Draw-Go with the Glamourous Cormela

Posted on May 31, 2022

Four years ago almost to the day, I wrote an article about doing a Draw-Go deck in Commander. I consider that article a prerequisite for this one, so if you haven't read it, please go back and check it out!

I liked that deck so much I built it in real life and still play it to this day. It's a fun, challenging play experience with lots of difficult play decisions and many different ways it can go.

One key about that deck is Kess, Dissident Mage, is mostly there to provide colors. I played one game where her ability was important and actually useful, but most of the time I never even bother to cast her. I wanted Grixis () for the various things I was going to attempt, and she was a great choice, but mostly useless.

But we've got a new Grixis - scratch that, Maestros - Commander I think will serve us much better.

Cormela is different from Kess in a few key ways. The first is she actually offers us a discount on a spell every turn, which was can use both immediately and whenever we want. The second is while she doesn't give us access to a spell from the 'yard every turn, when she dies she returns it to our hand, rather than going to Exile. That means we can use it again... and again... and again. This is key if there's one particular thing we need to do multiple times.

Since most of the time we're going to play our land and say "go", we want the vast majority of the things we do to be at Instant speed. You'll notice I've leaned in hard on this, with 46 Instants. We've also got a higher-than-normal land count at 42; because we're only running three permanents, and we don't want to have to cast things on our turn, we aren't running any mana acceleration. Instead, we're going to hit our land drop every single turn, without fail, so we need to have plenty of lands so we always can. Finally, the single most important thing we're going to do is stay alive. Winning comes much later. Our plan from the get-go is to stay as out of the way as possible and keep everyone else from winning the game or killing us. Let's take a look, then we'll talk through it.

Cormela, Glamour Thief | Commander | Mark Wischkaemper

Commander (1)
1 Cormela, Glamour Thief

Enchantments (1)
1 The Mirari Conjecture

Artifacts (1)
1 Primal Amulet

The vast majority of our lands here correct for color needs. Cormela nicely makes for us, and we can use it for all but two of our spells, but we still have some specific color needs, so the most important thing is making sure we have and when we need it. You'll also notice many of the lands come in to play tapped; this shouldn't be a big deal. We're not really going to do much of anything for several turns, so save a basic or non-tapped land for turn five or six and you'll be good.

We do have a couple of lands which do things. Creeping Tar Pit can win games. No one thinks about it, then someone is at two life and you can activate and just kill them (that happened to me recently). Emergence Zone is a one-use Flash-enabler, but being able to flash in Decree of Pain can be clutch. High Market lets us sac Cormela to get back an important spell; I love the idea of sacrificing her to get back a counterspell and then casting it to counter a spell. We've got some ways to use extra mana, whether drawing cards or doing damage or whatever, and Homeward Path is important in case some1 manages to steal Cormela from us.

Starting at about turn four, we're going to draw cards every turn cycle if we don't do something else. Starting about turn eight, we're going to draw extra cards every turn cycle. A lot of our card draw spells are draw-two Instants, which are just fine. Use them and keep drawing. We want to use our mana every turn cycle, just not on our turn. We also have a few ways of drawing which require we sacrifice a creature or something; go ahead and sac Cormela. We'll buy something back and we can replay her another time. She's not necessary, just helpful.

Some of our draw spells are modal spells. The best example, I think, is Archmage's Charm. We can use it to draw two, sure, but we can also use it to counter a spell, which is likely the most common way we'll use it. (I can see stealing something, too, but that'd be a weird corner case.) Don't be afraid to use your modal spells to draw, but save them till you don't have another option. It's better to draw than to have unused mana, but it's better to draw using a spell which only draws cards rather than closing off other lines of play.

The other major thing we're going to do is interact. We want to make sure no one else wins, right? So, we're going to have to stop them from winning. We have several Wrath of God-style effects so we can wipe the board. We also have some point removal like Terminate and Heartless Act. And we have counterspells like Forbid (which is awesome because it has Buyback), plus one-off things like Sudden Spoiling and Szat's Will. Unlike with Kess, this time there are a lot of modal spells. Choices are good, and paying a bit more for an effect when it means we actually have access to three effects is absolutely worth it. The granddaddy, Cryptic Command, is here, but so are things like Grixis Charm, Perplexing Test, and Sublime Epiphany. Remember, Cormela can help cast all of these spells, reducing their cost by two mana!

Our two permanents are pretty great. Primal Amulet reduces our costs even more, then if it flips to Primal Wellspring will allow us to copy a spell every turn cycle. This is worth it, because drawing four instead of two for the same cost is fantastic, and getting two Vraska's Contempts for the price of one is completely worth it. The Mirari Conjecture requires a bit more thought, because we're likely to want to time with it a push for the win, but it can also be useful in simply getting back a draw spell and a wrath effect, then copying a couple of spells. Again, don't be afraid to use it, but think about it carefully.

I once watched a video by Luis Scott-Vargas on a deck in Standard which had no win condition other than Nephalia Drownyard. The deck would grind out an advantage trading spells and killing creatures, and when it had enough mana, would mill you for three. I think it ran an Elixir of Immortality to save its own library from self-mill, but ultimately you would just mill out your opponent over a million turns. I'd love to do something like that with this deck, but milling 300 cards over three opponents is a lot harder than milling 60. Any method would require a fair amount of resources we don't have to spare, and we also probably don't want to make everyone mad from the very beginning with Mesmeric Orb or whatever. So, we're going to actually try to win the game with a mass-life-loss spell.

Our options are Exsanguinate, Torment of Hailfire, and Cut // Ribbons. We're also running a single copy of Reiterate to join Primal Wellspring and The Mirari Conjecture as a way to copy our kill spell, should we need to. The hope is we can survive long enough that people's life totals will have dropped some from other factors and we can straight-up kill them, with enough mana to support a counterspell backup. But sometimes the world doesn't work like that and we'll need to copy it or recover it with Cormela and cast it again. Either way, we want to wait to do this until we can make quite sure it'll succeed. Don't dump all your mana into Exsanguinate and not be able to save it with Silumgar's Command or something.

There are a couple of cards I'd love to have but didn't quite make the cut. Cruel Ultimatum has a special place in my heart, but because it targets, is so expensive, and because we can't use a part of it, it's not worth it. Magma Opus, on the other hand, is pretty wonderful, but it's really expensive and we have a lot of card draw already.

Would you play draw-go in Commander? Do you? Please let us know in the comments!

Thanks for reading.