^ ). Cheers!
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| Top Ranked |
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| Date added | 6 years |
| Last updated | 3 months |
| Legality | This deck is Commander / EDH legal. |
| Rarity (main - side) | 11 - 0 Mythic Rares 49 - 0 Rares 18 - 0 Uncommons 8 - 0 Commons |
| Cards | 100 |
| Avg. CMC | 3.32 |
| Tokens | Bird 1/1 U, Copy Clone, Experience Token, Frog Lizard 3/3 G, Plant 0/1 G, Wolf 2/2 G |
| Folders | My Personal Decks, Commander, Liked decks, intersting decks, Cool decks, Other Player's Decks, MTG EDH Decks, Ideas, Cool, EDH |
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