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Main » Articles » Convertible Commander: Ulrich of the Krallenhorde

Convertible Commander: Ulrich of the Krallenhorde

Mark Wischkaemper
Posted on September 6, 2017
 Reddit

Ulrich of the Krallenhorde
A little over a year ago, before I started working with Convertible Commander technology, I wrote an article which, in some ways, is the precursor of that very idea. The commander was Ulrich of the Krallenhorde. The idea was so wild even my normal playgroup didn’t really like it, but the thrust of it was this: You build a deck with 150 cards, shuffle, pull the top 50 face down and set them aside, then play with the 100 you’re left. It’s a seriously risky idea, in part because the land count is proportional to the larger deck, so there’s a chance you’ll pull 50 lands and just not be able to play anything, or pull 50 non-lands and get nothing but flooded. It sort of puts a magnifying glass on all the bits of Commander – like the ever-changing play experience due to the singleton requirement or to the fact that sometimes we get mana flooded or screwed – and lets you play even harder into those things. If you pull 30% of your deck out at random every game, it’s going to be different every time, but you’ll also run even more of a risk of the mana problems which occasionally plague us all. On the other hand, it is extremely thematic, because Ulrich himself changes dramatically and often outside his own control.

We’ve also just gotten an influx of tribal decks with Commander 2017. These are certainly some of the strongest out-of-the-box Commander decks we’ve seen from Wizards, and they’re full of toys for the four specific tribes the decks use. That’s great if you play dragons or cats or wizards or vampires. But what if we play a different tribe? Well, we get a few new pieces to play with, and we can use our Optionboard to give ourselves a different experience if we don’t just feel like howling, and we don’t have to leave our mana entirely to the luck of the draw to change the deck. Let’s revisit Ulrich, making sure to remain completely true to our tribe (that’s no cards other than lands which don’t connect to our tribal identity).

Ulrich of the Krallenhorde - Commander | Mark Wischkaemper

Signal the Clans
One of the things about keeping to a theme is it sometimes means we can’t use our normal tricks. Green decks love to lean on Cultivate and Explosive Vegetation style effects to pull lands, improving and increasing mana while thinning the deck and therefore drawing more gas. But those cards make no sense to werewolves, so we can’t run them. That said, it’s not much of a stretch to add in the Gruul mana rocks, because while there’s no evidence there are werewolves stalking the back alleys and city parks of Ravnica, they’d certainly fit right in with the clans of the Gruul. To that point, we’ve also got Gruul Charm, Gruul War Chant (giving all our wolfies Menace is a real thing), and Signal the Clans, which grabs us something good, even if we’re not sure what we get.

We can’t run things like Harmonize or Sylvan Library for more cards, or even Crystal Ball just to smooth things out. We can get away with a few things, though: Hunter's Prowess and Hunter's Insight can give us quite the new grip if used carefully. Combine them with Blood Mist or Uncaged Fury to draw a lot. Shamanic Revelation can also help. A bunch of those wolves are shamans, so apparently despite their hunter nature, they have a mystical side which is allowed to be revelatory.

Lurking Predators
One of the problems with werewolves is the way most of them transform. (I guess from their point of view, you might say one of the problems for werewolves is the fact they transform.) Most of our wolves will transform when someone casts no spells; then transform back when someone casts two or more. We can’t really control what everyone else does, and frankly, if I were playing against this deck, I’d play around the transformations, sandbagging cheap spells so I could make sure you’ve got a bunch of smaller, puny humans. That’s where Moonmist comes in handy. We might need to alpha strike, or we may just need to defend ourselves.

We also make a bunch of wolf tokens, and have some fun ways to mess with the world. Lurking Predators terrifies people at the table. Beastmaster Ascension, too. Howlpack Resurgence is a fun way to cast a spell on a turn other than ours and surprise the heck out of an opponent.

So we make a bunch of furry tanks and attack with them, using tricks and flavorful enchantments to punch through and beat the snot out of our opponents. Plus we get to play with Herald's Horn and Heirloom Blade, both of which should draw us a card or two while they’re out. Both of those things seem like artifacts a shamanic group of werewolves would keep around.

Stonehoof Chieftain
But what if we want to do something a little different? Who else would ally with these outcast humans? How about the Centaurs? A contingent of these half-breeds would add a new theme to the deck, like adding cavalry to an army.

These 11 creatures would substitute in for some of the non-creature spells, making this a deck leaning even more heavily on creatures. If you are cruel and it fits your sense of the theme, Xenagos, God of Revels would add a lot to the power level. Beastmaster Ascencion, Lurking Predators and the two planeswalkers become even stronger. We remain tribal, but we’ve become more accepting. It would give us, and our opponents, a different experience without taking away from the werewolf theme.

Commander is a format of limitations. We inherently saddle ourselves with color restrictions, card limitations, and a specific amount of cards. But within that box, we have a lot of flexibility, and one of the things which can make it even more fun and challenging is to make the box even smaller. Being a slave to the theme may mean the deck isn’t as powerful, but it sure can also mean it’s more fun.

And with this one? Furry tanks. That’s awesome.

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TAGS articles, casual, edh, commander, decklist, mark wischkaemper, ulrich of the krallenhorde, convertible commander

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