Why do we read articles about casual decks? They aren’t rife with the latest tech or layered with ideas for the current metagame. We aren’t compiling lists for the Friday Night Magic this week. What is it about casual decks that meet our fancy?

Decks are fun a priori. They don’t need reasons to be fun; they just are. There’s an innate awesomeness to deck construction and conversation. That’s why we write and read. We can take ideas for decks, card choices, strategy, and more from articles.

I’m not normally the sort of guy who builds decks I see online. I bring as many cards and articles to my deck building as the next guy, but usually on a micro level. I’ll steal a card combo for a deck, but I’ll use it in a different way. I’ll take a land suggestion and try it out. These are the things I usually take from articles.

I was perusing the mothership when I spied the daily deck list. It featured a Commander deck built around Edric. Something about this unusual Commander deck just flicked on a light inside me. I knew that I had to build a similar deck!

This deck is built around Edric, Spymaster of Trest. You play a ton of cheap, evasive creatures and then play Edric and start drawing a massive number of cards each turn. Then, you add a smattering of tempo elements to the deck and call it. I pored over my card collection to see what I had. I ordered a few of the cheap commons I was missing from CoolStuffInc.com. Then, I built the deck and began playing it.

Are you interested in seeing my version of this awesome deck? Let’s take a look under the hood!

"Trest Invasion"

• Commander (1)
• 1 Edric, Spymaster of Trest

• Creatures (34)
• 1 Arbor Elf
• 1 Cloud Pirates
• 1 Cloud Sprite
• 1 Copperhorn Scout
• 1 Delver of Secrets
• 1 Flying Men
• 1 Fyndhorn Elves
• 1 Gaea's Skyfolk
• 1 Invisible Stalker
• 1 Jhessian Infiltrator
• 1 Joraga Treespeaker
• 1 Jungle Lion
• 1 Llanowar Elves
• 1 Lorescale Coatl
• 1 Manta Riders
• 1 Martyr of Frost
• 1 Merfolk Spy
• 1 Mire Boa
• 1 Mold Adder
• 1 Mothdust Changeling
• 1 Quirion Ranger
• 1 River Boa
• 1 Scryb Sprites
• 1 Spellstutter Sprite
• 1 Tidal Warrior
• 1 Treetop Scout
• 1 Tukatongue Thallid
• 1 Werebear
• 1 Willow Dryad
• 1 Wolfbitten Captive
• 1 Young Wolf
• 1 Zephyr Sprite
• 1 Memnite
• 1 Erayo, Soratami Ascendant

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Garruk Wildspeaker

• Spells (30)
• 1 Chain of Vapor
• 1 Crop Rotation
• 1 Daze
• 1 Flusterstorm
• 1 Force of Will
• 1 Mana Drain
• 1 Mana Leak
• 1 Miscalculation
• 1 Mystical Tutor
• 1 Negate
• 1 Noxious Revival
• 1 Snap
• 1 Unified Will
• 1 Gitaxian Probe
• 1 Regrowth
• 1 Time Warp
• 1 Walk the Aeons
• 1 Windfall
• 1 Notorious Throng
• 1 Beastmaster Ascension
• 1 Rhystic Study
• 1 Rising Waters
• 1 Teferi's Veil
• 1 Veil of Birds
• 1 AEther Vial
• 1 Lotus Petal
• 1 Mox Diamond
• 1 Smokestack
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Tangle Wire

• Lands (34)
• 11 Forest
• 11 Island
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Dryad Arbor
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Hinterland Harbor
• 1 Misty Rainforest
• 1 Simic Growth Chamber
• 1 Strip Mine
• 1 Tectonic Edge
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Wasteland
• 1 Yavimaya Coast
• 1 Gaea's Cradle

Buy This Deck

There’s my version of the deck. It varies in several respects from the published deck. In some cases, it is missing cards that were in my 100 Combo Decks project. I don’t want to start stripping out cards from my decks already! Cards such as Counterspell, Chrome Mox, and Winter Orb are missing for that reason. I was also missing some card stock. For example, I don’t have an extra Temporal Manipulation, Flooded Grove, or Breeding Pool just sitting around. While I was happy to purchase a few small-cost items, such as a Zephyr Sprite or Veil of Birds, I didn’t want to mimic the creature list from the initial deck completely.

I knew the value of the flyers, so I didn’t touch them (save for Thought Nibbler). I grabbed whatever 1-drop landwalkers I had sitting around, and I didn’t purchase any others. Then, I massaged the creatures a bit to fit my collection and desires.

A few 1-drops felt missing to me. Isn’t a simple card such as Tukatongue Thallid a really good choice here? For a similar reason, Young Wolf is present. Having some game post-removal is valuable. You often have the mana to hop them, so isn’t Manta Riders a solid choice (you often don’t, but that’s okay).

Another one I like is Quirion Ranger. The ability to bop a land back and play it to get an extra mana when you miss a land drop is powerful, especially when under a tempo card. It also allows you to use a mana Elf again, which is never a dull moment. I wish I owned some of these creatures, such as Cursecatcher, Wirewood Symbiote, Lotus Cobra, or Spiketail Hatchling, but I don’t have any running around.

The rest of the creatures are those you’d expect. We have Memnite and Scryb Sprites all the way to Llanowar Elves and Cloud Pirates. I did add Joraga Treespeaker as a mana creature. Another questionable choice is Delver of Secrets. It only transforms about 20% of the time. When it doesn’t, it’s still a 1-drop that does what you want. Eventually, it transforms, and you move on.

Finally, I added a 3-drop that really appealed to me: Lorescale Coatl. It appeared really broken in this deck, and I was right. It quickly becomes a 9/9 in two turns. I wanted to have a creature that would win more quickly. Sometimes, you run out of steam with seven 1/1s out, having blown through everything, and people have enough time to recover. Add a 10/10 to the table, and the pressure mounts. However, any creature of significant size attracts pinpoint removal in this deck. People often don’t waste Doom Blades and Swords to Plowshares on Scryb Sprites, you know? Not only does it barely impact the board state, but there’s a psychological barrier to it. You want to blow your best removal on that? Well, all right then.

For spells, I tossed in what I had. I added some things, such as Sol Ring, that I suspected as missing in the first deck. The posted deck has a few counters that I don’t have extras of. It has eleven counters. I added Miscalculation to my deck, but I’m missing Counterspell, Arcane Denial, Spell Pierce, and Delay. I’m a bit surprised the original is missing Remand, which seems like a good choice for this deck. All of mine are in my Combo Decks, or else I would be playing it and Counterspell. I intentionally steered clear of some of the others. I like my other cards and creatures too much to add too many counters.

When you are drawing four to five cards a turn, you will hit all of your land drops post-Smokestack. It’s another card I’m a bit surprised to see off the list—it synergizes well with your tempo elements.

Finally, Rhystic Study is here for even more card-drawing and taxing. You’ll see a lot more cards with this out, and drawing an extra two to four cards each turn is never something to turn a frown at.

Sometimes, your foes adopt a kill-the-Edric mentality. Every time the guy hits the board, he is blasted off again. Lightning Bolts, Dark Banishings, and counters all come his way, and you can’t bring him back out due to the extra cost. Backup draw plans like Rhystic Study and kill plans like Beastmaster Ascension work very well.

We have a few Time Walk spells to add to damage dealt and cards drawn by your deck. A certain card from Avacyn Restored (Temporal Mastery) fits very nicely as well. Extra turns are always keen!

I kept some powerful spells. Crop Rotation finds Cradle most of the time. You can fetch something else, but why? Mystical Tutor has obvious uses, and I wanted a smattering of bounce, so Snap and Chain of Vapor are rocking the cut. Finally, Noxious Revival is a solid choice for the deck, and I kept it.

That leaves me with five cards that aren’t in the original deck. I need to fill five spots because cards such as Exploration and Green Sun's Zenith are elsewhere. What did I include instead and why?

With life loss not meaning much, Gitaxian Probe jumped in. This deck churns through cards when it’s going, but it’s never a bad thing to cycle away a card for 2 life and to see your foe’s hand at the same time, you know?

There are a lot of times when you have a grip of crap or an opponent has a strong hand. Windfall changes that. You’ll draw a new hand. This was originally Flux to discard all of those extra lands you draw off Edric but can’t play. Once I realized that hosing opposing hands would help, too, I added the Windfall. It’s rare that you have more cards in hand than your foes—the tempo keeps them down.

The final two cards are Garruk Wildspeaker and Teferi's Veil. Garruk helps untap lands immediately, so he really only costs 2 mana. He is amazing under a Waters or Smokestack, and he can spit out a creature a turn for your horde or Overrun your team to push through. He is amazing in this deck, and I’m not pulling him for anything

Finally, for my lands, I made sure to include the creature Dryad Arbor. Any way to get a creature I’ll take! I didn’t have a lot of special lands, so I only included three fetch lands that can find either color. The posted deck by WotC included all of the pain fetch lands, but since it also had two dual lands, that made sense. I have neither, so I didn’t want them.

Instead, I looked at the tempo element and added the three good land destroyers: Strip Mine, Tectonic Edge, and Wasteland. These are great as ways to blow up annoying lands as well as to push people after a Smokestack or a Rising Waters. I love them here!

Anyway, what are cards I expect to add once everything is back?

• Counterspell
• Winter Orb
• Chrome Mox
• Exploration

And I would expect to pull:

• Gitaxian Probe
• Chain of Vapor
• Snap
• Island

My deck is crying for Temporal Mastery, but right now, I can’t afford the price of admission. When I have an extra, in it goes!

This deck was published a few weeks ago, and perhaps those who worked on it have added and changed some cards. Perhaps they’ve unearthed additional tech! The deck does very well against Commander decks that lack game against fast aggro decks. This is a format that is not exactly chock-full of aggro decks. When you think of playing some of the best cards of all time, few lean toward Scryb Sprites. Neither do you see a Kongming, "Sleeping Dragon" white weenie deck or a Kaysa stompy deck or any other of the many options out there. This deck exploits many slower decks.

It also exploits the weak mana bases a lot have as well. There are a lot of decks that try to accelerate their mana to pump out powerful spells. This deck slows all of that down. In addition to tempo tools such as Strip Mine, powerful engines such as Rising Waters jump in to slow things down to a reasonable pace. From there, you just explode into a frenzy of cards, creatures, and beats.

Anyway, I hope that you enjoyed a look at this quirky Commander deck I modified to fit my collection. I suspect this will be the last Commander deck I’ll build in real life for a while. I have this, my Oros deck, my Equinaut Commander deck, my Five Color Planeswalker deck, my Nether Shadow deck, and my Nexus deck. After my 100 Combo Decks project and these, my card stock is virtually non-existent! Thanks for turning in, and remember: Go, Scryb Sprites!

See you next week,

Abe Sargent