I agree with DemonDragonJ on this one. I think you're close, but certain aspects can definitely be dialed in a bit more. Since you brought up the mana cost, another fairly restrictive and similarly costed card is Ruinous Ultimatum, which is also 1 mana more.

Arixmathise is pretty powerful in that:

• Between the haste & ETB, you may search up and put up to 6 land cards in your graveyard the turn that it enters, and then make your opponents do an equivalent amount of discard/sacrificing.

• The combo of keywords is pretty strong in that it's also a strongly statted commander that is inherently 1/3 of the way to lethal Voltron damage at baseline, stays Vigilant for defense (which is typically a weakness for Voltron without additional support), and helps stabilize decent chunks of life each time it connects for combat damage.

• The combo of creature types can also make it a pretty relevant option for certain commanders (Kaalia of the Vast), or typal shenanigans like Party.

I think to make the card more "fair", I'd recommend:

• Increase the mana by 1

• Maybe remove one or more of Haste, Lifelink, or Vigilance

• Change the attack trigger to a combat damage one, depending on how you tweak the addition of Haste.

• Maybe remove the ETB effect portion if you would prefer to keep more of the rest of everything intact.

• P/T could probably be taken down 1-2 points each respectively and still be decent. A 5 or 6 power aggro flyer with Vigilance with a high toughness is still nothing to scoff at.

• Introduce a drawback for yourself beyond the restrictive mana cost, such as losing life if your opponents sac or discard beyond a certain threshold.

I'm not saying to do all of the above, but I think those are all options in various combinations that could work to scale the card back a bit, but still keep it fairly powerful.

Edit: Ninja'd by Bookrook, but we're on similar wavelengths.

Thanks again for checking out my OG Modern decks. I haven't checked them out in years.

I haven't followed the Modern meta in years, but might take a peek. I don't really have any EDH decks I'm working on rn, besides recent updates to my existing lists.

Prowess/Flurry/Valiant seem like fun continuations to a Heroic deck that I used play. I thought I had my old Heroic list still up, but I must deleted or archived it a while ago for some reason I can't remember. It was a G/W Heroic deck built around OG Theros, and featured stuff like Ranger's Guile & Wild Defiance.

"the idea off playing a bunch removal and boardwipe seems funny" and "I don't like the idea of people getting salty about my stuff" are kinda opposing thoughts. If you are planning on leaning heavily into playing a lot of removal and board wipes, then be prepared for people getting salty.

I'd recommend checking out Anhelo, the Painter as an option for combo/control that you might be looking for. His need for sacrificial bodies for Casualty helps put some balance limit on him.

Same friend that does the pump fake will also ask the table some variation of, "Hey guys, should I do the 'funny' thing or the 'scary' thing next?" This is usually asked as a lead up to, or shortly after the pump fake. At this point everyone knows both options will suck for the rest of us lol. That question has tilted someone on a couple of occasions, but is most often met with tired sighs now.

I like to play into it with something like, "I could go for a chuckle right now."

My friends and I joke that one of them basically got the rest of us to pick up on his "pump fake" technique. This usually happens in mid-game, especially once everyone is racing to "turn the corner" and be the first to deploy their end game strategy.

To "pump fake", my friend usually threatens to drop something big and scary, definitely some kind of lightning rod interaction magnet. Someone will bite on the bait & counter or remove The Big Scary Thing™️, to which my friend follows up by playing his actual intended Bigger Scarier Thing™️.

I've picked up on that my friend will usually use board wipes as his pump fake bait, as it's a kinda win-win for him. Either his wipe goes unanswered, or it eats up some interaction & he drops what he actually wanted to after.

Are there specific types of control that you're interested in? For example, are you interested in something like Edict effects? Maybe splashing white for stax & tax effects?

I'd suggest checking out the EDHRec pages for control & combo focused commanders for some ideas. You might also notice some overlap on options across both pages.

In terms of making a deck a Bracket 3, that's up to you in terms of which Game Changers or other criteria you want included. The only way certain commanders can likely be a "baseline 3" is if they are on the Game Changer list already, like Kinnan, Bonder ProdigyGC, for example.

Also in regards to "I don't like the idea of people getting salty about my stuff", there is always a non-zero chance that whoever you play with might not like your deck for some reason. The type of combos or control you decide on might be considered more salty than others, and that varies from player to player. Your decks always have potential to be salty to someone.

Lol thank you for stopping by and checking out some of my first ever decks capwner. I first started playing MtG in college, around 2013ish. My friends and I only played 60 card jank decks using the Modern card pool. Although they were technically "Modern" decks based on the pool, our games were often multiplayer, playing out more like a Commander game. Idk why, but a 99 card singleton deck seemed so foreign to us at the time lol.

I haven't brewed anything 60 card in probably 6-7 years. My Allies deck that you checked out was probably the last Modern deck I put together before my friends and I made the jump to EDH. I've half-considered brewing some Modern jank again, mostly for the thought exercise lol.

Valiant Verbosity

Enchantment

Creatures you control gain first strike, flying, and trample.

Creatures you control gain +1/+1 if they have three keywords. They gain an additional +1/+1 for each keyword beyond the third.

This feels a little bit Silver-bordery, but wanted to do something a bit different than Concerted Effort.

Create an inverse card that punishes your opponents for having multiple keywords on their creatures, or wild.

Or wild if Selesnya Aristocrat is too narrow/tough of a prompt. I figured I'd give an inverse to "Rakdos Enchantress" lol.

Mirvva, Beguiling Instigator

Legendary Creature - Human Warlock

The first time a nontoken creature enters under an opponent's control each turn, create a Red Aura enchantment token named Beguiling Impetus attached to that creature. That token has "Enchanted creature gets +2/+2 and is goaded."

Creatures you control get +1/+0 for each enchanted creature your opponents control.

Whenever one or more creatures you don't control deal combat damage to one of your opponents, you and those creatures' controller each draw a card and lose 1 life.

1/3

Create a Selesnya Aristocrat.

Here's the Mutate wiki page for reference. The most relevant bullets for your question:

• "A spell cast with mutate becomes a mutating creature spell. It requires a target creature with the same owner as the mutating creature spell. In the rare case that the player casting the mutating creature spell is not its owner, that player must choose a target creature the spell's owner also owns."

• "A mutating creature spell is a creature spell, even if it won't enter the battlefield as a creature."

So since Mutate spells are considered creature spells when on the stack, they will trigger Primeval Bounty. You will need to have an already legal target on the battlefield if you are casting it for its mutate cost.

Thank you for checking out our first couple of episodes, legendofa, I'm glad you enjoyed them!

The structure that we are currently using is a bulleted outline of the major points that we want to cover and sequence through each episode. We prefer to keep the majority of our discussions fairly free flowing, but utilize the outlines as our guide to make sure we hit all of our major points.

One piece of feedback we got was that our episodes ended too early, so the next one we are recording on Thursday evening will not cap out at about 1 hour, like we did for the first couple. My friends and I are also trying out a remote recording, so we can each have our dual screen setups and own mics. The next episode will be Dragonstorm thoughts and brief Bracket updates.

Ullgraut, All-Encompassing

Legendary Creature - Wurm

Trample, ward

You have no maximum hand size.

When ~ enters, choose one:

• Its power and toughness are equal to the number of creatures you control.
• Its power and toughness are equal to the number of lands you control.
• Its power and toughness are equal to the number of cards in your hand.

X / X

I opted to use "x" instead of the star/asterisk for the P/T, but intended for those to be stars.

Create a legendary Temur bear, or a legendary Jund Mercenary.

Thank you, I deeply appreciate it. I think we are going to try doing some remote recording over Discord since our first couple episodes were recorded in person at my friend's place.

I'm hoping to chat with him soon and have some more definite recording dates penciled in. Generally speaking, the other episodes that we have outlined are dives into our personal styles, thoughts on "casual" commander now in the context of brackets, as well as a couple of deck techs (Isshin for me, Henzie for him). For the deck techs, we are looking to personalize them & discuss why those commanders are our favorites, & some of the thematic aspects we really connect with.

Beyond some of the aforementioned topics, we do have some broader topics like "Hobbies in the Face of Dystopia" and "How do you find Inspiration?" and tying those into deck brewing lol.

Here's the link to our podcast channel. We're still fairly new at this & only have 2 full episodes recorded so far.

Our episode 0 is basically an intro to who we are & we chatted Aetherdrift spoilers at the time. Episode 1 was recorded shortly after the Brackets debut, so we focused mostly on that. Spoiler: some of the cards we discussed are now on the Game Changer list lol.

I hope you enjoy, and happy to take feedback. We're def trying to be better about going on tangents & pacing.

Thanks for asking legendofa. It is still active, my friend and I just need to set aside some time to record soon-ish. Life has been pretty busy for both of us recently (he got engaged a week ago!), so we are trying to find a pocket of peace to sit down and chat. Our next two episodes we have in the pipeline are our thoughts on Dragonstorm, and eventually my Isshin one.

Would you like me to send you the Spotify link to our channel? We only have 2 episodes up so far. We have outlines written up for about a dozen episodes.