I love white decks in Commander—not because they’re good. I mean, let’s be candid for a minute: Most mono-white decks are pretty terrible relative to what other colors can do. Once you get past splashable staples such as Swords to Plowshares, Stoneforge Mystic, and Austere Command, what else is there? How much more does white have to offer?

That’s what I love about white decks: puzzling over converting resources. For me, white decks are a glorious kind of Rube Goldberg machine. Other colors have powerful, swingy, game-ending cards such as Sepulchral Primordial, Palinchron, and Avenger of Zendikar. The white decks have grindy cards such as Angel of Serenity that you have to combine with your Trading Post and Emeria, the Sky Ruin to begin making any progress.

You don’t win because your cards are overpowered or because you’re doing something better than the rest of the table. Let’s be serious: Storm Herd does not compare well to the likes of Exsanguinate, Insurrection, Tooth and Nail, or Time Stretch. When you shuffle up these decks, you win games because you used all of the tricks available to you to do more stuff than all of your opponents and be the last player left with a threat that mattered.

My white deck of choice for the last several years has been Kemba, Kha Regent. Cats, creature tokens, and Equipment are among my favorite things, so it’s pretty tough for me to argue with this combination of effects. This particular deck started out as pure Cat Tribal Voltron, but it since has evolved into a monstrously grindy attrition deck that sometimes aggros people out with Swords.

The deck is built to accrue small advantages over the course of a longer game—one Sword hit or Trading Post activation at a time. Very few cards don’t generate some inherent card advantage, and the ones that don’t tend to make your opponents dead. Throw in a few card-advantage wombo-combos and utility answers, and we have a monster of a deck that’s a blast to play. Let’s take a look:

Kemba, Kha Regent ? Commander | Carlos Gutierrez

• Commander (0)

• Lands (38)
• 19 Snow-Covered Plains
• 1 Buried Ruin
• 1 Urza's Tower
• 1 Urza's Mine
• 1 Urza's Power Plant
• 1 Mishra's Factory
• 1 Blinkmoth Nexus
• 1 Inkmoth Nexus
• 1 Windbrisk Heights
• 1 Mistveil Plains
• 1 Ghost Quarter
• 1 New Benalia
• 1 Ancient Tomb
• 1 Emeria, the Sky Ruin
• 1 Cloudpost
• 1 Glimmerpost
• 1 Vesuva
• 1 Thespian's Stage
• 1 Temple of the False God
• 1 High Market

• Creatures (20)
• 1 Indomitable Archangel
• 1 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Stoneforge Mystic
• 1 Puresteel Paladin
• 1 Mangara of Corondor
• 1 Burnished Hart
• 1 Treasure Hunter
• 1 Sanctum Gargoyle
• 1 Karmic Guide
• 1 Weathered Wayfarer
• 1 Stonehewer Giant
• 1 Mentor of the Meek
• 1 Sunblast Angel
• 1 Taj-Nar Swordsmith
• 1 Eternal Dragon
• 1 Razor Hippogriff
• 1 Restoration Angel
• 1 Sun Titan
• 1 Angel of Serenity
• 1 Kor Cartographer

• Equipment (23)
• 1 Sword of Fire and Ice
• 1 Sword of Feast and Famine
• 1 Sword of War and Peace
• 1 Sword of Light and Shadow
• 1 Batterskull
• 1 Darksteel Plate
• 1 Shield of Kaldra
• 1 Skullclamp
• 1 Leonin Bola
• 1 Sculpting Steel
• 1 Konda's Banner
• 1 Swiftfoot Boots
• 1 Lightning Greaves
• 1 Gorgon Flail
• 1 Bonehoard
• 1 Mortarpod
• 1 Basilisk Collar
• 1 Umezawa's Jitte
• 1 Haunted Plate Mail
• 1 Piston Sledge
• 1 Thornbite Staff
• 1 Champion's Helm
• 1 Sigil of Distinction

• Artifacts (9)
• 1 Trading Post
• 1 Expedition Map
• 1 Culling Dais
• 1 Mimic Vat
• 1 Slate of Ancestry
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Scroll Rack
• 1 Everflowing Chalice
• 1 Wayfarer's Bauble

• Spells (9)
• 1 Steelshaper's Gift
• 1 Enlightened Tutor
• 1 Faith's Reward
• 1 Karmic Justice
• 1 Return to Dust
• 1 Swords to Plowshares
• 1 Path to Exile
• 1 Austere Command
• 1 Dispatch

Buy This Deck

This deck’s plan has four key pieces: mana, value, protection, and interaction. We’ll start with the mana and briefly run down each of these pieces.

Strong Mana

To that end, you often spend the early turns of the game assembling powerful colorless lands such as Cloudpost, Urza’s lands, and Temple of the False God. Otherwise, you can assemble a recursion engine that lets you loop through Kor Cartographer, Solemn Simulacrum, and Burnished Hart enough times that you have enough mana to operate with. Everflowing Chalice for 5 or more is not uncommon in the midgame, and it is usually key to setting up the big turns you need to take out your opponents.

Protection

To that end, it’s critically important to find ways to keep her around. The very best cards for this are Darksteel Plate and Shield of Kaldra. They may be expensive, but once Kemba is indestructible, it’s pretty easy to suit her up with Swords or hexproof-granting Equipment to make her all but untouchable. You can go even deeper if you want by suiting up Indomitable Archangel with some indestructible or shroudy goodness for yet another layer of protection.

Value

My two favorite cards are Puresteel Paladin and Mentor of the Meek. Mentor should be pretty obvious, but Puresteel Paladin does one cool trick that I’ve written about once before. Sacrifice your Equipment to Piston Sledge, and Faith's Reward everything back for an enormous burst of card advantage in the late game! Is it good? It absolutely isn’t, but it’s among my favorite cute interactions from a bad Standard deck I enjoyed.

Even Stonehewer Giant does a pretty good impression of a value engine. This deck is good at making creatures die, so the Giant’s first target can be Thornbite Staff. From there, you can go off with Mortarpod and other crazy nonsense to put most of the Equipment in your deck onto the battlefield.

Interaction

Sometimes, though, it’s a card that’s the problem instead of a player. In that case, Mangara of Corondor and Angel of Serenity are the effects you’re looking for. With both of these, you can use their abilities and sacrifice them with that on the stack. With Mangara, that lets you save him to kill additional permanents later. With Angel of Serenity, it means you are able to exile creatures instead of giving your opponents their guys back.

With Emeria, Nim Deathmantle, and Mimic Vat as recursion engines, you have access to as many of these effects as you need once you’ve found the first one.

So that’s the plan. No single thing that this deck does is excessively powerful. The trick is that when you develop a strong mana advantage, you can do a lot of little things. These small interactions and edges add up over the course of a game. As long as you can keep your value engines going, everyone else will eventually run out of cards, and you’ll be the last one with threats on the table. To that end, redundancy and resiliency are critically important. The goal is to build your deck such that your various engines can feed into one another.

I’ve always been of the opinion that good decks never stop evolving. Over the years, Kemba has changed pretty significantly, but nothing has promised to change Kemba up more than this week’s Magic: The Gathering—Commander (2014 Edition) previews. It starts with the awesome ramp tool that is Myriad Landscape and abusable mana rocks like Commander's Sphere and Unstable Obelisk. There’s also the promise of fun, swingy Equipment like Assault Suit. But the biggest potential change is the new white Planeswalker Nahiri.

The question is whether Nahiri replaces Kemba as the commander of this deck—or if she fits better into the ninety-nine. Having consistent access to both creatures and Equipment recursion is powerful, and Nahiri would open up a ton of deck-building space by letting you cut some copies of Darksteel Plate and Champion's Helm effects.

However, What Nahiri lacks is Kemba’s ability to run away with a game, either by overwhelming opponents in Cats or by just stealing a game with commander damage. This style of deck needs an abundance of resources, and Kemba gives you a lot more to work with, even if Nahiri is more flexible. White decks need at least one powerful thing going for them, and while Nahiri is new and exciting, Kemba is still more powerful.

Whispers of the Muse

• What kind of unfair things can happen when you give Brago, King Eternal double strike?
• Puresteel Paladin plus Sunforger and Leonin Shikari should be a thing.
• How many times can I clone an Enchantress? Is there a way to build Enchantress so that it’s not obnoxious or degenerate? Maybe it could be with Pharika, God of Affliction.
• How insane is Myriad Landscape? A Krosan Verge for every kind of deck is just incredible.