Not Infinite, but Larger than the Universe

Commander / EDH MagmaArmor0

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Throne of Eldraine Release —Dec. 4, 2019

Well, it's been a while since I've posted an update to this deck. This isn't because I've abandoned it, or have stopped playing it, but rather because the deck has come so far from its original iteration that any potential improvements to the deck are really small, nuance-heavy things like the difference between Cleansing Nova and Austere Command, a lot of which are local playgroup-dependent. This means that it takes TONS of testing to try to determine which is better, since it's easy to tell when a card is preferable 80-90% of the time, but the difference between 52% to 48% takes lots of testing to uncover. Still, we have some more improvements, and most of them are pretty...obscure. Let's take a look!

Mystic Snake --> Patron Wizard

Mystic Snake was a guaranteed counterspell, but it cost 4 whole mana. Ravos could bring it back to us, but that wasn't quite meaningful enough for it to stay in. Patron Wizard takes advantage of an accidental tribal theme, which looks pretty gimmicky and weak, but realistically, we will almost always have Thrasios around, which makes for two Wizards to use on our opponents. Combine it with any other wizard in the deck, or Seedborn Muse, or Illusionist's Bracers (which works for every wizard you tap, since the ability always comes from the Patron Wizard!), and we haven't even started to consider the numerous token-copy effects that we have in this deck. Flashing it in off of a Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir, Leyline of Anticipation, or a Chord of Calling can catch opponents off guard the first time, and every time after that they'll be stuck wondering how many wizards might be in your hand, ready to be flashed in to catch them by surprise. And even if they pay the 1 enough times, that doesn't mean you can't still counterspell the spell with an instant!

Sakura-Tribe Elder --> Dismiss --> Veilstone Amulet

The elder was nice to get in some early game ramp, but we only play 4 basics, which made him pretty lackluster--only finding a basic in the early game when we need to establish all 4 colors as soon as possible, and only able to be meaningfully looped 3 times with Ravos. Instead, we used the generic counterspell Dismiss for quite a while, which was nice, since we hold open four mana for Thrasios anyway, and we still get the draw! In the end though, Dismiss came out for Veilstone Amulet, which is a bizarre little artifact that usually fits poorly into decks--if you have enough instants to trigger it reliably, you probably don't have enough creatures to want to run this over Lightning Greaves. In our deck, though, we have lots of creatures that we want to protect, and multiple sources of flash to protect them with. It also provides the bizarre effect of making your counterspells against spot removal uncounterable--if they cast Doom Blade on Thrasios, you don't need Counterspell to actually resolve, since he'll just become hexproof anyway. It's also an artifact, so it's less likely to be picked up by the usual answer to somebody giving all of their creatures hexproof--a board wipe.

Ashiok,Dream Render --> Mother of Runes

I don't actually know if this is the right call for my home meta--tutors and graveyard decks are everywhere in my neck of the woods. But Ashiok is an awfully specific hate piece, and Mother of Runes feels so good so often that I think this switch is wise more often than not.

Morphic Pool --> Verdant Catacombs

Okay, okay. I finally ordered the missing fetchland during the most recent Cyber Monday sales. Black is our least played color, so that's the Battlebond land that came out to make room for it. Now we have the full set of fetches, so our manabase should be about as consistent as we can possibly make it.

Swamp --> Island

Weird, right? But with no ramp effects left in the deck that actually care about basic land typing, the only time we really care about finding a basic swamp is if our opponent casts Path to Exile or Assassin's Trophy, and there just aren't enough black mana symbols in the deck anymore to warrant that. We have a grand total of (at the time of writing) 55 blue mana symbols between mana costs and activated abilities, which means we'd rather have the extra island. Oh well!