Over the past two weeks since my last Commander night, I have put together two (sort of three) new decks, and I was looking forward to trying those out. Fortunately, I got enough good games in tonight to try out all of my new decks, plus take a swing with one that is has long since proved to be unironically one of my favorite decks. In order, the decks I played were:
4. Sanar, Innovative First-Year
That last one, you may note (if you click the links), is not a link to an actual deck, but just the Commander.
I'll get into that when I get to the write-up.
Game 1 - Ashling
Fun factoid about me: I originally played Magic as a very young child. There are decades-old photos floating around from local newspapers where I grew up of me at county fairs playing Magic in between "club duties" for the 4-H Rabbit Club I was a member of nearly 30 years ago. However, I was also about 8 years old, making me the exact target audience for this hip, new "Pokémon" TCG that came out.
A TCG I also later stopped playing in favor of several other games as the years went by, only to pick that one back up about three years back. I digress.
Magic! Magic I got back into back when I was in college, and though I've taken some breaks due to losing my playgroup or not having time, I've stuck more or less with it since then. I came back to it not long after the 10th Edition Core Set, and then just a few months after I began, my first "new set" came out: The original Lorwyn.
So suffice it to say, the return to Lorwyn with Lorwyn Eclipsed has filled me with nostalgic glee. And that one of the precons was an Elemental deck? My favorite creatures from the original were always the Flamekin. And while a (good) deck starring just the Flamekin might not be especially doable, having an Elemental deck helmed by the most prominent Flamekin character in the lore is just fine by me.
Which, all of that long preamble aside, is exactly why I was so stoked to try out this new Ashling deck after I picked my preorder up yesterday during my Pokémon League, and made some immediate changes to it once I was home from the same.
And for its inaugural game it... worked. It did the thing I wanted it to do, and it ended up winning the game. It was only a group of 3, myself included, so not a "full" pod, but it was able to get off the ground and get going. It took it a while, I believe in part because the list has 40 lands in it, so I was hitting a lot more land than I think I should have wanted. But it got there.
I think I need at least another game or two to see if maybe this one was a fluke on the mana issues, but I suspect it's incredibly likely that I'll be trimming a few lands from the deck to make room for additional spells. The deck does run a significant number of expensive creatures, so I know it will need a lot of mana, especially with how few mana rocks it currently has, so there's a delicate balance to play with there.
If I do take some of the land out, the first additions I make will be my copy of Urza's Incubator and Brighthearth Banneret to make my Elemental spells that much cheaper, especially since those reductions also impact the 4-mana Evoke granted by my Commander.
Game 2 - Yuna
A game I very nearly ended up losing because of my own decision to board wipe in the face of thirty-some-odd Saprolings...
This deck did everything I wanted it to. I started with a one-land hand and a couple of mana dorks, and I proceeded hit a Sol Ring and a Nature's Lore, giving me the mana I needed to drop Bugenhagen and the Nature's Lore fairly early on, plus drawing other land and some small bits of ramp, giving me a fantastic mana base to play the game with. Even after my board wipe with a copy of Farewell, I was able to get more mana in place and take the game off the back of Primal Garuda and the Magus Sisters.
I am so unbelievably happy with the way that this deck operated, though in the opposite end of how my Ashling went, I think I need more games to make sure that this wasn't a fluke. I want to make sure it operates this well consistently, but the first game gives me some incredible hope.
I did run face-first into a hard counter, though, when one of my opponents - using the new Blight Curse precon, dropped a copy of Kulrath Knight that meant any of my creatures with counters on them couldn't attack or block. In a deck full of Saga Creatures, that relies on using Yuna to put +1/+1 counters on everything...
I was moderately displeased, but such is Magic sometimes.
Game 3 - Cloud
Turning to a reliable stand-by that I know functions the way that I want, and that it does so with reasonable consistency despite its somewhat low land count, my Cloud list hit the field.
And I subsequently got hard-countered by a completely different card that I hadn't seen in absolute ages: Stormtide Leviathan. That was entirely unexpected.
But eventually the Stormtide got removed, and I proceeded to delete an opponent playing mono-white Clerics (starring Minwu from the Final Fantasy set!) from the game as their life-gain meant I was by and large the only one who could take them out.
Only for the mono-blue Baral player, who has previously been the Ghost of Ramirez de Pietro/Brinelin the Moon Kraken player in other weeks until they took a number of bits of inspiration from my own Baral list, hit High Tide into Omniscience, then dropped Enter the Infinite and Jace, Wielder of Mysteries to take the game from out of nowhere.
Which I couldn't even be mad about. Heavens know I've won off of similar enough - usually using Thoracle - in my own Baral list.
"Game 4" - Sanar
And now for the last "game" of the night, with my other "new deck"...
So, I noted above that I wasn't linking to a list for Sanar, but rather to the card itself on Scryfall. This is because I technically didn't come up with the deck myself - I saw it from Decked Out, a group of MtG content creators, where VeggieWagon posted a short about the card and the "five dollar jank combo" that could be built around it.
So here is the deck list, in full:
Sanar, Innovative First-Year (Commander)
97x Lands
I used a mix of random, inexpensive dual lands I had laying around along with something like 90 basics. The way the deck works: Play lands for three turns. On turn 4, play your fourth land and then Sanar. Turn 5, Sanar's ability will trigger, revealing cards until you hit the Artillerist and the Treasure Hunt. Those will be exiled, and the lands will go back into the deck. You then play a fifth land, play Treasure Hunt and reveal your entire deck (which is all lands, remember), play the Artillerist, and then go to end-of-turn. You will discard down to 7, which will deal about 84 or 85 damage to every opponent, all at once.
And the deck, designed as it is, will do that exact sequence every time, give or take the possibility of drawing a combo piece early. The Baral player had a copy of Negate in hand, and could have stopped me by countering Treasure Hunt, but wanted to see what happened. I made the compromise of, after explaining what happened and how the Baral player obviously had the means to stop me, I scooped to let the other three finish out their game.
Will this deck ever work again, with any of the three people I was playing against? Well, no, they know what the deck does, know to take out Sanar or the Artillerist immediately or counter the Treasure Hunt. Unless the Baral player wants to let me show it to other players, I suppose.
But it worked out exactly the way I wanted it to. And that's all I could ever hope for.
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