If you regularly check the most popular commander of the week on EDHREC, you might be a little surprised at how some of the decks are performing. Old favorites from the past like Golos and Atraxa are making an appearance as people update their lists for new cards from the two sets that dropped on us simultaneously. "Obvious" commanders like Xyris slip in the rankings as the tougher nuts to crack creep up. This week, everyone is nuts for Winota, Joiner of Forces, which is pretty interesting by Boros standards, but in the end is just another combat-focused Boros deck. I toyed with the idea of brewing a Winota deck but ultimately, I am falling out of love with fair decks. Even if you can pop out an additional creature (unless you whiff), attacking with medium-sized creatures just doesn't do it for me. If I can't attack with a 40/40 unblockable player killer or with 200 squirrels, I'll kill you outside of combat, thank you.

That said, my approach to combat changes a lot when I have access to expendable troops. If I am attacking you with a creature I borrowed, it's all upside. I don't even do math, math is for blockers. You can decide which one of your creatures you want to survive the skirmish and if you have anything left alive to threaten to swing back at me next turn, I'll steal those creatures, too. Blue can steal creatures permanently but it also has a few "temporary" ways to steal creatures repeatedly, something we call "threaten" effects after the card Threaten which is Red's form of stealing creatures. You have to give them back at the end of the turn, but if combat goes as planned or if you have a sac outlet, you should be able to get away with sending them back nothing more than a bill for the burial cost.

I like having access to permanent ways to take creatures; Vedalken Shackles, Helm of Possession, Treachery and even Mimic Vat have made a lot of appearances in 75% decks over the years. If we want to make sure that the table can handle our deck, using as much of their own deck against them ensures they are equipped to deal with what we're serving them. Permanently stealing a creature is better than doing it temporarily, obviously, and if you have access to Blue, why would you play threaten effects when you don't have to? Furthermore, a lot of Blue's repeatable threaten effects have a downside on top of not being permanent. In a world where Control Magic exists, how could you ever justify playing Chamber of Manipulation? Discarding cards is generally regarded as a bad thing, after all.

Chamber of Manipulation does have one advantage over Control Magic, though, if you think about it on a longer scale than one or two turns. If the creature enchanted with Control Magic dies, Control Magic is gone, leaving you down a card. True, you didn't get 2-for-1'd and if you made them use removal, you 2-for-1'd them, which is great. But if you smashed two creatures together and both died, Chamber of Manipulation players scan the board for the next victim and Confiscate players sadly slide their expensive enchantment into the bin. By now means am I saying that Chamber is better, but if we plan on smashing them a lot with their own creatures, being able to select a new target is better. Sure, you're not 2-for-1ing them if you lose a card every time you activate Chamber, but if you're pitching a land, or a Gravecrawler or an Echo of Eons, maybe you're coming out ahead on the exchange after all. Chamber of Manipulation turns every awkward late-game topdeck into a 0-mana copy of Threaten, and that's quite useful sometimes. Even though we've looked at a few scenarios where changing your targets might be useful compared to having to stick with a creature you've stolen, I think the drawback of having to discard a card to make Chamber work is probably too high and will keep it out of rotation.

What if discarding a card wasn't a drawback, though?

If we could somehow benefit, or break even from discarding a card, we might be able to justify Chamber in the deck. Not only that, there are a slew of powerful cards we could consider running since the same drawback was keeping us from playing them. Some cards that are quite powerful are severely overlooked in our format because they're old and people don't know about them and the people who do remember them remember them being unplayable back when they were in print. I'll admit, the prospect of discarding a card, tapping a creature and paying four mana to borrow a Scoria Cat or a Ribbon Snake wasn't appealing when we were playing with absurd cards like Gush and Lin-Sivvi, but the math has changed on this card and I think it's about time it got another look.

Overtaker is another Chamber of Manipulation-type card, with the ability to borrow a creature every turn. I don't know what I said that, you can read the card. Let's start over, hi, look at Overtaker, I bet you didn't know this was a card even if you started playing before Mercadian Masques, doesn't this seem like a thing worth talking about since we're talking about Chamber of Manipulation and I'm clearly building to a scenario where it's going to be OK or even a good thing to discard a card but you already know what the big reveal is you can probably see the image of the commander I want to use below this paragraph? See, that was awkward, too. I'll let Overtaker speak for itself, because we can also look at the rest of this cycle from Mercadian Masques while we're at it because there is another absurd card that's underplayed and it deserves a look in lots of decks including the one we're going to build later.

Does that say ALL artifacts? Great googily moogily. Hammer Mage can really wreak some havoc and then wreak some more havoc later if it comes to that. Being able to wreak two or more havocs puts Hammer Mage way up there in decks where we have spare cards to discard. If you don't think of it as "I have to discard" and instead reframe the cost as "Every card I topdeck has the potential to be a copy of Meltdown" then you can start to see the real benefit to cards in this cycle. Discarding isn't always fun, but topdecking a land late in the game when you just need a way to stop someone with a ton of artifacts from killing you is less fun, and if you can turn that useless topdeck into a game-clinching spell, being asked to discard that card doesn't seem like too much of a burden.

Hopefully I've made the case that "Discarding isn't always that bad" because I feel like I needed to ease us into the concept of "Discarding is good, actually" which is the premise for our latest deck. Hold onto your hats because I'm about to reveal a card you've seen before and this is a thing you knew was coming, let's just do it already.

TADA!

Discarding cards makes our commander huge AND we can replace the cards we discard? This could be a really good time. We'll get to test out a host of new cards that force us to discard, run a few wheels since we haven't built a wheel deck in like 2 weeks and we get to play a deck where attacking with our commander might actually be worth it. This is going to be fun! What would a deck-build around wheelin', dealin' and creature stealin' look like?

Which card? Discard! | Commander | Jason Alt

• Commander (1)
• 1 Rielle, the Everwise

• Creatures (13)
• 1 Baral, Chief of Compliance
• 1 Brallin, Skyshark Rider
• 1 Diplomatic Escort
• 1 Glint-Horn Buccaneer
• 1 Hammer Mage
• 1 Hisoka, Minamo Sensei
• 1 Niv-Mizzet, Parun
• 1 Overtaker
• 1 Psychosis Crawler
• 1 Seismic Mage
• 1 Stronghold Machinist
• 1 Surly Badgersaur
• 1 The Locust God

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Dack Fayden

• Instants (20)
• 1 Brainstorm
• 1 Channeled Force
• 1 Chaos Warp
• 1 Cyclonic Rift
• 1 Dangerous Wager
• 1 Deflecting Swat
• 1 Fateful Showdown
• 1 Fierce Guardianship
• 1 Firestorm
• 1 Foil
• 1 Forbid
• 1 Frantic Search
• 1 Izzet Charm
• 1 Muddle the Mixture
• 1 Negate
• 1 Reality Shift
• 1 Rites of Refusal
• 1 Swan Song
• 1 Thrill of Possibility
• 1 Tolarian Winds

• Sorceries (17)
• 1 Acquire
• 1 Blasphemous Act
• 1 Breakthrough
• 1 Bribery
• 1 Burning Inquiry
• 1 Careful Study
• 1 Cathartic Reunion
• 1 Chandra's Ignition
• 1 Echo of Eons
• 1 Faithless Looting
• 1 Gitaxian Probe
• 1 Insurrection
• 1 Nahiri's Wrath
• 1 Ponder
• 1 Reforge the Soul
• 1 Turbulent Dreams
• 1 Windfall

• Enchantments (4)
• 1 Chamber of Manipulation
• 1 Rhystic Study
• 1 Thousand-Year Storm
• 1 Underworld Breach

• Artifacts (12)
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Helm of Possession
• 1 Izzet Signet
• 1 Key to the City
• 1 Library of Leng
• 1 Lightning Greaves
• 1 Mind Stone
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Talisman of Creativity
• 1 Teferi's Puzzle Box
• 1 Thought Vessel
• 1 Vedalken Shackles

• Lands (32)
• 11 Island
• 7 Mountain
• 1 Cascade Bluffs
• 1 Cephalid Coliseum
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Desolate Lighthouse
• 1 Fiery Islet
• 1 Forgotten Cave
• 1 Geier Reach Sanitarium
• 1 Lonely Sandbar
• 1 Mystic Sanctuary
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Scalding Tarn
• 1 Shivan Reef
• 1 Steam Vents
• 1 Sulfur Falls

Buy This Deck Export text format

This deck is going to be a lot of fun!

I wanted to add a lot more Artifacts even though they are explicitly bad here. We want our Instants and Sorceries to do a lot of the heavy lifting. We're running Hammer Mage on top of not wanting a ton of Artifacts so mana rocks are going to be scarce and not live long. You may want to consider something like Mana Geyser or Irencrag Feat or consider being judicious with Hammer Mage. I think Dreamscape Artist could be a good addition, also, to mitigate the harm from going ham on mana rocks. I had to limit the number of Creatures, also, so you'll want to yank out a creature if you put another one in even though there are some tempting Instants and Sorceries to cut.

There are some fun cards I don't get to use often and two of the most exciting are Stronghold Biologist and Hisoka, Minamo Sensei. Having them on the table untapped can alter the lines of play your opponents take, which I think is interesting. I don't typically like to discard cards to activate my creatures, but turning excess land into hard counters is useful, and Rielle says "each turn" which all but begs you to discard on other players' turns as well. We still have some countermagic in our hands, but having a "rattlesnake" type counter on the table can make your opponents bait out the counters only to get smacked by the one in your hand. Making people play around your effects disrupts their plans which can help us beat better decks if they overthink.

In this deck, it's actually reasonable to try and get there with our commander. Her power will be on the large end given our ability to discard almost at will and replace those cards and a discard outlet I should really use more, Key to the City, can make her unblockable, letting us knock people out of the game with 9 or 10 commander damage at will. If you find this is working for you, consider adding Whispersilk Cloak. We want to keep Rielle alive since we'll look really silly if we pitch our whole mitt and someone kills her, leaving us with no way to refill our hand. Keeping her alive is more important in this deck than in most and Whispersilk Cloak, while a little clunky and expensive, does double duty and protects her while making her attacks go through. I hate running Rogue's Passage in a deck where our mana is going to be bad so Cloak is the next card I'd add if I were adding one more, but I don't know which artifact to take out.

We're going to steal as many of their creatures as we can, churn through our deck and hopefully kill them with damage triggers from Psychosis Crawler, Brallin and Buccaneer. If you want to be boring, add Laboratory Maniac and Thassa's Oracle, but if that stops being Plan B, consider cutting them just to save you from getting bored with the deck. That's a real thing that happens to me with Lab Man decks and I caution people against playing them for that reason, not because I can't beat those decks.

That does it for me this week. Any card that incentivizes us to do something that's normally a drawback opens up a whole new world of card selection which is why I love Commander so much. Any card can be playable and you can customize any deck as you see fit. The only thing you're optimizing for is your own enjoyment, and nothing brings me more enjoyment than doming someone with their own Blightsteel Colossus after borrowing it with Overtaker. Keep brewing with the new cards and let me know what your plan is for Rielle. Until next time!