Secrets of Strixhaven’s Most Powerful New Commanders | 736

Greetings, humans. You have entered the Command Zone, your destination for all aspects of Elder Dragon Highlander. Enjoy your stay. Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Command Zone podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Weeks. How's it? It's Josh Lee Kwai. Oh, and we're talking about some secrets today. Yes. Specifically, the Strixhaven secrets. Yes, very excited about Strixhaven. Very excited about these commanders. A lot of spellslinger commanders, which is right at my alley. Absolutely. A lot of spells, which makes sense for this plane. We're going to be talking about many of the new commanders for secrets of Strixhaven, the ones that we think will be the most popular, the most powerful. We won't talk about the face commanders in this episode. We're dedicating full episodes to each of those as we roll out all of our episodes of Strixhaven. So if there's one that you're excited about, go check out that episode. We go deep into what we expect to be in the deck and what we would add to make it really awesome. And we are doing a video for every single pre-con. So don't worry. If that hasn't come out yet, it will. We will do a video for every single one of the Strixhaven school pre-cons. There's a lot of them. Yeah. Give us a second. Yeah, just give us a second. Yeah, but in this one, we're talking about some of the ones that just caught our eye, I guess. Yeah, some of the cool ones, some of the ones that we think that you guys will be the most excited about. And we're getting started with a little frog. This is Bertha Wise Extrapolator. She's here to extrapolate two green... As Quandrix does. You know, they're here just to take things to the nth degree. For two a green and a blue four man altogether, this is a one four legendary creature frog druid with increment. So this is a new mechanic from Strixhaven. It says, whenever you cast a spell, if the amount of mana you spent is greater than this creature's power or toughness, put a plus one, plus one counter on this creature. So it's sort of evolve-ish, but it's based on the amount of mana you spend on the spell rather than the creature's power or toughness. And then it says... Spells don't have power and toughness. Exactly. Yeah, it's basically evolved for spells. Yeah, and it doesn't care about what kind of spell. You can cast anything as long as you're spending more mana on it, Bertha will get bigger and bigger and bigger. And it says, whenever one or more plus one, plus one counters are put on Bertha, add one mana of any color. So the more mana you spend, Bertha gives you a little bit of a rebate on that for your next spell. Then she has an activated ability, X, tap and create a zero, zero green and blue fractal creature token and put a plus one, plus one counter on it. With X plus one, plus one counters. X plus one, plus one counters, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you pay X and then you make a fractal, that's that big. Yeah, so you pay three mana, tap, Bertha, you get a three, three. Yeah, and you can do that at an instant speed, which is pretty wild. Yeah, absolutely. And you can use the mana that you got from Bertha, maybe to pump into that if you can't spend it in other ways. Very interesting. I think anytime something's sort of giving you mana, it always makes my eyebrows raise a little bit, right? It's like, okay, there's definitely ways to break this. Anytime it's like when you do something, get mana, breakable, it just will be breakable. And there are- Especially when that thing is a plus one, plus one counter and there's like a million cards with plus one, plus one counters on them. Yeah, that's the thing is it, you don't get the mana if the increment triggers. You get the mana when a plus one, plus one counters put on Bertha, so you don't have to necessarily put the counters on by casting bigger and bigger spells. You can have other effects on the board that put counters onto Bertha. And now you're saying, okay, cards that are already good, already putting plus one, plus one counters are also giving a one mana return on investment. So yeah, so then you start talking about a lot of, already good, very good plus one, plus one counter cards, just becoming that much better because you tack on plus get one mana to that. Yeah, and the other thing that's so crazy about this is like, she gives you all of this mana and you're like, there's gotta be a ways to make a million mana with this commander. And then if you don't have a place to put that mana, it's fine, Bertha's got you. Bertha gives you the place to put it as a worst case scenario, okay, just make a 10-10. That's fine. Yeah. I'm okay with that. Yeah. Yeah, seems very powerful. I agree. Some cards that come to mind are a lot of landfall cards because there's a bunch of those that like say, landfall put a one one counter on stuff, basically, Bruce Lee Bill does this, Scythe Cack Cub, Retreat to Cosindu, those are all three, like, you know, they have other things they do that are also good. But like at a base level of like, my lands now give me one extra mana, it kind of turns them into Lotus Cobras. Yeah, well it turns your commander into a Lotus Cobra. Yeah. So it's now like any time counter mana. So Lotus Cobras is a very, very powerful card. Super powerful. And I think if you're building around this lands type of strategy, you can build with a lot of different ways to get extra lands into play and there's enough redundancy of this kind of effect. Like there's the new, the ride, the Shupoof, that was from Final Fantasy. And so like that's definitely a build that you could do where you really zero in on this stuff. But then there's also other ways to put plus one counters on stuff repeatedly with like flux channelers, is whenever you cast a non-creature spell, Proliferate. So now it's become sort of a Burgey type effect where it's when you cast a non-creature spell, you get a mana back. You have any color. Yeah, and inextrable tide does a similar thing, doesn't care about non-creatures, whenever you cast a spell, Proliferate. Yeah, it basically says for the rest of this game, obviously, Kamana can be removed, but all your spells give you one mana when you cast them. Like that's like an insane thing to do to your deck. Yeah. It was just like force multiply it like crazy. Very, very powerful. I did want to mention Astralogen's Planosphere. I feel like this is a card that we haven't quite zeroed in on just yet because it has more words than it needs to have. It's one in a blue for an artifact equipment with job select. So when it enters, it makes a one-one hero and auto-equips. But it says, equip creature is a wizard in addition to its other types. And whenever you cast a non-creature spell, and whenever you draw your third card per turn, put a plus one plus encounter on that creature, equip for two. The big thing here is whenever you cast a non-creature spell, put a plus one plus encounter on it. And again, this is another way to sort of turn your commander into a super beer jeep because like, if you're in this situation, it's very likely that you have a couple of these effects. Yeah, because if you have a flux channeler and the Astralogen's Planosphere, then all of a sudden you cast a non-creature spell, you get two mana back. Right. Like, you're really close. And maybe you're already there to like, actually being netting positive mana when you cast a spell. Imagine you cast a one-mana cantrip. You pay one mana, get two mana back, and draw your card. And it's like, oh, that's a broken thing that you're already doing. Right. And that's just if you have two of these effects on board. There's a ton of redundancies for this. There's a ton of different ways to put plus one plus encounters on your commander. Keep in mind, if you put like three plus encounters on Berta, you still only get one mana back. Right. You want to put it one at a time if possible. It's not the worst of, you know, obviously you're not gonna say no, if it's like, well, this puts two on there. That's why I'll take it. I'll still get one mana back, yeah. A card I just remembered existed is Radstorm, which is the card that's proliferate with Storm on it. That's really crazy in a deck like this. Yeah, for sure. Because any time that resolves, it's counter, counter, counter, counter, counter, so you get one mana for each copy of Radstorm. Yeah, I'm sure there's a Storm version of this deck that's running like the ops in the brainstorms and the considers and stuff with what we've just talked about. And in that, like, yeah, you get to Radstorm and it's just like, oh my gosh, like, yeah, game over kind of basically. Yeah, I mean, there's some really wild stuff going on. I did want to mention this next card because it is a new card and I feel like people don't quite have it on their radar yet. The card's bananas, it's the ooze. Two mana for a legendary artifact, 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. And then tap exile target card from a graveyard create a mutagen token. So this isn't going to make you mana positive, but it is a great way to sort of store all of, store all of the counters that were on Bertha or if you have a way to like reduce the activation cost on the mutagens or a way to double the trigger of your commander, the ooze gets really nuts and gives you a lot of different ways to start generating mana really fast. Yeah, I mean, it does graveyard hate plus make the mutagen too. So the mutagen token that it creates when it does that can be added to Bertha to get you the mana that you paid for the mutagen token. Basically free. Yeah, so you just kind of get free one one counters and then if Bertha dies with the ooze out, all those kind of get stored on the, to the mutagen that get created and can be immediately put back on to Bertha because again, every time you put a mutagen one one counter on it pays for it. So yeah, it kind of makes like an ozolith with graveyard hate on it a little bit, which is cool. Yeah, that makes you a ton of different objects. Really powerful stuff. There's a lot of plus one, plus one counter cards that are really powerful naturally. So adding a really powerful commander that gives you both the mana back and the thing to do with the mana is going to give you a lot. And generally with a powerful blue commander, a very powerful option you can do is just force multiply. And that's like non-legendary clones, like spark double or a Sikashima of a thousand faces. It just means that like anything you're doing is twice as good basically. Roming throne is really good. You get double the mana every time you put a counter on. That's like what we were saying with Flux Channeler, things like that. Like yeah, I think that's probably the strongest version of this deck, which is like you're trying to make it so when I put a counter on Bertha to actually get three mana back, I get four mana back. And then from there, it's not really that hard to like put together what wins, right? Cause it's just like, okay, so now I can pretty easily sculpt a turn, I'm going to get 25 mana. And it's, you know, from any number of things when you're the game from, I have 25 mana. Especially in green and blue. Something cool that I found as I was looking at activated ability stuff to sort of zero in on that activated ability rather than the triggered ability. Unbound flourishing is really good with this activated ability. It basically says when you activate Bertha, you get two fractals of that size instead of one. And then like training grounds and biomancers familiar are classic, just make your activated ability cost less, which means you get a bigger fractal when you activate it. And that's definitely like, you don't need too many pieces to win the game in this deck because even if you're like, oh, I didn't draw a win con going, yeah, I made like three, six, sixes and that's probably going to be enough to take somebody out. Yeah, I think even in the sort of stormy versions of the deck, sometimes you'll just be like, well, and then I made a 10, 10. And that was actually pretty good here. Yeah, and I sacked it to draw 10 cards and discard three with a greater good, you know? Like it's just madness. There's going to be a lot of combo potential with this commander just by the way that it is constructed like anything where you're like doing something else and it's saying like, in addition to that get mana, I think the first one that comes to mind for most people was intruder alarm stuff because of the tap ability to make a creature, which even if you tap it to make a zero zero, that's a creature entering which will untap all of your stuff, including Bertha, which means you can immediately tap Bertha. So if just Bertha's out, you could tap it on tap Bertha forever here. Now you wouldn't be up anything because you're creating zero zeroes, but all you need is one other thing that taps like one land where elves and you're infinite on mana or one Tim and you kill everybody, right? Because you tap the Tim to deal one to somebody, tap the Bertha, make a creature, untap all your stuff, Tim again, make creature, untap Tim again. And you know, it's slow, but actually you just demonstrate their loop and it's not that slow. Yeah, I mean, I didn't even think about X equaling zero. That's pretty good. Yeah, so Bertha, intruder alarm and any other creature that sort of taps to do anything is going to be infinite. Yeah, there's also stuff like Ivy Lane Denison, which just says whenever another green creature enters the battlefield and your control, put a one on one counter on target creatures, which could be Bertha, which could give you the mana. So now you tap Bertha to make the fractal, which puts a one on counter on Bertha, which gives you mana. That could be a very powerful. So you make like infinite one ones. Yeah, again, with intruder alarm out. Yeah, yeah. And Ivy Lane Denison probably just goes in the deck and is good just to be like, I can even make a zero zero to get a mana. So now it just turns. So it's like Bertha's like a Lotus Cobra that's also a mana dork that also sometimes taps to make a 10-10, right? Like you're just turning your commander into this really modal thing. Extremely powerful. And I mean, you can really build it around the part that you're excited about. Like you can do this mana thing and just have it be a turbocharged Lotus Cobra. Or you can be like, okay, I'm going to be a big mana deck. That's just trying to make big fractals every turn. The ability to do this at instant speed should not be underestimated. Like I don't know how you beat this in limited, basically. Because like they just, they can hold up a one four blocker that is going to grow. I think she's a one four. Yeah, and then on- If you have a five mana, you can't even attack into it. You can attack because I'll make a five five. And you can't kill the five five at sorcery speed. So they're like, I'm going to do it on end step and I'll untap and now I have another five five up. And you're like, that's maddening. It's an extremely powerful card. Yeah, my worry is that the sort of stormy version we've been discussing will be, and or intruder-alarmy version will be so powerful that it'll be hard for you to sit down and say, no, no, no, I built around the tap ability. Sure, yeah. Like they're going to be like, I don't know. Yeah, if you get a couple of things out where you're casting a spell and getting four mana back, that's just seems like they're going to have to give you credit for that version of it. So yeah. It's a very powerful Scymic Commander. What else is new? Rain is wet. All right, we're going to move on to the backup commander of the Prismari pre-con. This is muddle the ever changing. So this is two, a blue and a red for a 33 legendary creature elemental otter, shape shifter. It is a cursed looking otter. It's like cute for a third and then bug for two thirds. Yeah, it's a bug otter. Yeah, okay. It says whenever you cast an instant or sorcery spell, muddle becomes a copy of up to one target non-legendary creature you control until end of turn, except it has myriad. So of course, myriad is when you attack one player, you get two token copies of that creature attacking the players who are not being attacked, assuming all four players are still alive. Yeah. So this is cool. This is sort of a weird commander because it's once creatures and it wants instance and sorcery. We're going to see that a lot, I think, actually, with this set because it is very like spells and by spell slinger, which we mean instance and sorcery matter, there's a whole bunch of commanders where instance and sorcery matter, but also simultaneously creatures kind of matter for a bunch of these. This is the first that we're going to talk about like this. So yeah, there's that tug-and-pull between, well, if I have a lot of instance and sorceries, then how do I also have creatures on the board that I'm copying that I wouldn't be excited to copy? But if I have a lot of those, then do I have any instance and sorceries in my hand to make copies of the creatures? So that's going to be a delicate balance. I think that's going to be a thing where just enough play testing will get you there. A lot of card draw will help you out and hopefully you can find some overlap where there's spells that create creatures that you want to copy. Yeah, or creatures create spells in the prepared spell world. Yeah, so you're going to be looking for that to as the glue to kind of hold a deck like this together, I think. Yeah, that's the big thing about muddle. The other thing I want you to remember is muddle doesn't naturally have a vision and does need to attack and ideally survive. So a lot of the creatures that you're going to want to copy need to be able to get through in combat. Luckily, there's a lot of really great options. Well, Blue's got flying on most things, so Blue's going to help you out a lot here. So you want him to have an attack trigger or an ETB trigger. No, not an attack trigger. A combat damage or ETB trigger. Kind of the two things that you're looking for because again, muddle will swing, make copies of whatever it's a copy of attacking everybody and that's a things entering. So you'd get triggers there or hopefully they hit because you've got the evasion and then you get triggers there and that's kind of where you'd get your value, right? And I do think that this deck is more interested in bigger creatures for muddle to become a copy of and smaller instance and sorceries just to check that instance and sorcery box. Absolutely, because you're not like copying your instance or sorcery, right? It is just literally allowing you to kind of like get the value of like changing your commander into something awesome. So the main part of this deck that you should be excited about or where you're putting most of your mana is the creatures and their ETB or their combat damage trigger. And there's a lot of great options here. A crackling drake is one I thought of right away where I was just like, well, it's huge, it's flying and when it enters it draws a card. And it cares about instance and sorceries. That's gonna do a ton of damage. It's gonna draw you two extra cards when you attack with it and it's a huge flying threat. Yeah, I like that a lot. Professional face breakers, another one. It has menace and if you've got three of them and they all hit, they all trigger each other. Well, you'd have four hypothetically because you have the one you copy. You have the one you copy too. So yeah, you're gonna get like, what is that, three times 12 treasure? Will you do that? That's an insane amount. Yeah, I mean, yeah, right? It's three per one, so 12. Woof, untapped. Has menace. I mean, maybe you don't get through with all of them but this can be done pretty early. I think the thing we didn't talk about with Muddle that's also kind of interesting and makes it more powerful is you kind of get pseudo haste on the thing you played. Which is if you have like, you know, brainstorm or something that's small, you play your professional face breaker. Normally it would sit there and you couldn't, you know, you could get an attack in with one thing but you're like, boom, turn into the thing right now and immediately attack with it. That's pseudo haste on the thing plus the myriad. Yeah, I do think that's the way you wanna play this. Muddle is extremely telegraphed. If you like, play a professional face breaker on turn three, play Muddle on turn four and then on turn five, cast a spell, turn Muddle into the professional face breaker. Like- They've had a lot of time to try and stop that. Yeah, and then you make 12 treasures. Like they can't really let you do that. So it's way better to get Muddle on the battlefield, play the professional face breaker and cast a spell after. Yeah, and you think about that, you probably have like five mana when you're doing that and so you might even be able to hold up a little protection for disruption at the same point. So it's like cast your brainstorm, turn Muddle into the professional face breaker, still got one mana for my swan song or something. That's a pretty powerful position to be in and then you make 12 treasure and now you've got mana to stop disruption. Forever basically. This next card is nuts with Muddle. These sort of snowballing effects like we saw with the professional face breaker are really, really good. This is subterfuge for and a blue freight creature elemental incarnation. It's a three, five and it says, when this creature enters, target creature gains flying and whenever this creature deals combat damage to a player, draw that many cards until end of turn. So you play this turn Muddle into this, you attack now, you've got three or two additional subterfuges entering. So you've given flying to all the things. Counting the one that enters originally. And then when they hit, you draw three for each subterfuge, right? Yeah, so you're drawing nine when you hit, but like that is really good. It's really good. And the thing about this is too, you still have the subterfuge leftover later that you could turn it into again if they don't kill it. And a lot of times they're gonna be like, I have to kill Muddle and you're like, cool, but I still have a subterfuge. Yeah, like I can still blink this thing and get in. It's very powerful and this is the kind of card draw that is gonna make this deck really fun and explosive to play because you do need to do that puzzle that we said earlier that's like, okay, I need a spell and I need a cool thing to copy and they need to be able to get in combat. Cloud of Fairies is another one I thought was really fun because it's so easy to get into the battlefield and then it sort of acts like a sort of feast and famine almost where you play your Cloud of Fairies, you cast your spell or some other creature, go to combat, untap a fair amount of, you untap four lands with your creatures that enter. Plus there's flying naturally, pretty good. Yeah, there's something I didn't think of here. Yeah, there's a bunch of creatures that come in in the untap lands, so any of those is gonna be really, really good because the mirrored copies come in, give you the mana back. So there's a couple other things that I wanted to mention. There's some really nasty threats that you can put in this deck. I liked Rapacious Dragon, which is just a three-three that gives you two treasures when it enters. So it's like, it enters, gives you two treasures, make two copies, get two treasures back, so now you're up mana on your Rapacious Dragon. You've got six treasures. Pretty sweet. Fear of Sleep Paralysis is a threat that I live in sleep paralysis of. It's five and a blue for an enchantment creature in Nightmare. It's a six-six with flying and eerie. Whenever Fear of Sleep Paralysis or another enchantment you control, enters and, Oh. Yeah, and whenever you fully unlock a rim, tap up to one target creature and put a stun counter on it. Stun counters can't be removed from permanence, your opponents control. And these ones will see the others, so you're actually getting sort of exponential amount of stun counters. Yeah, so yeah. And if you can- Cast the fear, you stun something, you turn muddle into it, go to combat, attack, get two more. Now they see- They see the other ones. Yeah, so they see one more entering. Or two, four, six stun counters. So you'll have the first one is one, the second one, that one sees the two entering, so that's three off of that one, cause it's itself. The two that enter see the two that enter, so they get- Oh yeah, you're right, you're at seven. So it's seven. So you just tap and stun seven things and they cannot untap until you answer the fear of sleep paralysis. I love this, cause you almost have to kill the fear of sleep paralysis, which is like, okay, fine, but I still have my muddle. Yeah. And I got lots of value there. Well, if you play the fear of sleep paralysis and like, you have to like attempt to turn it into, turn muddle into a fear of sleep paralysis, if they kill it in response, you can put an instant on the stack again to do it. That's kind of cool. Yeah, I just meant like when they untap or like when it's their turn again. They feel like you're putting in this weird position where it's like, I'd like to kill the muddle because that thing is crazy. But if I don't kill the fear of sleep paralysis, my stuff is going to remain stunned. So I like putting, I think that's a good spot to be in where they feel like they have to kill the creature that you're copying rather than your commander because then you're in the same position on untapping your turn, play something else crazy, turn your thing into it. You know, yeah, it's way worse if they kill muddle. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really scary threat. I also liked Morang River Regent in this deck. This is the dragon that like has a spell on it, the omen, which is fine. It's good to have a little bit of overlap there. But when this creature enters, you return up to two other target nonland permanents to their owner's hand and it's a six, seven flying. Yeah, so you can about six things. You bow, yeah, the first ETB, two mores. You bounce six things and you hit with 18 power in the air the turn you play it. It's brutal. One of the reasons I love Mystic Confluence is just bounce three things sometimes. It just destroys people, bounce six things is like a one-sided board wipe. Yeah, it's so nuts. And it's nonland permanence, right? It's anything. So good. Okay, there's also just, you could just kill people. If you're copying stuff like Agate Instigator or like Terror of the Peaks. Now things start to really snowball in terms of like... Terror is pretty brutal because it's the same thing where the terrorists see the other terrorists. Yeah. So it's like when you go to combat, you have two Terror of the Peaks, two more enter, they see each other. So it's like each terror does 10. This is like the math episode. So much. That's a lot of damage. It's a lot, it does a lot. It's really herty. You could probably kill a lot of stuff or maybe a person. Okay. There's a lot of cool stuff that you can do with muddle. You can make more muddles. You could copy stuff with myriad and then they have myriad, myriad. Yeah, I like that. Which is if you copy a myriad thing, they have myriad twice. Which means when you attack with it, you make two copies attacking each of your other opponents, which is fun. Right, so like gold lust triad gives you just a million myriad treasures. And then a bunch of four threes. But let's talk about the spell sides of muddle because you need both halves of the puzzle. Cantrips, cheap spells here for sure. I really focused in on the cantrips that give something of Asian and then draw a card in case you wanna copy something like a professional face breaker that may not necessarily get through on the ground. You do need to make sure that muddle is safe. So stuff like enter the enigma or shadow rift. Just draw a card and make it so muddle is definitely getting through in combat. Yeah, you want them to be cantripe and you want to be really cheap. Yeah. And you want to be instant speed too. Instant speed is definitely a big part of this. Especially once your playgroup is wise to how dynamic this deck can be. Yeah, it'll give you a lot more play and it'll make you a lot harder to interact with because again, you can with it on the stack maybe change the target of what it's turning into and save it in some weird way. There was one more spell I wanted to mention here because it's perfect with muddle. It's corporeal projection. For those of you that didn't get intimately familiar with the Clue product, this is a blue and a red for a sorcery that says target creature you control gains myriad until end of turn and it has overload three blue, blue, red, red. You have everything myriad, that's cool. Yeah, but just getting myriad, myriad on anything. Now with face breaker or the sleep paralysis is insane. Yeah. I mean, I've always said I like any deck that has synergy and can legitimately include get taxing probe and this definitely is one of those. Yeah, for sure. For sure, it's also a good Muldrifter deck. Yes, that's great, that's great. That has my name all over it. All right, we've got a lot of commanders to talk about in this episode. If you wanna pick up any of the cards that we talked about today or if you wanna pick up any of the new Strixhaven product, you can support the show by going to cardkingdom.com slash command. Card Kingdom has a ton of singles and sealed product all in one place, especially after a new set comes out. They've got a huge inventory. If you're stoked about Strixhaven, like we are, make a list of all the cards that you want and you can paste it into the Card Kingdom advanced deck building tool. Pick all the versions that you want on the same page, click the versions, the foiling, the price, the, you know, all of the different. It's so easy. 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We shout out one lucky patron every single podcast episode and this one is dedicated to Emmanuel Kerr Brown. Emmanuel, you rock. All right. All right, let's get back into it. Next up we've got this cycle of elder dragons. If you don't know the lore behind strictsaving, every strictsaving school that's lower hold, quadric, such and such, their name comes from the elder dragon that kind of founded that school or that college. So the first one is a very Rachel. Yeah. Is a very Rachel school. It is, it's a lower hold of the historian. Sorry, it's awesome. It's three, a red and a white for a legendary creature, elder dragon. It's a five five with flying and haste. It says each instant end sorcery in your hand has, miracle two. At the beginning of each opponent's upkeep, you may discard a card if you do draw a card. So this is, gives your instance and sorcery's miracle and then enables that miracle on each of your opponent's turn. Yeah, so miracle means when you draw a card, if it's the first card you drew each turn, you can pay its miracle cost. Yeah, it's like reveal it and then you can pay it or you can cast it for its miracle cost. Yeah, you can tell if people played from the miracle era because they draw their card in a specific way. They don't draw it and put it into their hand. They draw it and put it sort of down to the side and so that you can never, cause once it hit your hand, it's too late to miracle it in like tournament play because you might've switched it with another card. Yeah, so this is crazy. And yeah, you're right. The rummaging aspect of it allows you to possibly miracle on other turns. Yeah, so this is a very cool, this is very cool effect. And not necessarily something I think of as super boros, it's only white, but like red miracles isn't necessarily a thing we've seen a lot of. So I think it's very cool and it comes with a lot of like splashy sorceries from red. So I think that makes it a really dynamic deck. When you think about miracle, what it is at, like what it's functionally doing is reducing the mana cost of a thing, right? So you wanna have like big things that would normally cost a lot of mana and get reduced down to two. That's how you break this kind of thing the most. Yeah. Oh, it is also worth noting that miracle ignores timing restrictions and it allows you, that's what allows you to cast it like in your draw step. So if you hit a sorcery on your opponent's turn, you can cast it as long as you reveal it for its miracle cost right as soon as you draw it. That is a very important thing because we're about to talk about some big sorceries and a couple of instance. As always, the top end on decks like this are sort of flavored to taste, whatever you have, whatever makes you excited, what kind of cards you wanna cast for 10 mana, because there's like, if it's seven mana, it probably wins the game. Yeah, anything that's up in the sevens, eight mana range that's a sorcery is, if you can cast it for two, it's gonna be a broken thing that you're doing. Yeah, it's gonna be nasty. So you can kind of do whatever cards you wanna do. But we're gonna tell you with some that we think are cool and maybe you have around the house. So the other thing is remember you want spells that are good to cast on your opponent's turn. So like, insurrection, not particularly good on an opponent's turn, it's okay. But like- You can't take full advantage often, yeah. Yeah, so you really want spells that'll give you a ton of value when you cast it, and regardless of when you cast it. Yeah, you can still have an insurrection in the deck, but you just don't want a lot of that. So hit the mother load was the first one I thought of, it's four red, red, red for a sorcery. It says discover 10. If the discovered card's mana value is less than 10, create a number of tap treasure tokens equal to the difference. That's great, because you can't lose, right? You either get a huge thing, or you get a medium thing and a lot of extra mana. And then you can cast whatever big spells in your hand next turn. Exactly, in some ways, if you get a one drop, you're perfectly happy because you got nine treasure out of it. Yeah, and you're like, next turn I'm gonna untap. Well, even if Lorehold dies, I can cast some crazy spell that's sitting in my hand. Yeah, and one of the problems with a deck like this is like you will end up drawing some cards that you can't miracle, right? Like you can only miracle the first card that you draw each turn. So stuff like hit the mother load, there's gonna be a few of them in your hand sometimes. And so you wanna be able to deploy them. There will be ways, we'll talk about later, to put them back on top of your deck, but also just being able to generate enough mana to just hard cast the stuff is gonna be a good thing that you wanna do. Yeah, these big spells that make treasures like Brass's Bounty does a similar thing is going to give you this big burst of mana that you need and it's gonna help you get cards out of your hand because with this deck, you're going to want a pretty high density of big expensive spells. They don't all have to be seven mana, but you're gonna want a lot of expensive things to get that value out of Lorehold. So having some amount of them give you mana back so you have a chance to cast them out of your hand I think is pretty important. Absolutely. We've got a couple other cool big ones. I like volcanic visions a lot. It's an old favorite of mine. Yeah. It's very, very powerful. Yeah, in the right deck, you have to have the right deck. So it's a sorcery for five red red. You return target instant or sorcery card from your graveyard to your hand and then volcanic vision deals damage equal to the mana value of that returned card to each creature your opponent's control and then you exile volcanic visions because otherwise you could keep doing this. Yeah, it's very powerful if you're in a deck that has a lot of instances and sorceries in the five mana value or more range, which this absolutely will. Yeah, because it draws you a card, wipes the board and it's one sided. Yeah, gross. I mean, that's pretty sick. I don't anticipate this deck is going to have a ton of board presence. So these big one sided board wipes I think are gonna feel really good. If you fall can of vision on a miracle for two on an opponent's turn, it's like ridiculous. How do you lose? Plus you were like, hey, and I got back my hit the mother load and they're like, oh crap. And I have nine treasures for casting that last turn. Exactly. Or I have a scroll lock out or something. You know, just like that is just back breaking. Yeah, the other one is like call forth the tempest. That's the one that Jimmy cast off of his hideaway land in game nights. This one is eight mana. It's got cascade, cascade already gross. And then it deals damage to each creature your opponent's control equal the total mana value of other spells you've cast this turn. So it counts the two cast gated spells at the very least. Yeah. And says, yeah, this is gonna be, it's nuts. Again, one sided board wipes. And those are really good off the top on your opponent's turn. Borderline better, right? Yeah. On your opponent's turn than your own turn. So. Absolutely. Can you imagine your opponent doing this in your upkeep? You're like, what do you, what? Come on. What? This is my turn, get out of it. Like I said, they don't all have to be like seven mana heaters as long as you're getting some amount of cost reduction, it's gonna feel pretty good to cast like a big score. Yeah, absolutely. It's just discard a card, draw two cards, create two treasures. Now you're mana neutral and you've filtered a little bit. Exactly. That was a zero cost spell that just draw two cards, discard a card, it would be very good. They don't make that card. So yeah. There is a lot of cool stuff that you can be casting. Oh, season of the bold is another one I wanted to mention just cause this is another one that makes treasures. Three red red and you get up to five paws worth of modes. You can one pause, create a tapped treasure token, two pauses, exhale the top two cards of your library and you can cast them until your next turn or the end of your next turn. And then three pauses until the end of your next turn whenever you cast a spell, season of the bold deals two damage to up to one target creature. It's until the end of your next turn. Yeah. So if you cast it on your opponent's turn, you have a fair amount of time. And so the end of your turn too, you're gonna get your whole turn as well. Woo, and narrowly. I like modal stuff here for the miracle cause you're not always gonna know that it's coming. And so having a couple options on it is good. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So I looked at the EDA track, this card's been spoiled for a little bit. And I saw a lot of cards that were like magecraft type stuff where it had like the magecraft maker treasure guy. Yeah. Strong kill artist. Yeah, I don't love that index like this because this deck is more designed to cast one big spell a turn and hold up mana to like try and miracles many times as possible. You're not really like chaining together a whole bunch of spells to get a maximum treasures. You're sort of better off just playing a two mana rock or playing like a spell cost reducer. You're going to get a little bit more mana out of that because you're not doing this stormy play pattern that where magecraft is really at its best. Yeah, although I think storm kill artist is probably still good enough because if you do two miracles, you know. Sure, you get two treasures back. And that's like, you know, pretty good. And every once in a while, you're probably gonna do a little bit more, especially if you one of them's, you know, hit the mother load or something. Yeah, but you don't want like gutter snipe effects. Like those kind of things. I don't think that's probably, it's too slow. Yeah, you're trying to win by casting, you know. You're not gonna chain together like 10 spells in a turn. Yeah. Yeah. But you probably will cast two or three per rotation maybe. Yeah. If you're lucky, if everything's going. I think you're more likely to want enhancers like copy effects, like forks. Forks are gonna be so good because you're just forced multiplying the reduction you got off the miracle, right? So you miracle some eight mana sorcery and then you copy it. So you pay two, you're up six mana there. And also doing something way before you're supposed to. And then you pay another two mana to get a second version of that. So now you're up 12 mana over the course of these two cards. Yes. Like, yeah, that's insane. Yeah. So fork effects, definitely very powerful. Reverberate is a classic. Return the favor is one I really like lately. Yeah, cause that's another mode. Yeah, it's a SWAT effect. So you can protect your commander who is a big part of your engine. Now these will be not the greatest hits off of the miracle rummage part. So you have to be careful. You don't want too many of them. It'll also depend on how many of the next category you've got in your deck that allows you to peek at the top of your library to know what's there. But you definitely could have too many of these. So I think you're probably at like two or three max. Fury Storm's another one. I really like a lot of the pet card of mine. But yeah, don't overload. That's a magic mechanic. So don't be confusing. Don't put too many fork effects in. But I think a couple strategically placed would could be really good. All right, let's talk about the manipulating the top of your library. Cause I do think that's going to be a big part of playing this deck. Huge part of all miracle decks. Oh yes. Cause you're in such a worse position if you're just like, well, I hope something good is good is there rather than being like, I know something good is there. I put it there. Yeah. That's the thing about miracles. Yeah. Is they do take a little bit of work. Less of a miracle and more of a plan. Yeah. Look, you call it a miracle. I call it months of planning. That's fine. So playing cards that let you set up the top card of your library is very powerful in this deck. There aren't a ton in white and red. These are not colors that are known for it. Blue's better at it for sure. But there's some very powerful artifacts that will help you. One thing I'll say about white and red is they're pretty good at finding artifacts. So you could, you know, depending on what your play style is, you could run some tutors that help you find these, which will kind of give you multiple copies of them. So scroll racks are one of the more famous ones. Yeah, it's been around forever, but nothing's really topped it as far as like, it allows you to replace the cards on the top of your library with cards in your hand. And you get to put the cards in your hand on top of your library in the order you want. So that allows you to be like, oh, I got this eight mana sorcery stuck in my hand. If it was just on top of my library, I could draw it a miracle and pave two for it. Well, scroll racks as cool, you can just put it there. Yeah. And you're not even down a card because you drew the card off your library to replace it. Yeah, and if your opponent scroll racks with this card on the board. You're in trouble. Uh-oh. Yeah, you're in trouble. Oh no. Something bad is going to happen, like really bad. Oh no. Sensei's Divining Top is the only card that might top scroll rack. Ha ha, top. It only sets up the top three though. It basically gives you like, you can arrange the top three cards. You hope that there's an incident sorcery or sorcery in the top three cards. And Sensei's Divining Top can give you like a miracle trigger. Yeah, because it can draw the card. So you can set it up and then choose when to draw it. So this could actually make your forks a lot better, right? Because if you miracle the amount of no or no, no, no, they're coming, you can't plan for it. But this could be like, I know that's there. Cast the spellhold priority, draw the card with the top. Oh, it's a miracle, boom. So that's, top is really, really good. It gives you a lot of control. I mean, especially because your commander says you may discard a card. So if you're like, I'm not going to discard a card. And then you're like on end step, ha ha, crack the top, miracle. Boom. What a nightmare. And we're allowed to have more reactive cards on the top for sure. So for a lot of does too. Yeah. Yeah. The other one is Planetarium of Wanchitong, which is a Six Mana for a Legendary Artifact. You tap one and scry two. So scry two is top deck manipulation, understanding what's there. It says whenever you scry or surveil, look at the top card of your library, you may cast that card without paying its mana cost. Do this only once each turn. So this is like, yeah, miracle. I see you when I raise you zero. Yeah, none. Just don't pay. I don't need miracles. Yeah. I have knowledge. But you could also put it, you know, strategically place the second card to be miracle, but the first card is going to be cast for free. I mean. Yeah, you like scry, put a creature on top, oh, cast the creature for free. And then, yeah. Now I'm ready for my miracle, yeah. Uh-huh. And in conjunction with Scroll Rack, this could be really, really good too, where you can just like sort of like, oh, I'm going to put these there. If something happens, I can change them around a little bit. Since his top kind of kind of works like that too, these actually work decently well together with the ability to be like, I said it, but now I have some options if like, oh, I thought I wasn't going to need removal, but now I need it since his top switches things around. You know, that kind of stuff. Scry, bam, yeah. You can, what I like about a planagerium of Wanchitong is it also means your deck works if you don't have your commander in play. It just gives you sort of a backup plan. Yeah, absolutely. That lets you cast some of these big things for free. Another one I found that was neat was not forgotten. It's one in a white fur sorcery. Put a card from a graveyard on the top or bottom of its owner's library. Put a one-one spirit creature towing with flying onto the battlefield. So you're like, I've got a cool card in my graveyard. I'm going to set that up for my next turn and I have another little flying blocker. So it's almost better than a regrowth in a deck like this because it's right where you want it. It puts it into the miracle spot. Yeah. One thing I'll say is if you go this route, which I think for this deck you should, you've got a bunch of cards dedicated to knowing what's on the top of your library, then you should run as many fetch lands as you can get. Obviously, a lot of the fetches are expensive. Maybe you don't have access to those, but even involving wilds and stuff become a lot better as soon as you know what's there. And sometimes they're like, I don't like what's there. I would like it to be other things. That's what the shuffle effects do for you. It gives you a redraw basically. Yeah, so even in budget versions of the deck, I would just lean towards the cheaper fetch lands even if they're a little bit slower, come and tapped, at least having a number of those to take advantage of that additional synergy. Finally, I wanted to talk about Library of Lang. It is quite good in this deck. An oldie, but a goodie. This is one mana artifact that says you have no maximum hand size. If an effect causes you to discard a card, discard it, but you may put it on top of your library instead of into your graveyard. This is amazing. So good. So your commander allows you to discard a card and you're like, how about this eight mana sorcery? Oh, I'm gonna put it on top instead. Draw this eight mana sorcery. It's a miracle. It's a miracle. Yeah, that's really good. Very, very powerful. It is worth knowing with Library of Lang where you're probably playing some amount of other rummaging cards, costs are not effects. So if you have a big score that says as an additional cost discard, you do have to discard that one. You can't put it on top. But if you have a triggered ability that says like whenever this draw and discard, that you can put on top, because that's an effect. Oh, magic. Oh, magic. Not complicated at all. Finally, I wanted to talk about mana production because I do think that this deck is gonna be more mana hungry than it looks. Just paying two, you want to be able to miracle as much as possible. And if you hit an instant or sorcery, you really need the mana to be able to pay for that. It's devastating to like hit the eight mana, it'd be like I'm one mana short. So I was looking at stuff like Bender's Water Skin, which is the three mana artifact that untaps on each player's untapped step. So it's just a three mana rock that makes you one mana return, basically. I was like, well, that means. It sort of is, yeah, it means that's one mana to miracle now, right? Like you just have to hold one extra up, yeah. Right, and Victory Chimes does approximately the same thing with colorless mana. So those are gonna help you just like make it a little bit more feasible, I think. Yeah, absolutely. This seems like great includes unwinding clock you've got on here as well, which is, you know, you got to play enough mana rocks, but once you're doing that, it will just say like every turn you will have the mana to miracle. Yeah, unwinding clock requires a little bit more building around, but I think with the artifacts that we're talking about, like Planetarium or Wanchitonga is really insane with unwinding clock because it untaps and you can scry again with it. Yep, insane. It's gonna be really good with a lot of the cards of what we're talking about. All right, more dragons, that was the first. Yeah, next up is Prismari, which is probably the school that I actually am. Yeah. Yeah, at least I think so. This card is insane though. It is. It is Prismari the Inspiration, five blue red for a seven seven legendary elder dragon has flying, has ward pay five life. Okay. And it says, instant and sorcery spells you cast have storm. Excuse me? Yeah, so storm is when you cast this spell, copy it for each other spell that's been cast this turn. This is a very good card. Historically and well known as one of the, maybe possibly the most broken mechanic of all time, definitely one of according to Mark Rosewater and basically anybody that's played with storm. Yeah. I mean, this is an exceptionally powerful card. It also just gives storm to cards that should not have storm that weren't planned to have storm. Which is like. Easy to break. Easy to break, easy to like break the game. You're like, okay. You need to break your brain. Yeah, you're like, I give thieves auction storm. It's like, don't, please. Oh my God. Just figuring out what happens sometimes will be a pain in the butt. Please don't. Yeah. There's just probably some chaos versions of the stack where like you put things in not even knowing exactly what's going to happen. Yep. Yeah. So storm decks historically and traditionally have sort of similar components. And I think this one's going to have those as well. Which is like a lot of one mana or low mana cost cantrips, right? Because what you're trying to do is cast a large number of spells so that by the end of it, you know, it's your fifth, sixth, seventh, maybe even more. You're getting so many copies of it that that exponentially starts to, you know, make these little things really, really big, huge threats. Yeah, we should probably walk through this first. So giving all of your instance first three spell storm is really bizarre because it's like, okay, you start with a getaxi and probe, which makes sense. So you pay two life, you draw a card, you look at a player's hand. The next spell. You now cast one spell. One spell. The next spell that you cast is consider. Okay. So you're like, okay, this has storm. So I've cast one spell before this. I make a copy of consider. So I now have two considers on the stack. So I surveil one straw, surveil one draw. Okay. So the spell I cast, let's say it's a lightning bolt. Lightning bolt goes on the stack. You've cast two more spells before this. Doesn't count the copies. It just counts the cards that you cast. You have two copies of lightning bolt. Now you have nine. Three total. Nine damage to deal out. So this thing gets crazier and crazier and crazier. So by the fourth and the fifth and the sixth one, you're casting a thing and making five other copies of it. Yeah, and that's why you really want to load up on a number of spells so that you get that exponential increase by the tail end of it. And that's when you go at the end, you know, normally brain freeze or something like that. And they're like, wow, you managed to brain freeze for like, you know, 400 or whatever. And that's because the multiplication of it all gets crazy. It also counts any spells your opponent's cast during the turn. That's the other thing to mention. It's all spells cast. Yeah, so you could like, if you cast Prismarie and you hold up a consider at the end of your opponent's turn, you could cast a consider and copy it three times. Yeah, or if they try to interact with you, it can add to your storm count sometimes. And you can also storm off on top of interaction a lot of times too. Storm is nuts and really complicated too, just figuring out the lines and the sequencing are sometimes. So, yeah, so, so, so low mana value cantrips is one of the sort of traditional pillars of a storm deck. Another one is rituals. Yes. So what you want is cards that are instance and sorceries that draw you cards and then also ones that give you mana. And now you've got the two pieces you need to sort of keep things running. So there's a whole bunch of rituals in both of the colors. There's stuff like mana geyser, Jessica's will, which obviously just give you red mana. A million, yeah. Yeah, but then you can also consider things like turnabout and reset, which untap your lands as rituals, right? Because what do they do? They give you extra mana. And giving these storm is like pretty insane because imagine you go get probe into ponder into mana geyser and you get three mana geysers, right? Normally mana geysers. Maybe like 45 mana geysers. Yeah, mana geyser often gives you 20 mana and you're just like, cool, I have 60 red mana. It's pretty, you know, just a fireball will kill people or maybe win the game from that point. And the fireball, you're gonna get four of it, right? So you go, okay, 59 point fireball times four. I win. Yeah, that's not even like a crazy scenario. And that's a very, yeah, it's a very modest scenario. So yeah, turnabout, same thing. Oh, you put five turnabouts onto the stack. You're like in between each one, I just float all the mana. It's pretty easy to go off. The ritual part of it's pretty insane because just giving storm to rituals is like amazingly broken. Giving Jessica's will storm is like the grossest thing I've ever heard. That's both pieces we just talked about, right? It's carded mana. That's the card draw and the mana. So you're like, oh, I make 28 mana and I also put 12 cards aside that are we gonna add, that I can now draw from to continue the storm. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah. That's okay. Yeah. It's madness. A cool thing you can do which is kind of like the myriad thing we talked earlier is you can give a storm card storm. Yes. You can have storm storm. Mm-hmm. Which is nuts. So we talked about brain freeze already but even just grape shot. Yeah, I mean, so it triggers fully each time. So the storm ability gives you all the copies that you, from what you've cast and then all the copies. So it's twice storm. So if you cast grape shot as your seventh spell for the turn, you'll get 14 grape shots. You know, which again, if you haven't watched storm in action, seven sounds like a lot. It's not. It's not a lot. We've all seen storm counts in the 20s. Yeah, brain freeze is like so broken because it's already broken and then you just doubled it, it's crazy. Yeah, there's some mad things that this deck can do and it's going to happen or it should happen the turn after the commander comes down. So it's like Prismarie, they untapped, they should win the game that turn. Yeah, it shouldn't be that difficult. And possibly and probably the turn they play Prismarie, honestly. Yeah, I mean, especially if you're in a deck that's running mana geyser type effects. If you mana geyser cast your commander, the next spell you cast is already copied twice. Yeah. Twice. Yeah, three times right. Oh, it's copied twice, but you get like, so it's mana geyser your commander and then that spell is copied twice. Right, right, yeah, you'll get three of it, but yeah. Yeah, so if you can go off, yeah. And again, you're going to have a lot of turnabouts and mana geysers and Jessica as well. So getting Prismarie out on round turn four or five with additional mana left over to really start going is not going to be super, super hard. We should talk about some enablers that probably come out before Prismarie, this go off turn two. So Storm Kilimanarys really good here. This is the opposite of the lower hole deck where is literally the goal of the deck to cast a lot of and copy a lot of spells. And the copy part, normally on Storm Kilimanarys, maybe not as important here, it's crazy. So important. Yeah, you cast Gip Probe as like your fifth thing, like your zero mana. Oh, you're done. Nope, Gip Probe, make five Gip Probes, make five treasures. I can now keep going. Bergy also good, not quite as good because it doesn't count the copies, but still just getting a mana rebate on every spell you cast when a lot of them are going to only cost one. Electro does a similar thing. I wanted to mention Electro specifically because it says you don't lose unspent red mana as steps and phases end. So it just can give you these weird turns where you're like, okay, first of all, this is a mana sink, if it leaves play, you can dump all the mana into it. But second of all, you can like cast Electro in the early game and charge up some mana for when you play or you're coming in or down. Yes, absolutely. You put some mana on lay away for when Prismari comes out. Okay, now I'm gonna pull that out. And now I'm gonna use all this. Pull out of the bank and use it now, yeah. So I think Electro is quite good for that ability. I did wanna mention Archmage Emeritus. This card is really powerful, but it does say whenever you cast or copy an instant or sorcery spell, draw. Yeah. No may, draw. So you could kill yourself if you're not careful. Careful. I think you'll be hopefully fine and be able to win before you draw yourself out, but you know. But you never know. I also put one on late, which is Twinning Staff, which also cares about copying things and copies things. Oh yeah, for sure. There's a million. Like this is not a difficult deck to find cards that are good, right? Like, yeah, because you know where all the categories are. And they're all good. And the thing about cantripé ritual edicts is they're really good at just like churning through the deck and finding the key pieces anyway too, because that's what they're doing, right? This card just draws you the next card. So you kind of are searching through your deck a lot faster than a normal deck would. Right, it's got a lot of velocity. So there's a bunch of combo potential here. Storm, historically very good at comboing. One of the big key pieces will be Forks, which we already talked about. Reiterates are a really good one because it has the buyback. So it can actually buy itself back to Recast. So imagine you have a mana geyser on the stack and then you reiterate it. And it makes another mana geyser, which gives you mana and you reiterate with buyback. So you let the copy resolve, the original is still on the stack. And now you've got the extra mana to maybe reiterate that mana geyser two times. Now you're infinite, right? Yeah. Let those resolve. Now I'm gonna copy the mana geyser four times. Now I'm gonna copy it eight times. And it's just like, okay, now that I have unlimited mana, can I figure out a win? Yeah, also I've cast an infinite amount of spells. So anything else will be copied infinite amount of time. So all you need is a lightning bolt at that point. Yeah, the win con for this deck is lightning bolt. It's chain lightning. It doesn't have to be like these big burn spells. It's gonna be copied a million times. And those double as like spells you could cast early in the turn because they're cheap or later in the turn because they're your win conditions. So there's a lot of really wild stuff you can do with this deck. I love Narcissus reversal. This one's crazy. So gross in this deck. This one's insane because imagine a scenario where you do the mana geyser thing again or Jessica's will. Then you cast Narcissus reversal. You get the copy of the Narcissus reversal, which targets, oh sorry, the Narcissus reversal targets your Jessica's will. The copy of the Narcissus reversal. The original Jessica's will. The copy of the Narcissus reversal targets the original Narcissus reversal. Both of those get returned to your hand. Copies are put in the stack. I'm now in the position where I got the mana from a mana geyser, but I end up with the same cards I started with. And then now, as soon as I get to there, I go, cool. Now what's my next thing? I can just Narcissus reverse. And this works with so many of your cards. And then you're like, cool. Now I'll just do that with my lightning bolt and kill you even though the lightning bolt will kill you with the infinite storm count that you've got. But like the Narcissus reversal allowing you to return itself plus the other thing to its hand means that you don't need as many cards in your hand to sort of get it going. Yeah, even remand is something that I would probably put in this deck because you can return an earlier spell in the stack to your hand to draw the card. And then as long as you have a target for the stormed remands, you can like return copies of the remand to your hand and draw all those cards. Yeah, and if you have too many, you just to all target them with the same one and the rest fizzle, but you got what you wanted out of it, right? Yeah. So forks are incredibly good when you make copies of them. Because the copies can also target the original forks, which can just up your storm count. So Fury Storm, this was a famous like infinite combo kind of with itself because when you cast it, you make additional copies which copy the original, which make copies the copy of the original and you can just get your storm count as high as you want with Fury Storm all by itself. Yeah. Yeah. So usually it's hard, you still need an additional piece to convert that into a win, but it's not hard to find those. We did want to take a second to talk about how this deck is, we spent a lot of time talking about how it's completely busted. If you untap with this commander in play, you're going to go nuts and you will probably win in one turn. But that also means that your opponents are going to have to do every single thing in their power to make sure that you cannot do that thing. Yeah, one of the reasons to talk about it is so that you know when you're across the table from it, like what's possible, so you can react accordingly. And this is definitely a deck that you just can't let them really have Prismari. You often won't be able to let them land it at all and certainly you can't let them untap with it. There's just very few scenarios where you can even imagine they untap with a Prismari and any amount of cards in their hand and they don't have the ability to win. Which not my favorite kind of design because it's an all or nothing thing. And we know that a lot of these commanders have existed. You know, the first one I can really remember thinking this way was the original Narset, which is like, if Narset swings one time, we probably lose. So then you get these games where it's like either the person plays it, wins the next turn, or that person has stopped and they never do anything for the whole game. And that feels like this deck will have that propensity. Yeah, it's gonna be very powerful. It's gonna be all or nothing. And you need to be prepared if it's in your command zone for people to treat it as the hostile threat it is. And you probably want some amount of disruption to make sure that you can fight through some disruption, especially if you're in a higher power play group. You really, this can only be played in a higher player. I agree. I don't think you can play this down in the ones and twos for sure. Even threes are, this is just inherently too powerful for that. Yeah, I was like, okay, so what could you do to sort of like bolster this if you're putting it in the command zone? And flash is gonna be really good. High-fake trickster is nuts. If you can flash in your dragon on end step right before you untap, it's a very narrow window for them to disrupt you. And you're more likely to untap and have that crazy go off turn. I was thinking about even something like unstoppable plan is sort of interesting. That means you have to be more reliant on instance. And mana rocks. That's probably how you're gonna be generating a lot of the mana to get your seven mana commander down. So that's at the beginning of your end step. You untap your non-land permanence. And now you can use your opponent's turn to get at least some storm triggers the turn after you get your commander down. Or you could play your commander, fully tap out for it. Know you're gonna untap with your counter magic ready to protect. Again, another very narrow window for you, the ability to protect your commander. Deflecting, SWAT and Boltbend, of course, anything that you can do to protect your commander using as little mana as possible, counter spells. This is, you know, at the power level, at the high power level, is definitely gonna have the force of wills and stuff too. Right. Yeah. Okay. Let's move on to the next dragon. This is Quandrix, the proof. For a green and a blue for a legendary creature, elder dragon, this is a 6x6 with flying and trample and cascade. And instance and sorceries you cast from your hand have, cascade. I gotta say, I like the simplicity of the design of both of these, even though I think the storm one's kind of a little bit nuts. The storm one's nuts. Yeah. But like, it makes your head go. But simplicity of design is nice. It's just like, it's not super complicated. It just gives instance and sorceries this additional thing. And giving cascades pretty strong, right? It's just free value of everything you cast. Oh yeah. And it only limits the instance and sorceries you cast from your hand. So if you hit an instance and sorcery, you don't keep going. Otherwise, cascade would go on forever, yeah. But you can do some really crazy stuff. So this is a very powerful commander. It gives you like a second spell for every first spell. It's a little bit less explosive than Prismari, which will give you a third and fourth and fifth spell for your one spell. I think it's a lot less explosive than Prismari. It's easier to get in play. It is one mana cheaper. I would say this also has similar problems to Prismari that like we were just talking about, where I can't really let you have quadrics after you untap. Like you can cast it. You get a cascade and then if they untap with it, they're going to be effectively doubled their mana and their cards in their hand. Yeah, I think you can untap with quadrics though in a way that like they don't win on their next turn. They're probably going to get a ton of value, but you might be able to equalize that, whereas Prismari, they're going to untap and like it will end the game what they're doing. Yes, this is just very... I don't think this is as powerful. I do think people will treat it like I don't, I think you will take removal spells. So you should be perfect. Yeah, for sure. You want to kill, you don't want them to have it. I just mean it's not as dire. It's not like, hey, we can't survive one turn of them untapping. You probably can survive exactly one turn of them untapping, given a board wipe or something. Yeah, but I think you have some of the same protection, like wilderness reclamation, high-fave trickster, that kind of thing. Anything that lets you flash in quadrics on your end step or flash with cascade is really sweet and good. Or just have mana up after you've cast it. Yeah, that kind of thing. So let's talk about some stuff that's good with cascade and the answer is kind of whatever you want. It's like instances sorceries. Yeah, although I would say as Prismari was skewed towards like small instances sorceries, you don't want little ones as much for quadrics because there's just gonna be less of your deck that they can hit, right? You have to cascade into something that's lower mana value than the spell that you cast. So an opt or a brainstorm, we'll talk about this. There are ways to build decks where you do that on purpose to find specific zero drops, but in general, you want to cast bigger things so that you have the chance to hit bigger spells when you're cascading. And so one of the good ways to do this is spells that, sort of have a price tag higher than you actually end up having to pay. So like Treasure Cruise is a great example, technically an eight mana value spell, but most of the time you're only paying one mana for it. So it's gonna cascade into possibly a seven drop or lower, but again, you didn't have to pay eight mana to get that effect. Dig through time, another one, something like March of Swirling Mist, which is like I'm discarding cards to get the mana value up there. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, I would think about those type of effects. And of course these are already good cards. Treasure Cruise and Dig through time, I also like a lot because with the amount of cascading that you'll be doing, hypothetically, you'll have a lot of spells in your graveyard so that delve cost is not as hefty. And then extra turn spells are really good with cascade and gonna be really good here. Obviously not everybody likes to play extra turn spells. They're very powerful top end spells. Yeah, and they're great because normally an extra turn spell just out into the blue with like, they take a lot of your mana. So a lot of times there's this scenarios where you play an extra turn spell and it was kinda just like draw a card, put a land into play. With the cascade tacked on, it becomes something totally different. Yeah. So now it's like, yeah, you can just cast one and then just cast one and then just cast one. And normally that would be like, oh, you got through, you ramp three times and drew three cards. And this is like, no, but then I also got three other spells in the midst there. And three attacks with my huge dragon. Yeah, and I was six six flying tramp. Another thing that's worth talking about is like, your commander has cascade. If they kill it, you can recast it and get another free spell. Like that's pretty cool also. Not the worst when it dies. Especially since you're in a simic, which should not have too much problems with generating a lot of mana. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, if you cast your commander and you get hit an extra turn spell, you're like, very powerful. Let's talk about some of the lower drops in this deck as well. Cause you want, you don't want a ton of them because you want to control sort of what you hit. I imagine a lot of the lower end in this deck is going to be ramp just to get your commander out as fast as possible. And it's really good to hit like a ramp and growth off of a cascade spell. Coldivate's not that great, but it's a lot better when it like also casts a random two-dramater attack. Yeah, it's quite good. Cause whatever, cascading is the mana that it costs the cast spell and the drawing of the card to cast it. So every time you cascade into something, you drew a card and got mana. Free ramp spells are extremely broken and will feel really powerful. There was a couple of ways that you could build around it. And if you wanted to do like a cast from exile thing that I wanted to mention, was like see the truth is look at the top three and get one of them if you cast it from your hand. But if you cascade into it, it's a draw three, which is really sweet. Or like a surge of brilliance is draw a card for each spell you've cast this turn from anywhere other than your hand. So it could be really, it also has four tiles. So you can exile it. And maybe you get into a turn where you're able to cascade like a couple of times and then you flip this up and get it. And draw a bunch of cards, which seems pretty cool. It's also like, it's better to hit, you can hit it at a weird time, but at the very least it just draws you a card. Another cool usage of cascade I wanted to talk about is you can build your deck so that you only have maybe even a single card at a certain CMC at a certain mana value, usually like zero or one. So you know when I cast a two drop, I will get this because I don't have other cards in my deck that it could hit off cascade. So some zero mana cards. And again, I've seen people build really cool decks because this is a way to kind of build around a non-Commander card as a way that like I can find this in the game by just casting a one drop. I always know I'll get it. And I just put 10 one drops in my deck. So some cards that you could build around are like Lion's Eye Diamond maybe. Also the suspend cards that don't have a mana value, our mana value zero. So Ancestral Vision, Gaia's Will. Oh, Gaia's Will, so cool. You might, I did play against, I remember a Commander deck once that had no two drops except for a certain two drop. And so, and they were a cascade deck that were cascading from three to hit that one thing. I forget what it was, but it was like, so there are cool builds you could maybe do that are like way off the beaten path. This is, you know, I got to build around this one specific card because Quandrix allows me to always find it. So I just thought it was an interesting thing to note. Having cascade in your deck means you can build something that's very consistent. Just depends on what you wanna be consistently casting. Other good spells for this are gonna be all the blue spells that untap lands. Cause what you really wanna do with cascade, once you land Quandrix and you untap or have any mana is just cast a lot of things because everything you cast gives you a free thing. So Snap, Frantic Search, Unwind, Rewind, these are all blue spells that untap lands when you cast them, which just allows you to cast another spell. Two of those are counter spells, so they're interesting things, but still very good in the deck. The other thing that you had here, which was really clever is spells that cast two spells. So like Rich Car's Expertise, you got a six power commander, you draw six cards, you cast, well, you draw six cards, you cascade, and then you cast a five mana spell or less from your hand and you cascade again. That's a ton of value in this card. He's like, already plenty good. Yep, yeah, for all his expertise. Also a similar thing where it's just five, or sorry, four instead of five mana value thing, but bounces three things, which is, as we just talked about, very, very powerful. Yeah, I think thinking about those terms is like, I want things that allow me to cast multiple things. So they're either giving me mana back or they're literally saying cast something else. And then we've already talked about top deck manipulation, but there's another thing where like, when you're cascading, it's nice to know what's there, what you're going to get so you can plan for it. Scroll Rack also very good, allows you to just pick what in your hand you wanna cascade into. Sensei's Divinotop, Brainstorm, Sylvan Library is a green one that allows you to sort of know what's there. Once again, run Fetchlands, or things that allow you to shuffle your library and what's possible when you're including a package like this. Top is also, first of all, it's a cool one to set up as you're like one drop to hit. You know, it's the only one drop in your deck. And you can do some weird tricks where like your deck is full of two drops. You can sacrifice the Sensei's Divinotop, put it on top, cast a two mana spell, cascade into the Divinotop you just put on top of the library and do it again. Like you can put together some really wild turns with a bunch of two drops in a Sensei's Divinotop. Yeah, and if you've got a couple of zero drops that every time you are casting the top, you're getting one of the zero drops. So, yeah, very cool. Oh, okay. Yeah, I think this deck is like a general value deck. It's not really a combo deck. It's just gonna get a lot of value really fast. Gonna be very explosive. I mean, we've seen commanders that just cascade a whole bunch before and they've always been very, very powerful. And yeah, it's just when you cast two spells at once, that's a good thing. It's kind of, you can think of it almost like doubling season, but it's just for the spells you're casting. Yeah, I mean, that seems okay. I'm doubling all the stuff I'm doing, okay. Oh man, okay, so we've talked a lot and we've got a lot more commanders that we wanna talk about, including two more dragons from this cycle, one of which I think might be the most powerful one here, but we'll have a fight about it at the end. So, let us know in the comments which commander you think is the most powerful and if we missed any, let us know which one that you wish we had talked about. But we're not done. We're still going through more. Lots more to come. We'll be right back. This message is sponsored by Raycon. Hello, dearies. It's your favorite old auntie. What's the raid, mother? You see that pair of goblins? I've made them. I've made many pairs of goblins in my day, but these two are my favorites. Why? Because those bitey little bongards conspired to get me the perfect Mother's Day gift, Raycon's everyday earbuds classic. I use them every night, which is all the time here in Shadowmoor. 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Selected dates and flights sale in 5th of May. Holidays minimum spend and also protected. Season C's apply. I am Arcades, strategist, elder dragon, and now CEO. In my years of commanding, I noticed an underserved clientele. Creatures with abnormally large butts. This led me to found my bespoke pants company, superior posterior, with sizes for even the toughest of customers. But my business strategy would not have been complete without Shopify. The commerce platform, pouring millions of businesses, including all birds and the command zone. Shopify is the business behind my behind-based business. They handle the back end, so I can focus on making customers back ends comfortable. Shopify provides expertise on everything from inventory to shipping. They even aided me in crafting my online store with hundreds of ready-made templates to draw from. And Shopify's award-winning support is available 24-7. I would prefer 7-24. Now I've become so successful, I'm having Doran start a second branch in Lawin. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash TCZ. Go to Shopify.com slash TCZ. That's Shopify.com slash TCZ. Hey, everybody. We wanted to tell you about something we're pretty excited about around here. It's from a close personal friend of ours, iconic magic artists, and avid commander player, Johannes Voss. If you don't know the name, you definitely know his work, Phorexian Metamorph maybe, or Blood Artist. Restoration Angel, one of my personal favorites. Yeah, Johannes has made some of the best magic art of all time. And now he's launching a limited-time Kickstarter called the Johannes Voss Token Collection, featuring over 50 tokens, all in his own style. Yeah, he's great at magic type fantasy, but his range goes way beyond that from the super cute cat and bird tokens to the more anime-style dragon. You've really just got to see these tokens for yourself. I think my favorite is the construct token with the robot in the field. It feels straight out of Studio Ghibli. Yeah, that same robot shows up on Power Stone. Yeah, he's on a few different tokens, right? Yeah, it's a cute little story. And there's actually a few things like that hidden on the collection, but they're all in order right out of the box, so you can't miss them. Oh, man, the attention to detail here is wild. Even down to which tokens he included, you can tell he put a ton of care into picking one's commander players actually used. I know, it feels like every deck these days makes 10 plus different tokens, and looking through these, there are 50 of them. It's going to cover a lot of commander decks. And you know, this is the first time these designs are being printed in cardboard. Johannes told us it is super important to him that these were black bordered, exact magic card size, and just ready to sleeve up and play. This guy is so passionate about the game, works so hard on everything he does, and this Kickstarter is a great way to support him. So make sure to get your pledge in at tinyurl.com.jvtokens. Each box comes with 52 tokens, plus there are some really cool backer rewards for sparkly plastic tokens to real magic card artist proofs. So go to tinyurl.com.jvtokens or scan the QR code on screen to get your pledge in before it's too late. Man, I cannot wait to get mine. Oh, he sent us some, you can have that one. Thank you. Oh, one's for me? These are spoken for. Oh. You know what's my favorite thing about Architect? The play tester. Architect is the deck builder with the best gold fishing experience out there, period. Clicking cards does exactly what you want. From drawing to playing to tapping, it can handle counters, tokens, dice. Whatever your deck does, Architect can help you test it. And it's fast too. Once you get the hang of it, you can test to turn five or six in like a minute, which I love because I will literally gold fish a hundred times. And the more you gold fish, the better your deck's going to be. I used to take forever to do it in paper, but I can't go back to that life. This play tester is just too good. Architect is the best place to browse, brew, and play test Commander decks. Just go to architect.com.com.com. slash command zone to get started. That's A-R-C-H-I-D-E-K-T.com.com.com.com. Welcome back everybody. We are talking about the dragons of Strixhaven. And we've got two more to talk about in this cycle. And this next one is very cool. It's also the cheapest in the series. Yeah. I think Sneaky very powerful too. I agree. It's Silver Quill the Disputent. It is two whites and a black. So four mana for this one, for a four, four flying vigilance, legendary elder dragon. It says, each instant and sorcery spell you cast has Casualty 1. Casualty 1 means you can sacrifice a creature when you cast an instant or sorcery and then copy it. So it does a similar thing kind of two quadrics where you cast one spell, you have to pay a cost to sacrifice a thing, but you get two spells for the price of one. Yeah. This is very powerful. I'd say it's a cross between quadrics and prismari. Prismari is like storming copies. Yeah. But yes, the difference here is like this has some other piece of setup. So what they did is they took some mana costs off of it. Yeah. Because it's like, well, you do have to have a creature. And we're now back in that position we talked about with Muddle, which is this tug and pull between you need creatures to sacrifice, but you need instance and sorceries to copy. Right. So yeah, that's going to be a balancing act for this deck for sure. Yeah. It's very interesting. Also, we've seen this kind of effect before and it has typically been Casualty 2 or Casualty 3. Yeah. This is the first time it's all the way down at one. And one feels like really not a cost, honestly. So let's talk about some of the fodder spells that you're going to run in this deck just to keep your engine online. Because really, once you have your commander down, you don't want to cast an instance or sorcery without paying the Casualty cost. Yeah, you got to casualty everything from that point forward. So Bloodgast, I think, is the first one we both thought of, which is just a 2-1 that when you play a land, it goes from your graveyard back to the battlefield. Yep. He loves to be sacrificed. That's why he's there. And he will come back. Reassembling Skeleton does a similar thing. It's a 1-1 you can pay to bring it back, as is Nether Trader. But there's a couple of other cool things. Like I thought this was a Neat Nine Lives Familiar deck. It's a 1-1 that just keeps bringing itself back. It's cost 3 mana, so it's a little bit more spendy on the initial investment. But it's good with a lot of the pieces that go in this deck. Or even something like Enduring Innocence is quite good here. You sack it, but you don't care because you still keep it. You still have an enchantment. Yeah. And you've doubled your spells that you just cast. Well, yeah. And you're going to be creating a lot of little creatures in this deck. So Enduring Innocence is super, super good because it's the utility of it sticking around. You also want the other part where it draws you the cards, right? Yeah. It's gross with blood gassed. Yeah. I do think you want to be careful. You don't want too many creature creatures. Yes. I think so. You definitely want to have instances and sorceries that create creatures, multiple creatures, because then they also become things you can copy. So if you have creatures out, you copy them and you have even more. And if you don't, they provide you the creatures that you can therefore sacrifice for future spells. So raise the alarm. I think it's going to be really good here. Lingering souls, oldie, but a goodie. So good. SRAM's expertise is really good. So expertise is getting a little come up in here. I was going to say. It's a good trick saving. Yeah. I haven't talked about SRAM's expertise overalls in years and years, but this is create three one ones. And then you may cast a card with CMC three or less from your hand without paying its mana cost. So you get two spells here. You get three things. You can double SRAM's expertise with the casualty. So now you get six things, cast two extra spells out of your hand. Seems super good and gives you the fodder for like six more casualties. So yeah, I really like that. Will the Mardu is another one. Oh yeah. We're going to talk about this later in the episode too. This card is so good. Yeah. I love Will the Mardu because it's modal. So it's like, hey, if you need creatures to keep your casualty thing going, you do it. And if not, you can do the other part. Of course, you can both of you have your commander out, but like it could be very good. And I feel like this will be a deck where you'll look down at some point and be like, geez, I just have 20 things. Yeah. I mean, the other thing with Will of the Mardu is you make a bunch of tokens and then with the copy, you have even more tokens. So you can make more tokens. Yeah. So you make twice as many with the second Will of the Mardu and you kill two things. It seems quite powerful. Yeah. I think this deck is going to be sort of, it's going to be aristocrats more than it's going to be like pump everything. Yeah. You could put a pump spell or two or an anthem or whatever in there. I think that's going to be less what the main plan is though to me. To me, it's like you already have a sacrifice outlet on your commander when you cast things and so you're probably going to lean into that a little bit more. Let's talk about some spells that are cool to copy. There's a lot of them. Copying spells is good. Reanimate was one. I was just like, ooh, because two reanimates. Yeah. Two reanimates is great. But also can you reanimate the spell, the creature you sacrificed? So if you cast reanimate, you have to name the first target. But then you've sacrificed the second one by the time the second one goes on the stack. Because yeah, you would have to have made the sacrifice before you would get the copy anyway. I believe so, but I'm not a judge. Hey, we'll look it up later. If you're hearing this, it's true. And if that's the case, you can also do that with like a Savins Reclamation, which is just giving you more fodder or just filling, having two copies of Savins Reclamation is good. Yeah. You're going to want to fetch lands. You're going to want to fetch lands if you put some means in. Definitely. Deadly dispute is interesting because as an additional cost to cast the spell, you sacrifice a creature and then you'd have to sacrifice a second creature to copy it. But in a deck that's making as many tokens as this is, I think that's a pretty easy cost to meet and it draws two cards and makes a treasure. So it gives you two treasures back and four cards, which seems quick. Yeah, for your two mana. Yeah. That's pretty good. Seems good. Spell spells are good. Just having two of them are going to be really powerful. One I wanted to highlight was Will of the Abzan. We mentioned the White Will, but this is the Black Will. It's any number of target opponents, each sacrifice a creature with the greatest power among creatures that player controls and they lose three life. So they each sacrifice their two best creatures and lose six. And then it says return target creature from your graveyard to the battlefield. So you can bring back some of your fodder or you can reanimate something cool. Yeah, another spell I really like that I want to call it is afterlife insurance. Oh yeah, this is super sweet. Which is super, super fun. It's one in a hybrid Orzhov, sorry, hybrid Silver Coil. For an instance, it says creatures you control gain afterlife one until end of turn draw card. So you double this up, your creatures get afterlife one comma afterlife one. So then when you sack them to future casualties or other aristocrats stuff, you get two one one white flying spirit tokens, which you can then continue to sacrifice. So that's like your go off aristocrats turn or whatever. Oh yeah. Yeah, only two mana draws a couple of cards. It's pretty sweet. That's really fun. I mean, there's just a lot of really powerful spells that you can put on the stack that are going to be sweet to copy. I think again, in terms of top end spells that you're casting, you can flavor to taste. It's whatever one excites you, but there's big X spells that are notoriously very powerful. Tormented Pale Fire, Exanguinate, Dead to the Deathless is very good to double. Yeah, I think that's probably more likely to be your game-enders or something like that, rather than like, you know, whatever the white and black mass pump spell that you want to play, because it's going to be a little bit less reliable. So once you get your aristocrats engine going, maybe you get like some sort of altar out or something like that, or even just like you're later enough in the game and just a, you just copy the torment for six, so now it's 12. And that usually will kill everybody, that kind of stuff. Absolutely. One I did want to mention, you'll have to find the mana to cast it, but this is a Phryxian Altered Duck maybe, is a Skullstorm. It's seven black, black for a sorcery. When you cast the spell, copy it for each time you've cast your commander from the commands on this game. And it says, Each opponent sacrifices a creature, each opponent who can't loses half their life, round it up. Wow. This is naturally a very good spell to copy, obviously, because it copies itself. So if you can copy this thing, like you get one copy from the casualty and you've cast your commander an extra time, you get four of these things. They have to sacrifice four creatures or start losing half their life, which is a very expensive spell, but going to put a ton of pressure on both their board and their life total. Just bring everybody down to two life or whatever, yeah. And then you'll be like, Round it down or up, whatever it is, yeah. Round it up. Okay, three life, that's right. It's one of my favorite finishers in Spell's Decks. Yeah, I think this deck is gonna, it doesn't look as flashy or as powerful as the others, but I actually think it's quite powerful. I agree. Yeah. But combining spells and aristocrats is really good and having twice the power of the spells. It's a very clean plan that Orzhov likes, right? Like they know what to do with tokens. This is going to create a lot of them. Not to mention it's 4 mana. Yeah. 4 mana is so much less than six. Like it's so much less than six. Yeah, you just get your plan online and also like, yeah, it's just not the same as the other ones where they feel like they just have to kill it. You can't untap with this. Yeah. Yeah, Silvercruel is definitely a situation where it's like, I can advance my plan and deal with it a little bit later. Okay. Final dragon. All right. This is the one I play in the upcoming Game Nights episode for Secrets of Strixhaven. Have we announced anything about who guests or anything are? I don't, not currently. Okay. Well, it's me, Jimmy, Rachel, but we also got Danny Phantom EXE on the episode. Woo! He's a very fun player. Very excited. Yeah, good deck builder too. And very fun game. Yeah. So I built wither bloom the balancer. Yeah. Which is six black green for a 5-5 legendary creature elder dragon. It has affinity for creatures. Yikes. So its cost is reduced by one generic mana for each creature that you have. It has flying and death touch and it says instant and sorcery spells you cast have affinity for creatures. Woo! Affinity never been broken once. Yeah. Cost reducers, we always say this among the most powerful things you can do because the main lever that Wizards has for balancing cards is their mana cost. How much resources they cost. So anything that circumvents that system has the chance to be really, really broken. Not to mention wither bloom itself also gets reduced by the number of creatures you have. This is a similar thing to Silver Quill and Muddle, which we've already touched on. Maybe not the last time we'll talk about this in this episode, but again, you got that tug-and-pull. Instances and sorcery spells have affinity for creatures. So you need creatures, but you also need spells. Spells, slinging spells. So it's a similar thing where you are mostly looking for instances and sorceries that create creatures so that the one reduces the other. The thing reduces itself basically. But you can have some creatures and stuff and I think at a base level you're looking for singular cards that create multiple creatures just to reduce the cost of everything by as much as possible. So Verdant Command is a really good card in this deck because it's very simple. It just creates two tapped 1-1 green scroll creature tokens for two mana and it's an instant. It also has three other abilities, which you probably won't use that often, but it's nice to have them. But that is just get your plan going right away because you can think of this as like it reduces witherbloom and future instances of sorcery by two. Gross. Like a two-mana thing that, you know, soul ring-esque. Yeah. Badger-mold cub really good here. It's a creature obviously, but because it creates two creatures and then also increases the mana that your mana dorks tapped for, you can think of Badger-mold cub as reducing the cost of witherbloom by three. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's crazy. Like Badger-mold cub all on its own, making it so this thing costs five and that's just Badger-mold cub all on its own. Yeah. Pretty nuts. The other thing with this tug and pull between creatures and instant sorceries is it's great with adventures and it's great with obviously prepared spells in the set. So something like a bright cap Badger is really sweet. This card's really good. This card is so good. Underrated. It has an adventure called fungus frolick that's two and a green for an instant and it creates two green sapperling tokens. So reduces your commander by two and all your instants and sorceries by two. And then once you cast the Badger, it's a four-mana three-four. It says each fungus and sapperling you controlled have tap, add a green and you just made two. So that seems really good. And then at the beginning of your end step, make a sapperling. It's so many bodies on this thing. It's so many bodies and it makes them into a mana dork. So what happens is once you cast the bright cap Badger, you've got minimum three creatures in play and two of them tap for mana. So that's three, four, five plus the four lands you have six, seven, eight, nine. You can possibly cast your commander like for sure the next turn and nobody like disrupts this. But maybe even this turn to be hang on, you know, if you started out with a mana dork. And that's the other thing I want to say. I said you don't want high creature counts, but you still want to play one mana dorks because you can think of birds of paradise as creating two mana for your commander. Because it's a creature which reduces cost and then it taps for a mana. So land where elves and that kind of stuff, just too good not to play. Yeah. Yeah. Even though they're not in since and sorceries. Yeah. This cheap creature category is like basically the creatures you're going to play in the deck is like the creatures that you're going to play have to either be bright cap Badger and make a ton of bodies. Or they have to be mana producing and very inexpensive. Because once your commander hits the battlefield and it's likely it's going to be a lot sooner than you think, you want to cast Incinous sorcery, sorcery, sorcery, sorcery, sorcery. Yeah. You don't want to cast any more creatures from that point forward. No. We're out of creatures now. And you do want to, the one thing that's going to kind of keep you a check is the number of colored mana you've got. You made this note which is smart for later. So you also want to sort of generally if you can make it like one of a color and then a lot of generic. Right. Once you get like 5, 10, 15 creatures out, that's a lot. Like your spells are reduced by 5, 10 or 15. Yeah. Ridiculous. But you can only cast as many spells as the colored pips you have. Correct. So you either need Birds of Paradise to increase the number of colored pips or you need to cast spells that only require one or maybe two pips. Yeah. So once your commander's out, you want to cast stuff like Scatter the Seeds, which is an instant for three green green with Convoke. You put three 1, 1, Saprolings onto the battlefield. This is great because you already have creatures you know that's the whole plan of the deck. So you can Convoke it and now all of a sudden you are costing this for just green green. And also if, hey, if you need to, you cast it before the commander comes out to increase your creature count to reduce the cost of Weatherbloom. Sprout Swarm's another one, which I think is obvious to everybody. It does go infinite pretty, pretty fast. Yeah. Once your commander's out because it creates the Saprolings to Convoke it and the buyback cost is covered by the affinity. So it's one green to cast Sprout Swarm, which is just tap one Saproling. The Saproling you just made. And then, yep, buy it back. Yep. And then tap that Saproling to buy it back again, then tap that Saproling to buy it back again, and then you know. So you have Invented, tapped Saprolings and then if you have any colored mana left over, you just cast something that's reduced by infinity. Well, it's just, Pressure is also an instant. So you just on the instant before your turn you do this and you go, I untapped with a million Saprolings. Oof, nasty. No, I didn't put that in my game night stack because we don't tend to go infinite, but you should know that it's possible. Yeah. So if they've got one green up, one single green up with wither bloom and you're passing the turn to them, you could be dead. You kinda need to be afraid. Yeah, you could be dead. That's the crazy thing about wither bloom and I will say from playing against it is that just removing wither bloom doesn't do anything. No, because you've got so many creatures you just like recast it. Like two mana. Like it also reduces the commander cost. The commander cost, yeah. So like having single target removal against this deck is nothing. You need a board wipe. You have to answer all the creatures on the board because if you don't, wither bloom still costs. Like you need them to start at zero. Yeah, the reduction of the commander tax is pretty nuts on it. Yeah. The deck has no problem just getting like 10 creatures onto the board. Yeah. Because once your all your spells are reduced by five or six and all your spells create a lot of creatures, and you're like cool for one man I get six things, then for one more man I get seven things. Like it happens so fast. Yeah, it's extremely explosive and it is more difficult to disrupt than Quadrix or then Prismari than like any of the dragons that we're talking about just because of that affinity for creatures on the commander. It's just very, very powerful. Okay, so then once you've got a bunch of creatures, yeah, so you're gonna want finishers, you're gonna like not, you know, a big portion of your deck is dedicated to what we just talked about, but then you have, you know, a lesser portion but a significant amount that is like, okay, but what are the really big things once I'm reducing by a lot that I want to cast to kind of like put the lid on this game or really advance me towards a win. So Necrotic Hex is a really good one. Oh yeah. Each player sacrifices six creatures and then you create six tapped 2-2 black zombie creature tokens. One mana. Yeah, one black mana. Board wipe everybody, you end up where you started. Yeah, Azur's Predation is really, really good even though it's three green, but it creates a 4-4 for each of your opponent's creatures and then they fight the creatures. So it creates all these tokens. You do this for three green, kills a lot of stuff, maybe not everything, but you just left over with a bunch of creatures at the end of it. Yeah. Army of the Damned for just black, black, black can be nuts. Nasty. This one was crazy is Dregs of Sorrow is X4 and a black for a sorcery. It's destroy X, target non-black creatures, draw X cards. So if you can reduce this by eight, you can kill four things and draw four cards for a single black. And the eight reduction is like very modest. Super modest. Like that is like you barely got your commander on the board. It's not crazy to do it for X is equal to 20. Yeah, it's not crazy. It's not that hard. Remember, you have all the creatures plus all your mana. Yeah. So it's not that hard to just be like kill every non-black creature on the board, draw nine. Yeah. X spells are really, really good because when I was building that in Goldfishing it, I did get into this situation where like even Necrotic Hex, I'm like feels like a little bit of a waste because I'm reducing all my spells by 14, but this I'm only getting six of that from Necrotic Hex. So I started skewing towards some big X spells just because with an X spell, you know, however much I'm reducing by, I will use every bit of it with this X spell. Something to notice about Dregs of Sorrow is you do need X targets. Yeah. You cannot. So you can only draw as many of the not as the non-black creatures on the board. So you like kill all your opponents non-black stuff, you draw that many. It's still a million, but like I just want to make sure that everybody knows how that works. And I will say stuff like Dregs of Sorrow is really, really important. Like I have a cost reducer deck and you just dump your hand. Yeah, you run out of cards. You need card draw so desperately in decks like this because it is going to be your limiter. You're going to have infinite mana effectively. All of your spells are going to be a million, a million. You just have to have them in your hand. And if you don't... That's how you lose. You run out of gas. Yeah. You're like, I can cost 50 mana worth of stuff, but I only have one thing to do. Yeah, and you're like, okay. You better hope it's not a Lenore elves. So Pest Infestation is another sort of X spell that's really good. Valgo Voss on slot, both of them. Terrifying. Yeah, both of them make a bunch of creatures. Pest Infestation also destroys stuff. Yeah. And then of course, just like Silver Quill, you can sort of end with the classics if you want. Tormin of Hellfire, Exanguinate, yada, yada, yada. If you want to mention there's a new creature that has the prepared ability, Exanguinate, that's going to be quite good in the deck. It's just like a two-man thing that has Exanguinate built in. Allstensian Sanguinist. Oh, yes. Thank you. Yes. Yeah. Which is another Exanguinate, which everybody, you know, of course was claiming for. We need more of that. Yes. We need more redundancy. I think it's fine. I think we poopoo on stuff, but like Tormin of Hellfire, like, I don't know that there's that much difference between like, oh, I did this other thing that ends the game versus Tormin. You don't have to reinvent wind conditions if you don't want to. Yeah. Don't let people make you feel bad about it. This is an exceptionally explosive deck. You just need something that wins the game. Yeah. If you play Tormin and Exanguinate, I think like, you know, turn six wins are probably like going to be pretty normal. Yeah. I think, I think if you play it with the most efficient wind conditions for sure. It'll be five. Turn five is easy. Yeah. This is going to be a four, probably a high three at best. And if I'm playing against it, I am treating it with extreme prejudice because it is extremely explosive. It's quite good. It's very cool. I put it in a weird spot, but Awaken the Woods is really good. Yeah. Awaken the Woods is great. All right. Let's talk about this next commander. We are in Boros now, but we're out of the dragons. Lord. Those are the five. Excuse me, Lord. There's the whole thing. All right. This is Aziza, not Azusa. Aziza, Mage Tower Captain, red and white for a 2-2 legendary creature, Jyn Sorcerer. Whenever you cast an Inciner Sorcerer, you may tap three untapped creatures you control. If you do copy that spell, you may choose new targets for the copy. More copying. More copying. More tokens. More Incincensorsories. More copy to your Incincensorsories. This is the same. It's so similar. The thing we're talking about. We're like, yep, you want creatures and you want Incincensorsories. So the path that is going to lead you down is Incincensorsories that make creatures. Yep. It is worth mentioning that you can tap creatures that are summoning sick. This is an ability of Aziza. You can make creatures, then tap those creatures to copy a spell that makes... Tapping them is a cost, not an ability on the creature you're tapping. So it doesn't matter if they just entered the battlefield this turn. Which is quite powerful because then you cast, you use this spell to copy a spell that made tokens and then you use those tokens right away to copy the next spell that you cast. Yeah. I mean, there's also a pretty nasty play pattern with Aziza where you just tap, you just cast one of the like Dragon Fotur effects, one of the Raise the Alarm effects, two mana to make two bodies on an Incincensorsory. Follow it up with Aziza and a one mana spell and you can copy it on turn three. So you can cast two swords to Plash Shares. You can cast two lighting bolts just right away. Yeah. And then you're still locked and loaded to do that again. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty great. And that's it. Very powerful. Very powerful. So having a fair amount of these like two mana to make two bodies is going to be very good but also having some of these big spells that are a little bit splashier to copy like 4th Aerolangus or like United Front makes X allies and then puts plus encounters on each creature you control. So you make like five allies and then put counters on it and make five more allies, put more counters on all of your creatures. Seems like a great one to copy. The philosophy is a similar here behind X, right? Where it's just like, well, however much mana I've got, it's going to, like I'm doubling that when I tap the creatures to copy it. So I just want to be able to like not be in a situation where like, oh man, I have nine mana available but I'm only getting six mana of value here. You also want some amount of things that just make tokens. Young pyromancer is going to be very good here. Agate Instigator, this is another really good Agate Instigator deck. That's the impact tremors with two creature bodies. And then Cosmogran Zenith is another one I wanted to talk about. It's two in a white whenever you cast your second spell. Each turn choose one, make two human bodies or and put a plus one counter on each creature you control. Really easy to cast your second spell in these decks. It's going to be a really low to the ground. It makes you the bodies to copy more spells. It gives you the counters to turn them into a threat. I think this deck is much more likely to go the Anthem direction than the Silver Quill deck that we were talking about before. Yeah, I think so because it doesn't really have the Aristocrats out that Silver Quill does and it doesn't have as good a ways to sort of like end the game with a torment of Hellfire. You'd have to go for like a Comet Storm or something which is less reliable. It has to be bigger. And you have to get the mana for that. So I think the two routes are pump everything that you've made kill everybody or it's Agate Instigator perfrose. Yeah, impact tremors. Yeah, impact tremors. Those seem like the two most common ways to convert all this into a win. Yeah, there's a lot of cool spells to copy. We've talked about some of them today. I wanted to mention a couple that folks might not know. Aloran's Searing Light is an edict in Boros. It exists. It's too red wide for an instant. Each opponent exiles a creature with the greatest power among creatures that player controls and has spell mastery. If there are two or more instant and sorcery cards in your graveyard, likely. Aloran's Searing Light deals damage to each opponent equal to the power of the creature they exiled. Do this twice. Ugh, that's great. Devastating. Exiles it too. So much damage, so much disruption. It's going to be really powerful on this deck. Will of the Martyr which we already talked about, obviously super good here as a way to just create a bunch of tokens and or deal damage. Yeah, again copying this thing's nuts. Copying any spells that make mana give you mana back is something that we've talked about a lot this episode like Big Score. It gives you those two treasures. But if you copy it, it's four treasures which makes it effectively mana neutral. Inspired Tinkering is one I like a lot. It's four in a red for a sorcery. Exile the top three cards of your library until end of your next turn. You may play those cards and make three treasure tokens. This is five mana to make... Impulse Draw six cards and make six treasure tokens when you copy it. Very cool. One I just thought of which is an old favorite of mine is probably going to be in this deck is Electro Dominance. Oh yeah, for sure. Because you can copy the Electro Dominance but then also copy the spells you're casting off the Electro Dominance. It's kind of like an expertise almost. Absolutely. Yeah, the red expertise sucks so we won't talk about it. It always does. That's a stand-in for that. Yeah. And the other spells that I think are just... Prisoner's Dilemma is hilarious. So funny. So it's already a really funny spell to copy. If you're copying it when you cast it, this is one that says each opponent secretly chooses silence or snitch then the choices are revealed. If the opponent chose silence, prisoner's Dilemma deals four damage to each of them. If each opponent chose snitch, it deals eight damage to each of them. Otherwise, prisoner's Dilemma deals 12 damage to each opponent who chose silence. I've never seen a prisoner's Dilemma where somebody didn't choose snitch. So just choose snitch every time which sucks though because you take it 16. Yeah, because in this deck you have to like... If you snitch the first time they're like, you snitched on the first one. So I'm going to snitch this time. Now we all choose snitch. Have you ever had one where everybody chose silence? I've never had that happen. No, I've never had that happen. And in a slashback. Can you copy stuff from your graveyard? It doesn't care, right? Whenever you cast, yeah, yeah. So you can... Copy the slashback. You can cast four prisoner's dilemmas in this game. That's pretty funny. If everybody's at eight, did they choose silence? I guess it doesn't matter because you have a copy. If everybody's at 12, did they choose silence? Will they finally come together? No. Somebody would bet on it. Somebody would say, I'm going to be the one who breaks it. And they'll take 12. And I'm going to take none. They're going to die. That's hilarious. Yeah. Another card that I think is really cool to copy is ensnared by the Mara. This is a Doctor Who card. It's four mana for a sorcery. Each opponent faces a villainous choice. They exhale cards from the top of their library until they exhale a non-land card. Then you may cast that card without paying its mana cost. Or that player exiles the top four cards of their library and ensared by the Mara deals damage equal to the total mana value of those exiled cards to that player. And two of these is brutal. Two of these is like... It could be so much damage. It might actually give you the spell. Yeah. Yeah, because you can't do that twice. You can't take the top eight cards of your library of the total mana value. So it's a very fun one to do twice. That's funny. Finally, mob justice might just be how you win this game. There's a couple versions of this card. The inverse practice charm. Yeah. It deals one damage to target player for each creature you control. There's a few versions of this effect at different mana costs. But I've got 20 things. I'm going to copy this and hit you for 40. Yeah. It seems good. Or hit different players for 40. So the win conditions we've talked about a little bit on this one. You could do your impact tremor type stuff or your anthem effect type stuff. I think that's probably the most common way this deck will win. Yeah. Yeah. With a little bit of swinging, but mostly the pinging. A little bit of swinging, but mostly the pinging. Yeah. So anything that triggers when a creature enters the battlefield, you could include something like an intangible virtue that gives your creature tokens vigilance. So when you attack with them, you can also copy spells. But that doesn't seem quite as necessary. Yeah. It doesn't seem quite as impactful enough. Yeah. The reason I threw on at the end was drum bellower. Just because it untapped your creatures, right? Yeah. So if you have enough instance, it could be nice. Yeah. Virtua of loyalty does a similar thing. Yeah. Just to be able to untapped the stuff to get more copies. Yeah. Having not played the deck, I don't foresee that you'll have much problem having the number of creatures you need to copy things. But it could be a thing you run into in building in the case you could add that kind of stuff. Yeah. At the very least, it's a creature you can tap to help you copy. Yep. We're staying in Boros land for my dream commander. Did they read my journal? This is a commander of Rachel. 100% immediately was like, I'm building this one for game nights. I didn't even look at the other options because somebody had already come to me and told me this was an option. I think you just typed in the chain, horse commander. Yeah. I think that's all that is said. I said Boros horse who's on titans. Done. No questions. This is Excava the Risen past. Should have been ridden past, but... The ridden past. Excava has ridden past? Yeah, he's the ridden past. Anyway, it's too red and white for a legendary creature spirit. Horse, it is flying, it has haste, and when it attacks, return up to one target artifact, creature, or non-ora enchantment with mana value three or less from your graveyard to the battlefield with a finality counter on it. It's a one-one spirit creature with flying in addition to its other types. So it brings back little things. It turns them into creatures. Yeah. If they're not creatures already. Okay. This is sweet. This is a commander I was super excited about in Kango and a lot of different directions. Obviously, the lorehold mechanic for this set is about stop leaving the graveyard. So you could really focus on leave the graveyard type effects if that was something that's the most compelling to you about Excava. It's hard when you don't have access to black, which has most of that stuff. I agree. Yeah. This set has a fair amount of it that you can put in it, but I just didn't feel like it worked super well with the way that this card was designed. So I really focused on just sort of using the graveyard as a value tool, bringing stuff back, and giving stuff flying that probably shouldn't have flying. So let's talk about filling up the yard, because that is the most challenging part of this, being in boros. Yeah. You're really relying on red and the rummage stuff, right? It's basically entirely rummaging. You don't have any self mill, which is usually a much faster way to fill your graveyard. But if you have a lot of self mill or rummaging, you can put the right cards into your graveyard? Yeah. That's what I was going to say is Excava is fine if it's few things, if they're the right things. Right. Because you get to choose like, I'm bringing this back. Right. So permanent based stuff is what I really tried to prioritize in this deck. It is the least incident or sorcery of all the decks we're going to talk about today. Yeah. So in fact, it doesn't do anything with incident or sorcery in your graveyard. Exactly. So you want most things to be permanent. So yeah, that makes sense. So the best rummaging spells are actually permanents like melded moxite or bitter reunion, because when they enter, you discard a card and draw two, and you can bring them back. They also have abilities to sacrifice themselves, so you can put them into the graveyard if you really... In order to bring them back. Yeah. Exactly. That's great. Keep fueling your graveyard if that's what you need. If it's like, I just need more cards in there. They are sort of a self-fulfilling engine. Smuggler's Copter is one that's really fun. Great card too. You can turn it into a car that drives itself. That's awesome. It's the ghost of Smuggler Copters fast. This is a two-man hard to back vehicle. It's a 3-3. It says whenever it attacks or blocks, you may draw a card. If you don't, discard a card. If you turn it into a spirit, it's still Smuggler's Copter. It's still a card. Yeah, you don't have to crew it anymore. It just attacks as a flyer. That's great. It's pretty cool. So that was the best vehicle. There's a few others that you could put in there if you really want to go the vehicle direction, but it's cute. The other direction is stuff that puts itself into the graveyard naturally. So I ran a couple of the Bobbles, Misher's Bobble, or Isis Bobble, because they were easy things for me to get into the graveyard by the time that Excava came down. And that is challenging because you kind of want to ramp on turn two to get Excava into play on turn three. So you need like a one-mana thing that puts itself into the graveyard for free. Yeah, because you don't want to be in a situation where you play Excava, can attack and everything, but there's just nothing there to get back. That sucks. That's a feature value. Yeah. So Bobbles or Lotus Petal or Misher's Bobble, Orsis Bobble all put themselves in the graveyard and are great to bring back with your commander. Yeah, and they're just great things to have as a toolbox in your graveyard. It's like, what do I need? Do I need card draw? This will kind of get me some cards. So do I need more thing? Do I need more through to look through my deck more to dig deeper? Okay, I've got that. Like, yeah, Lotus Petal is a little more mana. So that's kind of a good way to use your graveyard as just like this thing where it's like, what do I need right now? I've got all these options. Okay, I want that. Yeah. So I like to removal that was permanent based and would put itself to the graveyard like static prison is a card I still think is super underrated. This is a single white for an enchantment. It's when it enters exile target non-land permanent and opponent controls until it leaves the battlefield, you get to energy and you have to sort of pay the energy upkeep. Eventually run out of energy and it goes to the graveyard. It's a great thing to bring back. You just bring it right back. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. So much better than like swords in this deck, whereas if you have to rummage away or mill it, it's just in there graveyard and can't get it back. Yeah. So it's not going to be there anything and the fact that it like comes back is neutralized by the fact that you can bring static prison back or you can hit something that like, you know, a professional face breaker is a lot worse early right like on turn six than it is on turn three. Yeah. Yeah. Where you don't really care now. Okay. Fine. You've got it back, but at the board stage so much more advanced. That's not good anymore. Yeah. The other one I wanted to mention was dawn of a new age. I've been looking for a place to put this card for a while and it seems quite good. Hard on this is so good. It's so good. This is an enchantment for two that when it enters, it enters with a hope counter on it for each creature you control. So probably, you know, two or three. And at the beginning of your end step, you remove a counter from dawn of the new age. If you do draw a card, then if it has no counters on it, you sack it and you gain four life. So two mana thing that draws you a couple of cards, sacrifice itself and then you bring it back. Yeah. Nice. Pretty cool. Let's talk about a couple other things that are fun to put in the graveyard. My favorite trick was artifact and enchantment lands. Yeah. So you can ramp with it. Yeah. And there's indestructible ones. That's really nice. So Rustvale Bridge, if you rummage it away, you can bring it back with your commander as a one one indestructible land flyer. Yeah. That's great. Cool. Yeah. Darkseal Citadel too. That's awesome. So you ramped and created this thing that's like a pretty good like blocking piece. Urza Saga is good. It's obviously a very good card, but it sends itself to the graveyard and you can bring it back as a creature, redo Urza Saga and go get one of your bobbles or something like that. Probably have Skull Clamp in here, right? Probably. Yeah. Probably. I mean, your spirits are pretty valuable. That's just another thing Urza Saga did. Yeah. It's got a lot of options in this deck because there's so many of the little like egg things that send itself to the graveyard. They do come back with finality counters on it. So you could play Scholar of New Horizons to remove the finality counters. Oh, that's cool. I think that's a cool little ramp piece in this deck. So you're mostly prioritizing like the two mana rocks to get your commander down a turn earlier. Yeah, but it would allow you to maybe loop the same thing a couple of times if you found something really, really good. Yeah. Like Urza Saga. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wind Crag Siege is a three mana enchantment that doubles your commander's attack trigger. So you could bring it back and then have a... Bring two things back, yeah. Bring two things back on the next turn. The same thing you can do with extra combat creatures, so fear of missing out or combat a celebrant help you double up your attack triggers and obviously give you multiple combats and they're easy things for you to bring back. So we got some cool options here. Finally I wanted to talk about a couple of things that are just like have really sick attack triggers and aren't always super easy to attack with. So Leylia is insane as a flyer, gross. Tori and Mahler as a flyer, gross. And those are great because they come back as one once, but then they just grow. It didn't matter that they were one once. So now you have a growing flying threat that you got brought back for free. Yep. Felea was one I was thinking about because Felea can blink the finality counters off your spirits and then bring them back as whatever permanent they were. That's pretty cool. Yeah. So you could blink your land creatures and it enters as a land or you can like reuse your Urza Saga. It's another way to just reset stuff. And finally Gau Feral Youth is one I found looking stuff up. That's from Final Fantasy. It's at the beginning of each end step. If a card left your graveyard this turn, Gau deals damage equal to its power to each opponent and whenever it attacks you put a counter on it. That's cool. Great as a flyer, grows and then does a little bit of damage as well. All right. So that is really how I built it was like little stuff that kind of worked together to build a mechanical engine. But you could really zero in on the spirits of it all or the fact that this turns non-creatures into creatures. There's just some weird things you can do sort of like the vehicle trick where it's like I can mutate onto an enchantment and give it lifelink. Oh jeez. Yeah, yeah. Like there's strange, you can clone enchantments in a way that you wouldn't necessarily usually be able to clone it especially in these colors. The fact that they're creatures is weird. So like a roaming throne on spirits will like drop double the triggers of your fable of the mirror breaker. That's really cool. Right? So there's just strange like type of things that you could include that you don't necessarily have to build around spirits. You could get like a lifelink on an impact tremors or something. Exactly. If you bring back impact tremors as a spirit, mutate onto it. Rowing throne. I mean this is radical Christmas land but now like. Cool. Mold neckos is like a weird one. So now when you bring back the thing it enters as a spirit and you get two copies of it temporarily. So there's like, you know, there's some weird tricks that you can do because these are spirits that you wouldn't necessarily include. I'm not saying it has to be a type of spirit deck. It just look at the spirit stuff. You can use that fact to do some weird stuff. That's really cool. Yeah. It's a really neat deck. I still haven't cracked exactly the build that I want out of it. So I've been playing with a lot of different toys and it's a continues to challenge me. All right. The next one is Luyn exchange student. Yeah. He's cool. Yeah. So I'm going to use a little bit of a black wither bloom to green and a black for a three four elf druid. Now Luyn is one of the new prepared cards. So Luyn enters prepared, which means while it's prepared, you may cast a copy of its spell doing so unprepares it. I'll read that spell right now, which is called pest friend. It costs just one mana, which is a hybrid wither bloom mana. So either a green or a black, it's a sorcery. It's create a one one black and green pest creature token with whenever this token attacks, you gain one life. We'll talk about that in a second. Yeah. And then Luyn's tech. So that's the spell Luyn can cast as long as Luyn is prepared. And then when you cast the spell, Luyn becomes unprepared. And then Luyn also says, exile a creature card from your graveyard. Luyn becomes prepared, activate only as a sorcery. So you can reprepare Luyn and then for recast pest friend by just exiling a creature from your graveyard at sorcery speed. Yeah. And then you can also wrap to exile the thing. So you can do that multiple times in a turn. Yeah. Prepared is a new mechanic from said obviously and works in similar ways, but not every creature that has prepared or has a prepared spell has a mechanic on it to also unprepare it. Yeah. There are some to also prepare, reprepare it. Not all of them, reprepare themselves. Not all of them enter prepared. Yeah. It'll, it'll give you different stipulations. But the way the prepared spell works is when it is prepared or when it enters prepared, it basically creates a copy of the prepared spell in exile. So you're casting a copy of a spell from exile and when you do, it unprepares it. When it leaves the battlefield, it is also unprepared. You lose the spell. Or if it becomes unprepared for some reason other than you casting the spell. The copy goes away basically. The copy also goes away. Yeah. The fact that it's a copy and not a card you're casting can matter for certain cards like prosper, tome bound. Yeah. It's whenever you play a card from exile. It is not playing a card. It is playing a copy. But Pia says whenever you play a land from exile or cast a spell from exile that you are doing. So you are casting a spell. Yeah. So that's for like, if you're putting prepared stuff into your commander deck, but I wanted to call that out because it is bizarre. Okay. Before we move on, can we, can I complain about the pest thing? Can we complain about the pest thing? So I don't know whose idea this was, but pests were already a thing in first Strixhaven, but that's not how they worked. So this is, it's easy to miss. The old ones, when they died, you got the life. This one says whenever this token attacks, you gain one life. There's called the same thing and they're the same colors. Like couldn't we just call this a different thing? Like a super pest. So we don't have to go like, which kind of pest is it? And get confused and get it wrong. I just don't understand. I guess the argument you would make is like, well, there's one one, like there's, there's two two zombies and two two zombies. There are three, three bees and four four bees. But it's just like intrinsically different with the ability. I don't know. And also like, it's not desirous to do that just because we've done it before. It doesn't mean like it's great, but like the pest, the pest thing is a little, I guess maybe they just thought this is going to be annoying. And you know what pest means? Annoying. And it's got to annoy you. That's it. Flavor. Yeah. Maybe that's what it is. I think it is a flavor thing. I think it's probably like wither, maybe, I don't know. I haven't read the story. So I'm shooting from the hip a little bit. They were like, well, we don't want wither bloom, like killing all the pests anymore. We want them to be motivated to like go into combat with them. Just call them something else. That dude, I, I hate it. And it, somebody had to correct me because I was like, it makes a pest. Yada yada. And they're like, look at the pest. And you're like, why, why is it a different pest? It's not like pests show up in multiple different planes. Pests are here. This is what pest do. It's just so hard these days to like keep everything straight. So when they like for no apparent, like, I don't even know what the upside is, like make it more confusing. It just, it feels mean. It feels like they're messing with me. It's better in limited, I guess. Anyway, upset about the pest thing. I agree. Yeah. Just call it something else. That's fine. All right. Let's talk about this. Is this commander is super cool. Not all commanders are this easy to re-prepare. So this one is being able to just exile the card from your graveyard to re-prepare your spell to cast it again is really sweet and kind of unique to Lewin. There are things that do that, but usually it's only once each turn. Yeah. A lot of them are way harder to re-prepare too. So this one is like, you can cast it a whole bunch of times in one turn as long as you have creatures in your graveyard to exile. And there's some really cool ways to do this. For Xenalter, I think is the most obvious one. You sacrifice the pest. You get the mana to re-cast the spell. You exile a creature from your graveyard to re-prepare, obviously. Yeah. You don't get one life anymore. You don't. Sucks. It has to attack. It's weird that in commander it made them worse. Yeah. It totally did. It totally did. Because I'm not attacking with my one one. It's just harder to do. Yeah. Yeah. It's way easier to sacrum off. Like, hoarding broodlord and phalagi wafer do effectively the same thing in this deck, which is make it your pest friend able to cast with convoke. Yeah. So you tap the thing that you made to cast the next version. Yeah. Phalagi wafer gives this to multicolored spells you cast. So you can end... A hoarding broodlord does this for spells you cast in exile. Yep. And it tutors a card. So those are just cool. As long as you have like four or five things that you can exile from your graveyard, you're like, all right, I pay green, green, green, green, green, green, green, green, or none, none, none, none, none, none, none, none, none, none, none, none, none, none, none, none, and make a bunch of pests all at once. Yeah, that's sweet. And that's really good with stuff like magecraft triggers with like a sagemore witch, obviously, which makes even more pests, the other kind of pests though. Yeah. Sagemore witch is probably good for like a bunch of the other things we've talked about that are made with copies too like Silver Quill. Yeah. There's also, what I really like about this is, because we talked about for Excava, the leaving your graveyard stuff way better here because black is so good at that. So Insidious Roots is a good one. So good. Table's judgment is there. Yeah. There's a bunch. And because you can like singularly for one mana remove things from your graveyard so much, these like are really going to pay you off, I think really, really well. Yeah. I mean, Insidious Roots make your Pest Tap for mana. That's incredible. And then whenever a creature card leaves your graveyard, it makes you a plant and the plants get bigger. Each plant you have. Pants have for mana. And that makes mana and is a payoff for just a cost your commander has. It's awesome. It's really cool. Yeah. This was cool tech, Jamie founders, Tome of the Guild Pact. Whenever you cast a multicolored spell, draw a card. That's sweet because Pest Friend is a multicolored spell that you're passing. That's sweet. That's really cool. So, and it taps for mana. So now once you get the convoke thing out, you're just like for free. As much as you can. Yeah, draw you, well, you have enough creatures in your graveyard. And the deck probably wants to be like 45 plus creatures. So many creatures for sure. And a lot of it you have to just forget you have a graveyard. Your graveyard is to fuel the Pest machine. It's another resource like energy or something almost. Yeah. So the other payoff that's better with these pests is blossoming bogbies. Whenever it attacks, you gain two life. And then creatures you control gain trample and get plus X plus X until end of turn where X is the amount of life you gain this turn. So if you have like six pests, you attack with all of them, you gain six life. That's the turn you gain first and then bogbies. They all get plus A plus A and trample. Pretty cool way to turn your pests into an actual threat. But we have to make sure our graveyard is full of creatures to be able to put together this really cool engine that Luin allows for. So. Unfortunately, black and even green are pretty good. I mean, that's one of the things they've always done is been able to fill the graveyard. So old stick fingers, Sivris, Snarling Gorehound. Yeah. Because it allows you to surveil when one one's or sorry, two or less power comes in. So the pest will trigger the Snarling Gorehound. Yes. It will fuel your graveyard. Put together this engine path. I've discovered it is a similar thing with Explorer. It's like as long as you hit a creature on top, you hit another creature, you can mill it into your graveyard, exile it and keep your engine going. Old stick fingers, I think is particularly cool because X is the number of creatures that go to your graveyard. So if you pay like six, you know you're hitting four creatures that are going to your graveyard. Yeah. You can make that happen. That's cool. Yeah. So you can get your graveyard payoffs because they are way more powerful in these colors than they are in boros. Just because. It's mostly the black of it all. Yeah. Tavall's judgment, like you mentioned, Fang Fearless Lucie. I don't know. It's Final Fantasy. Sorry. Whenever one or more cards leave your graveyard, you draw a card and you lose one life. This ability triggers only once each turn. So your pest friend now makes a one one draws your card. Seems good. And can gain you the life back if you really care. It's only once each turn, but it is effectively a Phrexian arena type of effect. Amzu, Swarm's hunger is really good. Whenever one or more cards leave your graveyard, you may create a one one black and green insect creature token, then put a number of plus encounters on it equal to the greatest mana value among those cards. You exile the creature, the creature's mana value is three, you put three counters on the bug. Yep. Good. Tormod the Desecrator, Desecrated Tomb. Oh yeah. They both have desecration on them and they both do similar things, which is when things leave the graveyard, you get tokens. Yep. We're here to desecrate. That's what Luin's doing on Strix Haven. Yeah. I mean you're messing with graveyard. Yeah. That's desecration. I think this commander is really cool for an uncommon and can put together some really interesting loops. Yeah. It's crazy this is uncommon actually. Yeah. All right. We're going to talk about this next one. Yeah. We got a couple more to go here. Two. Two more to go. Right? Yes. All right. This is Moseo Vayne's new dean. Two in a black for a legendary creature, Bird Skeleton Warlock. It's a two one with flying and when it enters, it makes a pest. The new one. That's the other thing. The new one is some of the new cards in the commander the wither bloom deck make the old pests. Wait, some of the new cards make the old pests? Yeah, they do. Guys, pick a pest. Okay. This makes a new pest. It just feels mean to me. I'm just going to get it wrong. I don't understand. Just call them something else. Okay. to represent new pests and you're like, these are the life gain ones. I don't know. All right, and then it has an ability that says at the beginning of your end step, if you gain life this turn, return up to one target creature card with mana value x or less from your graveyard to the battlefield where x is the amount of life you've gained this turn. Okay. These are commanders that have existed in the past, but I wanted to call this one out specifically because the other two commanders that do this are six and five mana respectively, and Moseo is three mana. So Redolph, Duskbringer, and Celestine, the living staint, both have white in them and will give you an idea if you want to look at Redolph to get some ideas for Moseo, but this is three mana for this effect, which is big difference. And it feels like because it's three mana and it makes another body with it, it's a lot better with a aristocrat style of effects. Yeah, for sure. So if I was building Moseo, I would really focus my life gain around blood artist effects, Zul'bor cutthroats, Ayara first of Lockthwain, Vayne rippers. You can gain enough life that you can bring back something that makes a ton of bodies and just keep this chain going. And there's a lot of cards in Black that do gain big chunks of life. Like there's extort cards that seem incredible here. Cryptgast is a great thing to bring back from your graveyard and trigger the next turn. Trading post was kind of cool because you can pay one discard the card you want to reanimate, gain four life, and then bring that card back. Yeah, you got Gray Merchant here. Oh yeah. Cocucho, both of them gained tons of life. That's definitely how this deck wins is you're probably just playing Gray Merchant, gaining a ton of life, sacrificing Gray Merchant, and bringing it right back. And that should be enough to take care of the table. You're in a mono Black deck. And Cocucho does the same thing. You play Cocucho, sacrifice Cocucho, bring it back, sacrifice it again. The game should be over at that point. Do you remember when Cocucho was banned? Oh yeah, I do. Yeah, which is crazy, but also tells you it's quite good. It's very, very powerful. And it's like, if you don't want to play those two effects, I think this deck is probably not for you, unless you want it to just be mono Black aristocrats. But bringing back those individual threats, I think is probably how this deck wins. I did want to mention Gollum Obsessed Stalker because it's got a weird thing to it. Okay. It's at the beginning of your end step, each opponent dealt combat damage this game by a creature named Gollum Obsessed Stalker loses life equal to the amount of life you gained this turn. Okay. So if you play Gollum in the early game, you hit somebody and they kill it, you can bring back Gollum and still hit that person from earlier in the game. It sees it, yeah, interesting. Because it is a creature named Gollum Obsessed Stalker. Doesn't have to be this creature, yeah. Yeah, so it's cool. It's a neat little threat that turns your life gain into life loss, very much like Vito, Thorn of the Dustgross. It's obviously a perfect home for the Blood Bond combo. If that's the kind of gamer you are, because you're trying to gain big chunks of life and have opponents lose big chunks of life. Yeah, I think you can also play that without the part where they lose the life when you gain the life and just only lean into the... Or vice versa. When I gain the life, you lose the life. When I gain the life, you lose the life. But don't do the other half and then you don't have the combo. Just weaponize the life gain. Yeah, I think that's one way to sort of like, make sure you're not too combo if that's not the play group you're in. For sure. The next category I was thinking about was just fodder. You just need one creature that when you bring it back, it brings back a ton of creatures. This is going to be really good with your Zuliport cutthroat. So like Chittering Witch or Underworld Hermit, both of them enter and make three plus. Yeah, one piece of cardboard that creates, three, four, five pieces of cardboard. Yeah. Or just bring back your Douthy voidwalker. That's fine too. Sacrifice your Douthy every turn. Because it keeps the cards in exile, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It keeps them with a void count on it. Any graveyard deck is just like, throw up in their mouth a little bit. If horrible. Horrible. Yeah, bring back like, edict effect creatures too. Pretty brutal every turn. Just play crafter every turn. Yep. That was a very powerful way to build this deck and very easy to get to like three life you've gained each turn. Finally, for decks like this, you definitely want sac outlets because it's mostly about controlling where your creatures are. You don't necessarily need free sac outlets like Viserysir. You just need to be able to sac one creature, unless of course you're doing the Blutter to Spilt. So Village Rites, High Market, Dread Return, Yoggmoth, all very powerful ways to get your creatures in and out of your graveyard. The classics. Keep that value engine going. All right. One more. One more. It is Scriv the Obligator. Scriv is two white, black, four mana for a two, three, flying death touch, inkling bird, legendary of course. Says whenever Scriv enters or attacks, create a white aura enchantment token named Contract, Attached to Target Creature and Opponent Controls. The token has Enchant Creature and whenever Enchanted Creature Attacks, it gets plus two, plus zero until end of turn, if it's attacking one of your opponents. Otherwise, its controller loses two life. Okay. So it doesn't quite goad it, but it highly incentivizes them to attack with that creature you've enchanted over there as one of your opponents. And it also just does create enchantments that are entering the battlefield, which is probably the most important part of this card. Yeah. The fact that this is just an engine for enchantress type of effects, it's not quite in the colors to take huge advantage of that, but you can build a very cool enchantment stack based on Scriv. Yeah. It's got the white part, but not the green part. Right. Keep in mind that you're not really going to be able to control where your opponents attack. You can incentivize. You can encourage, make it easier, but there isn't that much goad in white and black. This is mostly like a disincentive to attack you or a trait. So first thing I thought of with Scriv is just blank. Yeah. You want to make this thing enter the battlefield as many times as possible, and you will make a whole bunch of enchantments. Seems good. Ephemerate is a classic one. I've been running like more of the Blink-a-Spell or Remuva Spells spells. Like Parting Dust is a good example or Touch the Spirit realm. Both of them can blink your own thing or remove an opponent's thing, usually for a little bit more mana, but that modality is really nice. Or just your classic teleportation circle. We'll do it and give you an extra contract each turn, and then you'll be able to attack with it on the next turn and blink it again. That's super nice. Delny, you've got this here, which is good. A lot of people yell at us for not listing it as one of the best cards in our Best Card from Every Commander set episode. Yeah, we didn't talk about it, and I'm kidding. Yeah, Delny doubles the trigger abilities of your power to or less creatures, and Scriv has two power. So get two enchantments on enter and on attack. Seems good. On to Spirit Dancers. Another one is whenever an enchantment enter, you control enters. You may create a token that's copy of it. So it just doubles again that ETB. Yeah, similar to Delny. The payoffs are interesting because you're not casting as many enchantments, but you're making a lot of enter. The Sigil of Antique Drum won't work. Yeah, but something like Archon of Sun's Grace, which has Constellation, will make you a whole bunch of life-linking Pegasus. Yep, that's good. This is Pegasi. And Pegasus is his. Pegasus is his. Pegasus is his. And I want the plural. Yeah, a Johnny's Chosen will make a bunch of two-two cats. The cool thing about a Johnny's Chosen is it actually steals the enchantment and puts it on your own stuff. And all of your creatures are going to attack your opponent, so you'll always get the plus two, plus out. So now you're making four two-cats? That's pretty good. Three ones with flying and brings an enchantment back from your graveyard. And there's, of course, a lot of ways to weaponize, just having a bunch of enchantments enter the battlefield. I think one of the big ones is Doomwake Giant. Yep. When your commander enters, everything gets minus one, minus one, is like pretty back-breaking. It's only your opponent's stuff too. So if you got that going with an Infamerain in a Delny, you could wipe everybody's board, or at least give everything that's not yours, negative four, negative four, something like that. It's not that hard. Pretty sweet. Yeah. That's one I haven't seen in a while, because enchantment decks don't tend to be in black, but it's one of the more scary things that an enchantment deck with black can do. This is also finally the commander for Ariette of the Charmed Apple. I remember when this card came out, we were like, oh, it's a black and white commander that controls your opponent's stuff with Auras, but it doesn't give you any card advantage, it doesn't protect itself, and it has two scary things written on it. It's pretty tough in the command zone. It's a great payoff for this commander. Yeah, absolutely. Because you can build up a ton of Auras and then play Ariette. Yeah. A skybind is weird in this deck. So skybind says whenever skybind or another enchantment enters the battlefield under your control, exile target non-enchantment permanent, like Scriv, return that card to the battlefield under its owner's control at the beginning of the next end step. So you can play Scriv, make an enchantment, exile Scriv on end step, bring back Scriv, put an enchantment, exile Scriv. They'll give you four contracts per rotation. That's pretty good. And then you bring it back, and you can put it on an opponent's creature. So you'll make like a million contracts in a turn rotation, or you can exile a lot of like your opponent's token stuff. That's cool. That's very cool. There are some like faux enchanterous effects that you can sort of put in there. Most of them are like when the enchantment leaves. So when an enchantment you control is put into a graveyard from the battlefield draw card, that's like Ashok's Reaper. It's four mana, but it does sort of what you want. Braids is a really good in this deck. Braids a risen nightmare, because you can sacrifice an enchantment, and if your opponents don't have an enchantment to sacrifice, or don't want to sacrifice their enchantment, you draw three cards. Yeah, that's really good, because they're unlikely to have expendable enchantments, particularly. Seems unlikely. Yeah. Okay, that's great. Killian, decisive mentor is the face commander of the deck. That turns this into a draw engine as well. No surprise that the face commander from the deck this is from is good with it. Works pretty good. Yeah. A hateful idle on is whenever an enchantment creature dies, enchanted creature dies draw card for each aura you control, that was attached to it. So when you kill off creatures, you draw cards, and then like caretakers talent cares about tokens entering. So those are your primary card draw engines, which you're going to really need to focus on. Yeah, because you don't have access to the green enchantments, which are the backbone of the card draw from the enchantment deck normally. Right. And finally, weaponizing, how do you weaponize putting enchantments on your opponents stuff is the next piece of this puzzle. Rushal fist of Torm says, or as you control have exalted. So now when you attack with your bird, it gets. It counts all the contracts that are out there. Really big bird. That's cool. Boon of the spirit realm, it says whenever another enchantment enters the battlefield under your control, all of your creatures get another plus one. So it can be plus one. Yeah, it's an anthem attack that grows over time. Yeah, for sure. Then there's like some amount of stuff that's when enchantment center, you drain everybody. I think that's probably okay in this deck, just to give you a little bit of pressure, you're probably not going to be able to kill somebody at an end nowhere with those. So that's your Baelmerk leeches and like rim guardians of the world. Finally, there's a couple of cards that will steal all of the auras that you have put onto your opponents things all at once. So like Heavenly Blade Master says when it enters the battlefield, you may attach any number of auras and equipments you control to it. So you're like, give me all your contracts. And it pumps all your creatures for how many things it gets. Yeah. That's cool. So that's a, yeah, that's a finisher. That's a double strike. So that one will definitely take people out and it buffs your commander. So you could probably kill somebody that turn. Arden will do a similar thing. We'll move all of the, you can move any number of auras you control onto one thing and give you a huge buff. Codsworth handy helper does it, but really only steals one. Okay. That's Scriv. Wow. That was a lot. That's Scriv. I mean, at least Scriv was different than everything else. There was a lot of similarities, a lot of instance and sorcerers based stuff. Yeah. In this set, which is, I'm not against because it's like, oh, if you want to do a strategy like that in any of these colors, we kind of gave you a way, but they're not all the exact same. Yeah. And it's a wizard school. So it's like, okay, it's all about spell slinging. I get it. That'll be, yeah. So we're going to talk about which commanders we think are the most powerful that we talked about today and the ones that we're the most excited to build in just a moment. But before we get to that, if you're excited about Strixhaven and you want to pick up some of these cards, go to cardkingdom.com slash command and you'll be supporting the show while you shop. Card Kingdom is great, especially after a new set drops. They just have a huge amount of inventory. So if you're like, I need one of those for my deck and this one for this other deck and that I'm going to buy for my friend, you can just have a list, paste it in, see what they have in one spot and all of it will get shipped in like so quickly. Just you're done messing around on the internet and counting all the different shippings and dealing with multiple people. It's so nice just knowing exactly how it's going to get shipped to you, exactly what it's going to look like when it shows up and it's going to be all the printings that you're looking for. So Card Kingdom is the best. If you shop with them, you're supporting the show when you shop at cardkingdom.com slash command. And of course, the game accessories brand that we trust our own collections to here at the command zone is Ultra Pro. If you go to ultrapro.com slash command, you can find all their cool products, including, I mean, if you're going to buy the pre-cons or build new decks, you need deck boxes, you need sleeves, you need play mats. Ultra Pro is the best in the business at keeping your cards protected and looking awesome. Highly recommend the Apex sleeves, which are my favorite sleeves. And I have like 27, 28 decks and there's a few of them, not an Apex. And every time I accidentally grab one of those and start shuffling it, I'm like, I actually can't even play it. I got to switch this to something else. I got so used to that buttery shuffle feel from Apex sleeves. So yeah, can't recommend them highly enough. Again, ultrapro.com slash command. And if you're going to Magicon. Magicon Las Vegas, it is on May 1st through the third. Friday, May 1st, we are doing Game Nights Live at 4pm on the main stage, mana stage on the mana stage. We are super stoked to be there. And if you're going to be there, make sure that you're there on Friday. Make sure that you go there a little bit early if you want to get a seat, because the show is going to be incredible. We have Leonard Williams, we've got Anna Margaret coming as well. And the show is full of new surprises and lots of cool things. If you've seen the show before, you haven't seen it like this. Yeah, we got a couple of surprises that were like, nope, we're not even going to put that in the promo materials. Only the people that are there will get the full surprise. We don't want to ruin it. So yeah, if you're coming to Magic Con Las Vegas, definitely come for the Friday. You don't need any additional ticket to go to Game Nights Live. If you have a badge to get into the event, then you can watch the show. But I would recommend showing up early to just get a good seat, because it always fills up. All right. Okay. Let's talk about our favorite commanders of the bunch first. I think mine's obvious or I'm going to go first. It's Excava, the risen past. I haven't had a borrows commander in a little bit. Oh, that's not true. I've had Pia. But she's not a borrows. She's artifacts. Anyway, she is borrows. I'm really excited to build Excava and have a horse that does something and does a thing that I particularly like a lot. I like flyers. I like graveyard stuff. I like hasty commanders stoked about Excava. I'm the most excited I think about quadrics. I like the idea, I mean, I like Simic obviously, but I like the idea of just I'll keep the top deck manipulation out and just like what do I get and just kind of build it for value. I think that could be fun. Having a commander with Cascades just all so fun. Yeah. And she's like, what do I get? And like it's going to be good because I put good cards in my deck, but like I think it's kind of a nice way to build differently than I build to just kind of like leave that to fate. Yeah. So, but I think there are powerful ways to build that deck where you don't do that, where you actually like scroll rack and stuff. And that's fun too. Yeah. Let's talk about what we think is the most powerful commander in the set. I said Prismarie the inspiration. Yeah. It's hard to argue with this one because if they untap with it. It's just really, really difficult to come up with how they don't win. It just seems so easy to win when all your, you know, your whole deck has storm. I don't think it's going to be the most fun deck from either side. I think this just caution word to the wary out there that or word to the wise, what is it? One of those is this, this will be a deck that like is people, it's not going to be that fun to play because people will try and shut you down and be successful often enough that you won't do anything. And also you'll do the thing a couple of times and probably be like, it's not that interesting to do this every time. Yeah. That's my thought is just, yeah. And some people like that. And I, you know, I'm not going to tell you what you think is fun. I would just caution people that like a lot of times this happens where power doesn't equal fun. Yeah. So like, like me, I read Prismarie, I'm like, yeah, you can do all this cool stuff. And I'm like, I do not want to do any of that stuff. Like it doesn't sound like it's going to be any fun for me or my opponents. Prismarie feels like it's going to be a very powerful card in the 99. I expect like that, like I am going to put it in my dragon's approach deck where I can tutor to the battlefield and then cast like other stuff. And that'll be really sweet. And sometimes it'll be fun to do. And other times I won't draw it or I'll pick a different dragon. But I agree in the command zone, it's going to be like, okay, you're starting with three players against you. And we're going to do everything in our power to make sure that we don't lose the turn you cast your commander. Yeah. And then sometimes we'll forget that every infighting or you'll have enough disruption to like be able to get it out there. And then you'll just win. And those were the two options for how the game went. Yep. Yeah. The one I picked for the sake of discussion, but also because this card is exceptionally powerful. It's wither bloom the balancer. And I think it's the reason I picked this one is because disruption is so challenging. This isn't as easy as remove Prismari. This is remove the board or slow them before they get rolling. Because once the value has started, you're probably dead. Like you can just get to that point where they cast a torment of hellfire where it's reduced by eight like reasonably. And you're just dead on turn five. So easily. So it just feels like the kind of snowballing threat that's going to be very difficult to deal with. And even if you're like, I know we need to do something about that deck. I'm not sure what I can do against that deck, but I'm going to try. It attacks casual really interestingly because we tend to not want a lot of board wipes in our casual decks, which I'm trying to change. Just because of the nature of design and modern commander, I feel like you need board wipes as like the only answer you have so often now. But people are still reticent to run them because there's a whole stigma around like long games or whatever. But that's really the only answers to where they're going because like you said, spot removal does nothing. They just recast it because it's, oh no, now it costs 10, but it's reduced by 12. So who cares? Just cast it for two. It casts two mana and I'm going to go off again next turn. Well, I cast it for two mana. I have all the rest of my mana available to go off right now again. And so it's like all it did was cramp me on two mana from what I would have done if I just untapped with it and it didn't die. So that's very, very powerful for sure. Yeah. The best way to disrupt this deck is deal with her hand. Make sure they can't get, if you counter any spell, it's the card draw spell. Deal with the spells that hit the board. That's fine. We're already at the point that we need a board wipe. But if there's one that's like, I'm going to draw 10 cards or something like that, you have to stop that. Very powerful stuff, very cool stuff. I think we're going to see a lot of these elder dragons at the commander tables. Obviously designed for us. Yep, yep. Yeah, no, it's a fun set. I mean, it's actually having such a fun setting. So yeah, let us know in the comments what you think is the best or your favorite commander from secrets of strict save. And if there's one we did not talk about there, like, how could you not talk about this? Remember, we are doing separate videos and episodes for every single pre-con. So that's why we didn't talk about the face commanders from each of those decks, because obviously they got a whole episode devoted to them. And just to reiterate, the ones that haven't come out yet are going to come out. We promise we will do all the schools. All right, we're going to wrap it up here and say thank you to our amazing team here at the command zone for making this episode and other episodes possible. Thank you to Karina Cruz, Josh D. as John Schneider, Grubgalati, Jamie Block, Jordan Pridgen, Jake Boss, Eric Lem, Manson Lung, Josh Murphy, Eric Wilson, Evan Limburger, Sam Waldo, Becky Bell, and of course, Jimmy Wong. And thanks to you all for watching. Bye. Happy strict saving.