Robot Viking

There are five Commander decks to choose from, and at $30 each, you might not be able to grab all of them. Here’s a brief analysis of each deck, what style of play it suits and a few basic suggestions for customizing it.

Each deck comes with three legends that can be used as that deck’s Commander, but one is the intended Commander — the deck is mainly built around that one.

First up is Mirror Mastery, which uses Riku of Two Reflections as the main Commander. Riku’s ability is incredibly powerful and doesn’t require him to get involved in combat to work, so you can sit back and wait a while until you come out with an explosive play, like slamming down a Magmatic Force and a second Magmatic Force, or stacking a pair of Colossal Mights onto a creature you sneaked through unblocked.

Riku requires a ton of mana to be at his best. Although he does have a few trick plays, like laying down two Avatar of Fury for four mana, or evoking a creature and getting a permanent token copy at a deep discount price, you will spend a lot of time setting up your mana base, and mana denial strategies can give you problems.

The easiest way to improve this deck is to use more efficient creatures. Low-cost fatties or creatures with powerful “enters-the-battlefield” effects that cost five mana or less will be great, since you can get Riku’s ability online much more quickly. Evoke creatures are amazing in this deck for the aforementioned reason: for the evoke cost plus two extra mana, you get the EtB ability twice plus one creature that sticks on the board. Riku’s instant and sorcery copying ability is sorely underutilized in this deck, so throw in some better sorceries and some good card draw spells for him to duplicate.

This deck is also notable because it contains Intet, the Dreamer, a card many Commander decks are built around, using him as the Commander.

Heavenly Inferno is the most straightforward deck of the bunch. It uses Kaalia of the Vast to drop huge dragons, angels or demons into play, attacking, every time she attacks. If you like attacking, and if you like dropping the best creatures in Magic into play, this is the deck for you. Modifying it is pretty straightforward, too. Just get rid of every creature that isn’t an awesome angel, demon or dragon. The biggest problem the deck has is that Kaalia herself is so fragile. In a multiplayer game, there’s usually someone who doesn’t have a flier up at the moment to block her, but she bites it to pretty much every burn spell ever printed. It’s going to be rare for her to live long enough for you to attack. For that reason, you want to add to this deck things that give her haste, things that make her unblockable, things that give her shroud, or things that make her indestructible.

Tariel, Reckoner of Souls is probably the second-best legend in the deck, but she requires a different sort of deck to be built around her.

Political Puppets is a deck that really only works well in a multiplayer scenario. The idea is to play a lot of cards that help everyone at the table, making them reluctant to kill you (because then those things would go away). On top of that, you use your Commander, Zedruu the Greathearted, to flat out give things to your opponents. You then, of course, gain immense card and life advantage from the exchange. There are a lot of things you can give away that don’t really matter. Howling Mine doesn’t care who controls it at the moment, and that fifth island you drew late in the game isn’t probably going to matter much.

If you’re clever, though, you can do powerful things with Zedruu. If one opponent is off to a slow start and facing a barrage of early attacks, you can give her a blocker. Zedruu’s giveaway is instant speed, so you can wreak havoc on combat by shipping your troops all over the table. If you’re the manipulative type who likes making all the other players fight each other until you come out on top, you’ll like this deck a lot. If you don’t have a steady play group and you think you might be playing a lot of 1-on-1 Commander, this deck won’t be as much fun.

One way to improve this deck would be to use more creatures with good EtB effects. Play a Mulldrifter, get the cards, then give it away when it’s no longer useful.

The Counterpunch deck can be a bit complicated to play. It uses Ghave, Guru of Spores to create token creatures and bounce +1/+1 counters around the battlefield. It then uses powerful sacrifice effects like Attrition to control the battlefield and get maximum use out of all those token creatures. If you like complicated board states and controlling the game at the battlefield level, you’ll enjoy this deck. Once you get rolling with it, you’ll largely determine what creatures live and die, so you can play a political game with it as well. It is somewhat vulnerable to graveyard hate, however.

A better assortment of cards that give you a benefit when you sacrifice a creature would boost this deck immensely. Persist creatures, like Kitchen Finks, would also be strong, since you could move a +1/+1 counter onto one to get rid of a -1/-1 and keep the creature bouncing back from the graveyard turn after turn. Elspeth Tirel would be pretty interesting in this as well.

Finally, we have Devour for Power. This is many players’ favorite of the five decks, mainly because The Mimeoplasm lets you do such a huge variety of insane and fun things. Copy a Triskelion, then make the second creature something huge, like some random Eldrazi. In a Commander game you’re going to run into a lot of weird, unpredictable situations, and Mimeoplasm lets you find a bizarre answer to just about all of them.

The thing is, Mimeoplasm only works well with stocked graveyards. This happens naturally in the course of a Commander game, and the deck is built to move the process along. However, you will spend a few turns hanging back and waiting for your graveyard antics to take shape. You’re also very vulnerable to graveyard hate, and there are enough recursion decks in Commander circles that a lot of players pack a Bojuka Bog or Relic of Progenitus. That kind of thing will ruin your day.

To fix those problems, consider a few counterspells, or some instants that will let you recover something from your graveyard before it gets exiled. There are some great dredge creatures in this deck’s colors that play well into the theme too. But most of all, just stock it with ridiculous Mimeoplasm targets and see what kind of insane monstrosities you can create. Even if you lose, people at your game store will long tell the tale of the time when you Mimeoplasmed a Khalni Hydra onto a Baneslayer Angel.

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