We currently live in a wealth of Commander. Every set sees multiple new Legendary creatures, as well as abilities and effects which are clearly aimed at multiplayer tables. Wizards of the Coast has clearly thrown their full weight into supporting the format directly.

This has benefits and detriments. We have a ton of choices. If you want to do a Boros Equipment deck, as my fellow CSI writer Kendra Smith pointed out the other day, you have a lot of options. You can do tribal for just about any tribe, now, too, with a glut of non-specific lords and a bunch of support for even the goofiest of tribe. We have four-color commanders, ways to have Planeswalkers lead us, ways to have more than one commander... the list goes on (and on and on).

On the other hand, we have power creep. I remember when Multani, Yavimaya's Avatar came out, because it was obvious that would replace Molimo, Maro-Sorcerer as head of that deck. I could literally just swap commanders and would have a superior performing deck. Molimo got power-creeped out.

We also have red herrings. In an attempt to not just do functional reprints of existing Legends, and give us new things to do, we wind up with Commanders which do a bunch of different things, some of which aren't terribly connected or are difficult to use in a Commander deck. Fellow MTG author Kristen Gregory recently published a post on five reasons your Commander deck isn't winning, and one of them was focus. If we spread around what we're doing too much, we're going to remain on our back foot the entire game.

(A quick side note: that may be fine! There is no reason the goal of a deck has to be to win all the time, and frankly, if you're winning more than about 25% of the time you're probably winning too much. But if the goal is to win sometimes, focus could be a problem.)

Today's commander is a good example of this chaos. There is... a lot going on here. There's power, to be sure, but we're going to have to be very deliberate in how we wield it.

On its face, everything seems to go together. We run a bunch of Sorceries and Instants (preferably high casting cost ones), cast one, make a giant Fractal token, then use Deekah to make it unblockable and attack until our enemies are dead. Seems great, right?

The problem is that's more easily said than done. To cast a large spell, we need mana. To get mana, we're going to need to play plenty of lands (it was awesome to see Jason Alt jump on the "you need 40 lands" train recently!) and probably some ramp. We're in Blue, so that means no Cultivate or other Sorcery-based ramp; nope, we're going to have to run mana rocks.

Well, now we're running spells that aren't Instants and Sorceries, which means we definitely need to run card draw so we can make plenty of Fractals. That's fine (again, we're in Blue), but we probably don't want to limit ourselves to high-mana card draw. Inspiring Refrain is probably worth it, but we'd also like an Archmage's Charm or two. So now we're running smaller Instants and Sorceries, and making a 3/3 Unblockable isn't all that exciting.

So now we need to make our little Fractals bigger. We can enchant them (which is costly in our deck because Auras die with the creature should it get Path to Exiled or whatever), we can equip them (which has the benefit of hanging around but still won't make more Fractals, not being Instants and Sorceries), or we can try to buff them. Since they get +1/+1 counters, it seems going with Proliferate is the direction we should head, because rather than focusing on one Fractal (who can still die to a wrath or other kill spell) we can buff all our Fractals with each instance of Proliferate. Additionally, many Proliferate spells (looking at you, Steady Progress) will make more Fractals, so that's nice.

Never mind we have to have four mana around if we want to make something Unblockable - it's not like our Fractals have any natural evasion. Nope, they're just ground-pounding, unexciting, boring little dudes with counters on them.

So, we've moved away from the obvious progression of large Instants and Sorceries and one huge token. Instead, we're going to run much smaller spells, run mana rocks, run card draw to get to more Instants and Sorceries, make many smaller tokens, then attempt to buff them up en masse using Proliferate. Then... use all that mana to make multiples of them Unblockable and try to win with damage? Chip away and hope to stay alive while everyone else gets lower in life, then finish people off with a single attack?

Hm, now it seems like we need to stay alive. We should probably run some removal and some counterspells. At least those are mostly Instants and Sorceries too.

Fractal Theory | Commander | Mark Wischkaemper

• Commander (1)
• 1 Deekah, Fractal Theorist

• Creatures (8)
• 1 Archmage Emeritus
• 1 Curiosity Crafter
• 1 Flux Channeler
• 1 God-Eternal Kefnet
• 1 Herald of Secret Streams
• 1 Octavia, Living Thesis
• 1 Skatewing Spy
• 1 Talrand, Sky Summoner

• Instants (23)
• 1 Aetherize
• 1 Archmage's Charm
• 1 Behold the Multiverse
• 1 Blue Sun's Zenith
• 1 Brainstorm
• 1 Counterspell
• 1 Cyclonic Rift
• 1 Dig Through Time
• 1 Disallow
• 1 Fierce Guardianship
• 1 Fuel for the Cause
• 1 Insidious Will
• 1 Jwari Disruption // Jwari Ruins
• 1 Narset's Reversal
• 1 Perplexing Test
• 1 Pongify
• 1 Rapid Hybridization
• 1 Rewind
• 1 Saw It Coming
• 1 Snap
• 1 Steady Progress
• 1 Sublime Epiphany
• 1 Thassa's Intervention

• Sorceries (11)
• 1 Aminatou's Augury
• 1 Contentious Plan
• 1 Curse of the Swine
• 1 Inspiring Refrain
• 1 Mentor's Guidance
• 1 Muse Vortex
• 1 Sea Gate Restoration // Sea Gate, Reborn
• 1 Spectral Deluge
• 1 Stolen Identity
• 1 Tezzeret's Gambit
• 1 Treasure Cruise

• Enchantments (3)
• 1 Inexorable Tide
• 1 Jace's Sanctum
• 1 Metallurgic Summonings

• Artifacts (16)
• 1 Astral Cornucopia
• 1 Bident of Thassa
• 1 Contagion Clasp
• 1 Contagion Engine
• 1 Everflowing Chalice
• 1 Geometric Nexus
• 1 Heraldic Banner
• 1 Idol of Oblivion
• 1 Lithoform Engine
• 1 Midnight Clock
• 1 Primal Amulet
• 1 Sapphire Medallion
• 1 Sky Diamond
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Thought Vessel
• 1 Twinning Staff

• Lands (38)
• 27 Island
• 1 Arcane Lighthouse
• 1 Halimar Depths
• 1 Homeward Path
• 1 Karn's Bastion
• 1 Lonely Sandbar
• 1 Myriad Landscape
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Remote Isle
• 1 Rogue's Passage
• 1 Terrain Generator
• 1 War Room

Buy This Deck Export text format

This deck deserves some play-testing and tuning for sure, but I think the bones are there. We're not really a permission deck. We're more like a midrange/control, with the goal of making some large, difficult-to-manage threats and a light counter suite to deal with big problems. (We probably want to save our counters for the Wrath we really don't want to land, not just use them willy-nilly on any old thing.)

We've got our 40 lands, plus several ways of ramping. Midnight Clock is particularly interesting; we get three rounds of ramp (assuming a 4-player game) before it goes away and we reset our entire 'yard and hand. This makes the card useful both early and late game, since later we can pump mana into it to hurry things along and buy back our entire 'yard, as well as draw seven new cards, while early we just ramp, then get to refill our hand. Primal Amulet reduces cost rather than adds mana, but the payoff in Primal Wellspring is 100% worth it. As long as we're Proliferating, we may as well run Everflowing Chalice and Astral Cornucopia.

A lot of our card draw is tied to other things we're doing. Archmage Emeritus is a great example: we already want to cast Instants and Sorceries, so now when we do, we draw. Same with Curiosity Crafter, who draws whenever a creature token does damage to a player; we can make our token Unblockable and draw a card. The aforementioned Archmage's Charm is a great sample of the kind of card draw we have, since this deck has a slate of modal spells, many of which include a card-draw mode. Idol of Oblivion is perfect for us, because we'll make a token or two every turn cycle. Even if we're saving for an end-of-turn card draw spell, we can still tap the Idol in response. Bident of Thassa is great in any creature-based Blue deck.

We probably want to lean on more than just a single Unblockable token or two in order to win, especially since there will be situations where we have several of the little Fractals. This is where Herald of Secret Streams and Skatewing Spy come in; since all our Fractals have counters, they'll take to the air or become Unblockable automatically.

We also have some ways to make our tokens really big. Geometric Nexus is too good not to include; a few of our spells plus one or two from the rest of the table and we'll be able to make a really big Fractal. Additionally, Octavia, Living Thesis should be relatively easy for us to cast (we'll get to eight or more Instants and Sorceries in our 'yard pretty quickly), then she'll start setting our Fractals at 8/8 instead of 0/0. That can get pretty serious, especially if we can activate a couple in a turn.

Talrand, Sky Summoner seems worth it here, as does Metallurgic Summonings. May as well make more tokens. We also want some ways to copy stuff, so Twinning Staff, God-Eternal Kefnet, and Lithoform Engine all find slots. And we have our Proliferate engine, including Inexorable Tide, Contagion Clasp and Engine, and Contentious Plan.

We wrap it up with some removal (Rapid Hybridization, Aetherize, etc.) and a counter suite (Saw it Coming, Sublime Epiphany) and call it a deck.

It was hard to get this deck down to 100; there were a lot of great cards. The one I miss the most, though, is Swarm Intelligence. It was too expensive to not be an Instant or Sorcery itself, but it would be really good in the deck.

What would you add and cut? How would you build Deekah? And how do you stay on target, rather than letting your decks get too unfocused? Let us know in the comments!

Thanks for reading.