Readers!

We have a whole raft of Legendary creatures to get to and only a finite amount of executive function to do it, so I'm taking a running start at this set by giving myself the most possible excitement around what I write about. In real life I'm building all 8 Street Fighter secret lair decks to use against each other in four player free-for-all brawls with friends, and that's going to take up a lot of my irl building bandwidth. Luckily, I'm keeping my mind sharp by diving into Dominaria United. I don't know if it's great for the long-term health of the game to release a set with 70 new Legendary creatures between the base set and Commander decks but Hasbro seems to have a "can't stop won't stop" approach to giving us new Legendary creatures. I am intrigued by quite a few of them, and there is one in particular that caught my eye. This Commander has it all - Simic colors, evasion, and aggressive rate and an ability that lets you get a ton of value. What's not to like?

Intriguing right? Well, I only said I was intrigued by this commander, the commander I want to talk about today is barely like this card at all, but I think we can learn a lot of lessons from how I want to build the commander I DO want to talk about from this one. For example, both decks would have the same Thesis Enchantment.

I'm doing that thing again where I pretend for the sake of a narrative that you don't already know which commander this article is about so I can do a big reveal after a few sentences of lead-up, and that's silly. We all know who this is about, what you want to know is why I brought up Ivy. If we want to make best use of Vesuvan Duplimancy, we want to play single target spells so that we can make copies of our permanents. The way we do that harkens back to another card that isn't the commander I want to ultimately discuss this week. I swear if I can think of another mislead by the time I get done typing this paragraph, I'll do that one, too, but I don't have all night to do this bit so let's hope I don't.

My Tatsunari deck, which is pretty similar to the one from the article and which is a lot of fun to play albeit a scary time for opponents, could really use Vesuvan Duplimancy. The whole point of the deck is to make as many copies of Keimi as possible by making a non-Legendary copy and copying it a lot until every Enchantment I play drains the table for 5 or 6 and then everyone blows up all of my permanents and kills me. I've never won with it but I did scare a bunch of people on the Commander RC and that's a win in my book. Tatsunari gave me a really fun starting point because I realized I could copy a lot of the same shenanigans that I love to pull off in that deck in both Ivy and the commander I'm going to finally talk about, Rona.

Instead of triggering on Enchantments, Rona triggers on Instants and Sorceries. You know what's an Instant and/or (it's or, I don't know why I said and/or) Sorcery?

I hope that got your attention like it got mine.

If we want to copy utility creatures in the deck, it will be cool to do that. Making a copy of Gray Merchant of Asphodel with Followed Footsteps or Helm of the Host is cool and good and we should do things like that. It doesn't have to be Gray Merchant - Diluvian Primordial, Grave Titan, Mulldrifter - there are no wrong answers. But if you do manage to use a card like Spark Double or find a copy of Mirror Gallery, suddenly you can ping everyone for a lot of damage. If you target Rona with Quasiduplicate while Vesuvan Duplimancy is out... I actually don't know what happens. I'm not good at math. I'm going to scream "Math is for BLOCKERS" and hope everyone scoops. My plan is to make lots of copies of Rona and every spell will make more copies and every copy will do more damage when I play the spells that make copies. It sounds complicated but it's mostly just a fun idea that I'm glad I came up with, so thanks for letting me have this one.

The deck is going to be fun to build, should play like Tatsunari except maybe even a bit more smoothly, and you protect yourself with Instants and Sorceries rather than playing a bunch of Enchantments that make people scared of you. This deck is more explosive than Tatsunari and is going to turn a lot of heads. Here's the list.

Their celeb couple name is She-Rona | Commander | Jason Alt

• Commander (1)
• 1 Rona, Sheoldred's Faithful

• Creatures (16)
• 1 Agent of Treachery
• 1 Baleful Strix
• 1 Clever Impersonator
• 1 Displacer Kitten
• 1 Gyruda, Doom of Depths
• 1 Hullbreaker Horror
• 1 Lier, Disciple of the Drowned
• 1 Mulldrifter
• 1 Orvar, the All-Form
• 1 Phantasmal Image
• 1 Ravenous Chupacabra
• 1 Sakashima of a Thousand Faces
• 1 Sedgemoor Witch
• 1 Sheoldred, the Apocalypse
• 1 Sower of Temptation
• 1 Spark Double

• Instants (17)
• 1 An Offer You Can't Refuse
• 1 Arcane Denial
• 1 Brainstorm
• 1 Cackling Counterpart
• 1 Consider
• 1 Counterspell
• 1 Drown in the Loch
• 1 Fated Infatuation
• 1 Frantic Search
• 1 Infernal Grasp
• 1 Lim-Dul's Vault
• 1 Mystic Reflection
• 1 Negate
• 1 Opt
• 1 Silundi Vision
• 1 Slip out the Back
• 1 Sublime Epiphany

• Sorceries (16)
• 1 Feed the Swarm
• 1 Irenicus's Vile Duplication
• 1 Night's Whisper
• 1 Ponder
• 1 Preordain
• 1 Quasiduplicate
• 1 Replication Technique
• 1 Rite of Replication
• 1 Sakashima's Will
• 1 Serum Visions
• 1 Sign in Blood
• 1 Solve the Equation
• 1 Stolen Identity
• 1 Tempt with Reflections
• 1 Toxic Deluge
• 1 Treasure Cruise

• Enchantments (5)
• 1 Endless Evil
• 1 Followed Footsteps
• 1 Jace's Sanctum
• 1 Mirrormade
• 1 Vesuvan Duplimancy

• Artifacts (9)
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Commander's Sphere
• 1 Dimir Signet
• 1 Helm of the Host
• 1 Mirror Box
• 1 Mirror Gallery
• 1 Sentinel Tower
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Talisman of Dominance

• Lands (36)
• 10 Island
• 10 Swamp
• 1 Choked Estuary
• 1 Clearwater Pathway // Murkwater Pathway
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Darkwater Catacombs
• 1 Drowned Catacomb
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Morphic Pool
• 1 Mystic Sanctuary
• 1 Otawara, Soaring City
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Shipwreck Marsh
• 1 Sunken Hollow
• 1 Tainted Isle
• 1 Temple of Deceit
• 1 Underground River
• 1 Watery Grave

Buy This Deck Export text format

This looks like a lot of fun. There's more we could do, and I leave it to you as always. There are a few packages and synergies I very obviously opted to omit, so let's start with those.

Isochron Scepter was an early consideration, but the more I added Instants that couldn't go on it, the more it looked like a way to end the game with Dramatic Reversal, which is pretty boring. Scepter can be fun and suspending even something like Negate feels akin to godhood in a two-player game, but it's way less fun in multiplayer Commander and it's a little too cEDH for me. I'd love Scepter and you can jam it back in, but I cut it.

Professor Onyx likely should be in here, but with the inclusion of Chain of Smog the obvious next step, I figured it would be an inevitability and I didn't feel like going down that road. If you want to, don't let me stop you - it's a six-mana Planeswalker after all and the deck does include Sentinel Tower and Sedgemoor Witch. It's a personal taste thing and I think it doesn't taste the way I want it to. That can't be right, I'm using that idiom wrong, at least I hope so.

I didn't include a lot of cards that worked well in a strategy I'm not employing. However, making a ton of copies of Talrand might actually be fun, so if you wanted to include Talrand, Sky Summoner, Murmuring Mystic or something like that, you could have tokens be some sort of tertiary gameplan.

All in all, this deck is very customizable. I endeavored to include all of the ways to make copies of Rona, but there aren't too many creatures in the deck that would suck to copy, and a lot of them aren't Legendary. Just imagine having six Displacer Kittens or getting a Baleful Strix every upkeep. The possibilities are endless, and with the newer clone effects like Irenicus's Vile Duplication stripping Legendary status, we're entering a new era of making a bunch of copies of your commander and laughing a lot. I'm already doing that second one.

That does it for me, readers. Until next time!