My Favorite Underrated Fallout Commander

Posted on August 29, 2024

If you've read my previous story about underrated Fallout cards, you probably know by now that the Fallout x Magic crossover is my Roman Empire. Even with all the sets that have come out in the six months since the set's release, I'm still going back and revisiting the cards frequently, and one of my favorite new commanders from the set has been Veronica, Dissident Scribe. Unfortunately for Veronica, she doesn't seem very popular, with only 48 decks to her name on EDHREC as I write this, so I'd like to get those numbers up. Here's what makes Veronica interesting, at least to me, and what a deck with her at the helm would look like.

Before we discuss the cards in the 99, let's break down what Veronica herself does. In terms of raw stats, Veronica is efficient but unremarkable, being a 3/3 creature for three mana with menace, a nice aggressive keyword that makes her harder to block in combat. She also has two relevant creature types in human and rogue, making her a great fit for those typal decks as well as any outlaw-themed decks.

Her first ability, which allows you to discard a card to draw a card when she attacks, is a solid ability that lets you get some extra card selection during your combats, but isn't a new or particularly exciting ability in Red. Her last ability, however, is what drew me to the card, and is what pushes her from an all right Red creature to a very efficient card advantage engine with a little bit of build-around. Whenever you discard your first card each turn, you'll create a junk token, which you can sacrifice at sorcery speed to exile the top card of your library and play that card until the end of the turn. Personally, I love the junk token mechanic; they have all the strength of other impulse card draw effects but with the added flexibility of choosing when you want those cards, reducing the chance of hitting a land after you've made your land drop or hitting a card you can't cast.

For anyone who has kept up with new cards this past year, these abilities may sound a little familiar. In last year's The Lost Caverns of Ixalan set, one of the sleeper hits from the set was a card called Inti, Seneschal of the Sun, which gave Red players the ability to buff their attacking creatures and play the top card of their library all by just discarding a card when attacking. Veronica and Inti are a lot alike, and while there's a valid argument that Inti is better, I prefer Veronica's flexibility and consistency over Inti's aggression and potential explosiveness. The two cards play very well together though, so Inti will be the first card we add to the 99 of this deck.

At first glance, it may seem like Veronica's second ability just makes her first ability better, as on her own it lets you essentially cast Thrill of Possibility whenever she attacks, but this ability also sneakily makes a ton of cards that a lot of Red decks already play much better. For example, while this ability may only trigger once each turn, it isn't restricted to just your turn. If you have ways to discard cards at instant-speed, you could trigger her four times a turn cycle, and as it turns out, Red has a lot of cards that discard at instant speed. Cards like the aforementioned Thrill of Possibility are exactly what this deck wants, as well as other variants like Demand Answers, Big Score, and Unexpected Windfall. This ability also pairs very well with permanents that can be used to draw and discard cards, like Collector's Vault, Matzalantli, the Great Door // The Core, and The Celestus, if you're willing to play with the Day/Night mechanic.

Since we'll be discarding a lot of cards with the deck, and since Veronica plays around with artifact tokens already, the secondary plan of our deck will lean into another one of Red's greatest strengths: its artifact synergies. We can use cards like Goblin Welder and Goblin Engineer to bring back the artifacts we discard by sacrificing the junk tokens Veronica makes, while cards like Reckless Fireweaver and Ingenious Artillerist will turn our artifacts into direct burn. Add in a few big artifacts to cheat into play or loop from the graveyard as wincons, like Portal to Phyrexia, Triplicate Titan, and Thunderhawk Gunship, and now we've got a stew going.

Finally, let's add in a few different ways we can use our junk tokens other than impulse draw. Farid, Enterprising Salvager can redirect attacks from your opponents' scariest creatures by goading them. Threefold Thunderhulk can sacrifice junk tokens to grow and make more gnomes on subsequent attacks. Finally, Ghirapur Aether Grid can tap our junk tokens and other artifacts to pick off small creatures or to push through that last little bit of damage to our opponents' faces. All we have to do now is fill out our deck with some mana rocks to ramp and some interaction cards, and the deck might look something like this: