Snowfall blankets the world while it sleeps. Just another winter moving in to take over the landscape, to make it fresh and new. Along with it, the coldsnap, the frost tickling the hairs inside one's nose. Stand outside too long and it starts to hurt. A sore pain throbbing through your fingers, ears and nose. So you stay inside as much as you can, enjoying the comforts of the things we do to escape the cold. And the snows keep falling. Eventually you realize you need more groceries, after all, life doesn't stop for the cold. You manage to get out the door, and avoid tripping on the ice that formed on the porch steps. You have to break the ice off your car door to get into the vehicle, a drift of snow falling onto you as it opens. The car won't start. A couple coughs are all it can provide. 'Screw it' you decide 'I can pick up some stuff from the corner store'. You slam the door shut, sending more snow tumbling down the side, a miniature avalanche. Jacket pulled just a little tighter you start walking. The cold gets into your fingers, your nose, your cheeks. You keep walking, because life doesn't stop for the cold. It strikes you as you walk that it hasn't really stopped snowing since it started. Snowdrifts start to get in your way, nobody is trying to clear the sidewalk, and it doesn't seem like anyone else has come this way, no tracks to follow. The wind picks up, cutting straight through you. The snowstorm starts to turn into a blizzard. Visibility quickly drops to zero. You're lucky to see a few feet ahead. But even in those few feet the snow accumulating on every landmark muddles the silhouette, every step feels like a mile. Did you make a wrong turn? You quickly seek shelter on a strange porch. Letting a hot breath into your hands, it strikes you. Life Doesn't Stop for the Cold, but the cold sure is doing its best to stop life.
Introduction
The concept for this deck initially was "Man, I really want to play BUG but I don't have any idea beyond that". I thought about some commanders, then found Jorn, God of Winter//Kaldring, the Rimestaff and realized "Oh, doing it snow themed would be sick, and we've had like, 4 sets with Snow permanents so its probably a solid enough base to work with" And it was and now we're here. The wincon formed out to being BUG value, tapping opponents creatures or dropping a one-sided boardwipe like Blood on the Snow or Dead of Winter.
I also erred towards zombies and snow creatures with repeatable pump effects/Dragon Breathing, because if we swing with Jorn, God of Winter and all of our snow permanents untap, we can probably afford to pump that Hailstorm Valkyrie a couple times.
What I think this deck is missing is possibly more control to protect us from board wipes or key players of our strategy being removed, because while we can get them back via Kaldring, the Rimestaff and some other effects, that requires we get Jorn back to the Command zone to cast his other side.
The Big Boss
Jorn, God of Winter is a pretty warm, inviting guy. He lets us get more bang for our buck, tapping out with reckless abandon in our precombat main phase, only to untap and drop some more goodness, either by pumping or boasting (with cards like Horizon Seeker) in our combat step, or afterwards by letting us drop it all into Villainous Wealth. As it stands, he's going to be important to the game plan, but the game plan should hopefully still work if he gets hated out of the game (albeit a little stilted). Although, we all know the real Big Boss of this deck is Marit Lage.
Kaldring, the Rimestaff is nice, it sucks that its either Jorn or Kaldring on the board, but it does help keep Jorn cheap and easy to play early and can be used for damage control if too many of our permanents find their way into the yard. Or if we put them there on purpose to retrieve with Kaldring later.
Manabase
For us, as the pilots of "The Snow Deck", it is in our interest to run almost exclusively snow lands. It is also surprisingly cheap money-wise to do so, and we gain a lot from it even if most of them are basics. Currently we are leaning harder into Green with our basics because we need Green to ramp for more mana and to play our Commander. In addition, there is not, to my knowledge, more than one Simic or Golgari Snow Dual Land, whereas Dimir has two. We run all the snow lands that can provide us mana, and there are some really nice ones, such as Scrying Sheets, which is the single most expensive card in the list financially but is very useful and fits the theme. Faceless Haven and Frostwalk Bastion are good Manlands, that we can still use for snow mana before Jorn untaps them for us to animate them come combat.
Whats a commander deck without Mana Rocks? Sadly, not very many Mana Rocks are Snow Permanents. Coldsteel Heart is nice and lets us get whatever color we're missing when we play it. Arcum's Astrolabe is a mana filter that nets us a draw and helps our 3 color deck stay on curve. If you choose to run Command Tower or Command Beacon or any nonsnow land, it can also filter the mana from them into Snow Mana, which is nice considering it doesn't do a whole lot else after it hits the board.
Tappers
Right off the Rip, I don't think I will ever get a Winter Orb, because I am not trying to be tried as a war criminal. Rising Waters on the other hand would be war crimes for a measly 2 dollars. But outside of pissing everyone off, The goal for a lot of these pieces is to just lock down any potential blockers (and maybe some combos that require having a creature do something) so we can get some solid combats in, or even for the big swing when we go critical.
We have two kinds of tappers in here. Single Target and Mass Target. Our mass target choices Gridlock, Aboshan, Cephalid Emperor, Sleep and Icy Blast can be used to open up our opponents for the win. Our Single Target choices can lock down problem creatures (and sometime permanents) and throw opponents off their game. Icebind Pillar and Rimewind Taskmage are able to tap a target, with Icebind Pillar being the better of the two as it can also hit Artifacts and being a snow permanent so Jorn, God of Winter untaps it on attack, meaning it could lock down two creatures each combat. Winter's Rest can hold down one creature, generally a commander. It is less part of our game plan to win the game right now, and more an act of removal on something thats a bit too stubborn for our other options such as Commanders and Indestructible creatures. Abominable Treefolk taps down a creature for 2 turns when it ETBs along with being huge as a rule because its power is based on the number of snow permanents we control. Frostwalk Bastion can combo with Rimehorn Aurochs by letting us choose what blocks it, making a creature we choose tap and not untap on their controllers next untap.
To top all of these effects off we have Icebreaker Kraken which keeps tapped creatures locked down for another turn, letting us have some breathing room between our big swings if we don't quite have enough creatures to take out multiple opponents in the same combat. We still maintain the advantage of having nothing standing in our way when we go to attack on our next turn.
Wincons
The only proactive way we have of winning the game is swinging for damage in this deck. I know, not as exciting as some options you'll find elsewhere, but if you know of a hype combo finisher for the Snow Theme, I'm all ears. Generally to win and deal with most pesky blockers, we'll use our tap down effects from above then attack with creatures like Grim Draugr, Hailstorm Valkyrie or Marit Lage for a lot of damage. Mostly you will want to not think about getting to a point where you do 40 damage all at once and take someone out of nowhere, more try to opportunistically take people out, whittle them down if you need to, play politics when you can. If we get our poison combo up Fynn, the Fangbearer + Ohran Frostfang
(with the help of tutors like Burning-Rune Demon or Sidisi, Undead Vizier) there is a potential of being able to take out more than one person in a turn by turning Marit Lage into the Blightsteel Colossus we all knew she could be and letting the rest of your minions deal with everyone else.
Tapping down our opponents creatures to win isn't the only tool we have to get straight to their life total, we can also drop Dead of Winter and hopefully clear the rest of the board of creatures (even if they're indestructible), leaving us open to run away with the game. We also have Blood on the Snow, which while it does destroy our stuff, it won't get Marit Lage and we get something of ours back from the dead afterwards, and because we have Kaldring, the Rimestaff our other things aren't really lost to us. Boardwipes are always useful in commander, because you may find yourself in a spot where "Man, I wish the Aristocrat Deck or the Weenies decks didn't have any creatures". Pull those opponents back from Critical Mass and hopefully keep yourself strong. A discussion with people at my LGS reminded me that Rise of the Dark Realms exists and would be an excellent follow-up play to Dead of Winter or Blood on the Snow, especially if we can keep Jorn, God of Winter on board to untap our mana after we wipe, opening our mana to cast Rise of the Dark Realms on the same turn we wipe and allowing us to still get some damage in. Include with that a foretold Rise of the Dread Marn will still let us get immense value from our boardwipes, leaving us in a strong position and hopefully substantially weakening our competition.
Upgrades/Customization
If you wanted to upgrade this deck, dump a little bit more cash into it, or want something much more competitive, you could certainly run a Winter Orb or Rising Waters.
We are already running the Fynn, the Fangbearer + Ohran Frostfang
combo, which provides very good access to poison counters, which if you wanted to you could really lean more into, its the best possible colors to do so, with easy and consistent access to Proliferate and some of the greats of Infect. The main hurdle to this being a truly powerful deck is that Snows main gimmick seems to be value. If Snow get X and so on. There isn't a game ending combo that just pops off beyond "I tap down your creatures and swing with a bunch". I don't view that as a huge weakness for this deck necessarily, being consistently big on the swing, good beaters in combat can get you pretty far in keeping opponents in check. Dropping Dead of Winter followed by a cheeky Triumph of the Hordes could be a lot of fun. Another option that could work well with other parts of the deck is Vorpal Sword, it gives deathtouch which helps make Fynn, the Fangbearer better and because we can tap out to tap down our opponents creatures then untap on the swing with Jorn, God of Winter we should have the 8 mana to pay for the 'Lose the Game' effect, giving our opponents a clean death. As this deck focuses on Combat, you can never go wrong adding in things like Overwhelming Stampede or Overrun.
More effects that let us root around in our graveyard could be a good addition, giving us a second go at casting Gridlock or Cryptic Command. To this end Tamiyo, Collector of Tales is one of those fun and delightfully cheap walkers from War of the Spark that I feel goes the furthest to being a good fit for the deck. Aberrant Mind Sorcerer do this with a dice roll, which I personally think (along with flipping coins) is always fun. All Suns' Dawn is nice, giving us up to 3 cards back to hand. Archaeomancer would be a solid more budget option, or even Bala Ged Recovery. Creeping Renaissance targets all spells of one type getting us back a lot of good instants or sorceries, and even has Flashback, so if it finds its way into our graveyard in someway we can still cast it. The High Cost, as I've said many times, is mostly mitigated by Jorn, God of Winter.
You could run Dark Depths if you wanted to have more consistent access to Marit Lage, as Into the North can fetch it for you because its a snow land.
Deluge + Vitalize
if you want even more tap effects, complimented nicely by Adarkar Windform. I can't recommend Mystic Decree as its a bit too rich for my blood, but if you got it, it could make these cards do even more work for you. In the Same Vein, Timbermare could also do well when paired with a Vitalize or Mobilize. I like the idea of Spore Cloud, but its kind of a big brain play. You either bait blocks from your opponent by swinging at them and taking the tap down yourself and losing a chance to deal damage, or you hold out for a pair of your opponents to go all in against one another and make them have a bad time when it comes around to your combat. Might also do well with Rimehorn Aurochs who are already in the deck because I think forcing opponents into bad blocks is fun in a politics heavy game like commander.
A tempting option, at least thats tempting me, is the possible synergy between Jorn, God of Winter and Vehicles. You run as many snow creatures as you can, which should be easy enough, not even all of them are in the current decklist. You tap your snow creatures to crew things like Heart of Kiran or Skysovereign, Consul Flagship and then Jorn untaps them when he's declared attacking. This allows for a much safer attack and the option to leave blockers open afterward should anyone at the table be trying to fight you while your guard is down.
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