As we finish up the lead in to Bloomburrow, I thought it'd be fun to look at one more Commander from before. This one has a particularly intriguing set of abilities.

When I think of decks with tons of Instants and Sorceries, I think of the old 60-card decks built around Kiln Fiend. You play out one of these things which gets buffed when you cast spells, then you cast a bunch and attack for a million.

The interesting problem with decks like these is it can be high-risk: what if you don't draw your Kiln Fiend? What if you draw nothing but Kiln Fiends? Getting the balance right is tricky.

In Commander, it's unlikely a Kiln Fiend is going to get there. I mean, I suppose there's some combo where we cast a bunch of Instants, give the Kiln Fiend Indestructible, Trample, and First strike, then copy it enough times we can kill everyone, but as a "push-damage-through-every-turn" concept it's going to be a tough one. Ashling, however, is here to help.

The first thing to note is we keep all our Red mana (that's mostly what we make, anyway). As long as Ashling is on the 'field, our Red will stick around. This could almost certainly be broken in some way, but we're going to use it just as a helper rather than the focus. Then the real craziness starts.

Our first Instant or Sorcery (from now on called "spell", though I know that's inaccurate) causes us to Rummage: discard a card, then draw a card. One nice thing is if we don't have anything to discard, we still get to draw a card! (If the discard were required to draw, it would say "if you do" before it said "draw a card". If we have a card to discard, we must, but if we don't, we still get to draw.)

Our second spell causes a Pyroclasm, except it doesn't hit our stuff and it does hit our opponents. (This is a decent argument for putting Basilisk Collar and it's kin in this deck, since it means we'd kill all Creatures our opponents control, thanks to Deathtouch. A thought worth considering!)

Our third spell adds to our mana pool, which we're not at all required to spend right away because it won't go anywhere.

My first thought was to run 100% Instants and Sorceries. Small burn spells to keep early damage off by killing attacking Creatures, and dumping mana into the pool every time we have extra, then eventually hitting a Comet Storm or something like it to simply win with all this mana. I think there's a deck there (though if you build it, run as many draw spells as you can shove in there).

Instead, though, I decided to run the risk and see if we can't find a balance on a goodstuff deck.

Ashling, Flame Dancer | Commander | Mark Wischkaemper

• Commander (1)
• 1 Ashling, Flame Dancer

• Creatures (14)
• 1 Birgi, God of Storytelling // Harnfel, Horn of Bounty
• 1 Conspiracy Theorist
• 1 Containment Construct
• 1 Dualcaster Mage
• 1 Electrostatic Field
• 1 Guttersnipe
• 1 Harmonic Prodigy
• 1 Kessig Flamebreather
• 1 Neheb, the Eternal
• 1 Runaway Steam-Kin
• 1 Storm-Kiln Artist
• 1 Torbran, Thane of Red Fell
• 1 Urabrask // The Great Work
• 1 Young Pyromancer

• Instants (23)
• 1 Abrade
• 1 Big Score
• 1 Bolt Bend
• 1 Chandra, Hope's Beacon
• 1 Chaos Warp
• 1 Demand Answers
• 1 Desperate Ritual
• 1 Display of Power
• 1 Expedite
• 1 Flare of Duplication
• 1 Increasing Vengeance
• 1 Lightning Bolt
• 1 Pyretic Ritual
• 1 Pyroblast
• 1 Red Elemental Blast
• 1 Reiterate
• 1 Return the Favor
• 1 Reverberate
• 1 Seething Song
• 1 Siege Smash
• 1 Thrill of Possibility
• 1 Unexpected Windfall
• 1 Valakut Awakening // Valakut Stoneforge

• Sorceries (11)
• 1 Blasphemous Act
• 1 Crackle with Power
• 1 Faithless Looting
• 1 Grapeshot
• 1 Jeska's Will
• 1 Mana Geyser
• 1 Mizzix's Mastery
• 1 Overmaster
• 1 Past in Flames
• 1 Rite of Flame
• 1 Vandalblast

• Enchantments (4)
• 1 Artist's Talent
• 1 Blood Moon
• 1 Braid of Fire
• 1 Underworld Breach

• Artifacts (9)
• 1 Aetherflux Reservoir
• 1 Arcane Encyclopedia
• 1 Bag of Holding
• 1 Cursed Mirror
• 1 Illuminated Folio
• 1 Mind's Eye
• 1 Primal Amulet
• 1 Pyromancer's Goggles
• 1 Ruby Medallion

• Lands (38)
• 34 Mountain
• 1 Myriad Landscape
• 1 Rogue's Passage
• 1 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
• 1 War Room

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This deck is unusual for me in a few ways. The biggest thing is I don't normally do a deck which doesn't have a specific "thing" it's trying to do. Instead, this is a pile of cards which all work together, generating value and changing the state of the Battlefield.

The second is it's not running 40 Lands.

We have 38 Lands here. 34 of them are Basic Mountains, then we have a War Room (card draw), a Rogue's Passage (evasion), a Myriad Landscape (thinning), and a Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle (because it's just value in a deck with this many Mountains). We have two Artifacts which ramp us, Pyromancer's Goggles and Cursed Mirror, but they're both here because of their other abilities. I started as I always do with 40 Lands, and discovered in play-testing it was too much - I was flooding out. We also have Rite of Flame, Pyretic Ritual, Desperate Ritual, and Seething Song, all of which add more mana than they cost. This deck makes plenty of mana.

We do have a few ways of reducing cost. Ruby Medallion and Primal Amulet lower the costs of some of our spells, as does Artist's Talent. Braid of Fire is silly here, sitting there giving us more and more Red (this card was from the days of mana burn!).

We have a few draw spells, most of which require a discard or two. My favorite is probably Big Score, but they're all good and it's possible the deck wants more. One thing I was finding was my Hand was getting empty fast, so some last additions were Mind's Eye, Arcane Encyclopedia, and Illuminated Folio, which should see more play in mono-color decks generally. That kind of repeatable card draw is really helpful, and we should feel comfortable burning through our stored mana to draw extra cards.

We have no devoted win-con. Aetherflux Reservoir is probably a good one, if it can stick around; we can normally kill someone with that. I'm also fairly convinced we could win with something like Crackle with Power. For five mana, it does five damage to a single target, but for 20 mana it does 30 damage to six targets. I suppose with the right combination of cards, an overloaded Mizzix's Mastery might suddenly win the game, and Grapeshot is a classic, though without that overloaded Mizzix's Mastery it's hard to imagine enough spells being cast for Grapeshot to do that much. Mostly we're going to want to do periodic, cumulative damage with Ashling and other sources, eventually adding up to everyone else being dead.

A lot of damage gets thrown around. With Ashling out, anyone focused on little Tokens is going to have a hard time keeping them alive. But we're not going to kill ourselves trying to kill other stuff with damage in a format filled with huge Creatures and lots of Indestructible stuff. Instead, we're racing to do the damage we need to do to kill our opponents and hoping we can stay alive long enough to make that happen. Don't be afraid to use Lightning Bolt, though, if you need to!

The real fun of this deck is playing around with all the synergy. Young Pyromancer spits out lots of tokens. Guttersnipe, Kessig Flamebreather, and Electrostatic Field do damage to our opponents every time we cast a spell, and Torbran, Thane of Red Fell makes them do more. Birgi, God of Storytelling // Harnfel, Horn of Bounty and Urabrask // The Great Work give us even more mana and Urabrask transforms into even more fun. Conspiracy Theorist and Containment Construct both care about the cards we're discarding, and Harmonic Prodigy doubles up on each of Ashling's triggered abilities. Storm-Kiln Artist makes Treasure tokens as we cast our spells, which means even more mana.

We've also got some noncreature fun. Blood Moon should be quite debilitating to our opponents. Chandra, Hope's Beacon helps us make even more mana and can churn us through some cards. We have a number of ways to copy our spells, with cards like Reverberate and Pyromancer's Goggles, as well as Dualcaster Mage. And Bag of Holding will return all our discards back to our Hand, which can be quite powerful.

If I build this deck, I'll be looking at a couple of things. The first is does it draw enough cards; I felt like by the end of play-testing, it was, but it felt shaky. It needs gas to keep going. The second is should it lean in a direction more, because right now it's just... good cards in a pile. It's possible the deck would want to focus in on a specific way to win, or have a pocket combo or two which simply win the game.

However, this deck should be great fun to pilot, especially if you have some experience with Commander and like a bit of a challenge. Figuring out which spells to cast in which order in order to stay alive and advance your board state is going to be a constant challenge with this one!

Thanks for reading.