Swing Your Partner Round and Round

Posted on October 31, 2016

Hello folks! Yet another spoiler season is here, and it brings another cool set of cards for kitchen tables around the world! Are you exited, thrilled, and ready to rock? I am! (You can tell by the epic amount of exclamation points I use)

Spoilers are Here Again!

Now the problem of too many spoilers is quite a thing. Let me give you an example. We recently had Conspiracy: Take the Crown released. Yay! I even wrote you a full five article set review for it. I included my normal “Top Ten List” for a new set, and then even included my typical “Decks Inspired By . . . ” article as well layered into those reviews. Now I heavily drafted and played this set anywhere that I could find down here in Mobile, Alabama. (Which is not a small city by any stretch of the imagination.) So I wanted to write up an article about the various draft archetypes I had seen, and what cards I felt were over — or under — valued, and then discuss them here. I also wanted to write an article about Conspiracies in my Commander Cube, and whether or not it was time to move to them whole cloth. But I didn’t have time! My Release Day article was on Edits and Updates to my decks from the set. As I was preparing for the draft-centric article, Kaladesh hit in a big way. So starting September 12th through today, I had all of my Monday articles around that set, and many of my Top Ten articles as well.

And now, today, October 31st, (Happy Halloween by the by) I am through my required Kaladesh pieces. Updates. Decks inspired by. Even my huge Equinaut update. And now? Okay, now that we are a few weeks past Kaladesh, I can look back to Conspiracy: Take the Crown, right? Nope! Commander 2016 spoilers are out. We are in full gear. And you and I both rightly want to talk about it. It’s hard to write, or expect people, to read an article in the middle of spoiler season, or as the set releases, on stuff released a couple of sets ago. And who is going to care about Conspiracy Draft Archetypes in late November or December when I am finally able to finish Commander 2016 stuff?

Do you sometimes feel like we are in spoiler season a little too much? I certainly do. Spoiler here! Spoiler there! Spoilers everywhere! But spoilers and new cards are the lifeblood of this game, so I can’t complain too much, right? Right! Cards for everyone!

Some things seem to have slipped through the cracks, like From the Vault: Lore. We have a Masters set, a Conspiracy set, and a commander set — all reprinting cards from history heavily.

So a lot of casual cards are dropping as they get printed again. Burgeoning! Horn of Greed! Desertion! Birds of Paradise! Beacon of Unrest! Sylvan Library! Argothian Enchantress! Oath of Druids! Balance! Baleful Strix (yet again)! And we are seeing a load more in Commander 2016. We’ve gotten lots of reprints from them in the past, like Wurmcoil Engine, Solemn Simulacrum, Wrath of God, Bad Moon, Karmic Guide, and Black Sun's Zenith. And that makes it rough to buy good casual staples because they can get reprinted anytime. I feel the best chance for stuff to not get reprinted is wonky stuff from sets that are very specific to that set, and make less sense reprinted. Take Homura, Human Ascendant as a good example. Do you really see that making the cut in a Commander 2017 deck? I doubt it. I’ve also been targeting good casual cards on the Reserve List like Deranged Hermit, Memory Jar, and Eladamri, Lord of Leaves.

Therefore, the bulk of my purchases when a new Commander set hits are just new singles from everywhere. Watch for that with C16.

Now, setting aside the question of older casual reprints, C16 has brought a new take to all things Commander — the partners!

Partner Up!

So here’s the cool thing. A lot of people are going to use partners as a way to get multiple colors into their Commander deck. But you don’t have to do it that way at all. You can use two Commanders that share colors to get two leaders instead of one.

You know how good it is to build a deck that basically has a guaranteed play. Each game, you are basically guaranteed to be able to play your Commander as soon as you have the mana. From Isamaru, Hound of Konda or Rhys the Redeemed on the first turn all the way through the more powerful stuff later, you can play your leader on that key turn. That’s how you build your deck.

Consider how much more compelling it is to have two guaranteed plays. And unlike a four color deck that may have mana concerns, you don’t have to worry about that.

Take the Orzhov Twins:

Ravos, Soultender — 5-drop, pumps your team, and on future turns acts as a source of creature-based card advantage.

Tymna the Weaver — 3-drop, gives you cards based on the number of opponents you attacked this turn.

Does that sound hot to you? Both sources of card advantage based on swinging and bringing the heat with creatures. So let’s build a Commander deck around that!

I’m looking for smaller creatures and cheap aggro stuff. Ravos helps cards that go wide and recurs creatures. Tymna needs to attack multiple players, and thus is looking for wide bearing loads as well.

Here’s my deck!

Orzhov Partners ? Commander | Abe Sargent

And that’s a deck folks!

So the key is to use your two leaders here for card advantage. You have a built in Raise Dead effect for free, and some life-for-cards when you swing at people. Everything is built right here.

Both Tymna and Ravos suggested to me a deck that went a little wide. Ravos pumps a team, so you get a better effect if you have more creatures. Tymna rewards you for attacking multiple people, so multiple creatures is handy. That means token creatures are making an appearance.

Now I didn’t want to make this an exclusively token-centric deck. There are other options out there as well. But that’s where I started, and there are a lot of cheap, swing-at-people’s-face token makers running around, and we have a variety of paths to token land. One example is Master Trinketeer that can be used to make some Servo tokens at a rate of 4 mana a pop, as well as a 3/2 beater for 3 mana himself. Another example is the Angel of Innovation, who can bring a pair of Servos with her when she arrives at the party. Or, if you prefer, she can make herself bigger so she’s a serious aerial presence, and don’t forget she pumps the team while on the table as well.

And this theme continues. You can make tokens with a variety of Planeswalkers in the Orzhov colors, and some are here, like classic Sorin, Lord of Innistrad or Elspeth, Sun's Champion. Decree of Justice? Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet? Grave Titan?

You can see a variety of token makers here. So we can go wide. And because we have some full team pumping, with cards like Dictate of Heliod and our leader Ravos, we can sometimes go over as well!

But I wanted my deck to be more than a simple little Orzhov Token deck. You have a couple of Commander abilities to flesh out.

Commander Tymna. She wants to swing at multiple people to enhance your card drawing. How can we do that? Obvious ways include Whispersilk Cloak, Shizo, Death's Storehouse, or Rogue's Passage to make something unblockable. But what about Behind the Scenes? Doesn’t giving your full team skulk make a lot of them unblockable against a lot of opposition? (And you can activate it to pump your team so it has an extra bit of synergy from that). Another card that rewards Tymna is Custodi Soulcaller. You want to attack multiple people for Tymna already, so you can build up a pretty big trigger each attack with the Soulcaller. And I’ve seen melee work to get stuff through a lot in the last couple of months, so I am all in with the Soulcaller.

Consider Ravos. He wants to bring a dead creature from your graveyard to your hand each (of your) upkeeps. You don’t have to set this up of course. You can just swing as needed, and bring back something that died in combat or to mass removal. Stuff dies without you setting it up frequently enough that you’ll be fine. But why stop there?

There are two major issues a small beater deck like this has.

It’s more susceptible to mass removal. Why? It takes more creatures to get an even board state, it takes more to recover from a sweep, and a lot of mass removal is size or damage based, like Languish or Wildfire, that bigger creatures can survive.

It’s harder to break through a board state, and when you do, you don’t have enough size or effect to make it.

So I want to push the Ravos aspects of the deck a bit to help with the second. We are Raise Dead-ing a creature. So let’s do a few things to help that out.

The first is to have a few creatures here and there that self-sacrifice. You can sacrifice them, then recur them and replay them with Ravos. I thought about cards like Burnished Hart or Augur of Skulls, but those were deemed unnecessary. You’ll see a few here. And then I layered in a small handful of sacrifice stuff, like Viscera Seer and High Market. We don’t have a lot, I’d rather run creatures than sacrifice engines like Vampiric Rites or Blasting Station. But they are here a little. And then finally I added a good friend. Shirei, Shizo's Caretaker. Let’s take a look at Shirei in detail.

Any non-token one-power creature that dies will come back to play at the end of the turn if you are running Shirei. That’s powerful. There are a lot of ways to abuse that. I felt Kami of the False Hope was a perfect choice. If someone attacks you, sacrifice the Kami to Fog, and then it comes back at the end of that person’s turn, ready to sacrifice again to stop them next attack. You can Fog and keep everyone back, and yourself safe. It’s a nice barrier to hide behind while you swing with your stuff at folks. You’ll also note a lack of great blockers here — this deck wants to swing and bring it. So this can help against bigger threats as well. But that’s not my favorite.

Loyal Retainers

That is just amazing here. We have a good number of legendary creatures for you to sacrifice this and bring back something good. I tossed in a few more to make it work. And then you can keep on sacrificing on future turns with Shirei, popping it before each of your attacks. And you can pull it back with Ravos as well, and then replay it, sacrificing it to bring back a creature immediately. Remember the creature hits the battlefield not your hand.

Another of my favorite cards here is a recently printed card that evokes a friend from Portal: Three Kingdoms much like Loyal Retainers. Recruiter of the Guard. Yeah, it’s that good, right? Drop it and tutor your deck for one of a ton of great creatures to grab. And it makes a sweet card to bring back a few times with Ravos, right?

And since Ravos works with the graveyard anyway, I wanted to hit this theme. Take a look at cards like Karmic Guide and Sun Titan here, all classics. Lash them to Shirei and Custodi Soulcaller and such, and you can see some great graveyard fun times.

This is also a perfect shell to dust off those Debtors' Knell and bring them back out for another day in the sun.

Check out Leyline of Sanctity to help protect your graveyard. Most graveyard removal cards target the player who controls the graveyard. If they can’t target you, then you can’t lose the graveyard. I almost tossed in Seht's Tiger for a similar one-shot surprise, but I ran out of space. Other answers include Rootborn Defenses, every version of Vindicate ever printed, and such. Even my support plays into the theme as well. Profane Command? Can kill a creature, reanimate something, but don’t forget making your team hard to block and swinging for a bunch of cards with Tymna! Orzhov Charm can self-bounce a creature to protect it (or get another trigger off of Recruiter of the Guard or something), destroy a creature, and don’t forget you can bring back a dead 1 mana creature which plays perfectly into this deck. Obzedat's Aid can bring back a critical Planeswalker, artifact, or enchantment, in addition to a cool creature. Mother of Runes can protect your stuff from removal, but also make a creature the right protection in order to swing past a defense for Tymna! You get the idea.

I also made sure to give my smaller creatures some bite. We have creatures with tempo-tastic options, like Thalia, Heretic Cathar (or Blind Obedience for a non-creature) that can slow folks down. We also have a few hate-bear-esque bodies in here like Aven Mindcensor and Kambal, Consul of Allocation. You could easily flesh that part out, these two colors have a lot of hate that way.

And you can delve in and find some cool stuff with cards like Master of the Meek. There are a lot of little synergies and strong options here that play well with our theme. So take a look!

What did you think of our little double dose of Orzhov loving? Did you see something you liked? They great thing is that there are a lot of cards to recommend and consider. You can easily marry this idea with your card collection.

Would you want to consider stuff like . . . ?

Campaign of Vengeance? Skirsdag Flayer? Nekrataal? Bone Shredder? Divinity of Pride? Harsh Sustenance? Immortal Servitude? Knights of the Black Rose? Archetype of Finality? Basilisk Collar? Imposing Sovereign? Lingering Souls?