And here is a good example of that. A couple of weeks ago I created an artifact matters deck around the theme of the non-Green color combination led by Breya, Etherium Shaper. And while non-Green certainly has one obvious artifact centric theme, there are other mechanical themes we could give a non-Green deck. For example, Wizards could have printed a flying-matters theme instead.

Consider cards like Favorable Winds and Dragon Tempest that help out flyers. And then there is an obvious way to use the “Flying Matters” theme. You run sweeping ground based removal, like Earthquake to handle any non-flyers on the table and you swing in the air.

That’s a pretty cool theme to me. Now if Wizards made that one of the official themes of a Commander product later on, that’d be cool. We could have some more “Flying Matters” cards out there. But I wanted to build a flying deck using the same colors as Breya. A non-artifact Breya deck.

Now there are a couple of ways you could make this work, mechanically. First, you could partner two flyers that get you this color combination. Ravos, Soultender and Kraum, Ludevic's Opus. Or you could just run Breya, Etherium Shaper herself, as she makes two 1/1 flying creatures when she hits the battlefield. Let’s skip Breya this time, as she doesn’t fly herself. I want to keep this deck to flyers only, in order to fully flesh out theme.

Kraum and Ravos it is!

Flying Flyers ? Commander | Abe Sargent

• Commander (2)
• 1 Kraum, Ludevic's Opus
• 1 Ravos, Soultender

• Creatures (31)
• 1 Angel of Despair
• 1 Angel of the Dire Hour
• 1 Archetype of Imagination
• 1 Avatar of Fury
• 1 Aven Mindcensor
• 1 Baleful Strix
• 1 Bloodgift Demon
• 1 Bone Shredder
• 1 Cloudblazer
• 1 Dragonlord Silumgar
• 1 Draining Whelk
• 1 Ethersworn Adjudicator
• 1 Fog Bank
• 1 Gisela, Blade of Goldnight
• 1 Glen Elendra Archmage
• 1 Ishai, Ojutai Dragonspeaker
• 1 Kaalia of the Vast
• 1 Karmic Guide
• 1 Keiga, the Tide Star
• 1 Kokusho, the Evening Star
• 1 Mulldrifter
• 1 Ob Nixilis, Unshackled
• 1 Pilgrim's Eye
• 1 Rune-Scarred Demon
• 1 Ryusei, the Falling Star
• 1 Scourge of Kher Ridges
• 1 Sprite Noble
• 1 Steel Hellkite
• 1 Sunscorch Regent
• 1 Thunderbreak Regent
• 1 Wall of Denial

• Spells (31)
• 1 Fault Line
• 1 Magmaquake
• 1 Return to Dust
• 1 Sudden Spoiling
• 1 Earthquake
• 1 Recurring Insight
• 1 Dragon Tempest
• 1 Favorable Winds
• 1 Flood
• 1 Ghostly Prison
• 1 Gravitational Shift
• 1 Luminarch Ascension
• 1 No Mercy
• 1 Phyrexian Arena
• 1 Propaganda
• 1 Spirit Away
• 1 Armillary Sphere
• 1 Blade of Selves
• 1 Chromatic Lantern
• 1 Commander's Sphere
• 1 Darksteel Ingot
• 1 Everflowing Chalice
• 1 Gem of Becoming
• 1 Gilded Lotus
• 1 Lightning Greaves
• 1 Skyship Weatherlight
• 1 Skysovereign, Consul Flagship
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Sword of Fire and Ice
• 1 Sword of the Animist
• 1 Bident of Thassa

• Lands (35)
• 4 Island
• 5 Mountain
• 5 Plains
• 5 Swamp
• 1 Ash Barrens
• 1 Buried Ruin
• 1 Celestial Colonnade
• 1 City of Brass
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Faerie Conclave
• 1 Forbidden Orchard
• 1 Mana Confluence
• 1 Reflecting Pool
• 1 Rupture Spire
• 1 Temple of the False God
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Transguild Promenade
• 1 Winding Canyons

Buy This Deck

Flying beats for the win! As mentioned above, we have a few flying enablers already — Favorable Winds and Dragon Tempest are both mentioned. Beyond those we have a small handful of other enablers, like Sprite Noble or Gravitational Shift. Those all work nicely. I also decided to toss in Flood. It can tap down ground creatures until you find a mass removal spell for them.

Another major theme is killing the ground pounders. We have a handful of X damage spells like Magmaquake and Earthquake in there. You can clean out the non-flyers and make the world safe for flyers out there. You also have Scourge of Kher Ridges which can hit ground pounders or flyers if you need to head skyward. Take a look at Ryusei, the Falling Star. It’s an on-curve Dragon that can play a lot of roles. And when it eventually dies, you can clean out some more ground vermin. Good stuff, right?

One of my favorite combos in here is Archetype of Imagination. Why run it, you already fly? Right? Because it drops all other creatures to the ground. That turns your Earthquake effects into a bunch of Plague Winds. And one-sided Wrath of Gods are a great way to push the table around.

Every creature flies! The obvious place to run flyers is beaters like Avatar of Fury and Gisela, Blade of Goldnight. But I needed to have some non-beater utility cards. I couldn’t run Solemn Simulacrum, but there’s nothing wrong with Pilgrim's Eye. Take a look at cheap defenders like Fog Bank and Wall of Denial, or Bone Shredder for removal, and such. Karmic Guide. Baleful Strix. Cloudblazer. You get the idea.

I tried to include some fun cards in here too. Take Kaalia of the Vast. Isn’t it fun to have these powerhouses of the format in different roles and not leading a deck? She fits here nicely considering the number of Dragons, Angels, and Demons we are running. And you can run Blue for her to drop that she couldn’t normally run, like Keiga, the Tide Star. Dragons, Angels, and Demons all (mostly) have flying. And your opponent will never know if Kaalia will work or not, so it’ll be pretty confusing over there.

1 powerful subtle card here is Sudden Spoiling. Now Sudden Spoiling has always been a useful trick to unveil against someone. From a combat trick to a way to denude someone’s board position to allow another payer to kill their stuff, it’s pretty good. Don’t forget that the creatures affected lose all of their abilities. I like using it to deal with indestructible creatures. So it’s a great trick generally. But here? It’s perfect! Since your removal is damage based, you can use this to kill creatures that are normally immune to damage, destruction or regenerate. And they now have easy-to-kill defenses so you can kill some bigger creatures that might have otherwise survived. But there’s another thing you can do. Drop a team to the ground so your Earthquake can work on the whole lot of them!

Sudden Spoiling for the win!

There are a few cards I thought about. If you had the cash, then Moat is clearly a winner here. There are some other cards that popped into my mind as I was building this deck. Form of the Dragon and Teferi's Moat continue the Moat theme. Dragon Roost can spit out some Dragon tokens as you have spare mana. It’s old and templated oddly, but Serra Aviary is flavorful. What about Thunder Dragon? Stuffy Doll? Unburial Rites? Add Snow-Covered Basics and toss in Adarkar Windform to drop opposing creatures? Or you could add in Phyrexian Splicer to move flying from one creature to another for a turn, saving one person’s creature while endangering another. (And you can just give flying to your own creature that already has it if you want).

I’ve always had a fondness for Sweep and Keep decks. This is a genre of deck that runs mass removal that kills lot stuff, but not yours. Sometimes it’s easy to build that deck (like a Mono-White deck with Mass Calcify). But I have adored running decks like Pestilence with Protection from Black creatures and such. One of my favorites is a deck using Thran Weaponry to tap and pump all creatures +2/+2, including your foes, and then play Retribution of the Meek to kill all of the newly eligible creatures save for my one-power creatures that are now just 3 and still safe.

And this is another entry in that line. Unfortunately, our foes will run a lot of flyers in Commander land. So if you wanted, you could run stuff like Predator, Flagship (which I’d rule would count in this deck us represents a flying skyship). This deck used to run Demonic Tutor, until I replaced it with the Good Ship Lollypop . . . er . . . Skyship Weatherlight. Flavor win!

Other flavor wins might include Earthbind and Tightening Coils (I wish Pin to the Earth had the needed “loses flying” language!) Oh, and note that if all that is left on the battlefield post-Earthquake are flyers, then Skyblinder Staff suddenly looks really hot. I’m just saying. And if for some reason you seek to drop one of your own creatures back to the ground, but to keep it safe from Earthquakes, might I recommend Magebane Armor?

It’s too bad that Burning Palm Efreet doesn’t fly itself, or else I would have pulled that thing out of the dust of history and made it a feature of today’s deck!

Anyways, that’s a deck! So what did you think about our good flying theme? Does it work for you? Are you ready to drop Earthquake? And is there anything I missed for this deck? Just let me know!