Readers!

Remember the first deck you spent real money on? For me, it was Scepter Chant. It was a really annoying deck to play against, but it taught me a lot about how the stack worked and how to minimize your opponents' outs. I spent a lot of money on it, foiling most of it out, including the shocks and fetches. I liked just shuffling it. I wouldn't run something like that these days, and not just because Scepter Chant is as annoying as it ever was but is now also not great on top of it. I never forgot how much fun it could be to just not let people attack you, though, and while Scepter Chant may not be great in EDH, I bet it's fun and I bet it's way less annoying when there are other people at the table to attack you and you can't just grief the same person. I want to be Chanting a little bit, and I think I finally found the commander who is going to let me do it.

Who else but the King of Gondor to enforce peace in the realm? Aragorn introduces The Monarch into the game, first of all. I do this from time to time, but I could spend the rest of this piece talking about how more games of Commander need The Monarch introduced. Unlike the Ring tempting you or crawling through the dungeon or other solo side-quests, The Monarch is a game everyone can play, and creating incentive to attack people creates more attacks. People are sometimes afraid to ruffle feathers early to the extent that they will do something like roll a die and blame the die for the person they chose to attack. The Monarch frees people up to attack the person who is the monarch, thus giving them the barest sliver of an excuse, which is all even polite people need. The Monarch makes the game go faster by drawing people more cards and by making more attacks happen. Things that make the game shorter are good.

However, the rest of my deck isn't going to make the game shorter for long. I plan to make sure I STAY the Monarch, and to do that I'm going to be not only building a pillow fort but also by Chanting a bit. In my opinion, the annoying part of Orim's Chant is not being able to play spells, not the clause where you can't attack. I want people not able to attack just me, so I'll be playing Kirkland brand Orim's Chants like Empty City Ruse (easily my favorite Heatmiser album) and False Peace. No Silence, just good, old-fashioned fogging a whole attack phase. I DO, however want to be Sceptering, so even if I only have one OG Orim's Chant in the deck, the other spells I'll have to throw on the Scepter will be cards like Moment of Silence and Dawn Charm. We aren't looking to lock anyone. Believe me, it would be so easy to jam Brine Elemental in here and just lock people up. I don't WANT to lock them up, I want them to attack people who aren't me and then when I have enough creatures, I am going to make sure they can't block. Then I'm going to take as many combat phases as I can in one turn to go around the table kicking people's lights out until I'm the victor.

This is me, talking, also - I bet you can already tell where my brain went with this. As soon as I thought "Let's become The Monarch" I thought of the 3 Courts in the cycle - Grace, Ire and "The Blue one, I guess, if there's room." Milling people isn't a great way to celebrate your coronation but it's not as though I ran 7 Nazgul in my Smeagol deck because having 9 ways to be tempted by the Ring was "overkill." Since I'm adding all of those Enchantments, Court of Grace made me think of Luminarch Ascension and suddenly I asked myself if I could build this deck entirely without creatures and kill them just with Angel tokens in an otherwise creatureless deck. Not playing creatures would hamper us quite a bit if we want to be doing extra combats, however. There are plenty of creatures that enable it, so why not run them? However, I will be relying very heavily on my Enchantments to give us creatures to use. Luckily, if we're staying unscathed enough to remain the Monarch, White has about a million enchantments that can all make it rain 4/4 Angels.

I mentioned Court of Cunning as an "if there's room" card because there is something I want to make sure I make room for - some Goad. Sure, making someone skip a few attack phases with Dawn Charm et al is cute, but if you don't want to be the reason the game is taking forever, keep them busy. If they have to attack each other and can't mess with you, you stay the Monarch but they don't stay at 40 life with a pile of creatures.

What is this deck? Is it Enchantress? Extra Turns? Goad? Opalesence? Is it Scepter Chant? How about YES to all of the above because this is a 100-card format so I can jam as many pet cards and bad decisions into a box until I run out of sleeves and that is my right as a builder in the goofiest format, (the only one I still play regularly). You have to see this pile I came up with, you just have to. I give you -

Gorn Today, Here Tomorrow (because of the extra combat steps) | Commander | Jason Alt

• Commander (1)
• 1 Aragorn, King of Gondor

• Creatures (23)
• 1 Adeline, Resplendent Cathar
• 1 Archivist of Gondor
• 1 Archon of Coronation
• 1 Aurelia, the Warleader
• 1 Bloodthirster
• 1 Bothersome Quasit
• 1 Champions of Minas Tirith
• 1 Combat Celebrant
• 1 Edgin, Larcenous Lutenist
• 1 Emberwilde Captain
• 1 Etali, Primal Storm
• 1 Faramir, Steward of Gondor
• 1 Geode Rager
• 1 Heliod, God of the Sun
• 1 Hellkite Charger
• 1 Karlach, Fury of Avernus
• 1 Komainu Battle Armor
• 1 Medomai the Ageless
• 1 Moraug, Fury of Akoum
• 1 Palace Jailer
• 1 Port Razer
• 1 Scourge of the Throne
• 1 Skyline Despot

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Zariel, Archduke of Avernus

• Instants (9)
• 1 Arcane Denial
• 1 Dawn Charm
• 1 Deflecting Palm
• 1 Illusionist's Gambit
• 1 Moment of Silence
• 1 Narset's Reversal
• 1 Orim's Chant
• 1 Response // Resurgence
• 1 Savage Beating

• Sorceries (10)
• 1 Disrupt Decorum
• 1 Empty City Ruse
• 1 False Peace
• 1 Fury of the Horde
• 1 Relentless Assault
• 1 Seize the Day
• 1 Spectacular Showdown
• 1 Taunt from the Rampart
• 1 Waves of Aggression
• 1 World at War

• Enchantments (14)
• 1 Aggravated Assault
• 1 Assemble the Legion
• 1 Breath of Fury
• 1 Court of Grace
• 1 Court of Ire
• 1 Curse of Opulence
• 1 Fealty to the Realm
• 1 Felidar Retreat
• 1 Ghostly Prison
• 1 Luminarch Ascension
• 1 Propaganda
• 1 Rabble Rousing
• 1 Sigil of the Empty Throne
• 1 Sphere of Safety

• Artifacts (5)
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Chromatic Lantern
• 1 Fellwar Stone
• 1 Isochron Scepter
• 1 Sol Ring

• Lands (37)
• 2 Island
• 4 Plains
• 6 Mountain
• 1 Ancient Tomb
• 1 Arid Mesa
• 1 Clifftop Retreat
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Deserted Beach
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Fabled Passage
• 1 Flooded Strand
• 1 Glacial Fortress
• 1 Hallowed Fountain
• 1 Mystic Monastery
• 1 Path of Ancestry
• 1 Raugrin Triome
• 1 Reflecting Pool
• 1 Sacred Foundry
• 1 Scalding Tarn
• 1 Sea of Clouds
• 1 Spectator Seating
• 1 Steam Vents
• 1 Stormcarved Coast
• 1 Sulfur Falls
• 1 Sundown Pass
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Training Center

Buy This Deck Export text format

Oh man, this looks really fun.

I didn't want to load up on stuff that was only good with Isochron Scepter, and it isn't as a good a card as it used to be (Research // Development was an auto-include, for example), but there are still a few cards in here that would be great on a Scepter. Deflecting Palm is more fun as a surprise but it's not a bad rattlesnake to have, for example. I wanted to have a few clutch "Don't attack me" cards, but it also felt more fun to load up on goad.

If you want to add Goad stuff, you can take a lot of the Enchantments out. I won't like it as much, but there is a lot of design space there. One theme seems to be sacrificing an Artifact to goad someone, so you would have to change a lot of this deck to make the most of it, but go for it.

I managed to jam just about every extra turns cheese card in here I could, but the Godo-Helm combo is missing because it's kind of boring. You can add it, and you can try and make cards like Lightning Runners work if you are desperate to, but I think I went very, very deep into extra turns without hurting the deck. As it is, we have a lot of six mana creatures and not much in the lower registers, so you'll want to get some permanents established. I think it's possible that too much redundancy is bad here - you will never really need more than one 6-drop that lets you attack more than once. I think it's possible we can cut quite a few of those for more ways to make tokens. That said, I think always being able to get extra combats when all of your creatures are unblockable is very good, so having a lot of those creatures means that the extra ones are attackers, not dead weight. I think the decision to add most of my redundancy here was correct, but I could use a lot more fun creatures that didn't make the cut.

What do we think? Am I trying to do too much? Does it not do enough? Let me hear it on twitter or reddit or whatever we're using instead in a few weeks. Until next time!