This week, we come to the first of three opponent-colored guilds. Unlike Dimir and Gruul, the card pool for Boros (and also Orzhov and Simic) is much more limited, as these color combinations only received support in a handful of sets (most notably Apocalypse, Ravnica: City of Guilds, and Eventide). Still, these colors are popular and powerful, perhaps none more so than Boros.

Strengths

• Beating Up – Boros brings the beats, hitting hard and fast with haste, flying, first strike, and double strike. They don’t usually have any evasion beyond flying, as the whole point of Boros is to meet the opponents on the field of battle (i.e. blocking) and soundly defeat them. In addition to their creatures, red and white excel at damage-dealing spells: creature pump, red burn, and white retribution effects (e.g. Eye for an Eye, Honorable Passage, and Divine Deflection).
• Blowing Away – The removal available to Boros is second-to-none. Boros can access white’s arsenal of sweepers and creature removal, which lets you attack fearlessly, knowing that you can reset the board once you’ve pushed the first wave of creatures as far as they can go.

In addition, Boros is king of exiling artifacts. If you are dealing with Darksteel Plate/Forge/Colossus, I highly recommend loading a Boros deck with Dust to Dust, Return to Dust, Into the Core, and Revoke Existence.

• Brushing Aside – A big part of the synergy between red and white is that white protects red from some of its more short-sighted tendencies. Earthquake for 20? Give your team protection from red. Walked into a sweeper? Faith's Reward and Death or Glory let you walk it off. Avatar of Slaughter, Repercussion, and Furnace of Rath created a dangerous board state for you? Give your creatures Safe Passage. And nothing takes the sting out of a deck full of mass-damage effects like a lifelinking army.
• Blasting Off – Both red and white typically begin the game with an infantry assault before establishing air superiority and finishing off the enemy with an aerial bombardment. Red Dragons, white Angels, and (for some reason) R/W Angels make for an overwhelming endgame. Blue can also take the high road, but Boros combines it with a high tempo early attack and a range of Earthquake effects to put your opponents away. Most other guilds have far fewer flyers.
• Bulking Up – White has an affinity for Equipment—Steelshaper's Gift, Stoneforge Mystic, Stonehewer Giant, and Taj-Nar Swordsmith are the big ones—and red’s aggressive weenies are the perfect complement for an Equipment theme.

Weaknesses

You may be tempted to rely on artifact mana to overcome this, but this both limits your options for sweeping the board and makes you vulnerable to other players’ removal. Sun Titan becomes even more of a necessity than usual when playing Boros, as you will no doubt have an assortment of mana rocks in your graveyard by the midgame.

Your best bet is probably to go all-in on red’s Wheel effects to ensure that you never miss a land drop and never stall on tempo; Wheel of Fortune, Wheel of Fate, Reforge the Soul, Dragon Mage, Incendiary Command, and numerous others are not played enough in Commander. The weenies you commit to the board in the early game will eventually be outclassed, but you can draw into your big guns and removal, and constantly cycling their hands will be more disruptive to your opponents than you might expect.

Hidden Gems

Fight to the Death – Very occasionally, one of my opponents will attack someone other than me. When that happens, Fight to the Death will kill all that player’s stuff while leaving my forces unharmed. If an opponent has the temerity to attack me, I can still use this before blockers are declared to blow up his or her stuff.

Firemane Angel – Let’s be clear: You could cast a much better creature than this for 6 mana. But whatever creature you make will probably die, and then you’ll be wishing that dead Dragon in your ’yard was a Firemane Angel.¹ Then in the late game, you’ll be wishing even more fervently that you had a Firemane in your ’yard as you play your umpteenth land and pass the turn. In a color that struggles to draw enough cards, a late-game cockroach like this can save your bacon.

Master Warcraft – White likes to tell others what to do, and red is the color of impetuous action. That’s why this is a perfect blend of the two colors: You can tell an opponent to rush headlong into battle or force him to sit on his hands (although once you choose the attackers, their controller decides whom they attack, so make sure you have your shields up). You can even play it on your own turn to ensure that your attack doesn’t meet any resistance.

Orim's Thunder – Another card that Abe Sargent turned me onto, Orim's Thunder is among the best pieces of spot removal in the game. For a mere 4 mana, you can destroy both Akroma's Memorial and Akroma, Angel of Wrath.

Searing Meditation – Life-gain is important in multiplayer, but it doesn’t actually win you games or affect the board state . . . until now. With Searing Meditation, incidental life-gain from cards like Sun Droplet, Lightning Helix, and Essence Warden can either be spot removal or a win con; your lifelinked creatures become even more powerful, and your opponents must suddenly play around life-gaining permanents and instants.

Spitemare – Spitemare is among the best rattlesnake creatures around, and if it doesn’t have any creatures to deter, you can swing it in and dare your opponents to block. Indestructibility and Furnace of Rath sold separately.

• Orim's Thunder
• Path to Exile
• Return to Dust
• Reverse Damage
• Swords to Plowshares
• Terminate
• Wrecking Ball

The deck actually has more instants to retrieve than that, but I'm probably going to win any game in which I get to cast all of these spells for free, so it doesn’t matter.

Waves of Aggression – Relentless Assault and its variants are some of the most powerful sorceries in the game, and this is best of breed. Being able to turn excess lands into excessive amounts of combat damage is a no-brainer, and since you were playing Boros already, I’m sure you're capable of turning a couple of extra swings into a win.

Meet the Boss

Crap

Once again, the secret to not having any crap legends is to avoid having any during the bad old days of Magic’s infancy. By my reckoning, Boros didn’t get its first legends until Ravnica.

Fair to Middlin’

• Basandra, Battle Seraph
• Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter
• Skullbriar, the Walking Grave
• Edric, Spymaster of Trest
• Nin, the Pain Artist

I think it’s pretty clear that Basandra is the runt of the litter, although she’s undoubtedly the prettiest. She’s an efficient creature, and her Nettling Imp ability can earn you some advantage, but you can't choose whom the creatures attack. Ultimately, she disappoints because she shuts down Boros’s powerful combat tricks and damage-prevention spells, while your opponents can still use activated abilities such as Maze of Ith’s to screw up your attacks.

Razia, Boros Archangel – For 8 mana, you get a creature that isn't quite worth it. She is a salad of special abilities, but WotC really missed the bus with her. 6/3 is a funny stat line for an Angel, and I have always imagined that she was concepted as a 6/6 who spread damage around, a la Spitemare. If she read, “Whenever Razia is dealt damage by any source, if it is the first damage she has received this turn, redirect up to three points of that damage to that source’s controller,” I’d play her. Instead, she can only tap once each round, and that makes her far too vulnerable in multiplayer.

Just Johnnyable

Jor Kadeen, the Prevailer – JK is powerful enough in his own right that he’s worth putting into any Boros deck, but if he’s commanding your forces, you want to achieve metalcraft early and often. The biggest lesson from Scars of Mirrodin Limited is that you need a buttload of artifacts in your deck to regularly achieve metalcraft—at least 25% of a forty-card deck. That means building around JK with a lot more artifacts than you would normally use. Once you do, though, the power level can be off the charts, and your forces receive the bonus to their power whether he attacks or not, making him a constant threat. See my list at the end for more ideas.

Powerhouses

Aurelia, the Warleader – Stats-wise, Aurelia is slightly weak at 6 for a 3/4, although the addition of flying, vigilance, and haste means she will always be useful (cf. Lightning Angel). However, a free Relentless Assault makes her a brutally efficient force multiplier. The interesting thing is that this puts pressure on your opponents to deal with the rest of your creatures even before Aurelia comes into play, so there’s a good chance they’ll be running on empty by the second or third time you play her. And if Aurelia has to attack alone, don’t forget Angelic Destiny and Loxodon Warhammer!

Gisela, Blade of Goldnight – Boros will never have a more powerful commander than Gisela—at least I hope not! Gisela is among the biggest game-changers ever, and whether you love her or hate her (guess which side I'm on), you can't deny her impact. If someone else is The Threat, Gisela will enable the rest of the table to give that player the bum’s rush; otherwise, you probably just became The Threat. Given that she is in the colors of Double Cleave, Psychotic Fury, and all kinds of exalted nonsense, she is a bigger threat for a one-shot kill than almost any other commander, and she makes alpha strikes a breeze. She does invite attacks because of this, but attacking into Gisela’s controller often seems like an exercise in futility. In short: KILL ON SIGHT.

Boros Battle Plans

Like Gruul yesterday, Boros sometimes seems one-dimensional, but that doesn’t mean that building is easy or that there’s only one way to do it. Here are some options:

• Voltron – Razia is the only Boros commander who would look out of place in an Equipment-heavy deck. Everyone else thrives with a sword in each hand!
• Tokens – Boros is the military guild, so give your commander an army. Look for cards like Goldnight Commander and Cathars' Crusade that synergize well with token generators such as Mobilization and Spectral Procession.
• Scorched Earth – Combine red’s ability to damage all creatures with white’s ability to shield your forces. Magmaquake is a lot less symmetrical when your army is shielded by a Mark of Asylum, and even Repercussion is no problem for you when Knighthood and Valor give all your creatures first strike.
• Deterrence – White has a ton of rattlesnakes. For example, Wall of Essence, Ghostly Prison, and Sphere of Safety say, “Don’t bother attacking me,” and Archon of Justice, Karmic Justice, and Michiko Konda, Truth Seeker make it very clear to your opponents that threatening you in any way at all is a losing proposition. Red brings all kinds of crazy randomness to the table. What happens when you play Myojin of Infinite Rage and threaten to blow up everyone’s lands if you die? I don’t know, but I'm itching to find out.

Finally, here is the updated version of a Jor Kadeen decklist I first built with the readers of Muse Vessel. I wanted to have a Standard-legal Commander deck to lend to new players, and I asked my readers what to put in it. When JK rotated out of Standard, I made some changes—I wanted to do an Equipment deck that didn’t just run five different copies of Sword of Wreck and Face, and here is what I ended up with.

Incidentally, if you're interested in seeing a similar process, let me know what Standard-legal commanders you'd like to see me build around in the comments section!

JK Rolling

• Commander (0)

• Lands (39)
• 16 Mountain
• 21 Plains
• 1 Inkmoth Nexus
• 1 Sejiri Steppe

• Nonartifact Creatures (13)
• 1 Kor Duelist
• 1 Stoneforge Mystic
• 1 War Priest of Thune
• 1 Kemba, Kha Regent
• 1 Stonecloaker
• 1 Oxidda Scrapmelter
• 1 Indomitable Archangel
• 1 Archon of Justice
• 1 Stonehewer Giant
• 1 Captain of the Watch
• 1 Charmbreaker Devils
• 1 Sun Titan
• 1 Hellkite Igniter

• Artifact Creatures (12)
• 1 Darksteel Myr
• 1 Alloy Myr
• 1 Etched Champion
• 1 Palladium Myr
• 1 Bonehoard
• 1 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Batterskull
• 1 Darksteel Juggernaut
• 1 Precursor Golem
• 1 Steel Hellkite
• 1 Thopter Assembly
• 1 Myr Battlesphere

• Nonartifact Spells (17)
• 1 Dispatch
• 1 Steelshaper's Gift
• 1 Boros Fury-Shield
• 1 Dispense Justice
• 1 Rootborn Defenses
• 1 Rally the Peasants
• 1 Remember the Fallen
• 1 Tempered Steel
• 1 Waylay
• 1 Frantic Salvage
• 1 Into the Core
• 1 Return to Dust
• 1 Elspeth Tirel
• 1 Mass Mutiny
• 1 Austere Command
• 1 Divine Deflection
• 1 Comet Storm

• Equipment (7)
• 1 Lightning Greaves
• 1 Obsidian Battle-Axe
• 1 Sunforger
• 1 Moonsilver Spear
• 1 Helm of Kaldra
• 1 Shield of Kaldra
• 1 Sword of Kaldra

• Other Artifacts (11)
• 1 Elixir of Immortality
• 1 Origin Spellbomb
• 1 Ichor Wellspring
• 1 Liquimetal Coating
• 1 Mycosynth Wellspring
• 1 Shrine of Burning Rage
• 1 Shrine of Loyal Legions
• 1 Mimic Vat
• 1 Vessel of Endless Rest
• 1 Prototype Portal
• 1 Mirrorworks

Buy This Deck

¹ Unless it’s an Eternal Dragon, which is actually very similar mechanically to Firemane Angel.