Sometimes, presale prices are really wrong. If you were quick, you managed to snag Blade of Selves for $1 before it hit the price stratosphere, selling out for $12 on CoolStuffInc and fetching even more green elsewhere. While I don’t anticipate it going for True-Name Nemesis money (for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is it not being a Legacy four-of and the decks being more equal than in 2013), it’s going for way more than $1. It was a card I was very excited about when it was spoiled, and looking at how it’s catching on, others share my excitement.

Blade of Selves is a card that is such a good time—and such a build-around-feeling card to me—that it’s actually made me reevaluate the way I feel about tutors in Commander. That is to say, it’s made me feel differently about running tutors that may only ever find the same card.

When I wrote about tutors, it was very early in the series. A lot of time has passed since then, and while I feel good about where I landed on tutors I like (Moggcatcher, Worldly Tutor) and tutors I don’t like (Demonic Tutor), I feel that cards like Laboratory Maniac have made me very wary of tutors that could end up being essentially a second copy of a win condition. Not much has changed since then—I think it’s more interesting to play Tooth and Nail in a deck in which you find Acidic Slime and Eternal Witness or whatever else you need than a deck in which you grab Mephidross Vampire and Triskelion every time. That hasn’t changed. But a deck in which you’re tutoring for a card that isn’t a win condition and actually isn’t all that good on its own intrigues me. Blade of Selves is that card.

I try to avoid labeling my “guidelines” as hard and fast rules because I don’t want to feel silly later on when I’m compelled to break the rules. I feel that ninety-nine percent of what I said about tutors in this series still applies, but I want to explore a new situation that not only bucks the convention, it entirely turns it on its head. I want to play a deck in which I have as many chances to find Blade of Selves as possible!

Why do we want to run Blade of Selves at all? Well, as you well know, the card bestows the keyword ability myriad, which used to mean “ten thousand,” but now I guess just means “a lot” so people can now say “a myriad of” which irks me, but “languages evolve” and all that. I still say “myriad reasons” instead of “a myriad of reasons” because I’m stubborn as my editor will attest because he has to go through and manually change every instance of me typing “EDH” to “Commander.” Speaking of myriad reasons, I think there are myriad reasons to want to give your creatures myriad. This keyword ability copies the creature with the ability once for every opponent, and the tokens created in this process attack the other opponents you didn’t initially attack and then go away at the end of the turn. This is good when you’re just making a bruiser, but it’s even better when you’re making a value creature. Acidic Slime is neat; Acidic Slime with myriad is neater. There are a few existing decks in which I think this would be very fun.

What about Tutors? For a deck like Riku’s, I recommend a personal favorite red tutor of mine: Godo, Bandit Warlord. There aren’t a ton of red, green, and blue ways to tutor for a specific Equipment, but Godo is a good one. You can run a few other Equipment to grab if you’re worried about Godo being a dead draw, or you can go sans tutors and rely on card-draw and good looks to help you find Blade of Selves more often. You’re not a Blade-based deck, so you’ll survive without it, but it sure is fun to draw it and slap it on Inferno Titan. If you want, you can run Mizzium Transreliquat, which is already a fun card but that can be another Blade if you want.

Roon of the Hidden Realm — This is another deck that is all about enters-the-battlefield (“ETB”) effects, and you have access to white, which is great if you want to tutor up Equipment. Roon decks are already about gaining a ton of advantage, so you’re not going to suck at Magic if you don’t get the Blade. Tutoring for it every game will just make your deck more fun, but with Blade being easy to disrupt and interact with, you’re not going to K.O. anyone by virtue of tutoring for it successfully. It’s just going to be a ton of fun when you grab it and slap it on creatures like Karmic Guide. It’s not going to be that great on some of the Flicker-based creatures like Stonehorn Dignitary, which makes the Blade seem even more fair to me.

Jor Kadeen, the Prevailer — This can work well, but you’re not going to be able to just wedge in a Blade as easily as you did in other decks without making some modifications and just call it a day. You have a lot of tokens and a lot of legendary creatures in a traditional Jor build, but if you make some room for a few creatures like Baneslayer Angel and Mirran Crusader, you may not even mind that you’re not generating a ton of ETB triggers when you have a huge beater with Jor’s metalcraft bonus aimed at each opponent. Metalcraft is your game, meaning a ton of Equipment, meaning you’d probably run Sunforger, Sword of Feast and Famine, and, more importantly, creatures like Godo and Stoneforge Mystic already. You can’t have too many Equipment.

What about Tutors? The same ones you run already in white-based decks will do nicely. You have so many targets you may not even want to grab Blade every time. I can live with that! I feel even less wary about toolbox tutors. This deck is very, very 75%!

What about Tutors? Awkward . . . black gives you a lot of good tutors, but not a ton I like. Face-down tutors in general are pretty questionable in a 75% context. While it’s fun to say, “We can relax on tutors when we have Blade of Selves as the target,” you’re probably just rationalizing running open-ended tutors in a black deck. I like a narrow, Equipment-specific tutor a lot in this context. The wider you can go with the tutor, the less 75% you’re playing. Does running Demonic Tutor disqualify a deck from being 75%? Absolutely not. Police yourself. I am inclined to say I would just run the Meren deck with no tutors and celebrate when I drew it. Thinning the deck a lot with Perilous Forays and drawing a ton with Greater Good may end up being all you need to find Blade as often as half the time, and can you complain about that? Yes, you can; Magic players love to complain. Just don’t.

And run a way to deal with Torpor Orb while you’re at it.

Has my opinion on tutors in a 75% deck changed? I don’t think it has, at least not substantially. I have always been open to narrow tutors, and cards like Steelshaper's Gift are no exception. However, I think we could see our way clear to running a lot of tutors and having our tutors focus on a smaller number of targets if the card we grab every time is something like Blade—not game-winning and entirely dependent on the board. Run a deck that’s good without Blade, and more fun with it and a few tutors aren’t going to ruin anyone’s day. And go buy a precon at your LGS to pick up your copy of Blade. If the price goes up any more, the rest of the cards in the precon will be practically free, and who doesn’t love value? We’re trying to generate ETB triggers after all.