The Best Leaked Cards from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles | 725

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If you haven't been paying attention, if you missed it in the news, Wizards accidentally leaked every single rare and mythic in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the pre-release kits for Laurel and Eclipse. Yeah, there was reports pre-release weekend, saw a lot of chatter online, people, you know, photos from their pre-release kits from Laurel and Eclipse. They're promo, they're pre-release promo being a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles card, a rare or mythic. Whoops. Yeah, I have no idea how this even happens. How is it possible? But anyway, as a result, basically every rare and mythic from the main set at least was, you know, there were crappy photos of it from people's cell phones at the pre-releases online. And as a result, Wizards decided, okay, we're just going to officially release the card images on their website for what those were. Blake wrote an article about it that we'll link in the show notes. But they were like, well, if everybody's going to know about these, we might as well get the good images out there so you can actually see them. Yeah, it was on them that this mistake happened. I mean, or somewhere along the manufacturing line. It was an internal mistake that led this to happen and not as, it certainly isn't the fault of all the players who opened the wrong cards in their product. So Wizards did the only thing they really could do, which is spoil their set a full month early. It's a real shame too, because, you know, there's already all this frustration that, you know, I'm with it. I feel too about just like the amount of universes beyond product. And it was like, okay, Lauren Eclipse, finally we're on like one of our, we're returning to, you know, one of our classic planes. People were excited. A set that really feels like classic magic. And it was going to get its moment in the sun. Yeah, and it wasn't even a long moment. Like there's a month and a half maybe between releases of Lauren Eclipse and Turtles. So people were already like, man, I wish we could spend a little bit more time on Lauren. And suddenly Turtles are cutting in even deeper than they were originally supposed to. Yeah. And if we remember last year with Edge of Eternity, like Spider-Man was coming out because of the timing of Comic-Con that we were previewing Spider-Man cards like during that, people were really frustrated because they didn't get to concentrate, you know, on the magic IP set. And it just feels like the magic IP stuff is getting stepped on a lot by the universe beyond. And this was not supposed to be as much the case here. And then whoops, it was. So yeah, just disappointing all around. But at the same time, you know, the cards are out. And as content creators, we were faced with this conundrum of like, okay, well, our normal release cadence would be that we would release this episode, you know, right after the cards were officially previewed. Which is usually two weeks before release or so. But at that point, if we do that, these cards will have been known to the world for like almost a month. Yeah. So we were like, I don't think we can wait because no one will care if we're talking about these cards that everyone else has already talked about for a month at that point. So this is us being like, I think we're just going to talk about them now since that's when they were previewed. And but we get it. People are going to be frustrated with it. We're frustrated too. But they are magic cards. And that's what we do. We talk about magic cards and there is some cool stuff in here. Yep. So now you are all caught up. We're going to have sort of a strange episode. This is basically going to be the rares and mythics that we think are worth talking about that have been spoiled so far. Obviously, there will be more cards coming out in the commander product. There's like commons and uncommons that haven't come out yet. So we're just covering what we have access to officially. Yeah. Usually we do the commanders as one episode and then in the 99 is a separate. That's not going to happen for this set. We're just going to have to sort of roll with the punches here and play it by ear. So I'm sure we'll do at least a couple more TMNT flavored episodes, definitely for the pre-con and then kind of the rest probably. Probably. Yeah. We'll figure that out later. A little bit of commanders today, a little bit of cards in the 99. You're getting, you're getting them both mushed together. But let's get into it. Starting with a cycle. We're not going to talk about all of them in this cycle, but I do want to talk about sneak, which is a new mechanic. It's basically a twist on Ninjutsu, which would cheat a player, a creature into play. It wants a, one of your creatures was declared unblocked. So you attack with a creature, no blockers are declared. You activate a Ninjutsu ability, put the Ninjutsu creature onto the battlefield and return the other one to your hand. Poof. Yeah. Taps in attacking too. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of a fixed Ninjutsu because sneak has an additional safety measure worded into it where you have to do it during the declare blockers or after the declare blockers phase. Is that right? Yeah. That's the same as Ninjutsu. The big difference is Ninjutsu is a cat or a sneak is a cast trigger where Ninjutsu is an activated ability that you can't counter. Well, right. But you can Ninjutsu after damage. You can't sneak after damage. Can you not? Yes. Make haste. You also return an unblocked creature you control to hand during the declare blockers step. I see. So you can't get quite as tricksy with sneak. Ninjutsu, they didn't really mean to do that, I think, but like Ninjutsu has these tricks where like after damage you're still in combat, you can Ninjutsu a thing out just for the entrance of the battlefield. Damages are even dealt, so you won't get on common damage, but you get ETBs and things like that. Sneak doesn't work that way. So. Which for these matters because you won't, these are sneak sorceries and you won't get the damage from the creature. Like I think you would want to cast these after damage to get the effect after you hit, but you can't do that with these. So the sort of new templating on sneak does matter here. Yeah. So let's talk about a sneak card. The first one we're going to talk about is Splinter's Technique. This is three in a black furry sorcery with sneak one and a black. Search your library for a card, put that card into your hand, then shuffle. Ho! It's demonic tutor. Yeah, it's demonic tutor, bounce one of your own creatures and it has to be an unblocked attacker when you do it. Yeah, it's demonic sneaker. Yeah. I like you put the comparison to diabolic intent, which I think is the best comp here. Obviously any tutor, vampiric tutor, anything, it can find any card, so it's a classic black tutor. But there are additional hoops you have to jump through. To pay one in a black, yes. Yeah, so yeah. But I mean, tutors are good. Yeah, the interesting thing about this is three in a black is too expensive. I like, we don't run a ton of the two black, black tutor. It's just a little bit too expensive, even if it is on more on the affordable side. But this is one in a black with built-in synergy. Right. So if you can reliably have a creature be unblocked, if you're running a lot of cheap flyers, if you're running a lot of cheap unblockable creatures, then you can start looking at this more as a demonic tutor style card. Yeah, maybe also if you're running like tokens or something where you can just sort of chump attack, like I don't care, I'll run three in here, one's going to be unblocked, then I'll sneak this out. I like, if that's a thing you can do, I think that's another, yeah, but you can't just run it in any black deck. You have to like, you have to think I'm going to most of the time be able to sneak this in. You do not want to pay for. And on top of that, I do want to kind of mention that this is one in a black as the sneak cost, but you're also sort of paying the cost of the creature you return to your hand. Yes. You're paying the single blue pip or whatever you used, because you're going to have to recast that, or you're going to have to like take that tempo hit of returning an untapped creature. So it isn't as simple as like, this is a demonic tutor. Like I think at its cheapest, it's kind of like one black blue in a specific moment is like how I think of what this is actually going to cost. Yeah, that's why I like the comparison to diabolic intent, because you have to say like, oh, I sort of got a factor in that I have to have a creature I can sacrifice. And what do you run diabolic intent in? Not much. Aristocrats decks that want to sacrifice things and will have them. And I think you kind of will think about this as similar, not aristocrats necessarily, but like, hey, do I have ETB creatures, cheap creatures that I actually want to bounce back to my hand? Right. That's where it's going to be good. I don't think if you either have stuff where like the mana cost is going to be low, because I got a lot of one and two drops. Right. Or it's tokens. So again, I don't, I'm losing a one one, so it's not a big deal. Those are the places I think you're going to want to run it, or maybe you've got enough ETB creatures that you would want, you would be happy to bounce back where you're like, you know, between Muldrifter, and of course, Muldrifter always comes to my mind, but like that kind of stuff, then that's the only other case I could think about it. Yeah. Because you just don't want to be bouncing a five CMC, you know, mana value thing back to your hand that doesn't have an inters ability or something like that, or a cast ability. Brutal. Brutal. Yeah. Just makes this too expensive. So with synergy, yeah, you can play it. And if you're into tutors, of course, but without, you're probably not looking at this, certainly not above any of the other tutors, unless it's a budget situation. Let's move on to the next one. This is the only other sneak card we're going to talk about. This is Raphael's technique for Red Red for an instant, but it has sneak two and a red. Each player may discard their hand and draw seven cards. So this is an optional wheel of fortune if you can sneak it in. Yeah. The fixed wheel of fortunes they've come out with in sort of modern day magic that say may, they don't force everybody to wheel. They're just a, if you decide you want to, you get the option to wheel, which is quite a bit worse I'd say than forcing it because it doesn't go in the decks that are like making, want to make your opponent's draw cards like the Neck-Goussars and the Xyras. Those kind of decks where your opponent can just be like, well, you know what, I don't want to take all that damage. I'm not going to wheel, but they are still good in the decks where like you yourself wheeling is what you're after. Right. And I think that's, I actually really like this pattern. I think Wizards has been smart to print wheels that are opt in because they are so powerful in that like disruptive aggressive way. That can just wheel and wheel and wheel. The interesting thing about this one that I wanted to mention is this is an instant. We don't see a ton of instant speed wheels. Six mana is hugely expensive for a wheel to just cast. Yeah. If you're going to cast this on like your opponent's end step, before your turn, that is a thing you could do. It's going to be a little spendy, but it's like more optional to cast this without its neat cost, I think, than the demonic tutor. Yeah. I also think like the decks that want to wheel are often going to be decks with like, you know, blue in them spells based decks want to refill their hand. And this gets a lot better in those scenarios because for two reasons. One, instant speed. You've got a lot of under instant speed stuff to back up the thing we always talk about where like, hey, you got counterspells. You didn't want to counter anything. This is not super efficient, but it is a thing you can do that you didn't just, you know, leave all your man open and not use any of it. But also those decks are going to have Malcoms and Fairy Masterminds, you know, ledger shredders that just go in a lot of those blue decks that are just incidentally good with the sneak part of this because they are too many of things with the vision. And so I actually think Raphael's technique is going to see a decent amount of play, probably not quite wheel of misfortune level, but like probably a little bit more than the Splinter's technique we'll see. That's my guess. I agree. Because I can just think of a lot more just decks that like it will just slot into it just already works with. Not that the other one doesn't have some uses, but it feels more narrow. I agree. Raphael's technique is definitely interesting. I think we'll run into it a little bit more nice that it's a May option. Yep. We're going to be talking about a ton of Magic cards today. Unfortunately, all of the ones in 2nd and 2nd Genie's Mutant Ninja Turtles burn out for sale. They're probably pre-sale though. Maybe, yeah. Card Kingdom usually has a pre-sale going. It might just be for sealed product at this point. I don't know how they deal with previews this far in advance because it doesn't happen very often. But what we love about Card Kingdom is they have a huge inventory. They're a really big retailer. They have all the cards you're looking for in one spot. If you see one of especially the commanders we're going to talk about today and you want to build a deck around it, they definitely have all the cards that are going to go in that deck. And we love the Card Kingdom sort of deck building and purchasing process. You can just copy paste the whole list into their deck builder and they make it really easy to check out from there. You don't have to have like 50 tabs open to like figure out the versions and you know, juggle all the different shippings and everything. That's a nightmare that I never have to go through anymore thankfully because I use cardkeem.com slash command. 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Yeah, we hope to hear from you. Okay, back to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Let's talk about Teenage Mutant Ninja Rats. Yeah. I like this next one. Yeah, he's cool. Yeah, so the next one is Splinter Radical Rat and this is the deck that I built for the TMNT episode of Game Nights. Yeah. Which is coming out. It's a little ways from now. Yeah. Just because these got spoiled so early. Yeah, this, let me read it. It is one and two hybrid Orzhov. So one white, one black, one black, or one black white. For a two four mutant ninja rat, it says, if an ability of a ninja creature you control triggers that ability triggers an additional time. And then it also has pay one in a blue, colon, target, ninja can't be blocked this turn. So you can do that as many times as you've got mana and ninjas, I suppose. I guess you could target the same ninja twice. Yeah, go nuts. Yeah, you can if you want to. This is sweet. So this is a Esper Ninja Commander. So we're looping white in there. We really haven't seen a full Esper Ninja Commander that I can think of. It's like been white blue, there's been blue black, there's been grics, blue, red, black. And this is a perfect payoff. It gives you a little bit of evasion. It doubles all of their effectiveness. So it's going to look like ninja decks that we've seen in the past, but we're going to walk through some of the steps that you go to when you're building a ninja deck. Because ninjas are sort of twofold. You need one mana evasive creatures, sometimes with ETBs, that you get them unblocked so you can ninja to or sneak in a spell after that. So this is stuff like Slither Blade or Changeling Outcast is great because it's also a ninja. Yeah, Changeling Outcast is sort of the best one of these, I think, for the deck. Absolutely. Or you want flying creatures with ETBs, something like Fairy Seer when it enters you Scry2, but it's a little 1-1 flyer. Or Baleful Strix shows up a lot in ninja decks as well. Baleful Strix is so good. It's just ridiculous. Because you bounce back here and replay it drawn to the card. Also, nobody wants to block it. Yeah, for a lot of reasons. Baleful Strix is great in ninja decks, so you need sort of a suite of these to make sure that you can sneak your ninjas into combat. Yeah, then you need actual ninjas to sneak in. It is a delicate balance. Ninja decks often fall prey to that thing where you draw the wrong half of your deck. You only draw the ninjas and not the evasive things, or you only draw the evasive things and no ninjas, so you have to be a little careful when you probably got a mulligan at least amount. But yeah, examples of ninjas, of course, Eureko is a big one. I will say Eureko is known as this sort of big bad because the Eureko deck is very powerful. But the Eureko deck is not really a ninja deck most of the time. It has big spells and stuff to do a lot of damage off Eureko, and it's taking advantage of that card advantage. And Eureko, yeah, can ninja too in, but you don't generally play a ton of ninjas in the Eureko deck. Yeah, this one will play a bunch of ninjas like Fallen Shinobi, Ingenious Infiltrator. Of course, there's a bunch of new ones in Turtles too. Usually they have deals, combat damage, and usually you want that to draw you cards or something is what you're looking for. Just keep in mind, your commander doubles all of these things. So the bigger, more impactful ninjas with super powerful abilities are the ones that you really want in this deck, where Eureko, if you're playing ninjas, you're usually playing the super duper cheap ones. A couple of the small ones, the ones that are also like 1-1 fires for 1-2, so they can serve either role. Let's talk about some of the new ones that came out, because I do think that this is the exciting thing about building a Turtles ninja deck. And just a bunch of new tools for a ninja deck in general is cool. Absolutely. Yeah, so there's Shark Shredder, Killer Clone, which is two black-black for a legendary 4-4. Shark Octopus Ninja has sneak for three black-black. So it has first strike, and it says when Shark Shredder deals combat damage to a player, put up to one target creature card from that player's graveyard onto the battlefield under your control. It enters tapped and attacking that player. Remember, this has first strike, so it hits on first strike, brings something back, which is still tapped and attacking, then on regular damage, that new thing will smack them. It brings it back post-block, so you know that this thing that you're going to reanimate is going to hit as well. Because they have no opportunity to block it if first strike damage has already been done. Yep, and you do just keep that thing, too, after that. It's not until end of turn. Yeah, this is very similar to Inka's servant of Oni. That is sort of an old, iconic ninja in Commander, but it's a little bit better because it gets it into play attacking. There's also, of course, many ninja Turtles like Leonardo, Sewer, Samurai. This is during your turn. You may cast creature spells with power or toughness, one or less from your graveyard. If you cast a spell this way, that creature enters with finality counter on it. That's awesome because you can get back your changeling outcasts and slither blades and stuff. You're going to be running a bunch of low toughness, evasive things. And a fair amount of ninjas are like two ones and like one threes with death touch, that kind of thing. So this is just a great recursive piece that also is like a three-three with double strike. Also, you're less worried about finality counters on those really cheap things like your bellfall strixes and that kind of thing because if you sneak them out of play, the finality counter doesn't worry about it and falls right off. Also, if you died and you're bringing it back with the finality counter, it's fine. You've already replayed it. Yeah, exactly. It died once already. You got your value. Yeah, I really like the next one, there's Turncoat Kunouichi, which is a three-two mutant ninja fox with sneak two white black. And it says, when this creature enters, choose target creature and opponent controls. Exile that creature until this creature leaves the battlefield. If this creature's sneak cost was paid, instead, exile the chosen creature. So it is a banisher priest unless you did it during combat, in which case it is just a exile the thing. That's it. No, it doesn't matter if they killed the Turncoat after that or whatever. They're not getting their thing back. Yeah, and if your commander is in play, you get two of them, that's backbreak. Four mana exile two is huge. I also like that this is an enters trigger, so you don't even have to do the sneak part. It is three mana, cast this with Splinter out. When it enters, do the thing. But you still exile two things and you can just kind of maybe get blockers out of the way and things like that with it. So yeah, that's the cool thing about Splinter is like a lot of ninja stuff is on combat damage, but it also just works with ETB. Which they gave us a bunch of ETB creatures in this set that are ninjas, right? That don't even have sneak like Dawn and Leo problem solvers. Oh, there's not a ETB. Sorry, this is an at your end step. But again, it's a trigger that Splinter will double and that is a blink creature in an artifact or one or the other if you only have one. Yeah, I mean, super great to double with your commander. I did want to mention in this deck, you kind of don't have to index into the cheap unblockable things as much. Yeah, as much, yeah. Because your commander does provide that unblockability. So typically with ninjas, they don't have natural evasion, but because you've got it built into your commander, you don't necessarily have to have like 15, 18 of the one man and one one evasive things. You can play a lot more of these powerful top end ninjas because you can rely on your commander to guarantee that they're going to get through. Yeah, that's true. That unblockable ability is real important later in the game. And ninjadex often have the problem where like they kind of get into late stages and like have trouble doing their thing because you could do it early when people didn't have a lot of stuff. And then later they've got defenses up and it's hard to get through. Yeah. Yeah, I wanted to mention that Splinter works like Katara from Avatar in the same way. The ally doubling. Which I also play, yeah. And so you can also do the same tricks where if you can give abilities to ninjas, it will double those. So combat research, which is maybe the best card in the Katara deck is also one of the best cards in the Splinter deck. Because it says whenever this creature deals combat damage, play or draw a card, it gives that ability to enchant a creature so you'll draw two cards. And it also gives Ward and Ward's inability that the creature has that will also be doubled. So giving Ward flowering of the white trees another card I earmarked, which is really, really good. It just will make your stuff harder to block but also gives the Ward to Splinter and your other legendary creatures. So that's really, really powerful again as just an anthem effect that also protects your stuff. Yeah. And there's going to be a fair amount of legends in this deck, especially if you're building around the turtles. Yeah. And I think you are going to have a decent amount of turtles in this deck just because there hasn't been a lot of ninjas. Like when they add 100 cards to the pool of all magic cards, 25,000 or 30,000 cards, the chances that one of them is better than something you've already got are kind of low. But because there's only a couple hundred ninjas and they're going to, you know, they just added like 50 more or whatever. It feels like 50 more or so. The chances are very high that like, yeah, a large number of them are better than what was there. Yeah. All right. We've got a couple other things that we wanted to mention that are not necessarily ninjas but are very powerful in decks like this. Specifically, I wanted to mention the Blue Spirit, which I think is a very powerful card from Avatar. This is whenever a non-token creature you control enters during combat, draw a card. Well, sneaking in Jitsu are all happening during combat. That's a lot of card draw. Yeah. And it says you may cast the first creature card you cast each turn as though it had Flash. This is a little bit weirder with ninjas, but it gives you a little bit more flexibility in terms of when you can actually draw the cards. The Blue Spirit isn't themselves a ninja, so you can't double this ability, but that card draw engine is so powerful in a deck like this. Everybody knows I like casting stuff at Flash Speed. It's really good in a deck like this though because it can look like you don't have an evasive creature out and then you can get one out at instant speed. So people against ninjas, they're always looking to have blockers. What can I see? I'm likely to have haste in these colors. So if I can figure out a way that I've got all of my bases covered here, I don't have to worry. And then you go, okay, on an instant Flash out this thing you didn't expect and now it's attacking and it can be the thing that I sneak with is also a really good just thing to have in your toolbox on your card draw engine. Yeah. Haste is something you don't really have access to and pseudo haste is huge. Yeah. Just being like, okay, I can get going a turn earlier because I have a creature that can attack this turn. And having something like a welcoming vampire, those kind of things are really powerful. Ninja decks like this are susceptible to board wipes because you have to commit so much to the board and you can replay all your one drops, but there's not really anything you can do if those all get wiped. Having good card draw engines, having good protection, Flash engines like the Blue Spirit are going to go a long way in making a functional Ninja deck. Yeah. When they board wipe, you want to be able to be like cool, play like six things, you know, because it's all one and two mana spells go and they're like, crap. They're just going to do this to me next turn. It's the worst in the world when they boardwipe and you're like, I have three cards. Yeah, for sure. You've got to keep your hands full, especially in Asper colors. You've got lots of opportunity to. Let's move on to the next one. This is April O'Neill hacktivist, three and a blue for a one five human scientist. At the beginning of your end step draw card for each card type among spells you've cast this turn. This is a four mana creature draw engine that smells sort of like a beast whisperer, but like doesn't really zero in on one type. It in fact cares about all the types. So the first thing that I noticed when I looked at this one is like, this isn't really how we build in commander. Like when I build an instant like a spell slinger deck, I'm putting in like 45 sources, instant sorceries, you know, if I'm building a creature deck, I'm putting in like 50 creatures. Right artifacts. Yeah, exactly. Artifacts. You want everything to be artifacts. Do you really zeroing in on a type? So April's sort of strange in commander because you're like, I don't really know what deck naturally wants in April O'Neill. Yeah, it's, I mean, I think there are decks that do that, but they'll be sort of in weird way more narrow, I think, than the ones that are like, this is a creature deck. This is an enchantment deck. This is an artifact deck. This is a planeswalker deck. This is a spells deck. You put down that spells you thought were probably the most likely and that makes sense because spells means instance and sorcery. So it's already two things and spells also tend to have some creatures in them. Whereas creature decks tend to have very few instance and sorcery, a couple, but not that many. And a lot of them are like boardwights and removal. Yeah, it's an interesting card. I think there are, the other thing to think about is there are cards that have multiple types. So if you have a lot of artifact creatures, this will get a lot better because one spell gets you two cards. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, so enchantment creatures are also a thing. So maybe that's a spot that you could think about it. To me, it's just like, well, you kind of look at your list and you say, you know, is it either evenly spread between a lot of the different categories or does it have a lot of things that are two categories at once? Right. Yeah. April does draw you a card right at the end step. You cast her. That is the interesting part about this is there's definitely some turns where you cast a beast whisper and you're like, if I untap, it's going to be great. But April says like, well, you got me on the battlefield. I'll give you a card for free because you've cast a creature that turn. Yeah. Assuming you've cast her. Yeah. And beast whisper is one of the most played cards in the format and very, very good. I still put in decks all the time. Yeah. If beast whisper said it drew you a card when it entered or whatever. It's not the exact same because they can kill before enchantment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's like that seems broken because it's such a slam dunk. Now, April won't draw you a card if you cast two creatures on the same turn, which beast whisper will. Right. So I think, yeah, there's just a lot to think about there, but it does seem definitely playable and definitely like could be good because a format of thing that draws you a card and then has the possibility to draw you multiple cards and will likely draw you at least one card every turn. Yeah. And is a one five, like it's not nothing. It will stop some stuff on the ground, like good against that ninja's deck. Yeah. I mean, the interesting thing about this is like, there are some turns where this is going to feel insane. Like if you cast a signet and then cast this on turn five and you draw two cards on end step, that feels nuts. Really good. Yeah. That feels like, okay, I have a threat on the battlefield that they have to deal with right now or I'm going to spiral out of control and I have two cards right now. Yeah, if you kill it, I still am up. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Like that feels quite strong. So there's definitely worlds where I'm like, this is a banana straw engine, but I have to like look through my decks and really consider how often am I going to do that? And it's kind of artifact decks. I think artifact creatures is going to be a good signpost for you should look at April O'Neill and then spells decks. Yeah, maybe enchantress decks because they often, but they actually, maybe not though, because enchantress decks do not have problems drawing cards. They have trouble doing anything. Yeah, I don't. This doesn't help you do anything. It also draws you cards and end step, which like enchantress decks are kind of trying to like spin your wheels. So it is spells decks though. So drawing on end step might be more of a downside than we think. Yeah, I would think spells decks have enough instance probably because spells tend towards instance these days because sorcerers are so bad that like, you know, you probably can use your mana on other people's turns. But again, and then again, maybe that's bad because this won't draw you cards if you hold all your mana open. Yeah. Right. If you want to draw a go, this is not good because it's drawing you on end step. You want to be casting stuff during your turn. Yeah, that's interesting. So it's sort of like a, is it burn deck? Yeah. It's like where this might be comfiest? I think this is a, you know, it's going to be a case by case basis as far as like you got to look at your list. It's not like a certain kind of deck necessarily wants this. It's just like you look at your list and if it's like, I got 10, it's 10 sorceries. I got 12 artifacts. I got, you know, 20 creatures. I got two planes, walkers, you know, whatever. Then it's like, oh, it's pretty good candidate just because I am doing a wide variety of stuff. Whatever my strategy is, it's not focused around one card type. Delirium decks. Yeah. I want to call out like, how is April O'Neill not investigating? It is a little weird. I mean, she's kind of like getting straight to the point. She's skipping the making the artifact part and just going straight to drawing my card. Maybe that's what she did originally, but like her character is an investigative journalist. Yeah. Investigate, like she feels like she should make clues. She follows clues all the time. That's kind of her thing. Yeah. So from a flavor standpoint, I just, I question it a little bit. Yeah. Not saying it's not good. It would be worse if it made clues, but still. Still. Yeah. It's very interesting. Maybe they just didn't want to mix tokens with the mutagen tokens and everything. Maybe. Maybe. That's April O'Neill. She seems pretty sweet. Well, the next card is cool, but rude. That's what it's called. Cool, but rude. It's one in red for an enchantment class. It comes in with the ability, whenever you attack, you may discard a card if you do draw a card. So whenever you attack, rummage. And then it goes to level two for one in red. Whenever you discard a card, this class deals two damage to each opponent. Pretty good with that wheel from earlier. And then at level three, also one in red. So it'd be six mana total to get here. When this class becomes level three, search your card, search your library for a card, put it into your hand, shuffle, then discard a card at random. So it's gamble. Gamble on the last one. Yeah. Gamble with deal two damage. Yeah. I kept looking at this card and I was like, this isn't that good. I was like, I don't know. It's like a lot though. And unlike a lot of classes that we've seen in the past, which are sort of like one to get on the battlefield, board upgrade, three to upgrade the last time. These are all two mana and feel very doable. Where like I could pay two for a little looter, especially if I have a cheap commander that I can get into the battlefield early and start doing this rummaging. But it's easy to level this up and wheel in the same turn and come out of nowhere. It's easy to level this up two times, get a tutor and have a big turn, the turn after that. So the more I thought about it, the more I was like, I don't know. This is kind of a nasty little card that fills a lot of roles in different decks. I do think the one you want to focus on is level two. I think the reason that you put this in the deck is you're wheeling a lot, you're discarding a lot to like looters or you're more obviously like a Madness or a Mayhem deck. Yeah, you want to discard your reanimator. It's paired with black and you want to get stuff in there. I think you have to want to discard things or I guess want is a weird word, or be incidentally discarding a lot like a wheels deck doesn't necessarily want to discard things. Although sometimes you lean there because that's what you're doing. But I think if you had a lot of wheels in your deck, you could run this because it will just deal a ton of damage. And you're just like, I'm taking advantage of a thing I'm already doing. But to me, I agree. The level two is what I'm circling as like if I don't like that, I'm not playing this card. Probably. Yeah, because that's what I'd be playing it for. And the other two parts are just kind of gravy. I do think you need enough creatures in your deck that could be attacking to run it too. Because a lot of times you see a run ranger, it's on a creature that can attack. Right. This is like, well, you need another piece for that first level to do anything. What was the name of your shark commander from Aether Drift? Captain Howler. Captain Howler. Yeah, that was the first card I thought of where I was just like, there's a lot of decks that are kind of like your Captain Howler deck. It was Jimmy Spider-Man deck was sort of looter centric. We've talked more and more about two mana looters being very common in Commander. So there's a fair amount of decks that will look at cool but rude and be like, ooh, look, a little way to like turn spinning my wheels into damage. And if I need a gamble, great. And if I don't need a gamble because I'm doing plenty of rummaging already, I'm in a perfectly good position. I'm in a perfectly fine spot. Yeah, but gamble is pretty good when it is tied to another thing you want. Absolutely. Yeah, it's like two mana for like, go find your best card and probably, you know, hopefully something like five out of six times, keep it. Yeah, got it. But also if you're in the reanimators or the discard, want to discard it, also plays in that, right? Go get a madness card. And then if I do end up discarding it to this, it's fine. I will, that's what I want to do. And if I don't, I'll rummage it away on my attack. So yeah, it even plays into that as well. Or if it's a big creature that I'm going to reanimate and I don't mind if I discard it, then the gamble becomes a lot better. Right. Yeah, so it's famously Red's in Tomb gamble. But I was thinking about this card and I was like, does this go in just like a blue-red-burny style deck where like, you're casting frantic searches and you're casting chartic horses and you're just trying to cast a lot of cheap spells, which in blue and red sort of incidentally discard a fair amount of cards. Like, is it good enough there? I sort of got to like maybe, it really depends on how, if you have the creature to trigger this first ability, if you're like, does this go in my dragon's approach deck with something that I was thinking about. Yeah, interesting. I would think no, just because I don't think that those decks really want a thing that is, like, usually want cards that replace themselves. That's why pretty sure you are down a card, but it gives you mana back. But it's a lot of like one mana cantribute things. And the fact that this doesn't replace itself really at any step along the way is kind of enough of a downside given that like, I might also not have a creature that wants to or can attack. Right. Yeah. But I think if you explain that deck and I'm like, how many wheels do you have and you're like, five. Okay, yeah, you probably could. It's yeah, it's a very interesting card. I think it'll pop up and I'm curious to see what people think about it. We've got a lot of cards to talk about in this episode. We're going to, we're going to join. A lot of turtles. Have we talked about any turtles yet? No, we've talked about a rat. We've mentioned one turtle, the Ninja Turtle. Which we will go into more detail about later. There's more turtles, don't worry. But first, let's take a break to your rewards from our sponsors. Keep the cuddles and lose the mess with Advantage Chewable. Just one tasty tablet kills fleas and ticks for a whole month. No mess, no stress. Just one tasty chew. Advantage Chewable. Flee and tick protection made easy. Find out more at advantagechewable.co.uk. Easy to love, easy to protect. Advantage Chewable. One fish, two fish, red fish, clu fish. Doctor Seuss? No, I'm working on morph on fish typo. Just want to make sure I have enough fish to actually draw some. Oh, well you should use Archidex hypergeometric calculator. See? Archidex makes it easy to check your chances of drawing what you need. Whether it's a certain creature type, mana value, or category of cards, like ramp or draw spells, I use it to check my land count. See, in this deck you only have a 61% chance of drawing three lands by turn two. Might be a little low. Okay, I'll cut a basic or two. Wait, you mean add? Nope. I've got a reputation uphold. Archidex is the best place to browse, brew and playtest Commander decks. Just go to Archidex.com slash command zone to get started. That's A-R-C-H-I-D-E-K-T.com slash command zone. Okay, we are back. We are talking about all the cards that were recently spoiled for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Only a month before we thought they were going to be spoiled. Only a month. And we're about to talk about our first actual turtles of the episode. Let's do it. Only a half hour in or whatever. This is Don and Leo Problem Solvers. Three and Azorius Azorius, so five mana altogether. This is Hybrid Mana for a legendary creature, Mutant Ninja Turtle. No teenager quite yet in the type line, that's okay. It would not fit anyway. It's a long word teenager. This is a 4-6 with vigilance. It says at the beginning of your end step, exile up to one target, artifact you control, and up to one target, creature you control. And return them to the battlefield under their owner's control. This is one I talked about earlier in combination with Splinter. Splinter would double this trigger. I think Azorius Blink is a very supportive and there are many. Nico, Brago, there's a Lavenia that does it. There's a million. The question is what is this add to that conversation that doesn't already exist? The answer to that is not that much. The artifact thing is the biggest thing, I think. Which Brago and your end can do, but in slightly different ways. Right. This is super reliable. You don't have to have it attacked to do that. And it does two. It does it the turn you play it. Yeah. And it does two things. But it can only be one creature and one artifact. Unless you have an artifact creature. If you have artifact creatures, you can be like, okay, that one. Solemn Simulacrum and Moldrifter. Double Blink. Yep, exactly. So this is a card that we're used to seeing. The wondrous closet still sees tons of play. Thassa Deep Dwelling still sees tons of play. Five mana is a lot and it is in two colors. So we'll see less play than those two things. Just by the nature of it being two colors. But as a commander, this is a really interesting card also. Because you can build around like these big artifacts. And essentially, untapped a really powerful mana rock for your opponent's turns. Yeah, exactly. Gilded Lotus Thrand Dynamo, Chromatic Aurory. These are really good blink targets for Don and Leo. Because you use them and then you untap them and you have access to additional mana. And all you need is to be able to use that mana at instant speed during your opponent's turn for it to be good. Not hard to do in blue and white. And in a blink deck. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the interesting thing about this is I was like, so this is a blink spell that actually combines really well with other blink spells. Because it untapped your mana rocks to spend more blink spells on your opponent's turn. Make sure that you're never tapped out. Also really hard to go after your commander when you've got like a Gilded Lotus Up. Because it's just like very good chance you've got some way to interact with what they're going to do and they're going to waste it. And they can talk themselves into like, well you already got the value off of it. Yeah. You know, I'm just not going to go into that mess of mana open and everything and I'll do something else. Not to mention this is great with like artifact ETPs. I mean we're talking about Icar wellspring type of stuff at the least and portal deforexia at the top. Like if you can blink a portal deforexia. And the game isn't already over. It's over now. It's now over. So if you have a deck that has like a displacer kit and it's very likely that this is going to feel right at home. Because displacer kit most often I think blinks artifacts sometimes itself. But you know. Yeah, that's one of the problems with displacer kit. And I think if it didn't hit artifacts it would be like more palatable. But it's like game changer level powerful in those decks because it's just like, wait what? Blink your Gilded Lotus? Yeah. Oh crap. So you can just kind of have unlimited mana? Yeah, basically. Yeah. It's not infinite. It's just a lot. Displacer kit is a lot closer to Paradox Engine than it's not that good. Yeah. But it's not not Paradox Engine. It's a card that's like on my own personal. I don't put it in game night decks. Yeah. Like that's which like Jessica's will. So to me it's like game changer powerful. Yeah. Yeah. But it goes very well with this kind of deck and it fits right at home with a lot of different blink decks. I think if you're a creature blink deck you can think about this because it's just another copy of conjurer's closet. And blinking your artifacts. Like I might adjust my ramp sweet a little bit if I knew this was in the deck. Yeah. I absolutely think you're going to want to put Throne Dynamo and Gilded Lotus into the deck. But like yeah, it can still be mostly creatures. And then I would like you said lean towards Sollum Simlacrum. You know, Mirror Battlesphere maybe. Dot cast. Mirror Battlesphere. That kind of like creature artifact stuff that's got ETBs. Yeah. Yeah. But this is a really sick card. I think it'll see plenty of play. Yeah. All right. Let's go on to more Turtles. All right. It is Dawn and Raph. Hard science. Mm-hmm. This is one and then two is it hybrid. So one blue, blue, blue, red or one blue, red. Three mana total for a two, four mutant Ninja Turtle. Menace, Menace. And it says whenever Dawn and Raph attack the next non-creature spell you cast this turn has Affinity for Artifacts. Which means that it costs one less to cast for each artifact you control. Okay. Blue, red have a lot of stuff. So this is a commander that we've seen a couple of times in slightly different forms. I think it's the most related to Cihili the Gifted. Yep. Which is a planeswalker that ticks up to say the next spell you cast this turn costs one less to cast for each artifact you control as you cast it. The big difference between Cihili and Dawn, of course, is Cihili can cast creatures. And Dawn and Raph can only cast non-creature spells. But they trigger roughly on the same turn. Dawn and Raph have to attack to do it. Yeah. So it would be turn four, which is when Cihili comes down and could do that. And could reasonably do it. Generally Cihili doesn't come down then because you're waiting to set up more artifacts. And Dawn and Raph might be the same, although I could see you playing them earlier just because you wanted them to not have summoning sickness. So you do this, cast a couple of artifacts, then attack and get the benefit. Yeah. It reminds me a little bit of Chiskoria, Forge Tyrant. Chiskoria, of course, has haste and can't come down early. You have to have all the artifacts set up because he is infinity for artifacts. So I think that's a decent comp as well. But Chiskoria, again, can cast creatures. A couple of interesting things to note about how building the stack is going to be a little bit different is your win cons, your big spells are going to tend towards non-creature spells as opposed to Cihili and Chiskoria, which may like lean on your battle sphere. They may lean on Blist steel colossus. They may lean on big, colorless creatures to win the game. You need a slightly different plan. But let's talk about how to get there first, which is just getting a ton of artifacts on the battlefield. Yep. Rectangle theory. Affinity for artifacts means you've got a lot of artifacts. Yep. So cards... This will be a heavy artifact deck. I mean, I think you want, like, you know, of your 63 playable cards, you probably want, you know, as close to 50 as you can get to the artifacts. Yeah. And ideally, they make other artifacts. Yeah, absolutely. A new one that's really cool is Ravenous Robots, which is one in red for an artifact robot. It's a 2-1. Whenever you cast an artifact spell, create a 1-1 colorless robot artifact creature token. And then it also has pay a red and tap it. Creature tokens you control gain haste until end of turn. Okay. So what a tight little package on that thing. Seriously. And it's an artifact itself. Yeah. This is the thing that, like, really hit for me, because we've seen this kind of effect before on, like, Third Path Iconoclast or Sihili Sublime Artificer, which are great and should probably go in this deck that trigger when you cast non-creatures and make artifacts. But they themselves are not artifacts. Right. So you can't really get the ball rolling as fast as Ravenous Robots does, which is just this ridiculous burst of affinity all at once. Yeah. It seems great in the deck. And it really is, like, right on the plan of what you want to do, which is kind of ironic, because aren't the Ravenous Robots like Krang's things or somebody else? One of the bad guys things? They definitely look like bad guys. Yeah. I don't think the turtles make the robots. I think the robots come after the turtles. Yeah. All of you will be destroyed. They sound like bad guys. Yeah. The other one that we're going to talk about a little later in this episode that seems pretty good in the deck is the ooze, and this makes mutagen tokens. This is the ooze that made the turtles. The turtles, see? It's the OG. Yeah. But it's another rectangle theory card that just, like, makes a bunch of rectangles. And I think this deck will have a lot of, like, if it makes a treasure, it makes glue, it makes blood, like, if it's a repeatable thing every time you cast or whatever, make these. And I'm just going to collect a lot of tokens, cabbage merchant type deal. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's... Artifact lands. Like, if you can, if it's an artifact, you should probably sneak it into this deck to, it just supercharges what your commanders are capable of, because you really want to be able to cast something crazy impactful the first time they attack. So on turn four, maybe turn five. You need... I think turn four, you've got to be trying to do this, like, have some line where on turn four I get a six or seven mana thing out of possible. That's hard to do. Yeah. Like, turn one, you cast some kind of cheap artifact or you play an artifact land. Turn two, you cast some kind of thing that makes more artifacts. Turn three, you cast your commander, follow it up with some cheap things. Turn four, then you attack. Cast a couple of things, attack. Right. And then you can cast a big game maker. And then you can cast, like, yeah, you can probably cast, like, a seven drop or something there. And then the question is, like, what are those seven plus drops or whatever that you're casting? And you want those to be artifacts as well, just because they will synergize with the rest of what your deck has going on. The end stone is one you put down, which is really good. Chamille, the inner sun. Yeah. Yeah, if you ever get that card out, it does a lot of work. You know, just going to sit there and turn out value. Yeah, I mean, a Chamille on turn four is like, well, that is going to be a problem for sure. You're going to get so much stuff from it. Yeah, I mean, I was even thinking, like, you can cast Oog and the ineffable or something like that is a great thing to follow up. Now it reduces the casting cost of all your colorless spells, which you'll have plenty of. That's great. It's removal and it's like a good non-creature spell for your cast. You can probably go, like, Oog and then just cast a couple of free things. Yeah, absolutely. That's great. Card draw is going to be really important in this deck because you're absolutely dumping stuff onto the battlefield. The other option for big things you can cast is X spells, especially in the later games. If you're attacking with your commander the second time, ideally you'll have built up even more artifacts. This is when you have, like, 10, 12 and can really start trying to go for a win. This is when I'd start looking at stuff like Pull from Tomorrow or even, like, the Great Train Heist was something I was thinking about. This is the spree card that gives you the extra combat. But also it says, choose target opponent whenever a creature you control deals combat damage to that player. This turn, create a tapped treasure token. So it gives you an extra trigger from your commander. It's an instant that you can cast the turn that it attacks. Have an immediate other attack and have another spell you can cast second main phase. Yeah, I think the draw spells, I think you might want to be like Stroke of Genius or something that can target your opponent if you want to. Sure. Because you could possibly get high enough that you're milling them out. Yeah, you have Hell to Pay on here. Oh yeah. Electrodominance is another one of my personal favorite of mine. Electrodominance is cool because you can use it to cheat out a creature. Yeah, exactly. So you kind of get two things off of your cost reduction, I guess. Yeah. And yeah, the reason X spells are going to be really good here is because eventually later in the game you get a swing in. It's only your next spell that gets the affinity, so it will be hard to take advantage of it with a normal spell that doesn't have X in the cost if it's like 20 or something. So getting full value off an X spell is great. I wonder if you want to play some forks in the deck too because the fork then doubles up the X spell. Yeah. And you get double the affinity kind of. Yeah, it needs to be forks that target a thing on the stack. It can't be the next spell I cast is doubled. But yes, there's plenty of forks that don't have. Well, no, you could do it then attack and then do it. That's true. That's true. So you could still figure out a way. It's very telegraph though. I would be reticent to show my opponent that plan before I go to combat because, you know, Rachel's going to kill my creature then. Yeah, I would. You might let attack being like, okay, how bad is it going to be? Seven. I'll let you do that. The other thing I was thinking was extra combats, which you mentioned. Oh, yeah. Really good. But extra turns are also really, really good. This is sort of in the mold of the old school Narset. You know, if you think of Narset as like, it draws you a free spell but also casts the spell for free. This gets a spell out for close to free if you've built it correctly. So time stretch, time warp, that kind of stuff will be really good because, I mean, extra turns if you want to play them, obviously not everybody does. But obviously it like gets you another turn with another attack and another chance to the winner and then forks are really good with those as well. Right. So those are all good, especially they give you more turns to build up your artifact count, which is I think how this deck is going to bring it to the end. It's like stuff like hell to pay that makes a ton of treasure tokens all at once. It sets you up for a huge turn next turn where hopefully you can close things out with something like a comet storm or a crackle with power where you can really take that cost reduction and turn it into damage. Yeah. Crackle with power I think is going to be the best one. It's XXX for a red red. Crackle deals five times X damage to each of up to X targets. Reduction of nine is like not that much. That's pretty modest. Yeah, that's a modest reduction. I think especially you probably going to want some haste enablers in here as well. But I would say like especially if you're on turn seven or eight, there's a pretty good chance like your artifact count can be in the teens for sure. Yeah. If you reduce this by 15, then you're doing 25 to each opponent. And you can see how the game closes out real fast. So this is an interesting deck. It's going to be a tough balance between stuff that makes artifacts. You're going to need like little bursts of artifact numbers, just like the robots that we were talking about where like a ton of artifacts can come from one card. And then big top end payoffs for that. The tough part is going to be getting the attack with your commander. And it's going to, I feel like it'll be the type of deck that like, if you play with the same people a lot, you probably don't want to build a deck like this because they're going to learn just kill the thing. Yeah, you can't let it. And never let you do the thing. So it won't be, this is a deck where you like, you do the thing a lot or you don't do the thing at all. So it might be, or it's one of those ones where like, you know, you just don't bring it out against your play group that you play with all the time. You bring it out, you know, once in a while among people that you don't see as often and don't necessarily know to kill it on-site every time. Because they will learn like, oh yeah, we, that's what you learn about like, Narsets and stuff. Yeah, you just can't attack once. A single swing and there's like a 70% chance we die. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. All right. Up next we've got Kitsune Dragon's Daughter. This is for Blue Blue for a legendary creature. Fox Warlock Avatar. It's a 6x with vigilance. Whenever Kitsune enters or deals combat damage to a player, you may exchange control of two other target creatures controlled by different players. So this is an ETB creature that can swap creatures around. So you can give a small thing of yours away to steal the best thing on the board. You can swap two players' commanders and ruin their lives. Well now they're like, well I want my old axe built around my commander and I've got your commander. I mean I've done that before and what they usually, they usually figure this out pretty fast is like, hey, I'll attack him to you and you attacking to me and they'll die, right? Yeah. And then we'll... Buys you a turn. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's not the worst. It's just, it doesn't end up being locking them out. They figure out a way to trade off. Yeah. Working together. Yeah, this is an interesting card. I think there's some cool usages of it. We've seen cards that do similar things in the past. So a lot of the cards that are like, the blue ones anyway, they're in like Zedru and stuff are going to work here. Right. And then you can't give them, you know, enchantments, artifacts and things like that, which limits it a little bit. Yeah. It's interesting. It's sort of, it's like an agent of treachery that triggers more. Like the fact that it triggers on combat damage and ETB is kind of interesting. I don't know how often it's going to actually hit because it's a 6x on the ground and people don't want their stuff stolen. Yeah. I would assume that if you built this deck and this is the commander that you're going to put in some evasion on blockability, things like that to be able to attack with it. It is a 6x too. Yeah. It's annoying to jump. It's not crazy. Yeah. It's, there's plenty of boards where you look around and it's like, well, 6x can just kind of like attack for free. So I don't think that's nuts. Yeah. The question is to me is like, what are you swapping? You probably want tokens so that you've got expendable little one-ones sitting around that you can give away. You might seed some cards in there. There's a bunch of cards that are like kind of bad unless you're built around them. So you might have some of those. And then also I was thinking like, there are a bunch of cards that will let you get the thing back that you took. So coveted Falcon. Ooh. Yeah. This one says, whenever coveted Falcon attacks, gain control of target permanent you own but don't control. Right. So this is like, hey. Give me that. Commander comes in, swap a thing, attack with the Falcon, give me my thing back but I keep yours. Yeah. Yeah. Which is really, really cool. Sort of Harthin' Home blinks a target creature that you, and returns it to owner control so you can blink a thing that you gave to them, give it back to yourself. Right. So the important keyword on sort of Harthin' Home and the effects that work here is it's exile up to one target creature you own that's yours no matter where it is and it returns under the owner's control that's you. Right. So if you've ever stolen something and somebody gets a sort of Harthin' Home out, you know like, oh crap, they just get to get it back. Well this is the thing where you didn't steal it, they gave it to you and now they give it back. Don't blink the thing you sold. Yeah. We'll go back to them. Yeah. So there's a few cards that do things like that that go in this deck and are pretty interesting because it can look like, oh, I'll give you something decent. Yeah. The thing that's cool about it is it also works really well with blink spells because your commander has a very powerful ETB so blinking it makes a ton of sense and then there's plenty of blink spells in blue and in white if you're in like a flickery deck. You can run planar incision that says exile target artifact or creature then return it to the battlefield under its owner's control. So it doesn't limit what you can target and it returns it under your control. So you can steal back the stuff you gave away, nice, or you can use this to blink your commander and get another trigger. Yeah, really, really cool. The Kitsune deck is interesting. I wonder if Kitsune goes into blink decks. That's what I was thinking. Yeah. Like in the 99. I think if you have enough of these, yeah. Yeah. Or even like rune or something. Nobody plays rune anymore but like back when they did, I think it would probably be good there because you're often like you don't care if they get a thing because you are. And also ETB's decks are pretty good because you know, I already got my card draw off the mold drift or giving it to you is not that bad. I'll give you a wall of omens. That's fine. Yeah, you get that and I get a thing that like has a Rachel plays that has like an on attack or combat damage trigger, right? Something cool. Yeah, I already got my value of the thing. So it's interesting. I think it's kind of cool. Yeah. Jimmy will like this card because he likes taking other people's stuff. Little and I like that you can be political with it. I like that you can be like, look, you're behind. I'm going to give you this sun Titan and I'm just going to like to put this person back. Yeah. And we'll make some kind of deal. Don't send the sun Titan at me, you know, like I'm going to. This is going to be a pain to play against, especially if it's in the command zone because like you deploy your commander right before they play this. I don't know. It feels like you don't want to. It's pretty annoying. Yeah. Because you know they're going to have a way to steal it. So it's on the CTV from the command zone does make this card pretty annoying as a commander like Agent of Treachery, but I think more interesting in casual games because of the swap of it all. Yeah. So you don't just straight up steal something. You do have to give them something. So you got to do a little bit of work, but it's not going to be that much. Not that much work. All right. Let's go to the next commander. This one's actually kind of similar speaking of Jimmy. Yeah. This is the commander that Jimmy is playing on the next episode of game nights, the one he built speaking of stealing other people's spells. Yeah. Jimmy would never do that except for in the game nights. Every time you play against Jimmy. It is Crangan Shredder for and then to hybrid Demir mana. So for blue, for black, black or for blue, black six mana for a six, seven. Uh, U-Trom human ninja U-T-R-O-M. Yep. U-Trom. U-Trom. I don't know. Okay. It says whenever Crangan Shredder enter or attack each opponent exiles cards from the top of their library until they exile a non land card. And then it has the ability disappear. It says at the beginning of your end step, if a permanent left the battlefield under your control this turn, you may cast a card exiled with Crangan Shredder without paying its mana cost. Oh, now we're talking. So you potentially get free casts of the first spell off one of your opponent's libraries. And the thing is like you hold the other two and reserve to cast later if Crangan Shredder are still around. So. Uh, yeah, this card's really interesting. I think the six mana commander in blue and black, it's got a very powerful ability. The first thing that you need to do if you're building around it is to guarantee you can trigger disappear. Yeah, you really need to cast it in the same turn you get to cast one of the spells you got. 100%. You cannot cast this card and be like, I exiled three of your spells, pass. Like you have to be able to cast it. Because they're looking at the spells also being like, they're going to get my Atali? No, no way. No, I will kill that. That could not happen, yeah. Uh, yeah. So you just have to have a plan to do that. And luckily disappear isn't a super high floor to meet. So you can do this with treasure tokens, which makes sense. You've got a six mana commander. You want to make sure you can get it onto the battlefield ahead of curve. So stuff like black market connections is great. Nobles purse is one of my favorites. This is the two mana artifact that just spits out treasure tokens. So it means that you can trigger disappear reliably for three turns. You can stockpile treasures to get your commander even earlier. I think this card's going to be really good in the deck. Yeah. And you don't mind the sort of card disadvantage of it because you're getting all that value off of your commander as well. Yeah. It's great. Yeah. Because again, you sack the treasure and that it counts as it... Crangan shredder see that, oh yeah, it's like, did you sacrifice something this turn whether they were there for it or not? Right. Yeah. The other way to trigger Crangan shredder is a blink. It says left the battlefield. It doesn't specify what kind of permanent leaving. It doesn't say how it left. So if you play Crangan shredder and you exhale three cards and you blink Crangan shredder, you're going to lose the original three that you exiled because it's a different card. But you'll get three new ones when it enters. And those ones you can cast one of them. Because you've triggered disappear. Yeah. Yeah. That seems really good. Man, we've been talking about a lot about blinkers. A lot of blink today. So blinks evidently get a lot of tools in this set. Makes sense. Ninjas. Yeah. Blinking you miss them. Absolutely. Yeah. Also just like fetch lands. Oh yeah. Fetch lands are definitely the easiest way to do this. Yeah. And I think you can overload on fetch lands and stockpile one for the turn that you cast your commander. And at least you'll be guaranteed to have one. Absolutely. And obviously the ones that provide an untapped source are going to be the best, which are the more expensive ones. But like you need one of those that turn you're going to cast Crangan shredder. Yeah. Yeah. Also clones is the next thing we're going to talk about. So there's clones that don't care about the legendary rule like spark double and Sikashima, the imposter. These are great because they can enter, give you another ETB from your commander. And now you can cast two spells for free as long as you can trigger those disappear clause. And that's great. So a ton of selection that's two free spells whenever you have a powerful blue commander in the command zone, clones like this are going to be good. You could also go with non-legendary clones like Clever Impersonator or something like that that come in, clone your commander and then die right away. When it enters, the new one's going to do the cards and you sacrifice the original, which you'd probably want to do anyway because the original can be recast. Can be recast. Yeah. Okay. That probably seems like a really good one because it's only three. Yeah. And I think those clones are not as good as spark double and whatever, but you could also think of it as like four mana versions of the thing you got for free also if it happens to be awesome. Yeah. Phantasmal Image is a personal favorite of mine because it's only two. And then those, if you really wanted to keep the original around for whatever reason, it's two mana to kind of trigger the disappear part of it. Right. So you can always do that if you wanted to. A roaming throne is also very good. It just doubles up all the triggers. So you get twice as many spells exiled and you can cast multiple spells for free. Yeah. Roming throne. Continuing to be really good. Always good, yeah. If you don't want to spend a whole bunch of money on roaming throne, Fractured Realm also does it. This is the room. It's five blue blue. If a trigger to ability of a permanent, you control triggers. That ability triggers an additional time. So again, that'll give you double the triggers that you want for a bit of a mana. Seven mana is too much. I don't think you can do it. Yeah. If you're in a ramp deck to get your big expensive commander in, then like maybe you can get there with this, but it's a lot. It's also a clone on the other side, which I liked. Mirror room is... That's true. You can have that make a token. I would play for Mirror room and then say, okay, Fractured Realm, but like, man, it's hard to imagine ever casting Fractured Realm. Yeah, you could get there. You could do it, I believe in you. Cast this thing and then, yeah, I guess so. If you had a treasure or something and you know you're going to trigger it. Yeah. So, yeah. Crack a treasure to cast Fractured Realm. And you're looking at the card, you already know what you're going to get. So it's worth it. Yeah, sure. The last thing we wanted to talk about is like in these theft decks, it's really hard to sort of cobble together a wincon out of stuff you find at random from your opponent's decks. You're most likely going to use their disruption, their ramp. They're like, maybe if you hit a big bomb, that's sweet, but it's going to be very difficult to build a plan around the cards that you excel. So you need some kind of proactive plan of your own to either pay off casting spells from your opponents or just to move the game forward. So stuff I was looking at was like Brainstealer Dragon. This is also a great thing to clone if you're going the clone direction. At the beginning of your end step, exhale the top card of each opponent's library. You may play those cards for as long as they remain exiled. If you cast a spell this way, you may spend mana as though or mana of any color to cast it to steal spells. Whenever a non-land permanent and opponent controls enters the battlefield under your control, they lose life equal to its mana value. Great thing to double with your clones. Great way to start burning your opponents for the spells that you're casting. Yep, you also have Thieving Amalgam and Agent of Treachery down here both in the same mold as far as like dealing with stealing things and or rewarding you for having things that are your opponents. Being able to steal stuff from your opponents battlefield is nice because sometimes when you yoink their commander, you can make the synergies that they have work a little bit better. They won't like it. They won't like it at all, but yeah, you can do it. Philosophically, I think part of the fun of decks like this is figuring out how you're going to win with your opponent stuff. So I would tend towards not worrying about win cons and just like enabling my commander and being like, how am I going to win? I'm going to steal the ways my opponents were planning to win. And we'll figure it out from there. That's part of the fun of it. But you're right. You often get into positions where you're like, I'm spinning wheels, but I'm not winning. But everyone's mad at me. As we all know, that is how I like to play anyway. All right, let's move on to the next one. I love this little gator lady. It's Leatherhead Swampstalker. Two green green for a crocodile mutant rogue. This is a 5-4 with trample. Enters with a hexproof counter on her. Whenever Leatherhead deals combat damage to a player, you may remove a counter from her. When you do destroy a target artifact or enchantment, that player controls my God, what a trigon predator. This thing's huge. Yeah, it's big. It's got trample. The hexproof counter is real. You got to be able to put counters on it. I think I don't want to take the hexproof counter off of it. For sure. But jeez. What a walloping. Yeah, you're going to play this against me and I'm going to hate it is what's going to happen. This is definitely a really hard to get rid of and really hard not to take the damage from it. If you're playing against somebody who plays this thing, they're playing a mono green counters commander and they play this thing Hunter in 3, you're like, well, I'm going to die to that and I can't answer it until I can cast my six mana board wipe in my hand and it's just going to be so annoying. I can't play any artifact or enchantments between now and then. That's the thing is you just have to be like, okay, my plan totally changes into don't play anything that makes that person want to attack me. And hopefully I hadn't played anything like that prior to it, like a soul ring or even just an arcane signet. Right? Like, yeah, it's super annoying. It's super annoying. Not to mention a hexproof counter is a very powerful counter. If you have a commander like Tidus Unis Guardian that proliferates counters and moves counters, now you've got a hexproof counter to play with. So there's additional synergy in the right kind of decks. I think this is great in plus one counter decks. This is great if you can proliferate over your moving counters and even if you're just in a monster deck that incidentally puts a couple of counters on it, it's going to be a real headache. Yeah. Speaking of counters, Mikey and Leo. Mikey and Leo, chaos and order. It is a two drop. So it's two Celestina mana hybrid. Green, green, white, white, or white, green. All right, two, two mutant Ninja Turtle says whenever you put a counter on a creature you control, draw a card. This ability triggers only once each turn. Wow. Pretty good. Two mana for this. Two mana. It's so good. Any kind of counter, this doesn't have to be plus one counters. Obviously, those are the ones that are sort of easiest to get. Celestina counters isn't exactly groundbreaking. There's a lot of great decks that you can find that you can model this deck after. Like Kutsil, Malamette exemplar is a good example of just a powerful Celestina counters commander that draws cards. Yeah, but there's more hoops with Kutsil. That's true. Mikey. This is very little hoops on a two drop. I think this is a card that counter stacks have wanted for a long time and just kind of hasn't been there. And there's a lot of cards that work with it really well. Anything that gives itself a counter on some sort of trigger just like for no mana cost to you is going to be like super good. So, you know, forgotten ancient mana, Gordra, Hydra, this kind of stuff. Yeah. It can only trigger once each turn, but it'll trigger once each turn. Four cards on your two drop. Her rotation. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty crazy. It's pretty absurd. I was looking for just anything that says whenever opponent's comma some kind of counter. And there's a fair amount. Sunscorch region is a great option. Patrolling Peacemaker is the whenever your opponent crimes proliferate. Really good. Steelburr champion gets counters on non-creature spells. Like even scavenging ooze and lion sash is just like, I'll exile something during your turn. A good counter draw card. It's very good. It's very easy to draw four cards in a turn rotation with this two mana commander. Yeah. If it's your commander and you talk it full of those type of cards, you're going to draw a lot of cards. And it also just goes in the plus one counter decks. Which almost have Celestina anyway. Yeah. This card's going to see a lot of play. It's just very efficient. Yes. And it's not hard to find plus one counter synergy. Obviously, we've been supporting plus one counters for a very long time. It's one of the most popular archetypes in the format. Yeah. Counter effects are going to go a very long way. But also there's just a ton of different cards that are going to benefit from what you're doing already. Terrorism Biosys is a card we keep coming back to and continues to be super busted. This is the first card I thought of when I saw Mike and Leah, which is because they're in a similar mode. Just like a card draw reward for the counterpart. Dusk Legion dualist is kind of like whenever counter card. But then there's also plenty of like whenever counter mana. You know, like Gyrsage makes a ton of mana to dump all those cards that you're drawing. Kami of Whispered Hopes gives you mana for each counter that you have. And then on top of that, there's ways to turn counter into Windcon. On top of it just being a lot of power on your battlefield, Abzan Falconer says, if counter then flying. You die. Or if you're on the back foot because your opponents think you're the threat. Convoy of the Ancestor says if it has a counter on it, it has life link also, which is pretty atrocious. Yeah. I mean, plus one counter decks are kind of solved at this point. So I think this just kind of slots in as a card draw engine in any of those decks as like, yeah, is your deck centered around putting counters on stuff? Cool. This needs to go in that deck. It is no way it's not in the top 60 cards for that deck. It's probably in the top 10 cards for that deck. One that I wanted to mention, one way to build this that I don't think is super obvious with all the Ajani's Pride Mates. Yeah. There's so many two drops that say whenever you gain life, put a plus one counter on this. So if you fill your deck with Ajani's Pride Mates equivalents and Soul Warden equivalents, now you've got any time a creature enters the battlefield, you get a counter and draw a card. Yeah. It's a really reliable engine. You're drawing a ton of cards, you're gaining a ton of life, and you have a ton of power on board. Yeah, life gains have been getting better and better as the format speeds up. I think the only problem with that is you want to be able to gain life on your opponent. Yeah, I mean, Soul Warden and Soul's attendant will do that. Yeah, when your opponent's creatures come in. Yeah. So I think that is definitely another way that you could build this if you are interested in zeroing in a little bit because plus one counters are again so wide open. Speaking of counters, let's talk about this next ooze. It's interesting. I read this, I looked at this one for a little while when we were picking game night stacks. It's Mutagen Man, living ooze. It's Green Green and X for a legendary ooze mutant. It's a 2-3 with trample. It says activated abilities of artifact tokens you control cost one less to activate. And then when Mutagen Man enters, create X Mutagen tokens. And Mutagen tokens are artifacts that have the ability pay one, tap and sacrifice this token, put a 1-1 counter on target creature, activate only as a sorcery. These are the new sort of tokens from the set. First ability that it sort of training grounds your artifact tokens, but it doesn't have the clause of like it cannot reduce it below one. So you can reduce the cost of activated abilities on artifact tokens to zero. So like blood tokens or something. Yeah. You can get time to... Mutagen tokens obviously. Mutagen tokens obviously down to zero. This is a very interesting card because I looked at it and I was like, well it says plus one counters all over it, but for me this is more obviously a Chachki type of card. This is a clue card, this is a blood card, this is food. It's going to show up in a lot more decks that are interested in making a ton of rectangles than it is in plus one counter decks where counters come so cheap. You don't need to like get one... This is just a Hydra in those decks. Yeah. Right? Because you... Oh yeah, my Mutagen tokens cost none to activate, but like a Hydra would just come in with like an X tokens. So this just says like, okay you can put those... Or sorry, X counters and this just says, well it's a Hydra that comes in and allows you to put the counters in other places if you want. Yeah. That's not the exciting part. The exciting part is like it makes X rectangles on your board. Yeah. Cabbage Merchant was the first card I thought of when I was like thinking about it. And I think I probably would have built this deck if it had another color. The fact that it's in mono green makes it hard as a commander to really take advantage just because you know, it's food's really what you're doing there. You can't really get access to blood that well in that color. Clues are like some... Clues are even kind of tough. Yeah. Because it's only artifact tokens. You also can't like spark double or somehow clone it to reduce the activation of clues and food to zero. Right. So yeah, but it's got a lot going for it. And I did consider for a long time because this combination of abilities is... It's Nate. Yeah. It's cool and it gets your mind going. Yeah. I mean, and it can do like... We should mention it can do crazy stuff. If you can get like a token copy of a basalt monolith, you can reduce the activated cost to make it mana. It's kind of blue to be able to make token copies of like artifacts and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So like I was like, oh, can I get make a token copy of like staff of domination? Ooh, yeah. Then the untapped cost is free on it. Right. And like that seems broken, but I was like, okay, you can't do it in a mutagen deck. Mutagen has to go in a deck. And then it's like, we always talk about this, but you can't really build... It's really hard to build a full deck around one card in your 99. You need... If the card in the 99 has a lot of redundancy, then you can do it. But if it's like a very specific card like this, it's really hard to do. Yeah. But this card is really neat. And I think if you have a deck like the Cabbage Merchant, you have a Peregrine Took deck, you have any deck with Forensic Gadgeteer already in it, this is... It's going to feel right at home. Yeah. Any deck that's about clues or food that has green in it, I think this is probably going to be pretty good. Yeah. For sure. Not to mention it just comes with a pile of rectangles. I did want to mention that, yeah, if you have something like Forensic Gadgeteer on the battlefield, which makes clues and says, activated abilities of artifacts you control cost one less to activate, this effect can't reduce the mana in that cost to less than one mana. If you have both a mutagen man and a Forensic Gadgeteer on the battlefield, you can reduce clues down to free. Because there's a... Yeah, the gadget here gets it to one. It didn't bring it down to zero. And then the mutagen man says, I'll bring it down to zero. I got it. Yeah. I don't have that rule. Yeah. It's a 601.2F. If multiple cost reductions apply, that player may apply them in any order. So it's similar to something like if Sam Loyal attended had that same stipulation. But you can get it down to free if you'd like. See, that's cool. Why doesn't it have blue? I know. I was looking at any other color. I can think of it as red. It's like the Goose Mother deck is really sweet. Yeah. It was two color. I 100% would have played it on you, inmates. Yeah. All right. Let's move on to this next one. It's Northampton Farm. This is a land. It taps to add a colorless mana. It's one tap exile target creature you own. Two taps sacrifice this land, return a creature card exiled with this land, excuse me, to the battlefield under your control. Return each other creature exiled with this land to its owner's hand. So this is endless sans-ish, which is a desert that we've had for a little while. It's two to exile the creature and it's four to bring all of them back. Northampton Farm brings one back to the battlefield, but the rest go back to your hand. Yeah. The mana cost is a lot more palatable. One to exile rather than two. Two to do its thing rather than four. Really good with Kitsune. Yes, for sure. It definitely has a homeward path style writing to it, which is cool. It's also got a command beacon-esque thing where you get to protect your commander if there's a board wipe and then sack this to bring it back to the battlefield. So it's got some element of lands that we've seen before, but not quite ever in this arrangement. So I wanted to talk about it because I played with endless sans. I have a desert deck. So I know that endless sans has done the thing for me before and it's twice the cost. So I look at Northampton Farm and say, this is pretty close to something I would play not all the time, but if I have an expensive commander that I need protection for and I'm not in three colors, probably I would run this or think about it. Yeah, I think so. I think just like I always say, if you have enough instant flash beat stuff because you have to think like I have to have two mana up this and one other mana to do it. To bring it, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. To exile the creature. Otherwise, yeah, if I'm tapping out of return, like this won't be good. And if I'm that type of deck, there's no reason to play something that's just hit your colors. But if you are the type of deck that does want to hold mana up and this is a thing that could just incidentally be up when you've got other options too, this becomes a lot better. Yep, you've got clues. If you've got food, like those kind of things. Yeah, nobody wants to remove it. I do the thing, but I'm just holding this up and it's like I'll crack the clue if that's what is in the clear. But like if they go to kill my important thing, save it. Then I think, yeah, this gets way better in those scenarios. And that's where I'd consider it unless you have like specific synergies like Kitsune. Yeah. I mean, you can also like on end step, like pass with this up, wait until the turn rotation. On end step, exile your commander, untap wrath, bring back your commander. Like that's a pretty good turn. A lot of mana. It's a lot of mana. You have to have like a three or four mana wrath and then another three mana, right? So seven or eight mana to pull that off. Yeah. But it puts you ahead on a board wipe. It turns a cheaper board wipe into an asymmetrical one in some ways. I could see play patterns where that feels like it's going to be the right thing to do. I don't think you should look at the farm as a, I'm going to store multiple things under here. I think that's not really how it's likely going to play. But it's a decent protection piece for a commander that you need to untap with and you know people are going to come for it. Yeah. Just redundant protection. It's risky if you try and store multiple things under there and you don't like crack it right away because if you, let's say you exile a creature under it and then you don't activate it and sacrifice it the next turn. If you don't at least hold up the ability to do that, somebody could destroy the land. In which case you just kind of don't get that stuff. And if you put your commander in exile, it's not moving zones when the land dies. So it's stuck in exile and it can just turn off your entire game. So that is a risky play. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is pretty narrow. I don't think that you probably want to run it a lot. Another place I could think of is like if you were able to untap your lands a decent amount, then all of a sudden this would get a little bit better. Wilderness, reclamation style stuff. I wanted to pause here and just say like, because these feel really safe because we just don't touch lands in commander and like I do think people need to play strip mines and ghost quarters and stuff. I know strip mines kind of expensive, but like that style of card, yeah, Demolition Field, more. And we should like single target land destruction should be fine because there are just too many powerful lands in our format from Field of the Dead to Nikthos to Cabal Coffers to Ancient Tomb like Guy's Cradle if you got those in your Playgroup or whatever. And to not be able to touch those is not correct. Yeah. Like you should be able to destroy powerful lands. And so people should play those more and in the world where they do play those more, this card gets a lot worse. It definitely does. It's just very risky. Yeah. So in fact, should have a Demolition Field in it or a ghost quarter depending on your flavor. And if you're in red, you should be running Sundering Eruption for sure. This card is messed up. The one that blows up a land and replaces it, but can also win the game because it means that nothing can block. It's a falter. We don't do it on game nights, but in my regular decks, I try to have like two to three things that could destroy a land. Yeah. Just because you will just lose a lot of games to an unchecked Cabal Coffers or something. Yeah. And then there was another thing I put down, which is my favorite card from Loroni Clips, which I think the most common usage of that is going to be to turn anything into all your things into a land. And you really can't go to try and do that if they got a strip mine up because you've got to target the land. Right. Yeah. It's a, that's a good counter play for the mirror form. That's my PSA to everybody out there. Run a little bit more targeted land just removal. I won't even call it land destruction. Yeah. It's land removal. Land removal. All right. So, sibling rivals, this is the Boros combination. It's one hybrid Boros, hybrid Boros, three mana altogether for a two four. It says whenever Raph and Leo attack, if it's the first combat of the turn, untap one or two target attacking creatures. After this phase, there is an additional combat phase. So, it's a cheap commander that gives an extra combat to one or two creatures. Sort of fear of missing out-ish. Yeah. But it can go in the command zone. This is one of the cheaper combat doublers that we've seen in the command zone. Usually this is on like a six drop or it's on a five drop. It's a late game thing. This is one of the few that you can get on the battlefield early, which is interesting and says a lot about the kind of curve that this deck wants. I think when I was thinking about what cards go in it, I'm like, okay, so I want a creature unturned to probably or that can attack with Raph and Leo the turn that I can attack with it or I want something that triggers on combat the turn that I can attack with Raph and Leo. So, probably turn four. Yeah. I think you need a lot of two drops because you play the two, then you play this, then the next turn you attack with those two things and get the extra combat. A four drop doesn't cut it because it's like, well, yeah, it's not involved in the combat when Raph and Leo attack the first time. So, you don't really get the advantage of it right away. And Raph and Leo has already got to sit there and be like, we're coming. It does threaten it unless it's something like an Impa call that triggers when something attacks. That's what I mean by the four drops that get involved in the combat. Yeah, those are the four drops you can have to play. It can't be on their attack. That's obviously a three drop. Yeah, on an attack. So, you put it's kind of like Ishin a little bit. It feels a little Ishin-y because it doubles your attack triggers, it doubles your damage, it doubles your effectiveness of the creatures that are on the board and Ishin tends to have that really tight curve out. That's like play something on two, play Ishin, attack, double the trigger. So, obviously, it happens to turn slower than Ishin. Yeah, it's way worse than Ishin because with Ishin, you play it and then attack with your two drop and you get double triggers right now. On turn three. And then also, if they kill Ishin, you're not two turns behind at that point, you redeploy Ishin, attack with the thing, get the double. But if they kill Raph and Leo, you're, okay, now I got to cast it and wait again before I get the thing off of it. So, yeah, I mean, Ishin's busted. It is. It's a very good card. Cool card. It's powerful, broken. It's just like, anyway, it's not a complaint that Raph and Leo are not as good as Ishin. That's all I'm saying. Yeah, it's just, but I think it gives you the idea of the play pattern that this deck is going to look like. It's not going to quite match up to what Ishin's doing, but it does, it's a lot more open-ended than Ishin is in terms of what you can include. Because you can do combat damage. Damage triggers, attack triggers, at the beginning of combat triggers, all of those get doubled just as much. So, I was looking at stuff like Arabella Abandoned Doll, which is a great attack trigger that cares about small things. Makes sense in a deck that wants to curve out and wants to attack early and fast. Absolutely. Ragevan, Nimble Pilfer, disgusting with this commander. If you can curve out with Ragevan, nice. Generous plunderers, one I like a lot. And we play a fair amount just because it's a proactive two-drop that also ramps you. And has a nice attack trigger that can push that damage early. Because this is going to be a, I'm curving out, I'm killing you before you do stuff kind of deck. Trying to put a lot of pressure on people in the first few turns when they're not necessarily ready for it. Yeah. You've got to get out to a fast enough lead that you can kind of hold on to. Right. Yeah. I think all the sword ofs are probably going to be really good in this because you get double triggers off of them. They also help you get through and they protect the thing as well. That was... Yeah. Feast of Ammon obviously like insane, but it's always insane. But I think a lot of the swords, I think Fire and Ice and everything are going to be really good here too. Just two card draws, four damage, a lot harder to kill and block it now. It's also something that works really well in the curve, the swords. Even if you don't have a true drop and you play a signet on turn two, you can still follow it up with Raffin Leo and then the turn after that have enough to cast the sword, equip the sword and attack and get double triggers. It fits in really well and ensures you're getting actual value out of that double combat. A cheaper one that I was looking at that doesn't require you to ramp is Strength Testing Hammer. This is whenever a quick creature attacks. Your roll is excited die. That creature gets plus X plus O until end of turn where X is the result. If it has the greatest power or is tied for the greatest power among creatures on the battlefield, draw a card. It's one to cast, three to equip. Then it'll retain that bonus for the second attack and get an additional, so it gets twice as much the second time. In the early turns, it's very likely that this will be the most powerful thing on the battlefield. You get double boss turn, double card draw, and you get to push a lot of damage in the early game. Yeah, that's cool. Let's move to this next section because your commander is just a three man of two four with no evasion. You do need to make sure you have a plan to attack with it in the later game. Even something like reconnaissance that says, like, oh, I got into a mess. I'm going to pull them out of combat. Gets your attack trigger and they don't die in combat. Yeah. Reconnaissance is great because if you have three or four things, you just attack with all of them and then they figure out, well, you're going to get your extra combat and then nothing's in danger, right? No, they block this and this, pull those out. The other thing that's nice about reconnaissance is if you double the trigger, if you double the attack trigger or something, now your commanders, your cards have vigilance. You can actually use that double trigger to untape your stuff. They only untapped two things. Right. So if you've got four things, reconnaissance would untape the other two to allow them to participate in that other combat. Yeah. Exactly. Finally, I do think the equipment is great in this deck, especially equipment that just fits really well into this curve, like equipment that you can cast on for equip and get a lot of value out of. One of the best ones I saw was Mjolnir Storm Hammer. This is a four mana. You play it, it auto-equips to a legendary creature. Then when the equip creature attacks, you tap to your creature, defending player controls, put a stun counter on it and deal damage to them equal the number of tapped creatures they have. So tap, stun, shoot, attack again, tap, stun, shoot, brutal. It's just like, ow! Just stop doing that. Yeah. You also just put the aether spark, which is, every time I see it in play, it's better. I'm just like, that card's so good. Then the next time I see it, man, it's even better than that. Now I'm not underrating it. It's still better. You can't double up the value, but you get twice as much loyalty onto it. So you tick it up, you hit for three, you get three counters on it. You do it again. Then you do it again, you get three more counters on it. That means you're in negative 10 range next turn. I think that's the thing about this. Why Sword of Feast of Fam is going to be the best card in the deck is because you've got to get a lot of stuff out there to take advantage of this. Like Rachel said, you need to do that early because it will be less effective late. So aether spark will just turbocharge your plan. Yeah. Is this a spot for the buster sword? If you ramp, yeah. The buster sword is a huge buff. It's plus three, plus two when it hits. You can cast stuff from your hands or just dump stuff onto the battlefield and helps accelerate the plot. Draws you the card, draws it twice, casts two extra spells. Yeah. I mean, it seems like this, if it's good anywhere, it's good here. Because the way you want to speed, your deck is trying to kill them fast. All right. If you don't want speed, even though there are skateboards in this, it ain't a fast card, this next one. Yeah. So this is my commander for game nights. I played Raph and Mikey Troublemakers. This is five gruel gruel. That's right. I'm a gruel girl this time. For a mutant Ninja Turtle, it's a 7-7 with trample and haste. Whenever Raph and Mikey attacks reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal a creature card, put that card onto the battlefield, tapped and attacking and the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order. Seven mana, big attack trigger, you're putting some haymakers onto the battlefield. Yeah. Has haste, so it's going to do this the turn you play it. It doesn't have the sneak attack clause of sacrificing it or the ill heart clause or anything like that. Nope. That creature is just out there on your battlefield now. Yeah. This is Winota for Fatties. This is what I saw when I looked at it. You only get one, but unless you double this attack trigger, but you're guaranteed to hit a creature. The big thing that I was focusing on when I was building Raph and Mikey is you don't want any creature basically under four mana at all and you probably don't want that many four drops. Yeah. You don't want to attack and get out of Succur Tribelder. No, that's not the plan. No, just be it. It's seven mana. They're not going to let you attack very often with this thing, so you need it to count when it does. Absolutely. That building restriction is super real, but it makes your deck work really well once you get your commander onto the battlefield. So the first question was, what do you do in the early turns if you can't cast creatures? You try and get to seven mana. You try and get to seven mana. You ramp. That's a lot of mana. You ramp. You want to play a ton of two mana ramp. You want to play herd heirloom, all the ramping growths. You want to guarantee that you are ramping on turn two, so that on turn three, you ramp again. You can ramp twice. Yeah, yeah. That's the thing about two mana ramp. And one of the reasons like we're always so low or I am on three mana rocks is because if you, two mana ramp builds on itself, if you put a lot of it into your deck, then the two mana ramp turns into two two mana ramp spells on turn three. It fits really well. Yeah, those fit really well together. And this is a deck that definitely wants to be like two mana ramp on two, two two mana ramp spells on three. And now I'm sitting pretty to cast my commander possibly on that next turn. Yeah. Yeah. Three turns early. And at the very least, if it goes kind of not as well, I'm hopefully at least two turns early on it. Right. So I didn't put Sky Shroud Claim in a deck in a long time and I was like, Sky Shroud Claim is cracked in this deck. Another card that's really good with a lot of two mana ramp because it leaves you with two untapped lands that you then go cool and I'll use those for the ramping growth. Yes. Yeah. I like Sky Shroud Claim is incredible because you can just absolutely snowball with this mana stuff. I was even running like Goraklautera of Colsisma, which is just great with big stuff and means if you once you, if you have a big creature stuck in your hand, you can get it out, but it ramps you into your commander and it gives you more stuff to beat down with. Yeah. It's a little risky because you can get it, you can hit it off your commander. You can, but I think it's a fine thing to hit. I could see versions of this deck that are unwilling to run any creatures under seven mana and are just like, I only have like five or six of those and everything else is just non-creature stuff and I just know. And there could even be versions of this deck that there's literally only one big creature and they're like, it's Blight Steel. I got nothing else. Yep. And I will hit Blight Steel when I attack because it's the only creature on my deck. There might be, I don't even know if Blight Steel is the best one, but people used to do this with cascade decks where they would just like, it's going to cascade and I only, the only two drop in my deck, you know, I have no ones and the only two is this. So I know I will hit that. Like that was a thing. You could do that kind of style here. I don't know. You'd have to get clever with what that is, but. Yeah. You want something like Blight Steel that shuffles back into the deck maybe, but yeah, it's the biggest issue that I found. The reason I was running stuff like Goraklautera and four mana creatures, because I ran a couple of them was you're in Groll and you need something on the battlefield. You got to do something. You got to do something. Otherwise, you're just going to die. You're going to get hit early while you're casting all these ramp spells. So I was even running three mana board wipes. I was running two. That makes sense. That's what I would do. Yeah. I was running Brotherhood's End, which is incredible. This deals three damage to each creature and each planeswalker and destroys all artifacts with mana value three or less. You could pick one of those. So you can set everybody else's ramp back or you can just clean up the board and make sure you don't get hit in those early turns. Yeah. I think I was running Sweltering Suns as well, just to be like, all right, while I'm ramping, you all chill because most of my stuff is not going to die in this sweep. There's no creature on the battlefield that like Goraklautera, I guess, would get swept up in it, but you can figure that out. Or you run some early fogs. Something like Tangle is each attack and creature doesn't untapped during its controllers next untapped step. That says like, oh, you attacked me while it was down, but I caught you. It's tapped for another turn. That early creature disruption just buys you a little bit of time to not die in the early turns when you don't have anything on the battlefield. Yeah, that makes sense to me. I think another thing you could do is sorceries or non-creatures that create tokens. So you could run some of that. They can't be hit off of your commander, but they will provide you a little bit of a board and some way to like thwart aggression early until you kind of get your thing out. Yeah. I love the fogs. That's a really good one. And the fact that if you have a couple of fogs and are known to have it, this is the opposite of what was the deck I was saying? If you build it, they're going to learn to kill it right away. This is the opposite. If you play a type of deck that has a few fogs in it and your playgroup often enough, they'll give you credit for the fogs when you don't have them. Yeah. Yeah. Super fun in this deck. Weirdly, I wouldn't play Obscuring Haze in this deck, the one that's free when you're commanders on the battlefield. Yeah, because you won't have your commander on the board when you're casting it. Yeah. That's the whole point of it is to get you to the point where your commander comes out so you don't die before then. Right. Yeah. Up next, protection. Yeah. And you're very vulnerable. The turn from the moment you cast it to the moment you attack with it is a very clear window where yes, you must answer this threat and it's like, can I either be countered, it can be removed, it's... Right. It has to attack. So they go to combat and then if it gets killed, you are... You skipped your turn. It's... Oh, and it's... You've done... It's a disaster because it's now cost nine. Yeah. It's really bad. Yeah. So you really can't even really deploy it probably unless you've got a piece of protection ready for it. Yeah. Yeah. When you play the game night game, I won't say how it turned out, but my entire calculation when I was looking at your board was like, oh, can the commander come out? It's two turns from now. Oh, it's one turn from now. Yeah. It's possibly next turn. Like just knowing that, even if... Do I remove or do I hold it up or not? But I just needed to know when that might happen. Yeah. You have to be ready for it and especially if you play in a playgroup that's sharp, they're going to know that it's coming and they're going to know that it's going to be bad. And they got one wide open. It's like, you maybe can't cast it. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is a deck I would consider running something like Cavern of Souls where that you can cast with your commander so it can't be countered if you're in a counter heavy playgroup. I actually ran free protection in this deck, which I don't usually run. I ran deflecting swat and Nod of this world, which are both free spells that can protect your thing because I knew I was going to tap out for my commander and I knew there was a super narrow window. Right. I really think a smuggler's surprise is another great option. Not only does it help cheat fatties from your hand onto the battlefield, it has two mana to give creatures you control with power four or greater hexproof and indestructible until end of turn. So that flexibility means you can run more protection and it does cost mana so it like may set you a turn behind, but if your opponent does have mana up on that turn, you can wait, hold up your fogs, do some other stuff and wait until you have mana for that protection. It's going to be really important. All right, let's talk about the cool things though. Yeah. Why are you going to cheat out with this thing? Big guys for sure, probably like the biggest ones. Old Nobone. I never put old Nobone in any deck and I was like slamming old Nobone into this because you hit, you make 14 treasures. If you hit with your commander as well. Andrag the Quake Mole was one I put in. I liked that this was four mana and dodged all the three mana wrath so it was good and I didn't hate if I hit it off my commander because if it becomes blocked, I get an extra combat. So either I hit for eight off of my commander or I get an extra combat and get another trigger off my commander. So I really liked that one a lot. O'Hare Coslam was one I really liked as well. This is the five mana six five that when it hits, you can hit a creature from your library and put it into play and you get a land. And if it dies, that's fine. She turns into a land which makes it easier for you to recast your commander when you inevitably need to. So those are the ones that I was really stoked about but like you can hit anything. You could put an Eldrazi in here. You could put a Blightsteal in here. You could put an ancient copper dragon sick. Eldrazi aren't that great because they're mostly cast triggers and annihilator won't trigger. Or attack triggers. Yeah because that's when it attacks. Yeah. I was thinking like your opponents are going to be aware and if they're not the first time you hit something, they're going to not want this to happen again. So you want to get a lot from the first thing. So yeah, Apex Altasaur came to mind for me because of fight stuff. That's the one that cast Gage four times. You don't cast it with your commander. So yeah, that's one's just a 10 turn. Blightsteal obviously, ancient copper dragon. Oh yeah. I mean those things like combat damage, ETBs and I guess it becomes blocked or something like that. The stuff that you definitely get the turn it enters the castle. And leaves you with something that allows you to progress past. Because remember, you don't have a lot of creatures. You're not putting yourself in a position where you've got a lot to hold off your opponents. So you want to have mana left over after this. You're probably going to use all your mana to get this done. And something that gives you mana to work with after that is going to be really important. So at least you can hold up your fogs or wrath after you attacked or whatever. Balefire dragon is a great one because it can hit and wipe the board that you're most afraid of. You can put some big nasties in here. But this is kind of a flavor to taste thing. If you've got creatures that you're interested that you like, you should put them in because it's a good opportunity. This could be a fun deck to just have a rotating like, I'm going to have 12 or 15 or maybe I'm going to have a stack of 20, you know, seven plus drops. And I know six of them are going to the deck, but I'm just going to shuffle that before every game and then randomly put six in. So even I don't know what I'm going to hit. Pretty fun. That could be fun. I really like this deck. It was very fun to play. All right, let's move on to a card we've already talked about, but we wanted to spend a little bit more time with its ravenous robots. Yeah, this is the one that is one in red, two one robot artifact. Whenever you cast an artifact spell, you make a one one colorless robot artifact and then you pay red, tap it and create your tokens you control gain haste until end of turn. Yeah. This is an artifact. It cares about artifacts. It creates more artifacts. And then it gives you a case for it. Yeah. I mean, this is a very serious threat all in one package for two mana on an artifact body. It does a lot. Yeah. It just feels like you get so much for the two mana and the strategy behind it is very clear and those decks are very popular. There's a lot of them and a lot of them have red. So this just does feel like a card that's going to slot into a lot of existing decks. Yeah, we already talked about comps, but like Psymaster, Thopterus, Psyche, Lisa, Blimartifice or third pass iconoclasts. Those are all like similar, but none of those are artifacts. So in some ways this is better. And also I do like the haste granting thing because especially artifact decks can get into like scrap trawler KCI loops, you know, or you use the Foundry Inspector, Ethereum Sculptor type stuff to like reduce artifact casting costs to zero and you start like doing the trickeration of like, play this, bounce this, play it again for free because all my stuff is reduced and like just, you know. So you... Mystic Forge just casting a bunch of artifacts off the top. Yeah. So it's not crazy to be like, I create 30 one ones in a turn and then this provides the second part that you normally don't have, which is like, okay, cool. Now I tap this thing. I give them all haste and I actually convert that into a win right now rather than like, I hope I don't tap with all this go. It even has like some weird synergy where like if you're playing this copy stuff, like Sahili can turn an artifact token into your commander and now you can give your commander haste. Like there's some neat things that you can do and all these cards do kind of go in the same type of deck. Yeah. So I think we'll see plenty of ravenous robots and it's going to feel right at home. So nice on a two-drop is crazy. All right. Let's talk about this next card because, ah, what? Surprising. No one. I like this card. Yeah. This is rennet. Renee might be Renee temporal apprentice, three blue blue for a legendary creature, human wizard. It's a four three with flash and when she enters return each other non-land permanent that entered this turn to its owner's hand. Brutal. Just a straight time walk. Just all this that you did. No. No. On an ETP. Brutal. Brutal. Just like your turn didn't happen. It's also a mid turn like you're doing stuff and it looks like it might kill us. Yeah. Stop. Send it all back. Yeah. None of this. Oh, you made 30. You made 30 tokens artifact decks put it all back in your hand. Exactly. That whole thing I was just talking about. No, that all that scrap. Trot. Adorable. Yeah. Adorable. Give it a nice all back to your head. That's totally fine. You can do it again next turn. Yeah. Oh, combat. Like what the heck? Yeah. This card is, it's really good. It's really good. Yeah. It's really good. It's tricky. It's got flash, which is what you want. And it's a creature you can blink it. Yeah. What? The blink ability of this is pretty nuts because you can threaten to do this on any turn. How do you play against it? I don't know. Yeah. And you know, like they could have a blink spell, so they could flicker it in response. So you have to like literally team up against it and be like, I'm going to try and remove this thing. Can anybody back me up? Like, does anybody have a counter spell or have another removal spell? You have. You need to because they're in a blink. Yeah. If you're worried about the blink. Yeah. It's, it's, uh, this card is going to be like, it's going to be bad to play against. It reminds me a little bit of like perplexing Chimera. It doesn't do the same thing, but when perplexing Chimera comes out, everyone's just like, how do I do anything? Cast anything. Yeah. Right. Like I just can't do stuff. You can cast spells. Like the only way to actually progress is like cast draw spells. Cause like, and if you put creature, if you're not deploying things like, how are you winning? Yeah. You're going to be in trouble. If that's what your deck wants to do, it's not good against a spells deck, but it's, there's, you know, that's one kind of deck. Yeah. So I mean, this is the kind of card that's going to go, it's going to go in blink decks. It's going to go in flash decks. It's controlled decks, just generally can, can play this very well. And honestly, artifact decks is one I thought of. Paradoxical outcome is like completely busted in artifact decks when you cast a bunch of zero drops and a paradoxical outcome picks them all up and draws that many cards, but you're often like making robots when you cast artifacts. It's good against ravenous robots. It's good with ravenous robots. It's good with ravenous robots. So you return all your zero drops back to your, back to your hand. I guess that bounces all the robots. Nevermind. It's less good with ravenous robots. But if you're like, whenever you cast an artifact, you draw a card. Whenever you cast an artifact, you ping people. Renette resets that, lets you redeploy your entire hand and keep going. So it can be even used proactively, which is pretty wild. Like with this place or kitten, does this just go infinite? Because you can cast the bobble to blink this to pick it back up again. Yes. Yeah. I mean, if you cast a zero drop, you can play the bobble a million times, but like, yeah, you, I don't know. Yeah, you're not doing anything. Uh, yeah. Draw a bunch. Oh no, you have to sack the bobble, but you have to have another thing that's triggering off of the entry of a creature or an artifact. Not too hard. Seems okay. Yeah. Anyway, it's very good. Nerd effects also. Yeah. I just love this type of card because I play a lot of Aether Spouts and stuff like that too is just because I like to have a one off that does that, a one off that does this, a one off that does that. And you're like, he's got mana open and it's impossible to predict which of these five or six effects he could have. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what I like is like, yeah, don't just all have, you know, you don't want six fogs necessarily. You want one fog, one thing like this, one counter spell, one whatever. And they're like, Oh God, if it's this, I should do this, but if it's this other thing, I should do that. Right. Yeah. If it's this, I definitely shouldn't attack him, but if it's that, I should attack him, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And just, this is a great example of her. Why you should go to combat before casting any spells. Yeah. 100%. Oh, brutal. Like you should absolutely, like if Josh is sitting there with five man up and you don't know what it is, send three things at him and see what it is. Don't commit anything. Like, like don't start casting stuff. Find out it's Renette and get blown out. Um, yeah, this card is really powerful. Yeah. I like it. Yeah. Uh, this is also a board wipe. All right. Yeah. The next one is called the last Ronin. It's four black green for a saga enchantment. Chapter one, destroy all creatures. Chapter two, mill four cards when you do return target card from your graveyard to your hand and then chapter three is whenever a creature you control attacks alone this turn, put three one one counters on it. It gains trample lifelink and indestructible until end of turn. So the play plan is destroy all creatures. Chapter the next turn you mill four, but you return the good creature that got killed during your board wipe to your hand and then you cast it. And then on turn on chapter three, you've got that creature that came back and, you know, you had a couple of counters to it and you attack gain a bunch of life. Um, yep. That is like what's written on the card as the play pattern. Obviously there are others. Right. Um, this is interesting. So it's a symmetrical board wipe for six mana, which is a little over costed for what we're used to, but it's a little less symmetrical because it picks up a creature that you have next turn and it gives you a little bit of life back. It's a slow process, but it's, it's like, that's a good story for what you want to happen. Um, or if you're in a saga deck and you have ways to manipulate counters, you just board wipe, board, board, wipe, board, wipe, board, wipe, board, wipe, board. Yep. Just read it's chapter one. You remove the counter next turn goes back up to chapter one, kills everything. Yeah. There's a lot of decks that just will not be able to beat that. Yeah. Like they just fold to it. There's nothing they can do. Yeah. Until they can draw an enchantment or wreck sage or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So it definitely can be that. I think if you're not manipulating counters, is this good enough? There are decks that just want to board wipe a lot. And I think that is the other type of deck. People don't play those a lot because nobody likes them. And, uh, so, you know, this will just fit in with not liking it more. Those are the only two places I could see it. It's destroy. It's not exile or anything. It is six mana, which is too much regardless of what you get afterwards. I think, yeah, if you're not be able to manipulate saga counters in some way, or your deck is not like wrath.deck, then it feels like unlikely you'll want it. Right. Yeah. Okay. That's the last ronin. It's interesting. I think it could be really powerful in certain decks, but, um, hard to tell. The thing where you're like, my plan here is, and my decks already set up to do this is to wrath every turn is real. Like, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, if you have a nesting grounds, it has to be on a non-creature way to remove counters, obviously, because you're blowing up all the creatures. Power conduit and nesting grounds will do exactly what you want. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about the, we've mentioned it before, but it's needs a little bit of picking apart. It's a two-man of legendary artifact. It says, whenever a creature you control with a plus one counter on it leaves the battlefield, create a mutagen token for each plus one counter on it. Then it has an activated ability. Tap exile target card from a graveyard, create a mutagen token. I love that second ability. Me too. That's what I think it's about. I think, yeah. I think the first ability is a smoke screen and could confuse you, but the reason this card is good is the tap ability. Absolutely. I mean, this is tap, disrupt a graveyard, make a square. Yeah. Really. Graveyard hate is tough to play because when you're building, you think, what if I'm, what if it doesn't matter? Yeah. And so anything that says, okay, graveyard hate with any amount of upside becomes good because then it's like, okay, even if graveyards don't matter, like they're not going to recur anything here. I get a rectangle. Yep. Right. I get a mutagen token. And even if all I do is put a one-on-one counter on something, that's enough upside that this card now becomes cool. This is a piece of graveyard hate that I can put in any deck. And you're not, just like you're not running enough land removal, you're not running enough graveyard hate. I can promise you that. Yeah. I mean, and like this is good in token decks that care about triggers. If you've made a token this turn, you can do it at instant speed. This is good disruption just across the board. This is good in sacrifice decks that need stuff to sacrifice, whether you pay to sacrifice it with a mutagen ability or you sack it to some other thing. This is good in affinity and improvised decks that just cares about having a lot of artifacts on the battlefield. This is good with counter synergy where you're proliferating. It's good if you want to target creatures or you need abilities that you can copy. There's a lot of reasons to put this card in the deck. And the gravy is that your friend can't keep looping or Kaomancer against you. You know, like it's so good in terms of disruption. And then on top of that, it's got this weird ability that's like, if you've used the mutagen ability, it gives you more rectangles after that. Yep. It replaces the rectangles you used to make the rectangles. So it's like sort of a bad complicated ozolith in that way. But this thing is going to make a ton of material and it's going to be very annoying for your opponents to play against. Yeah. The thing about this style of graveyard hate too, is it's really hard and you won't know it for your opponents to play against when they have graveyard synergies. They just, they'll hold a lot of stuff and not make certain moves knowing that like this won't work because I'll discard this. And then I'll go to reanimate it and they will use the ability there. And so they're like, not making those plays. So you don't even really know you're stopping that play, but you are. They just are like, well, then I won't discard it and I'll have to figure out a way to kill that thing first. So yeah, that's the thing about graveyard. I think, I think causes people not to play it is they're not aware when it's working. And a lot of when it's working is when you're not even using it is just stopping. They see it and it's stopping them from forwarding the game plan they want to forward. Yeah. I mean, even just like you eat a faithless looting with this, that's huge. Yeah. Again, they probably won't cast the faithless looting or they might not. Just because they're like, well, I don't just don't want to lose that value. And then you don't even know, but you stopped the faithless looting. Yeah. Yeah. This card could probably go in almost any deck because it is just colorless and it's doing enough on its own that you don't need that much of a specific plan to go with it to like, this is just fine. Yeah. I think this card's great. Yeah. And it will see a lot of play. Try it out if you're not sure. Just try it out and get it on the battlefield a couple of times. I guarantee you're going to be like, oh man, this thing, I just get a lot from my two mana. All right. Let's talk about a lot for seven mana. This is Turtles in Time. Five blue blue for a sorcery, return all creature cards to their owner's hands. Each player may shuffle their hand of graveyard into their library. Then each player who does, draws seven cards. Exile Turtles in Time. Speaking of modern templated wheels. Yeah. It's a turtle twister. Turtle twister. An optional turtle twister. This card's kind of crazy. You look at it and you're like, well, seven mana is a lot for a board wipe. And seven mana is a lot for a wheel. But if this is four mana for a board wipe and three mana for a wheel, that's very efficiently costed. So you need to cast it in a time or you need to put it in a deck that really, really wants both of those things. Yeah. That's the big question to me is like, I don't think the price is too high, but what deck wants both of those things and wants both of those things to happen at the same time? Right. Yeah. That was the that was the weird question because it's like if you have a bunch of creatures on the battlefield, then you don't want to wheel them away because you're likely wheeling away more than seven cards to go down cards. Yeah. And if you don't have any creatures on the battlefield, then it seems OK because you're bouncing everybody else's stuff and they won't likely want to wheel because they've just bounced their entire board to their hand. Yeah. And the best case scenario is you have very few cards when you do that. But right. You know, but that's OK, if not. But being in a situation when you don't have a lot of creatures on the battlefield and you don't have a lot of cards in your hand is sort of strange. I don't know what deck that is. Yeah. I don't think you need that don't have a lot of cards in your hand part. That's just when it's going to be the best. I think not having a lot of creatures is fine. And then also just knowing like, hey, if I get six cards and they're not the best, I think I can do better. That's good enough. Yeah. Yeah. I play a lot of decks like that, right? Not a lot of creatures in them. Yeah. And this feels like it'll probably be pretty good. I think what I would want, actually, the more that I think about this is like, I want a deck that's putting a lot of lands into play. That's what I thought is ramp decks. Yeah. Heavy land based ramp decks. Or artifact based. Could be artifact based. But you tend to be more untouchable with the lands, right? Nobody's generally playing like something that's going to destroy a bunch of your lands where they will play Vandal Blast and things like that. So to be able to be like, because if you think of what this does, it's a resetting of the game in some ways, right? But if I reset the game and everybody just goes to like, you know, obviously this is not exactly what happens, but goes to like whatever lands they've got in play and that's it. Then I just want more lands than everybody else, because if I've got 15 and everybody else has seven, that's a really good position. Because I'm going to be able to redeploy some of it right now, but then also double redeploy versus everybody else for the rest of this game. So, yeah, that's that's sort of what I landed on. I think a deck that's got a heavy amounts of land ramp specifically. You could do it with artifacts. I just think that's a little more dangerous because the other players are likely to be like, cool, we got to pick away at all that stuff. Sure. And then you won't untap with it. Yeah, it's if you spend a lot of resources to not get creatures on the battlefield, it's probably OK. Like if you have a lot of cheap cards. Really good in your your deck, because I didn't have blue, but the the sneak the what's what was your commander called the Raph and Mikey. Yeah, the trouble makers one. Yeah, yeah, because that's the type of deck that could just run like 100 percent land ramp and only a few creatures and just be like, this is one of the pieces that's just going to be like, cool, I don't really care. Yeah, I'm not worried. I don't have any creatures before a certain time. So I'm going to I'm going to wheel and then I'll deploy my one big threat after that. But I got, you know, I got nine lands and everybody else has six. So that's a really good spot for me. So this this card does do a lot, but it needs to be a very specific kind of deck. And I think I think ramp taxes is definitely the one the one that's spending a lot of resources to get a lot of mana. Maybe super friends. Maybe. That's a good answer. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's only OK, because, you know, the play pattern of like, I play a few planes, walkers, and then I somehow untapped with seven mana with my planes, walkers still there. That that is a thing that doesn't actually happen in games. And you don't have a ton of creatures on the board. Yeah. Yeah. Easy. You do need to play the planes, walkers that that get creatures out. But people usually, you know, they find ways to kill your planes, walkers. Or at the very least, there are a lot of cards that are good in the scenario of like, I'm a super friend, I deployed two planes, walkers, and then untapped everything with them. Yeah. Yeah. One other thing that's worth mentioning is this gets cast against you. If you want to wheel, put your commander in the command zone. If you don't want to wheel, you can put it in your hand. Yeah. OK. Wealds, the wheels, not wheeled. May wheel. All right. The next card we're going to talk about is a weather maker. We're going to play our favorite game. Is this three man Iraq good enough? I don't know. Let's find out. Weather maker is three man of art effect. It's got landfall. Whenever a land you control enters, put a charge counter on this artifact. Plus, you can tap it and add one man of any color. Also, you can tap it to remove two charge counters from this artifact and add colorless colorless mana. And finally, for the third activated ability, you can tap it, remove three charge counters from this artifact. It deals three damage to any target. Rachel, come on down. OK. Three man Iraq and a landfall deck. Huh? That's a curious start for me. Yeah, that's not what is coming. It's definitely I don't know if that's where we need good three man of rocks. But that's fine. That's fine. Let's talk about it. I've never looked at one of my landfall decks and you're like, you know what I really need in this deck? A man of rock manolith. OK, so in those decks, though, I was like, so I first wanted to think about it in the context of landfall because it says landfall on it, of course. So if you get a ton of charge counters on this through landfall, this third ability is honestly what I'm most interested in. Remove three counters, tap to lightning bolt something, because that's very interesting. If I'm in mono green landfall, if I'm in even simic landfall and I can reliably get three counters on this thing, a turn and kill a fairy mastermind or professional face breaker or a commander or something like that, this is a very powerful removal engine. And I'm probably not using it for mana. I have mana in lots of other ways. I just put a bunch of lands into play. But the idea that I can repeatedly lightning bolt even somebody's face is like, that's a decent payoff for landfall that we don't have access to yet and we don't have access to in colorless. Certainly. Yeah, it does feel good in landfall. I also think just like remove two charge counters and make two mana like early on is a thing you might want to do. You don't have to think of it as like, also, am I going to lightning bolt every turn? I think you don't have to get that many lightning bolts out of this before you're like pretty happy with it. Like two lightning bolts. You kill two creatures with this thing. You're like, whoa. And then you're tapping it for mana the rest of the time. I think that you're perfectly happy with that card for for your three mana. Right. Three mana, get a one mana rebate. And then, you know, throughout the course of the game, I was able to kill two creatures with this and maybe get and, you know, tap it for two mana once or twice, but also just like it just at its face. It does tap for one man of any color. So for my one extra mana over the arcane signet, I got a lot there. Yeah. So I do think it's probably pretty good in a landfall deck. Yeah. So the question for me is like, can you play this in not a landfall deck? I don't know. Because you're only going to be able to. The play pattern with three mana rocks is often that you have to play it on three because playing it on four is just like then you used to your two mana on turn four is a little strange. And if you play this on turn three, it doesn't do anything. It taps for one mana, but you can't get any charge counters on it because you've likely already played your land. And so you're only getting your first charge counter on it on turn four when it's tapping for one mana, which is fine, but slow. You really want to be able to play this on turn four, like this land counter cast a two drop and then on next turn get two colorless out of it. If you're not in a landfall deck, that's where it feels best. You could fetch land there and maybe get three. So if you have a lot of fetches, I think it probably gets a lot better because that fourth turn. Turn four, you can cast this into a three drop. That's very good. Yeah. Then I think you're fine with that. You're down one mana, but up this mana rock. Yeah. You put a coalition relic as a comp, which I think is pretty good. Coalition relic essentially taps for one and a half mana per turn. This kind of feels like it'll do a similar thing. Yeah. Is coalition relic good enough to run in most decks these days? I think if we played the game, is this three mana rock good enough for coalition relic now? We'd probably say no most of the time. Yeah. And that feels like it's a no then and non landfall decks for this one as well. I agree. How much does the lightning bolt change the calculation? Because that's a thing coalition relic just does not have access to. So the reason I brought up coalition relic is also a proliferate decks. Proliferate decks could definitely be another place where this lives. Yeah. Which is pretty much the only place you play coalition relic these days. I agree. So that's, and this makes less mana compared per charge counter compared to coalition relic. Yes. Because it makes two charge counters is one extra mana. That's kind of easier to get counters on it. But it's easier to get counters on it. It's not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You have to skip a turn for coalition relic. Yeah. So, and then it has this lightning bolt side of it. So in the deck that can proliferate twice a turn or something like that, this is going to do a lot of work. This is a lot of flexibility. It can give you, give you a ton of mana. It can give you removal. And the minimum is that it just gives you one thing and gives you a counter to proliferate, get some extra value out of it. So for me, it feels like you have to have a lot of synergy around this thing. And then it will perform very well, but it's not a three mana rock that I would like. It's not even like relic of legends where the upside is like, is minimal synergy. It's like, no, you need a lot of lands coming in or a lot of proliferate happening. So you're either a landfall deck or a proliferate deck. That's right, Matt. Do you think a deck that just has like 12 fetch lands in it is good enough? No. I wouldn't. I don't think I'd run it in there. Yeah, I agree. Because most of the time I'm going to want to deploy my fetch lands and turn one or two anyway. You don't want to hold them. Yeah. I run surveil lands if I'm running that many fetch lands. So I'm using the tapped lands more than I'm using, than I want to like play around this thing, I think. Yeah. It's interesting. It's interesting. I do like it. It's cool design. I think it's cool design. And I love that they keep having us play this game and that the answer isn't just clearly like still no. It's a lot closer. They're starting to get to, yeah. And we don't want the answer to ever be like clearly yes every time either. So I think they're in a really nice space with how they've been designed in the three mana rocks. It's like, yep, this one's good enough in these decks. And I don't think we really want three mana rocks. They're like, no, just getting all of them. Yep. I agree. We don't want two mana rocks like that either. Yeah. Guys. All right. We've got a couple of cards we're going to move through really fast because we've just seen these kind of things before, but they're worth talking about. The first one is Ground Chuck and Dirt Bag for Green Green for an Ox Mold Mutant. It's an 8-8 with trample. Whenever you tap a land, Burmana add green. It's a mana doubler. It's thick. 8-8 trample is nothing. That's big. Small, yeah. That's the biggest regal behemoth I've ever seen. It's true. It makes regal behemoth feel really sad, I bet. The regal behemoth gives you the monarch, but you have to defend the monarch. Yeah. Ground Chuck and Dirt Bag are great. If you like mana doublers, if you like big creatures, I think you probably just run it if you want either side of those. I ran it in my deck with... Well, most decks that want big creatures want more mana. You're right. Those things go together a lot. They go together really well. Yeah. And the fact that this gives you one additional mana, like Cage Sun gives you one additional mana, and it's just an artifact that chills, gives you an anthem effect, I guess. Yeah. Ground Chuck and Dirt Bag give you a big old body. All right. Let's move on to the next one. Yeah, that would be a really good hit for your deck, right? Yeah, right. Because you got it out for zero mana, and now that turn is doubled. Yeah. Provided it lives through combat, which I... It's an 8-8, so it would... Probably. Yeah. All right. The next one is Michelangelo Weirdness 211. It's one in a green for a 1-1 mutant Ninja Turtle. When Michelangelo enters, create a mutagen token, and then if one or more plus one, plus one counters would be put on a creature you control, that many plus one, plus one, plus one counters are put on it instead. So it is a hardened scales creature that comes with a mutagen token. It's a lot of stuff for your two mana. I think that's just going to be good if you care about counters. Yep. If you're playing hardened scales, if you're playing Ozalith, the Shattered Spire, uh-huh. I mean, hardened scales is just like the first include in a lot of decks. Yeah. Because you just go plus one, plus one counters. Yes, hardened scales. You don't think about it. That's just going in. I think Michelangelo will be like that. And it's a body that like gives you a way to get counters already. Yeah. It's very good. Up next is Raphael the Night Watcher. Two red red for a two, three creature with sneak. It's one red red is his sneak cost. Attack and creatures you control have double strike. Nice. This is great with combat damage abilities. If you're playing a lot of saboteurs, if you're playing a lot of evasive creatures, this is going to be really good. I did think it was a little weird in a decks with high power stuff because you're like sneaking in a much smaller creature to give your bigger creatures double strike. I don't think that's where you want to play it because you usually don't have a lot of higher power creatures out. So I think, yeah, you're probably in the mid range or even a bunch of smaller creatures. And it is an interesting combat trick, right? If you attack with enough things that one of them is going to be unblocked, they block a couple of things and you're like, cool, those things have double strike now. And all your blocks look a lot worse. You would have blocked totally different. And now a bunch of stuff that you thought was going to live is going to die. Yeah. Or if you didn't block, you're just going to take a lot of damage. Wow, I haven't almost done that in a long time. Yeah, double strike tricks are super powerful. I play Blasphermas Helcite and get people all the time. Like that's really fun. All right. And finally, this is also a turtle, a mutant berserker turtle. Oh, I didn't even realize it's a turtle. It's slash reptile rampager, three red red for a mutant berserker turtle, seven five. Big. Has alliance. Whenever another creature you control enters slash deals two damage to each opponent. And then whenever slash attacks create a two, two red mutant creature token. Okay. It's perforose for five mana on a seven five. That also makes a token. If somehow this survives a turn, you're going to play this. Yeah. I think this one's okay. It's so much mana and one more than perforose. Yeah. Yeah. Well, perforose is indestructible. Yeah. Like that's a big part of perforose is like you can run it out there. It's pretty safe. This is harder to do and it's a setup play. Like it doesn't do anything until the next turn when you like trigger it in some way, which is, you know, I think that when you're calculating that the other thing you put down was tear of the peaks, which obviously sees a ton of play. And I think you're weighing upside verse risk there. Right. Like the risk is I don't untapped with it. And then when I do, is that good enough to warrant that risk? Tear of the peak says, Hey, listen, I can kill a lot of stuff. I'm a flyer, but also like I can point that damage anywhere. Yeah. It's slash above or below line hard to tell it does trigger itself at least when it attacks makes it two, two does the thing. So it's close for me. It's interesting. I think this thing isn't going to attack very often. Don't count on that. They just if you play this card, it's going to lead the threat. They have to get it off the battlefield. If you can play this and make a ton of tokens for free, it's going to be really powerful. If you can play this and you've got some sort of power synergy, that's even better. But I agree. Five is going to be a lot and it's going to flag really scary. So if this is just a setup piece and you can't capitalize on it on the turn it enters the battlefield, you probably can't get away with it. OK, that's it. Those are all the cards we're going to talk about. Oh, my gosh. Is that all? Well, no, I don't know. There's going to be more cards coming out at some point. That's actually a good point. That is not all. There's not all. Yeah. In a couple of weeks, probably. I don't know. We're so ahead of time, but we're revealing the teams between the turtles pre-conduct. We are. I should know that date. What is that? Like the 18th. Yeah, February 18th. So yeah, never mind when I acted like I didn't know when I actually did have that information in my brain. Absolutely. Yeah. Oh, man. So those are the turtles we're going to talk about right now. We hope you're excited about them. We're going to talk about the card that we think is our favorite and then the most powerful of the cards that we talked about today. Obviously, we don't know the whole set in just a few minutes. But if you are excited about this set, you can go to cardkingdom.com slash command and you can pre-order this product and you can buy any of the cards that we were talking about today. If one of these commanders really floats your boat, got you excited. Maybe you want to gruel smash. Maybe you want to ask for ninjas. Maybe you want to buy a bunch of blink cards. Yeah. It feels like all these cards work with blink. Yeah. Yeah. You want to pick up a displacer, kid. And Card Kingdom's got a ton of cards all in one spot. Oh, don't tell them to do that. Look, I'm just saying. It is good. It's really good. Displacer getting with a rennet is just like, boom, or rene. I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm not a turtle's gal. Card Kingdom has a ton of the cards all in one place, especially like maybe you're still in the Lorwin groove. So are we. That's all I'm playing. And you haven't picked up your Lorwin stuff. You can take a list of all the cards you want from Lorwin. You can paste it into Card Kingdom. You can get all of them at one place. You're going to pay shipping once. You're going to be able to pick everything on the same page. And you're going to be able to move on with your life. And you can support the show for years or affiliate link at cardkingdom.com slash command. And of course, once you get all those cards, you want to keep them protected. Ultra Pro is the game accessories brand. We trust our own collections to here at the command zone. If you go to ultrapro.com slash command, you can find all kinds of awesome stuff like play mats, deck boxes, sleeves. We really love the mana eight line. It's just classy and beautiful. It's just the mana symbols on white. It's very arresting too. When you walk into a room and somebody's got mana eight, your eye just goes to it. You're a design person, right? Like simple design is perfect for signing. I love the apex sleeves of shuffle feel. I'm going to check out the Bob Ross stuff that I didn't know existed. Hopefully they're not sold out. That's the other thing is they do sell out of the special stuff. It's nice to check back to ultra pro fairly often just to see if it's there and if it's in stock. I know the foil final fantasy stuff was really hard to get your hands on, but it does look awesome and is worth checking back or you can sign up for their newsletter as well. And before we get back to our favorite cards from the set and what we think are the most powerful, just want to reiterate, we are hiring here at the command zone. If you've ever dreamed of getting a job in the content creation space, if you want to share your love of magically gathering with the world, if you want to join our awesome team and be part of our content, go to commandzone.com slash jobs. There are a bunch of jobs listed. Yeah. If you've got editing chops, we've got a spot for you. If you don't know anything about content creation and are just interested in learning and joining the team and sharing your love for magic, we've got options. If you don't live in Los Angeles, but you've got some skills that you think we could use, there are also some freelance positions. Yeah. You can see some examples of your work and stuff. Of freelance stuff. Yeah. And I want to say too that we are just looking for people that are talented and passionate about magic that think they might have skills that are applicable to our team. Because we have certain roles that we're kind of looking for, but then there's a couple flex positions where we're like, ah, we just want somebody sharp that has a skill that we could use, but we're just trying to fill our team in different ways. Hey, feel free to just send us an email directly at jobs at commandzone.com and let us know what you've got experience doing. And we'd consider something kind of out there. Oh, and that's a thing we didn't even know. The website one more time is commandzone.com. All right, let's talk about our favorites cards from this set so far and what we think guys is the most powerful or at least of the stuff we talked about today. Yeah. Favorite cards is, I really like Raffin' Mikey. It's not really my style. It was really fun to play though. It's sometimes fun to just be like, it's coming. Are you ready? I know it's what it is. I don't know. It's a little your style because it's kind of like the Atla Poulani. Yeah. The tricksy early turns is fun too where you're like ramping, but you have some more responses, that kind of thing. It actually feels a little bit similar to my Spider-Man deck, which was funny, the Mr. Negative. So Raffin' Mikey was really, really fun to play, but I think Don and Leo is pretty neat as well. I'm curious what a deck built around the, they're the Blink duo looks like, like if you're over indexing into artifact creatures or if you're just playing those big rocks, I think that's kind of a fun puzzle as well. Yeah. I chose Renet. Renet? I don't know. I've never seen Renet with a T on the end, but I really don't know. I watched Turtles when I was a kid, but it was, you know, like the old movies and the crazy costumes and Renet definitely wasn't in it. Anyway, Renet's definitely my kind of card. I'm going to love to add it to my box of tricks that, you know, people can, another thing they can be scared of that I might have, that sounds fun. I also put Ravinous Robots as sort of my honorary mention because I do, I love rectangle theory and this is going to create a lot of rectangles. So it just sounds cool. It's pretty, it's pretty nuts. That's going to be a very powerful card. All right. Let's go to the most powerful card in the 99, the card that we think has the most gas behind it. This one is really interesting because I, it felt pretty flat. There were a lot of cards that I could see, super high ceilings, and there was a lot of cards that had a bunch of synergy built around them. So looking at stuff like the ooze, I think is a very powerful card and is very easy one to look at. But also, you know, the Ravinous Robots is a really powerful card that's going to go in a lot of decks super naturally. So I had a lot of trouble picking the one that I think is like the most powerful, but I think in terms of flexibility and floor for me, I'm going to say the ooze. I think that's a really solid pick. And I think because it's colorless, it likely is like going to be the most played card from this set coming out of it. It's got a good chance just because it can go in any deck. Yeah. Yeah, definitely on my list. I think I'm going to change my answer. I had written down Michelangelo Weirdness to 11 because it's a hardened scales on a creature and this is very efficient. And I think that was a sort of easy safe pick. But as we were talking about it, I kind of talked myself into Mikey and Leo Chaos and Order. Yeah. It's a two-drop, the Celestinia Hybrid, two-drop that says whenever you put a counter on a target creature, you control draw card. This ability triggers only once each turn. It's like a counters enchantress. It's a counteress. It's an encounteress. An encounteress. Yeah, there you go. That's definitely what it is. That's what it is. It's going to stick. I can feel it. From here until the end of time. Which goes in the same deck as a hardened scales, but I think because we already have hardened scales and a lot of things that are like hardened scales, not that Michelangelo Weirdness to 11 is not powerful. This piece is a little more unique, I think, and going to provide something that those decks need even more than another hardened scales. Because I think a lot of the problems with Plus One, Plus Encounter Decks is you invest a lot of resources into making a couple of creatures big and then they get removed and you're kind of like, if you didn't draw a lot of cards during that time, you can be basically out of that game. That's why Terrasim Symbiosis is one of the better cards in the last few years because it gave that tool to the Plus One, Plus Encounter Decks. And this is another one of those. In some ways, better because it comes down earlier. Some ways worse because you can't draw as many at a time, but because it's a two drop that just kind of slowly does its thing, it might also not be a thing where they're like, we have to kill that person. They just drew nine. Drawing one here and there might not sort of raise the alarm the same way. Anyway, as we were talking, Michelangelo, I decided. I was like, why didn't I pick that one? Another reason for the Lighting Bolt, Three Manorock, to be good. There you go. There you go. Adds counters. Well, to kill Michelangelo is what I mean. It's only creature, so it wouldn't draw the card off the counter going on. That'd be sweet. It's only a creature. All right. Those are the cards we're going to talk about from TNMT, at least for now. But this has been a long one already, so we got to say thank you to our amazing team for making this episode possible. Thank you to Karina Cruz, Josh Diaz, John Schneider, Gaurav Galati, Jamie Block, Jordan Pridgen, Jake Boss, Becky Bell, Eric Lem, Manson Lung, Josh Murphy, Evan Limberg, Sam Waldo, and of course, yours truly, Jimmy Wong. All right, everybody, thanks for listening. Bye.