I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Any time a Legendary Creature says "draw X cards" it's worth another look. Even if that requires a bunch of hoops to jump through!

Exhaust abilities are an interesting new addition to the game. In their never-ending quest to make sure I have plenty of things to track in any given game, Exhaust abilities may be used only once - total. So, we activate our Exhaust ability, and then we have to mark the card in some way (I'm still not sure how I'm going to do this) to remind ourselves that Exhaust ability can't be used again.

The thing is, the game sees each card as new every time it changes zones. That means if a card with an Exhaust ability leaves the Battlefield in some way - by going to the Graveyard, Hand, or Exile - then finds its way back to the Battlefield... we can activate its Exhaust ability again. Let's see what we can do with this.

Loot, the Pathfinder | Commander | Mark Wischkaemper

• Commander (1)
• 1 Loot, the Pathfinder

• Creatures (30)
• 1 Aether Channeler
• 1 Boom Scholar
• 1 Camera Launcher
• 1 Circuit Mender
• 1 Cloudkin Seer
• 1 Coiling Oracle
• 1 Deadeye Navigator
• 1 Displacer Kitten
• 1 Draconautics Engineer
• 1 Elvish Refueler
• 1 Elvish Visionary
• 1 Etali, Primal Conqueror // Etali, Primal Sickness
• 1 Ice-Fang Coatl
• 1 Inspired Sphinx
• 1 Ioreth of the Healing House
• 1 Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy
• 1 Kiora's Follower
• 1 Lilysplash Mentor
• 1 Lord of Change
• 1 Marvin, Murderous Mimic
• 1 Mindspring Merfolk
• 1 Mulldrifter
• 1 Peregrine Drake
• 1 Pit Automaton
• 1 Reclamation Sage
• 1 Seedborn Muse
• 1 Skyserpent Seeker
• 1 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Stampeding Scurryfoot
• 1 Thassa, Deep-Dwelling

• Instants (10)
• 1 An Offer You Can't Refuse
• 1 Beast Within
• 1 Blur
• 1 Counterspell
• 1 Displace
• 1 Essence Flux
• 1 Ghostly Flicker
• 1 Planar Incision
• 1 Swan Song
• 1 Teferi's Time Twist

• Sorceries (8)
• 1 Blasphemous Act
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Farseek
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Nature's Lore
• 1 Rampant Growth
• 1 Splash Portal
• 1 Three Visits

• Enchantments (1)
• 1 Unstoppable Plan

• Artifacts (10)
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Commander's Sphere
• 1 Conjurer's Closet
• 1 Illusionist's Bracers
• 1 Lumbering Worldwagon
• 1 Rangers' Aetherhive
• 1 Rangers' Refueler
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Sword of Hearth and Home
• 1 Thousand-Year Elixir

• Lands (40)
• 7 Forest
• 10 Island
• 3 Mountain
• 1 Boseiju, Who Endures
• 1 Bountiful Landscape
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Commercial District
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Hedge Maze
• 1 Kessig Wolf Run
• 1 Ketria Triome
• 1 Minamo, School at Water's Edge
• 1 Muraganda Raceway
• 1 Otawara, Soaring City
• 1 Rejuvenating Springs
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Rogue's Passage
• 1 Temple of Abandon
• 1 Temple of Epiphany
• 1 Temple of Mystery
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Thundering Falls

Buy This Deck Export text

The goal here is going to be to bury our opponents in card advantage: we will always have more mana, more cards, and more resources. We're going to do this by using Loot's Exhaust abilities, primarily the first and second (mana and cards), over and over. And we'll do that by Blinking Loot. We'll figure out how to win from there.

A five-mana, three-color Commander is no joke, so we're running a good amount of Land fetch in addition to our 40 Lands. In most cases, if the Land isn't a basic, it's fixing our colors, but we do have Rogue's Passage and Muraganda Raceway to help get something through and give us a little extra mana.

A five-mana Commander can reliably be cast early with a three-mana ramp spell, so Cultivate and Kodama's Reach are both here, alongside Nature's Lore and a few other two-mana spells. We also have Commander's Sphere and Sol Ring, plus a couple I'm interested in seeing how they work - Pit Automaton, a Creature which can help us activate Abilities and copy Exhaust abilities, and Lumbering Worldwagon, which for three mana does a whole bunch of things I really like.

This deck works because it draws cards, so in addition to Loot's Ancestral Recall, we have a number of additional ways to draw cards, most on Creatures. Our exception is Rangers' Refueler, which will draw us an extra card every time we activate an Exhaust ability. Otherwise, we have cards like Elvish Visionary and Mulldrifter, which draw us cards when they Enter. Because we're going to be flickering stuff in and out, it seemed worth it to lean into that; if Loot isn't out, at least we probably have something we can flicker for value!

Winning is... different. Loot has Double Strike, of course, so if he can get through, he can do some damage. We also have Etali, Primal Conqueror // Etali, Primal Sickness and Lord of Change, both of whom are good flicker targets and can win us a game on their own. I suppose we could end up with a fleet of Dinosaur Dragons off Draconautics Engineer or Thopters from Rangers' Aetherhive. Either way, we're going to want to attack and keep on top of moving the game along - we need to do things with the cards we're drawing before others can draw their cards. This isn't a sit-back-and-watch-the-game-go-by kind of deck!

We do have some good answers. A Counterspell suite is here, and they should do a good job of scaring everyone at the table. Beast Within will catch anything we need it to, and Reclamation Sage does an excellent job of being Disenchant, except we can reuse it.

The big thing we're doing is flickering stuff. We have a few ways to do this with a spell, like Blur or Ghostly Flicker; these are great when we have used up all the Exhaust abilities on Loot and need to do it again, these give us a one-shot method of doing that. Ultimately, though, we want some way to repeat that ability, so a Conjurer's Closet or a Deadeye Navigator, something like that.

Additionally, we have a few ways of untapping everything more than we should - the Seedborn Muse effect. This way we can use Loot, then on our opponent's next turn use him again, then use his third ability, then flicker him to get to do it all over again!

Watch for other tricky things - Peregrine Drake, for instance, goes infinite mana with Deadeye Navigator. I can see that being fun, because if you do it right you could then go infinite with Loot and kill everyone with his Exhaust ability.

This is probably not quite optimized. There are certainly ways to make Loot work harder - use his Exhaust abilities more and more efficiently. On the other hand, this deck will be super fun to play and pilot, and will probably scale nicely - I can see this deck working well at a table with anywhere from Bracket 1 to Bracket 4, depending on how you pilot and how well their decks tick. Now get out there and Exhaust some resources!

Thanks for reading.