Vela's School for Wizards

Posted on November 30, 2015

Vela the Night-Clad is a tricky commander to build around, to pilot, and to play against. It's not easy to gain full value out of her abilities, but in the late stages of the game, she can be extremely difficult to deal with. I'm not here to just build a Spikey Vela deck though—this is going to be a role-playing Commander deck: Commander, Vorthos style.

The last deck I talked about, Isperia, Supreme Judge of Fun, introduced the idea of role-playing a deck by making in-game decisions based on story and character rather than just optimal plays (in that case, by regulating what is and isn't fun in a given game of Commander). Vela's School for Wizards is also a role-playing deck, but in this case, the story that plays out is more internal—each time you play the deck, the "story" has a different outcome based on which cards you play and how your opponents react. And if you want to go all-in on this role-playing idea, you can then change the deck's build depending on how things turn out.

That sounds kind of crazy when I just lay it out there like that, so let me explain how we got here. The original version of this deck was mono-blue, with Rayne, Academy Chancellor as commander. It was purely Wizard tribal, and the theme was a school for wizards with Rayne in charge. It wasn't a very good deck—there was no real win condition, there were a lot of thematic cards that were just boring and not much fun to play with (that's on you, Disruptive Student), and the heavy tribal theme didn't leave much room for innovation. I knew I needed to rebuild it, but I had no idea how to approach it. Then I stumbled across Vela, just sitting there in a binder. She's a Wizard! But she’s not mono-blue, so it would never work. Unless . . . unless, there were a lot of black Wizards as well. And they all joined the school when Vela took over as headmistress. And that created a tension between the old-guard blue mages and the new black and blue-black Wizards, some of whom are quite a bit creepier than those stuffy old blues.

That brings us to the basic idea of the deck: It's a school for wizards headed by Vela the Night-Clad. All of the legendary Wizards in the deck (including Rayne, who's been demoted but is still around) are the faculty, while the other Wizards are staff or students, whichever seems more appropriate. Most of the Wizards are Humans, although there are strong contingents of both Faeries and Merfolk. The school's exact location is uncertain, but I imagine it to be a forbidding coastal area, perhaps like some parts of Scotland. Cards like Dire Undercurrents, Underground River, Sunken Ruins, and Sunken Hope reflect this small thematic touch, not to mention the fact that Wrexial, the Risen Deep shows up from time to time.

The influx of black Wizards brought to the school a darker aspect. Stitcher Geralf used to be alone in the unused dungeons, but now he's joined by Grim Haruspex and a Dimir Guildmage, occasionally catching glimpses of Shadowmage Infiltrator slinking through the cyclopean catacombs. Rumor has it there's even a Havengul Lich down there, not to mention a strange Planeswalker named Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver. Now and then, overeager students dabble in magics they ought not to, summoning horrors that lurk on the school's grounds until a member of the faculty comes to deal with them. Students can even find a few ancient artifacts hidden within the school's walls, and if they really need help, there are several tutors to fall back on. True, some of them are demonic or diabolic. That's the price of knowledge sometimes.

The school focuses on teaching bounce magic (they probably have a fancier name for this—maybe tempomancy), although there are classes on enchantments and the occasional counterspell, too. Students often communicate using specially coded spells, which have been developed over the years into the cypher spells Call of the Nightwing and Voidwalk. You don’t have to proxy your own custom Call of the Nightwing tokens, but why wouldn't you?

You can see it's not too difficult to work different mechanical themes and subthemes into the deck and still keep things full of flavor and story potential. This is partly because Vela herself is such a blank page. All we know about her comes from her flavor text and Krond the Dawn-Clad's flavor text—apparently, they frequently oppose each other. Why? If one of your friends pilots a Krond deck, feel free to invent your own reasons. For our purposes, it's sufficient to say that Vela is a wizard who favors the night and embraces its more shadowy aspects without turning her back on the knowledge and learning emphasized by blue.

Let's talk mechanics. This deck has a solid amount of card-draw from a variety of sources (Azami, Lady of Scrolls, Thalakos Seer, Rayne, Sea Gate Oracle, and so on), and you have a few powerful effects to work toward. Gather Specimens can be a huge blowout and is perfectly on theme. Archmage Ascension and Lighthouse Chronologist both require a lot of work, but the payoff is huge—just be aware that either will put a big target on your head. Also note that we're mostly ignoring Vela's intimidation ability—it's valuable and will often let you sneak damage through to finish a player off or win the game, but we're not using creatures with saboteur abilities specifically to take advantage of it. That's a whole other Vela build.

Bounce and mass-bounce spells are your bread and butter. Single-target bounce spells are usually played as tempo manipulators, but in Commander, they have so many uses I could never list them all. You can reset Planeswalkers or any other creatures with way too many counters on them, get rid of indestructible threats, screw up some ramp and reanimator strategies, or play politics by rescuing other players from lethal damage. Bounce plays nicer than removal in multiplayer since your opponent will feel less bad when he or she knows he or she will be able to recast the creature again instead of losing it completely. Your mass-bounce spells let you clean up messy game states or just reset things if you've fallen behind. Depending on how many things are on the table, they can force opponents into really unpleasant end of turn discards, too.

But most of all, mass bounce is a chance for a lot of Vela triggers. How many depends on how long Bitterblossom has been in play and how effectively you've been activating Call of the Nightwing. The problem is that you always feel that you want this to be an epic, game-ending play, you with a bunch of Wizards on board and all your opponents at 6 life—and then, boom, Evacuation. But it never really works out that way, and in early playtests, the deck felt underpowered. Here's the initial build:

Vela the Night-Clad ? Commander | Ed Grabianowski

Commander (0)

Planeswalkers (1)
1 Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver

There are some obvious problems. Wingcrafter is neat, but weak. There aren't enough tap abilities to take advantage of Galvanic Alchemist. Reality Strobe is too unpredictable. The most glaring flaw is that we're running so many nonbasics that Magus of the Coffers will never have enough Swamps to run on. So it's time to start making changes, and we're going to think about both card power and story.

For one thing, why was Magus of the Coffers there in the first place? In the mono-blue version of the deck, a cadre of Sphinxes acted as both advisors and win conditions. They were replaced by the magi, two of each color. But ol' Coffers couldn't build a strong enough power base to maintain his position on the school's Board of Governors. He's out. So we need a Magus to replace him, and here's where our story decisions become interesting.

Has the deck been winning with blue spells and creatures? Then maybe Magus of the Unseen joins the school, swinging the balance of power back in blue's favor. She brings a decidedly old-school flavor to the deck, along with a very potent ability to borrow artifacts. We can also consider where the school was built in more detail—if you were going to build a wizard school, you'd build it on some mystic leylines for sure. Leyline of Anticipation gives this deck a lot of versatility and makes it much less predictable for your opponents to deal with.

Now let's work on the power level. Since Vela isn't going to win most games with huge swings, we want to maximize the value we gain every time her trigger activates. That means we replace the underperforming Wizards with Wizards that have solid enters-the-battlefield effects. Architects of Will, Archaeomancer, and Puppeteer Clique are pretty powerful when you can bounce or Flicker them repeatedly (throw in Snapcaster Mage and Vendilion Clique if they're in your budget). Master of Waves does amazing things since he gives you tokens to trigger Vela if you cast a mass-bounce spell. But if you bounce or Flicker him alone, chances are his tokens are going to die when he leaves the battlefield (triggering Vela multiple times) and then generating more tokens when he returns! That makes for some fun Commander shenanigans.

Having more mass-bounce spells seems to be a good idea—Kederekt Leviathan gives you that effect while leaving a big body on the battlefield and while still fitting the coastal theme, and Displacement Wave is nice because you can tune it to bounce some things while leaving others behind.

We also want more ways to trigger Vela. The new myriad ability is perfect for this, so let's hide a Blade of Selves somewhere on the school grounds. Throw in a Ghostly Flicker, which, among other uses, is a ridiculous Snapcaster Mage target.

What if events push the school in a darker direction? Instead of Magus of the Unseen, add Magus of the Abyss. Throw in Leyline of the Void and Lich Lord of Unx. Wound Reflection represents some particularly dark experimentation by the students, but it doubles all the life-loss done by Vela at the end of each turn. Brutal! Meanwhile, Exquisite Blood gives Vela some vampiric tendencies, pumping your life total whenever she triggers.

If you want to really push the dark direction of the school, you can add Sanguine Bond for the Blood-Bond combo—it goes off and kills every opponent as soon as you trigger Vela even once. Deadeye Navigator and Crystal Shard may be blue cards, but they're pure evil at the Commander table. Consider your group's play style before you add these cards (I decided not to run them).

I learned a lot from working on this deck: that theme doesn't automatically make a deck fun to play, that it takes work to balance theme and card utility, that creative thinking can build a lot of versatility and ideas into a story-based deck, and that Vela the Night-Clad runs one badass wizards school. When I said the role-playing of this deck plays out "more internally," I meant that the story of this deck largely happens in your head. That's not to say you can't play up the story during a game—I've found that as long as you don't overdo it, other players enjoy it and will often interject their own decks into your deck's story. "A horde of goblins has invaded the school and killed off a bunch of the wizards!"

But after everyone has gone home from Commander night, you're free to sort through the deck and consider what worked and what didn't, which Wizards took center stage, and which ones stumbled. Use those story factors to inform your decisions when you tweak the deck—it's just another excuse to tinker, and if my experience with Commander has taught me anything, it's that the tweaking process can be half of the fun.

With that in mind, here's the current version of the deck with several changes from the version above. This pushes things in a slightly more blue direction, avoiding some of the harsher black spells like Wound Reflection. There are so many great Wizards that you can really flavor this one to your taste and even make drastic changes without affecting the overall wizards-school idea. After all, Vela triggers on Damnation just as well as she does from Evacuation. Or maybe the school has Planeswalker advisors instead of the magi. You might want to keep Lighthouse Chronologist in there instead of Dire Undercurrents or use more artifacts and Wizards that interact with them. You could even alter some of the cards to play up the Harry Potter thing going on here (I've downplayed that angle in my version of the deck, but it's kind of unavoidable).