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Get it?! I... SUE. We're operating under the principle that I am pronouncing this card correctly. I'm sure I'm wrong and can hope for a "Well actually, it's pronounced Tani FA not Tani WA" correction in the comments section because the two wolves inside of me are a pedantic wolf and a wolf who mostly knows things from reading rather than talking to other people and it makes me prone to guessing wrong on pronunciations. Can you guess why I want to talk about this deck? Well, you might be looking at this deck and thinking "I really need to run as many Snow permanents as I can" and like, do you? I'm seriously asking. It seems to me that while you could pay five mana for a 3/2 flying creature that, and I'm not making this up, requires you to pay an additional SNOW MANA every time you want to give it FIRST STRIKE. Are you going to pay 26th card quality limited picks in your Snowman deck? You might be thinking you have to. So why am I, of all people, writing about a deck where you need to run Saddled Rimestag and Berg Strider? Because you do. You see, readers, I'm writing about Isubominable Snowfam because this is not a snow deck. It's a landfall deck.

When you put a Snow permanent onto the battlefield, your commander can grow larger and eat people easier. You can put any Snow permanent into play to trigger this ability, so if all we ever put into play is Snow lands, we're still a very efficient landfall deck, in good colors for it. We are going to grow our commander, protect our commander and 1-hit KO people with our commander. For you see, we are going to put lots of snow permanents onto the battlefield. We are going to cast Boundless Realms with Amulet of Vigor in play. We're going to do SHENANIGANS because this is a landfall deck and it happens to be one of the most fun-looking I have seen. You don't have to play awkward cards in the deck if you don't want - you can literally just play Herald of Secret Streams and Champion of Lambholt in this deck and that's what I am going to do. Being able to grow your commander in a ramp deck just by remembering to ramp means we don't need to do anything we wouldn't do in a regular landfall deck, but this time our basics will be Snow basics, that's all. Will we run 0 snow cards? Of course not, but we get to only run the ones that are better than their non-Snow equivalent, which is a huge boon for the deck.

The snow permanents I'm excited about are few enough but they have to clear a pretty high bar since I'm not starting from a completed Snow deck and working backward. I don't talk about this as often as I should, but both in my professional experience as a deck-builder and also as a member of the EDHREC content team, I have noticed that when people start with a completed deck, perhaps a precon, and try to cut until they're satisfied then add cards back, the card quality suffers. Your deck becomes crowded with stuff that seems synergistic enough to leave in, crowding the deck with mediocre picks that seemed too good to get cut but which you'd never add to the deck in a million years if you started from 0. We already unshackled ourselves from the expectation that we're a Snow deck, so let's not start out with the assumption that we need to play Into the North. I mean, we're gonna, it can grab one of our many, many (bad) Snow duals, for example, which makes it better than Rampant Growth for grabbing Arctic Flats and the same as Rampant Growth for grabbing Arctic Treeline.

There are plenty of Snow cards that can help us do Landfall stuff and there are a few that are just good utility creatures. It's important to figure out what we want from our utility creatures - is it worth the mana and effort to get Rime Tender and Heidar, Rimewind Master going, or is it better to just load up our commander all fat and 1 punch man them into Bolivian? I am going to play the Snow cards it makes sense to play and use the leftover room to jam a bunch of landfall cards into the deck. It's going to be rad, I promise.

Isu the Abominable | Commander | Jason Alt

• Creatures (25)
• 1 Augur of Autumn
• 1 Avenger of Zendikar
• 1 Azusa, Lost but Seeking
• 1 Champion of Lambholt
• 1 Deep Gnome Terramancer
• 1 Dryad of the Ilysian Grove
• 1 Elvish Reclaimer
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Herald of Secret Streams
• 1 Karametra, God of Harvests
• 1 Knight of the Reliquary
• 1 Kodama of the East Tree
• 1 Lotus Cobra
• 1 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
• 1 Oracle of Mul Daya
• 1 Ramunap Excavator
• 1 Roil Elemental
• 1 Sakura-Tribe Scout
• 1 Scute Swarm
• 1 Slogurk, the Overslime
• 1 Tatyova, Benthic Druid
• 1 Tireless Provisioner
• 1 Tireless Tracker
• 1 Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath
• 1 Wayward Swordtooth

• Instants (5)
• 1 Crop Rotation
• 1 Graven Lore
• 1 Growth Spiral
• 1 Inspiring Call
• 1 Tamiyo's Safekeeping

• Sorceries (9)
• 1 Blizzard Brawl
• 1 Boundless Realms
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Farseek
• 1 Into the North
• 1 Rampant Growth
• 1 Reshape the Earth
• 1 Search for Glory
• 1 Splendid Reclamation

• Enchantments (11)
• 1 Burgeoning
• 1 Druid Class
• 1 Exploration
• 1 Felidar Retreat
• 1 Finest Hour
• 1 Hibernation's End
• 1 Resourceful Defense
• 1 Rhystic Study
• 1 Simic Ascendancy
• 1 Together Forever
• 1 Zendikar's Roil

• Artifacts (11)
• 1 Amulet of Vigor
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Blackblade Reforged
• 1 Commander's Sphere
• 1 Crucible of Worlds
• 1 Fellwar Stone
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Sunstone
• 1 Sword of Hearth and Home
• 1 The Ozolith
• 1 Zuran Orb

• Lands (38)
• 10 Snow-Covered Forest
• 5 Snow-Covered Plains
• 9 Snow-Covered Island
• 1 Arctic Flats
• 1 Arctic Treeline
• 1 Boreal Shelf
• 1 Dark Depths
• 1 Faceless Haven
• 1 Frostwalk Bastion
• 1 Glacial Floodplain
• 1 Mouth of Ronom
• 1 Rimewood Falls
• 1 Rogue's Passage
• 1 Scrying Sheets
• 1 Shimmerdrift Vale
• 1 Thespian's Stage
• 1 Urza's Saga

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This looks like a ton of fun, honestly. It takes very little to make this deck a Voltron deck, and a fun one at that. It's not just Equipment that would really crank this up to 11 as a landfall list, you can add really solid auras, as well. Bear Umbra, Steel of the Godhead, Rancor and a few other Auras could really spice things up quite a bit, for example. It's going to be tough to block our commander but a few ways to give it flying or trample might not go amiss, and we're in White so we could really commit to tutoring for good Equipment. If the other creatures get a bit jealous of Isu getting all of the attention, the good news is you can cut pretty heavily from that part of the decklist. All the go-wide cards are fairly bad and if you're super aggro you can cut defensive cards like Sunstone and swing for the fences instead. No one expects a Snowy Bant deck to slap them with a Yeti on turn five and if you load up Voltron style, you can really take a bit out of them. A bite out of Rime if you will? You won't? Yeah, me neither.

I didn't honestly sacrifice very much from a good landfall deck except some redundancy and some of the interactions I like. I couldn't justify keeping some very cool pet cards like Admonition Angel and Helm of Possession and Retreat to Coralhelm, but the stuff I kept in is a lot of fun and you should be slanging lands and serving yeti punches like Isu was a Wampa and your opponent was a brash and inexperienced Jedi who watched everyone who tried to teach him anything about the force die right after. I left in Blizzard Brawl if you want to try and reconstruct that exact scenario - punch their commander so hard it wakes up in a Bacta tank and tell 'em Jason sent ya. That does it for me, readers. Until next time!