I was going to save this until it was actually snowing, but then I decided I didn’t want to come up with another topic for the week. I’m hoping next week will bring us some Commander (2015 Edition) spoilers to toy around with and subsequent weeks will give us a really good idea of some 75% goodies that we can start jamming in our decks, provided we’re cool with the word “goodies” and not overly concerned with the fact that it makes us sound like small children. Goodies are found in stockings, not serious times Magic-card articles on real content websites. Whatever you want to call the new cards we’ll be pretending to hurt our friends with, check here to see how we’ll be using them in a 75% context.

I like asymmetry in Magic games. Powerful effects are going to give you an advantage—that much is obvious. If you destroy all of your opponents’ creatures and keep all of yours, you’re likely to win. If you destroy all of their lands and keep all of your own, you’re likely to win and then have your playgroup stomp on your hand like those cops did to Matt Damon in Rounders. Wrath of God is good, Wrath of God when all of your creatures are indestructible and theirs are not is better. Symmetrical effects are generally a reasonable mana cost, and asymmetrical ones are usually more expensive. However, there is a class of cards that I find expose you to an asymmetrical advantage in subtle ways and can allow you to do some decently unfair things in your Commander games. Everyone is free to build this way and not a lot of people do. How do we cheat while playing fair and get a little bit of asymmetry out of some inexpensive cards to give our 75% decks a bit of a kick while not being overwhelmingly unfair? Let’s get into it.

Cover of Winter — You can use this card to very, very great effect in a deck like Brago, King Eternal’s. Load it up with counters when they’re swinging to give yourself a big shield, and then Flicker it out of play, return it to your hand, recast it, and so on. Even if you have to pay the cumulative upkeep, it’s worth it as it becomes a more and more formidable shield. Besides, with a lot of ways to bring enchantments back out of the graveyard, not being able to cough up the snow mana isn’t the end of the world.

Gelid Shackles — This is another Arrest effect and doesn’t require additional mana if all you’re doing is shutting down abilities or keeping it off blocking. It’s a political card that can see you allowing your opponent to attack with the creature if the opponent doesn’t attack you. Having snow mana to pump into this can become annoying, but I like that you choose when it can’t attack. Play around with this in a white snow deck; I bet you like it.

Glacial Crevasses — This is the least red card ever printed. This is in my top ten snow cards—and with good reason. Being able to Fog in a deck with Snow-Covered Mountains is surprising to people and, frankly, a lot of fun. You control combat with this card, and no one will see it coming. It breaks the color wheel, it lets you attack freely, and at the cost of a Snow-Covered Mountain, it is super-low for what it does. You basically have Constant Mists in mono-red. How good is that? I think it’s plenty good, and I’m excited to jam with this Ice Age bulk rare.

Heidar, Rimewind Master — Having four snow permanents can be tough . . . unless your basics are all Snow-Covered Islands, that is. Being able to bounce any permanent at instant speed seems to be a fair trade-off. Do I want him as my commander? Not necessarily, but he can do work in the ninety-nine, and you’ll be able to use his ability freely almost every turn. If Tradewind Rider is playable, this is playable in a deck with snow permanents. Maybe use him to bounce your Cover of Winter.

Into the North — Solid. You have a Rampant Growth that can find Scrying Sheets or Mouth of Ronom or the Highland Weald cycle. For real? Seems the case for it makes itself. This is a very good twist on a very good card, and this card alone is a reason to look into snow lands.

Mouth of Ronom — Obviously, this is a lot saucier in sixty-card Magic, but this still does work, killing cards like Prophet of Kruphix and creatures with protection from given colors, and it can finish off creatures wounded in combat. It’s easy to tutor for, it can be brought back with cards like Crucible of Worlds, and it’s very inexpensive right now; Mouth is the second best snow land. You should run this if you can.

Rime Transfusion — Not a super-exciting Aura at first blush, this breaks the color wheel a smidge by making a mono-black deck able to make creatures unblockable—you know, except for the snow creatures there is literally no chance your opponent is playing. This Aura even counts as a snow permanent just in case you have to keep track.

Rimefeather Owl — Can you come up with a way to use this? You can juice your snow permanent count, but if you have the mana to do that, you’re probably sitting on enough snow basics to make it to four so you can use Heidar. Still, this plucky owl can become huge, which is weird because it’s, you know, an owl. I realize they’re birds of prey. I also realize it’s stupid that an owl can devour a Dragon because it’s really cold outside. Conversations like this—and also the conversation asking, “How does a Birds of Paradise carry an Umezawa's Jitte and a Sword of Fire and Ice?” (it could grip it by the husk!)—are probably why I’m not a Vorthos guy. Still, this can become formidable, and if you plan to have a lot of snow permanents anyway, this could do some work.

Rimescale Dragon — This has the ability Rimefeather Owl should have, and Rimefeather Owl has the ability this should have. Maybe. I don’t know. Is this a frost-breathing Dragon? All I know is that this is absurd. Locking down creatures is not the most red ability ever, but snow cards are giving us a reusable Fog, so I guess letting us frost creatures makes as much sense as anything else out on the wacky frozen streets of the Multiverse. This card is savage, but it’s slow, mana-intensive, and not very red-seeming. I like how powerful it is, and I can overlook a lot to that end.

Rimewind Cryomancer — This card is seriously solid. Countering activated abilities is very useful, and you should be able to assemble enough snow permanents to use this consistently without a ton of effort. I really like how frustrating a card like this can be, especially against Planeswalkers and cards that tap to use their abilities. I could be becoming more excited about this card than it warrants, but this seems useful and overlooked or underrated. Looking through snow cards on Gatherer has been a very rewarding exercise.

Scrying Sheets — This is the money card here. This is the biggest and best reason to run snow lands in your deck. You draw extra cards with this land. If your deck is loaded with Snow-Covered lands, you can dig through them and draw gas more often. This is a good thing. You are going to draw extra cards with a land that you can find with Into the North. This is absurd, and while Commander players already know this, I’d be remiss if I didn’t share my enthusiasm. This card is also a little bit underpriced in my view—at $6 for nonfoils and $13 for foils—given how tricky it would be to reprint it and how much work it does.

Skred — Another “fair” card that feels more at home in a sixty-card deck, Skred was very useful in old Standard and still pops up from time to time in Modern. Being able to Flame Slash a creature for 17 for 1 mana is appealing, and while you’re not going to bring your damage counter up that often, this is worth a look at least.

Sunstone — They liked Glacial Crevasses so much they printed it twice in the same set. This having a 2-mana activation seems ridiculous to me. The number of lands is the limiting reagent here, not how much mana you have up. Are you going to activate this four times per combat? In Commander, the real question is whether you’re going to activate this four times per turn cycle. Do you have enough lands to sacrifice? Either way, this lets you Constant Mists in every color, but you don’t have to try and push the spell through countermagic every turn. This card is dumb. Use it if you like not taking damage or not letting someone else deal damage or both. Snow cards are cheating.

Winter's Night — This is an asymmetrical Mana Flare effect. Sure, you don’t gain the benefit of those lands next turn, but if you’re comboing off or you can afford to only have your lands every other turn because they’re tapping for double, this can be useful in a Naya or a four- or five-colored deck. Being the only player at the table rewarded for snow-land devotion feels good, and any Mana Flare only you can use can give you a significant advantage.

This was the list of strictly snow cards. I found a few cards that don’t specifically reference snow but still give you a big advantage for being the only player at the table using them.

Adarkar Valkyrie — You can draw this off Scrying Sheets. This isn’t exactly an asymmetry thing, but this is a nontrivial benefit of playing with snow stuff. Ohran Viper and Blizzard Specter are also not completely unplayable.

Extraplanar Lens — You can tell I’m big on asymmetry by now. Imagine being at a table with four other blue mages and being the only one to have his or her mana doubled because you imprinted a land called “Snow-Covered Island” and none of their Islands are called that. True, you don’t gain the benefit of another player’s lens if he or she has one, but you’re no worse off than you would be in a situation in which the player was a different color. You’re built around this interaction, and that player isn’t, and that feels good. This is a solid rationale for running snow lands, and I wouldn’t play snow without a lens.

Wake of Destruction — Remember what I said about blowing up their lands and not your own? This is pricey and can be narrow, but this can also devastate everyone but you because they all have Mountains and your lands that you tap for red mana have a different name. I like the idea of this card an awful lot in terms of asymmetry. In general, I don’t like screwing with mana, so use this carefully, but just know it’s an option.

None of this is really that new—Commander players have been using snow lands to break the symmetry of Extraplanar Lens for so long that, when they started, there was no Caged Sun to use instead. What I do feel the need to address here is that this seems to be a legitimate way to “juice” a 75% deck that seems to be almost there but not quite. Rather than going back to the drawing board and seriously addressing card choices, a lot of these snow-land “tricks” can be implemented without a huge commitment. Scrying Sheets, Mouth of Ronom, Extraplanar Lens, and Snow-Covered basics alone can add a little zing to a deck that seems to be close to being done, and they can give you a subtle advantage that will help you win those grindy matches against well-tuned decks without overwhelming more casual opponents.

What would a frosty 75% deck look like? Can we get there by frosting our opponents out of the game? Instead of building from scratch, I decided to update a well-known Numot build. This promises all of the destruction and one hundred percent more frosty goodness. Enjoy!

Rime Time ? Commander | Jason Alt

• Commander (0)

• Creatures (30)
• 1 Angel of Serenity
• 1 Body Double
• 1 Bogardan Hellkite
• 1 Deadeye Navigator
• 1 Diluvian Primordial
• 1 Duergar Hedge-Mage
• 1 Frost Titan
• 1 Inferno Titan
• 1 Karmic Guide
• 1 Luminate Primordial
• 1 Molten Primordial
• 1 Mulldrifter
• 1 Restoration Angel
• 1 Rimewind Cryomancer
• 1 Stonecloaker
• 1 Stonehorn Dignitary
• 1 Zealous Conscripts
• 1 Duplicant
• 1 Phyrexian Metamorph
• 1 Pilgrim's Eye
• 1 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Aurelia, the Warleader
• 1 Brago, King Eternal
• 1 Godo, Bandit Warlord
• 1 Heidar, Rimewind Master
• 1 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
• 1 Ojutai, Soul of Winter
• 1 Adarkar Valkyrie
• 1 Rimefeather Owl
• 1 Rimescale Dragon

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Venser, the Sojourner

• Spells (29)
• 1 Boros Charm
• 1 Cloudshift
• 1 Dismantling Blow
• 1 Momentary Blink
• 1 Return to Dust
• 1 Suffocating Blast
• 1 Swords to Plowshares
• 1 Tithe
• 1 Rite of Replication
• 1 Cyclonic Rift
• 1 Glacial Crevasses
• 1 Parallax Wave
• 1 Rhystic Study
• 1 Cover of Winter
• 1 Gelid Shackles
• 1 Chromatic Lantern
• 1 Coalition Relic
• 1 Crucible of Worlds
• 1 Crystal Shard
• 1 Extraplanar Lens
• 1 Lightning Greaves
• 1 Relic of Progenitus
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Sunforger
• 1 Sword of Feast and Famine
• 1 Sword of Fire and Ice
• 1 Sword of Light and Shadow
• 1 Thran Dynamo
• 1 Coldsteel Heart

• Lands (39)
• 1 Arid Mesa
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Dust Bowl
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Flooded Strand
• 1 Hallowed Fountain
• 1 Maze of Ith
• 1 Scalding Tarn
• 1 Slayers' Stronghold
• 1 Sunhome, Fortress of the Legion
• 1 Temple of the False God
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Thawing Glaciers
• 7 Snow-Covered Island
• 8 Snow-Covered Plains
• 9 Snow-Covered Mountain
• 1 Mouth of Ronom
• 1 Scrying Sheets

Buy This Deck

I liked using this deck as a skeleton because it already had a lot of the cards we want to play in it, and the frost theme plays well with what the deck was doing already. Plus, running three colors allows us to jam a lot of snow cards unobtrusively. Five colors would have been better, but maybe you can brew your own deck with Winter's Night and Into the North. I added new cards that weren’t available when the deck was first built, such as Brago, King Eternal and Ojutai, Soul of Winter, and they happened to fit our theme perfectly. We already have Venser, the Sojourner for the Cover of Winter! How perfect was this deck? I love how this turned out, and I hope you like it, too.

Did I miss a trick? What are you doing with snow lands and other wacky snow cards in your decks? Should I not bother? Is Scrying Sheets the only worthwhile card to run, and will you annoy people by scrying constantly? Are snow strategies so overpowered in your group that you run cards like Cold Snap? Leave it in the comments section! As always, thanks for reading, and keep shipping me your questions, deck ideas, and good vibes. Until next week!