I have flirted with writing it up the past few weeks, but I am really in love with a deck built around Tajic, Legion's Edge that keeps the board wiped down with damage-based sweepers, leaving your team alive and killing opponents with Repercussion and Pyrohemia. You need to keep Tajic alive, so you'll want to dump some equipment on him which also serves to make him a clock. I think one of the reasons I like this concept so much is that Boros decks are usually combat-based and sort of linear; while I'm still attacking with this deck, this reminds me of another recent Boros commander that also excited me.

Remember these donkeybois? Firesong and Sunspeaker made Boros spellslinging feel like a legitimate way to win, and when it occurred to me that they have a place in this Tajic deck, I got even more excited. Josh Lee Kwai of Game Knights and The Command Zone fame loves to build a deck around a creature that isn't the official commander. It lets him surprise people out of nowhere and it lets him have access to more colors than the colors in the build-around commander which expands his options. Building what is essentially a Firesong and Sunspeaker deck with Tajic at the helm does a few things for me. First and foremost, it makes people think I'm playing a much more creature-heavy build than I really am and could cause them to sit on their wrath effects for longer, expecting me to play more creatures. The more turns that go by without them wrathing my board and killing my utility creatures the better. I will have effects like Ghostway and Teferi's Protection to keep from losing it all, but I want to pretend I am sandbagging more creatures to keep them off of wraths.

To make sure we're bothering with Tajic at all, we'll need to think about how to play to his strengths with cards we already run in Firesong and Sunspeaker decks for the most part. Luckily, cards like Star of Extinction and Blasphemous Act are good in both decks and I want to run as many Red sweepers as I can. Tajic, however, isn't indestructible so I want to include a few ways to keep him from getting nuked when you meteor creatures back to the stone age. I think equipment is the way to go and that makes him more formidable in combat as well. Sword of Fire and Ice and Sword of War and Peace are obvious fits for the deck since they prevent Red damage and we plan to deal a ton of that. Darksteel Plate is another equipment that would be a real benefit here. These keep Tajic alive even if someone plays Wrath of God, although Tajic can't protect the rest of your board from those wraths. However, if you're not flooding the board with creatures, I expect opponents to hold some of their wraths back and let you keep the board clear and then you can slam Firesong and Sunspeaker out of your hand, Blasphemous Act a full board and gain enough life to Reservoir everyone to death. You're not a combo deck, but you're not NOT a combo deck, either.

I still want plenty of creatures and while they're likely to be mostly utility creatures, I can't resist the urge to include pet cards like Assemble the Legion, Anointed Procession, Divine Visitation, Dawn of Hope and both Legion Warboss and Goblin Rabblemaster. We'll play the obvious utility creatures like Boros Reckoner, but there's no reason we can't have a heavy token subtheme since I love the idea of any two of those enchantments really getting cranking. Divine Visitation turns Dawn of Hope into Luminarch Ascension and you know how much I love me some Luminarch Ascension. Jam a Heliod in there and you're even more wrath resistant, especially if you say "meh" and throw your dying tokens into a Goblin Bombardment or just restock. If they don't have wraths, you should close the game out fairly quickly, especially if you can burn the whole board out and end up the only person with tokens who can swing unopposed.

There is a decent amount of overlap between the two lists. If you read my finance articles on MTGPrice, you already know about this tool, but for most of you who aren't interested, I found a great tool on reddit that compares two lists and it's great for seeing commonalities between decklists. If you feed in the average EDHREC list for Firesong and Sunspeaker and Tajic, you can see which cards both builds run and definitely make sure to include those or at least give them a look and that's a great way to start a hybrid build.

No real surprises here. When you're looking at an average list from EDHREC for both decklists, you're going to have a "vague in, vague out" problem but if you look at the cards in common for what they represent rather than for what they are, you can see the kind of thing both decks are doing in common and it's basically what we expected. Removing format staples and land, we have a trim list.

We're dealing damage and getting mana with Neheb, dealing more damage with Gisela, hitting every creature on the board with basically half of this list, and we're keeping our stuff alive with Mark of Asylum and Light of Sanction, a card I forgot all about despite having opened cases of Ravnica. There really wasn't anything here we didn't assume would be here, but I still recommend this technique of seeing which cards two decks have in common in your future building. If people still bookmark sites, bookmark the database comparison site I linked for future use.

I think these two deck strategies will be easier to reconcile than the small degree (3 cards, including a few lands) of overlap would indicate and that's going to make for a fun deck that, again, you can flip into a Firesong and Sunspeaker deck if you want to change things up. We won't have a way to tutor for Tajic (or Firesong and Sunspeaker in the main configuration) so make sure you are ready to play slightly differently. OK, I've teased you for weeks - let's make with the list already.

Tajic, Legion's Figurehead | Commander | Jason Alt

• Commander (1)
• 1 Tajic, Legion's Edge

• Creatures (20)
• 1 Balefire Liege
• 1 Blaze Commando
• 1 Boros Reckoner
• 1 Burnished Hart
• 1 Firesong and Sunspeaker
• 1 Gisela, Blade of Goldnight
• 1 Goblin Rabblemaster
• 1 Godo, Bandit Warlord
• 1 Heliod, God of the Sun
• 1 Iroas, God of Victory
• 1 Legion Warboss
• 1 Monastery Mentor
• 1 Neheb, the Eternal
• 1 Purphoros, God of the Forge
• 1 Rune-Tail, Kitsune Ascendant
• 1 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Spitemare
• 1 Stuffy Doll
• 1 Treasure Nabber
• 1 Truefire Captain

• Instants (8)
• 1 Arcbond
• 1 Boros Charm
• 1 Crush Contraband
• 1 Fault Line
• 1 Ghostway
• 1 Gideon's Phalanx
• 1 Swords to Plowshares
• 1 Teferi's Protection

• Sorceries (9)
• 1 Blasphemous Act
• 1 Brightflame
• 1 Chain Reaction
• 1 Deafening Clarion
• 1 Earthquake
• 1 Hour of Devastation
• 1 Rolling Earthquake
• 1 Star of Extinction
• 1 Subterranean Tremors

• Enchantments (10)
• 1 Anointed Procession
• 1 Assemble the Legion
• 1 Dawn of Hope
• 1 Divine Visitation
• 1 Light of Sanction
• 1 Mark of Asylum
• 1 Pariah
• 1 Pyrohemia
• 1 Repercussion
• 1 Searing Meditation

• Artifacts (13)
• 1 Aetherflux Reservoir
• 1 Boros Locket
• 1 Boros Signet
• 1 Commander's Sphere
• 1 Darksteel Plate
• 1 Hammer of Nazahn
• 1 Mind Stone
• 1 Pariah's Shield
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Sunforger
• 1 Swiftfoot Boots
• 1 Sword of Fire and Ice
• 1 Sword of War and Peace

• Lands (39)
• 13 Mountain
• 13 Plains
• 1 Arid Mesa
• 1 Battlefield Forge
• 1 Boros Garrison
• 1 Boros Guildgate
• 1 Clifftop Retreat
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Inspiring Vantage
• 1 Needle Spires
• 1 Rugged Prairie
• 1 Sacred Foundry
• 1 Slayers' Stronghold
• 1 Sunhome, Fortress of the Legion
• 1 Temple of Triumph

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This is a good rough draft and looks like a lot of fun to play. As it currently stands, the deck may not be optimized for Firesong and Sunspeaker and you might want to leave them in the deck due to the relatively low number of Instants and Sorceries (16 total) compared to the average Firesong and Sunspeaker deck (over 30) but I still think we need the creatures and enchantments we're running. I like the idea of making tokens so we can recover from getting hit with the odd Wrath we're not prepared for and I like the idea of punishing them for having more creatures than us until the late game where Assemble the Legion and Divine Visitation spiral out of control and Dawn of Hope turns into a slot machine that always pays. I wouldn't add many more Instants or Sorceries to this particular build per se.

I like that we have a lot of ways to make Tajic himself into a formidable creature in combat. I excluded Helm of the Host here since I always run it with Godo and it's sometimes boring, but you can surely add it if you'd like - there are some fun targets for it, certainly.

We have lots of ways to reflect damage at them so make sure if that the plan to take Tajic offline somehow. You don't want to plan to dome them with Boros Reckoner only to have Tajic prevent all of that damage. Other than that, the deck is pretty straightforward and honestly looks like a lot of fun. I think you'll be glad you didn't build a classic Tajic or classic F&S (I don't know why I didn't use that abbreviation until now, good gravy what a mouthful that name is) deck and instead worked on expanding the overlap between the two strategies. F&S (Look at all the time I'm saving, not typing it out) was a deck that really excited me when it came along because Boros decks tended to be 100% combat-focused and it was good to not have to rely on gimmicks like double strike to get there. Being able to borrow a lot of that deck's ethos for a new build is encouraging to me and goes to show that Tajic isn't quite as straightforward and boring as we may have thought he was at first.

That does it for me. Is there a deck or combination you'd like me to cover next week? Want me to take a look at your deck and see if it's a good example of a 75% build? Hit me up in the comments and don't forget to share this article with your friends on social media. Thanks for reading. Until next time!