In this experiment, we go deep on all five colors at once while building a Commander deck and rounding it out with the tribal synergies of the primal forces of nature.

This week’s deck started with Prismatic Omen. One of the decks I have on Magic Online, for when I occasionally boot it up to play some casual games, is a Modern build constructed to take advantage of Prismatic Omen in various powerful ways. Cascade spells help ensure my Omen, and cards such as Tendrils of Corruption and Howl of the Night Pack are my powerhouses once my lands are feeling all prismatic.

For today, I want to fuse that concept with a Commander deck, broadening the deck’s scope both with the format’s one-of requirements and with another theme enforced by the deck’s commander: Horde of Notions.

The Ground Up

To start, we have to solve the problem of building a hundred-card deck essentially around a single card.

Ardent Plea, Demonic Dread, and Violent Outburst are Alara Reborn’s offerings to our plan. As long as we don’t have any other spells in our library that cost 2 or less, these spells will always cascade into Prismatic Omen. Shardless Agent is Planechase (2012 Edition)’s contribution to the same concept, though he has the slight upside of being able to chump-block.

Tutors are obvious possibilities here, but they tend to be on the more expensive side in terms of mana cost, and I’d like to have the Prismatic Omen online sooner rather than later. In addition, they tend to be very black-heavy (though we could use Idyllic Tutor, Plea for Guidance, Golden Wish, or the like). But tutors are commonplace in Commander, and people have mixed feelings about them and how they can lead to scripted gameplay. While we want our Omen to be scripted, the rest is more fun if it plays out differently each game.

Now, it won’t take long for opponents to realize our reliance on the Omen. We won’t be completely beholden to having it on the battlefield, but many of our deck’s spells will scale quite nicely as long as we control it. They’ll want to rid us of our signature enchantment, so we need a few ways to bring it back.

Praetor's Counsel is among my favorite cards, both for the Phyrexian flavor and for the immense power and card advantage it brings. Obzedat's Aid is a versatile spell, reanimating our Omen as needed or, otherwise, any other of our permanent cards we might fancy. Mistveil Plains can only activate if we have enough white permanents, but when we do, we can just put Prismatic Omen back onto the bottom of our library for us to cascade into again. Eternal Witness and Creeping Renaissance can buy back our enchantment as well, and Privileged Position will help us protect it.

Next up, we have actual concerns about our lands. When playing five colors, mana issues are exacerbated, so we’ll want ways to find the colors we need outside of Prismatic Omen. In addition, when we do have the Omen, to take full advantage of it, we’ll want a lot of lands regardless of their printed names and types.

For help with both of these issues, we have green. Ramp spells will accelerate us into the game and help us find the colors we need at the moment—as long as we have the green mana to cast the ramp spells to begin with. To this end, I’ve included more Forests than basic lands of any other type. Ravnica shock lands will help us with mana-fixing, and since they have basic types (despite not being basic), they’ll contribute to our basic-land-type counts in an Omenless pinch. Of course, if you have original dual lands, such as Plateau and Tropical Island, feel free to roll with those.

One nongreen card we have here is Terraformer. Probably unused most anywhere else, this little guy finally might have a chance. (Okay, maybe not.) He acts as a kind of Prismatic Omen in lieu of the real thing. If we have a Jaws of Stone, we can just pay 1 and make all our lands Mountains. If we have a Flow of Ideas, we can just pay 1 and make all our lands Islands. In fact, if we have enough mana, we can pay 1 to make our lands Mountains, cast the Jaws of Stone, and then pay 1 afterward to make our lands Islands and cast Flow of Ideas. He can even be used to cast multicolored spells: Tap a land for one color, pay to change all the lands, tap another land for a second color, and repeat as necessary. It can make a, for example, Maelstrom Archangel pretty expensive, but it gets the job done.

Realmwright and Elsewhere Flask would be neat additions for the deck as well, but as they cost less than 3, they can’t be included in this cascade-focused iteration of the deck.

Make It Big

Now let’s assume we played our Forests, ramped up our mana, and landed a Prismatic Omen. Here are a few of our sweet, scaling spells.

Armored Ascension is big. Or, rather, it can make one of our creatures big. If we enchant our commander while we control sixteen lands, we can take someone out with commander damage in one shot. Blanchwood Armor is nice, but I have to go with the flying. Primal Bellow would be an awesome mid-attack surprise, but it’s pretty much the worst card to cascade into when trying to find an Omen.

Crypt Ghast can act as a virtual Mirari's Wake, though all the additional mana comes out . Mirari's Wake is basically a better option, but you could always play both, and Crypt Ghast takes advantage of the theme. Plus, extorting with all that extra mana is sweet.

Eternal Flame is pretty bad. I already mentioned taking advantage of theme, right? This card has the upside of making your opponents read it. It has the downside of losing you the game. It has the upside of being from The Dark.

Koth of the Hammer was actually the main card I wanted to synergize Prismatic Omen with. Prismatic Omen works with all three of Koth’s abilities. His +1 isn’t particularly exciting for a Commander deck, but his -2 can make a bunch of mana, and his -5 doesn’t immediately win the game, but it does make the game really, really fun while the emblem quickly forces the game to a conclusion.

Coalition Victory may be banned, but that’s not the only five-colored weird sorcery from Invasion block. Last Stand is like a doubled Corrupt plus Spitting Earth plus Beacon of Creation plus Flow of Ideas . . . minus a Flow of Ideas (draw but then discard). I can imagine this being awesome to resolve when all our lands are all our types.

There are a bunch of other Prismatic Omen synergies in the list, and you can always tailor the ones you use to your collection and/or preference.

Elemental Time

Really, you could take everything up to this point and build any five-color Commander deck around it. But for today, I’ve selected this guy:

Now, I have a confession. I’ve had a Horde of Notions deck for a long time. But the deck doesn’t have any other Elementals in it. I hardly ever cast the commander. The deck does have a theme, and that’s enchantments, but it does pain me to have a Commander deck that doesn’t, in any way, take advantage of its Commander. Progenitus would be a slightly better option, but only because he can so easily close out games once I’m able to cast him.

For our Omen Elemental deck, though, I decided to rectify my disrespect for Horde of Notions and give him plenty of allies.

The Verdant Force cycle, completed only recently in Commander (2013 Edition) happens to consist of five powerful Elementals. They’re big, and they produce valuable bonuses on each upkeep—not each of our upkeeps, but each upkeep.

Mulldrifter, Shriekmaw, and any other Lorwyn or Morningtide evokers you might want to include offer a lot of bonus as well. I wouldn’t fault your selection of Fault Grinder, and running Dawnfluke wouldn’t be a fluke. (Sorry.)

Crib Swap, and/or perhaps Nameless Inversion, is potent removal befitting any Horde of Notions Commander deck.

Just in case you missed it, Horde of Notions allows you to cast any Elemental card from your graveyard for . That means the Forces will keep coming back, the evokers will provide enters-the-battlefield triggers repeatedly (as long as we can get them to die), and Crib Swap will provide an almost endless stream of changeling children.

Supreme Exemplar has champion an Elemental, which can let us use Horde of Notions’s superpower in an interesting way. Say someone casts Hallowed Burial while we have the Horde on the battlefield. This would be quite unfortunate, as we would lose our commander. But, in response, we could activate Horde of Notions’s ability targeting Supreme Exemplar in our graveyard. It enters, champions the Horde, and then moves to the bottom of our library, thus returning our commander. In that case, we did lose the Exemplar, but when it comes to Wrath of God or the like, this trick becomes even more potent. Oh, and the Exemplar is also a 10-power flying creatures. Nova Chaser can work as well, but its efficacy is in its lower (4-mana) cost, which is less enticing for us here.

Conspiracy makes all of our creature cards Elementals (or another type if we chose). This means Horde of Notions’s activated ability now works on other creatures, such as Eternal Witness, Terraformer, Prophet of Kruphix, and Maelstrom Archangel.

The last card I’ll specifically cover here is Maelstrom Wanderer. It’s an Elemental, making it buddy-buddy with Horde of Notions despite the fact that the Wanderer leads plenty of Commander decks of its own. However, the key here is that the Horde allows us to cast the Elemental in our graveyard—rather than just put it onto the battlefield. That seems obvious with Crib Swap, but for Maelstrom Wanderer (and Shardless Agent in the case of an Elemental Conspiracy), that means we can pay, make a 7/5 with haste, and cascade twice off a cost of 8.

(Note that Horde of Notions’s Oracle text reads play and not cast, but that is still different than put onto the battlefield. Play just means: If it’s a land, you play it, but if it’s a nonland, you cast it. I suppose it’s templated that way in case there were ever, somehow, an Elemental land card in someone’s graveyard.)

"Elemental Omen"

• Commander (0)

• Creatures (25)
• 1 Baleful Force
• 1 Celestial Force
• 1 Chromanticore
• 1 Courser of Kruphix
• 1 Crypt Ghast
• 1 Dungrove Elder
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Fertilid
• 1 Maelstrom Archangel
• 1 Magmatic Force
• 1 Mulldrifter
• 1 Prophet of Kruphix
• 1 Shardless Agent
• 1 Shriekmaw
• 1 Silverglade Elemental
• 1 Supreme Exemplar
• 1 Terraformer
• 1 Tidal Force
• 1 Verdant Force
• 1 Yavimaya Elder
• 1 Burnished Hart
• 1 Draco
• 1 Korlash, Heir to Blackblade
• 1 Maelstrom Wanderer
• 1 Patron of the Orochi

• Planeswalkers (2)
• 1 Koth of the Hammer
• 1 Liliana of the Dark Realms

• Spells (32)
• 1 Tendrils of Corruption
• 1 Violent Outburst
• 1 Crib Swap
• 1 Beacon of Creation
• 1 Boundless Realms
• 1 Corrupt
• 1 Creeping Renaissance
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Demonic Dread
• 1 Eternal Flame
• 1 Explosive Vegetation
• 1 Flow of Ideas
• 1 Howl of the Night Pack
• 1 Hunting Wilds
• 1 Jaws of Stone
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Last Stand
• 1 Obzedat's Aid
• 1 Peregrination
• 1 Praetor's Counsel
• 1 Skyshroud Claim
• 1 Ardent Plea
• 1 Armored Ascension
• 1 Collective Restraint
• 1 Conspiracy
• 1 Maelstrom Nexus
• 1 Prismatic Omen
• 1 Privileged Position
• 1 Chromatic Lantern
• 1 Naked Singularity
• 1 Nightmare Lash
• 1 Vedalken Shackles

• Lands (40)
• 11 Forest
• 3 Plains
• 4 Island
• 4 Mountain
• 4 Swamp
• 1 Blood Crypt
• 1 Breeding Pool
• 1 Cabal Coffers
• 1 Emeria, the Sky Ruin
• 1 Godless Shrine
• 1 Hallowed Fountain
• 1 Mistveil Plains
• 1 Overgrown Tomb
• 1 Sacred Foundry
• 1 Steam Vents
• 1 Stomping Ground
• 1 Temple Garden
• 1 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
• 1 Watery Grave

Buy This Deck

Of course, there are plenty of cards I didn’t specifically discuss, but they mostly fit into the themes outlined above.

Anyway, if you’ve ever wanted to play Howl of the Night Pack, Jaws of Stone, and Flow of Ideas in the same deck, or if you’ve just wanted to control all five Forces at once, give this deck a try.

Andrew Wilson

@Silent7Seven

fissionessence at hotmail dot com