River Landscape with Horseman and Peasants by Aelbert Cuyp (1658). Pearl Lake Ancient by Richard Wright.

Today's column is a look at building a deck around Lutri, the Spellchaser. Lutri has been banned in Commander, but only because of how it would work as a companion. I'm firmly of the belief that they should simply ban companion as an ability in Commander and unban Lutri. We've got a command zone to play these cards out of, and anyone wanting to apply additional restrictions to their deck-building process is free to do so. We don't need companion, it doesn't make the format better, and in many ways I think it makes it worse.

That's an argument for another day, and one I'm unlikely to win.

Today I want to see how strong a Lutri deck I can build. Could it be that there is an argument for banning Lutri based on its power level? I doubt it, but I think it's worth a look. How badly can I "break" Lutri? I'm not a cEDH player but I've been around the block a few times and I've played enough semi-competitive Commander games to want to give it a shot. I've also got some very smart and much more cEDH savvy friends from my home store of NexGen Comics in Pelham, New Hampshire, that I can lean on for advice.

Chasing Spells

The first step in any experiment like this is to take a good look at what I'm building around.

You have to cast Lutri, so there will be no Deadeye Navigator shenanigans in this build. I can't copy an opponent's instant or sorcery spell, so that's also a limit on Lutri's ability, but not a major one.

That's it. At first blush, this doesn't look like it could possibly be built into such a strong deck that it would deserve to be banned. Still, that's my stated goal, so let's think about how top tier decks usually win.

Combo. I'm pretty sure most competitive decks find a way to not just make more out of the sum of their parts - they want to go to infinity (and beyond). Tuned Najeela, the Blade-Blossom and Godo, Bandit Warlord set themselves up to not just get a few extra attacks, but to have an infinite number of attack steps to kill the table. Competitive decks often go infinitely wide, create an infinitely large creature, ping opponents for an infinite amount of damage, and so on. My use of the term "infinite" isn't quite accurate. You are in some cases limited by the life totals or your opponents or even by the number of cards in your opponents' libraries. My point is that they set up loops they can do as many times as they like until the game is over.

My basic plan to build a cEDH deck will be to identify some game-winning combos and then figure out a path to those combos that uses Lutri's ability.

Spells We Control

If we're going for a combo build, we probably want to run tutors. Tutors are a key part of the cEDH game, allowing you to essentially have a flexible duplicate of any card that tutor could go search for. There's usually some restriction or drawback, but not always.

Lutri is in blue and red, so I'm not going to have access to the best tutors in the game. Lutri also gives me the ability to copy an instant or sorcery, so every card in this deck should be looked at through the lens of what would happen if we used our commander to copy it.

Merchant Scroll only gets Blue instants, but it puts them in our hand. If there's a wincon we can assemble with two Blue instants, this card can be copied with Lutri to get them both. Mystical Tutor can be one of those two search targets, so things are looking good for this plan. It's worth noting that we'd never want to use Lutri to copy Mystical Tutor, as you'd do each search in sequence and the first card you tutored up and put on top of your library would get shuffled away when you did the second search. An instant-speed draw option could solve that problem and we've got a few of those in today's list.

Gamble is the kind of tutor I both love and hate. I love that it can get any card. I hate that unless I have nearly a full grip, I feel like I'm setting myself up to flush that card right into the graveyard when I randomly select the one I'll have to discard. Having to do that twice in a row? Well, it may feel like quite the gamble, but the upside if I get lucky is that I should be set up to try to win the game. Competitive EDH is very much about winning so I think Gamble has to be in our list. With a good assortment of creature-based instant and sorcery recursion, having a key card in the graveyard isn't a huge problem.

I stated earlier that you won't be able to use Lutri to copy an opponent's Diabolic Tutor because you can only copy spells you control. You won't be able to grab both halves of a two-card combo to win the game in proper cEDH fashion. I wasn't wrong, but there are ways around that little restriction.

Spells that copy spells on the stack are spells you control. If I have a Reverberate or a Fork in hand and Lutri in the command zone, I might catch an opponent when they cast a Demonic or Diabolic Tutor. They'll still get to search up a card, but I can cast Fork to copy it and then flash in Lutri, the Spellchaser to copy the Fork.

While that's a strong play, my opponent's spell will resolve last, so they might just choose to get a way to stop me from winning. What I really might be a way to interfere with or just take control of their tutor.

Wild Ricochet will allow you to choose new targets for the spell you're copying. You can take their tutor and have them search up a Swamp, use your copy to get Isochron Scepter and flash in Lutri to go get Dramatic Reversal.

Aethersnatch and Perplexing Chimera will both allow you to take control of a spell on the stack. The former is a great way to take control of our opponent's tutor. The latter... is Perplexing Chimera. It seems like it will work well, and it will, but our opponent will get control of Perplexing Chimera and we'll need to get it back before launching into any attempt to win the game.

Those last two would be good in a more casual deck, but when I went through the process of tuning this list for cEDH play I wound up dropping them out. I think they're still strong, but at five and 6 mana, with 3 mana added in for a Lutri casting, it's clear that this plan isn't efficient enough for competitive play.

Those Pesky Wincons

Winning the game is the goal of any competitive or semi-competitive deck. It's the goal of most casual decks too, though you do get the occasional deck that is built to do something else entirely.

My initial plan was to build infinite mana combos with cards like Mana Geyser and Reiterate or Turnabout and Reiterate. If you can afford to pay the buyback cost you can go infinite and then pour that mana into a Comet Storm or Walking Ballista. My instincts weren't terrible, but the competitive (or semi-competitive) strategies of five or six years ago don't really hold up now. Paying 10 or 11 mana to try to make infinite mana is way too expensive for today's cEDH.

I also looked at using combos like Grand Architect and Pili-Pala. Those two cost a total of 5 mana, but they're both creatures and Lutri isn't in colors that provide for good creature tutors. A Sultai or Simic deck might want that combo, but in Blue and Red and with no synergy with Lutri it just doesn't make sense for this build.

There are some combos that fit Lutri's colors and game plan much better and I have to thank Bryan Li, Ryan Black and Pierre Totari for help in finding them. They are friends from NexGen Comics and are three of our best players. Bryan and Pierre are also Magic Judges, and all of them were great resources to help tune up this list. They know much more about competitive EDH than I do and I really wanted to do right by Lutri and give you a legitimately strong deck to look at today.

The first combo that actually made the cut into today's list is the Ral, Storm Conduit combo.

All we need to do is get Ral out and set up a loop involving spells that copy other spells. Ral's -2 ability will let us copy the next instant or sorcery spell we cast. Lutri will also let us copy an instant or sorcery spell we cast when it enters the battlefield. The Standard combo involved casting Expansion targeting an instant on the stack and then casting another Expansion targeting the first Expansion. At that point you keep targeting your Expansions until you've got enough copies put onto the stack to kill the table.

The Ral, Storm Conduit damage triggers when spells are cast or copied so they don't even have to resolve. The deck has other copy spells like Fork and Reverberate to make this a viable wincon even if you couldn't cast Lutri. With a copy effect in the command zone, that makes this strategy even easier because you can get the loop going with just one copy spell in hand.

Ikoria gave us a new combo with Dockside Extortionist and the new mutate creature, Lore Drakkis. You cast Dockside Extortionist to (hopefully) make a bunch of treasure. You mutate Lore Drakkis onto Dockside Extortionist with a bounce spell like Chain of Vapor or Unsummon in the graveyard and you should be able to make infinite mana. Just bounce your mutant, recast it, get that bounce spell back and keep going. If you're making more than five treasures, you can go infinite.

If you have a way to do damage when a creature enters the battlefield, you can just kill the table. One of the references we looked at when putting this list together was Baeowulfe's Naru Meha, Master Wizard list. We couldn't run the Ghostly Flicker combo from that list, but with red available to us it was an easy choice to add Impact Tremors and Release to the Wind.

With this combo, you simply cast Release to the Wind targeting one of your nonland permanents. With that on the stack, you cast Lutri and when Lubri enters, copy Release to the Wind, targeting Lutri. Let that copy resolve, exile and recast Lutri for free and again copy the original Release to the Wind. You get as many Lutri enter-the-battlefield triggers as you need to kill the table with Ral, Storm Conduit, Impact Tremors or with Guttersnipe. With Talrand, Sky Summoner or Young Pyromancer on the field you can make a huge army of creatures.

Lutri's Bounce House

We really want to be able to bounce Lutri because we want to abuse Lutri's enter the battlefield ability. In a casual meta I might want to Fork and then Lutri to copy an opponent's ramp spell in the mid-game and then do it again when someone decides to tutor. In the late game I might just use it on my own Comet Storm or maybe Invoke the Firemind.

Having to re-cast Lutri out of the command zone dramatically reduces the chance that we'll actually use him in the late game.

We definitely want cheap bounce spells in today's list. Chain of Vapor, Rescue and Unsummon are essential to the Dockside Extortionist / Lore Drakkis combo and they can be imprinted onto Isochron Scepter as well.

Being able to bounce and recast Lutri at instant speed will surely help us win games. If nothing else, we can use Lutri to copy our counterspells and sometimes that extra counter is the difference between winning and losing. That was made especially clear in this video. They were playing Lutri as a companion, but it's clear after only a few games that having a copy effect readily available in a format where there are often crazy stack interactions can be very strong. For 1 mana, you can put your Lutri back in your hand and be ready to copy that Arcane Denial or Force of Will you're hoping will protect your win.

Extra Turns

When brainstorming for this deck I had been goldfishing my Narset, Enlightened Master deck and it struck me that one of the most backbreaking things you can do in Magic is take lots and lots of extra turns.

Taking one extra turn is great. We'll try to use Lutri to copy that extra turn spell. Two extra turns isn't game-winning in itself, but with a little recursion and some bounce, this deck might be able to abuse this tactic.

It's not quite as compact and elegant as Ezuri, Claw of Progress and Sage of Hours, but if we can manage to take three or four extra turns we should be able to pull ahead pretty well. Cards like Panharmonicon and Twinning Staff made my final list for today's column, so we might be able to pile up quite a few copies of a single instant turn spell. That's all well and good, but I have to ask: can we go infinite?

I like to challenge my readers and today's challenge is a simple one.Is there an infinite turns loop I'm missing that can be pulled off while using Lutri as a key element to the combo?

I think we have a bunch of the key pieces, but so far I'm not seeing it. You'd need to bounce Lutri, bounce your recursion dork, recur your bounce spell and recur your extra turn spell. You might have a couple of turns to pull all of that off, so if you have an idea on how to line up that kind of craziness please comment below!

Building Without a Budget

If I'm truly trying to make an attempt at a cEDH Lutri deck, I need to set aside my normal reservations about not throwing in too many pricey cards.

I don't normally think in terms of building without a budget, but I've been told that cards with "Mox" in the name are actually quite good. Mox Diamond, Mana Crypt and Mana Vault have to go in because we're building a cEDH deck and we're running Isochron Scepter and Dramatic Reversal. We need what Ryan called a "critical mass" of mana producing rocks for "isorev" (Dramatic Scepter combo).

The Decklist

I've been goldfishing this list without concern for budget and I've definitely found that it's hard to fully evaluate a deck that is built to be so dependent upon interaction. I'm not confident that this is the best deck that could be built around Lutri, but I think it's quite strong and will be a lot of fun to play. It is definitely NOT so strong that it should be banned as a card in the 99 or as a commander; the problem only comes when you want to run it as your companion.

I'm even more confident that a more casual Lutri build would be a blast and that it would probably be easy to build in line with Jason Alt's 75% deck-building philosophy. Stealing your opponent's spells is very "75%" and using Lutri and copy spells to steal them twice is the kind of fun I'm guessing he could get behind.

Lutri the Spellchaser | Commander | Stephen Johnson

• Commander (1)
• 1 Lutri, the Spellchaser

• Creatures (16)
• 1 Archaeomancer
• 1 Baral, Chief of Compliance
• 1 Dockside Extortionist
• 1 Drift of Phantasms
• 1 Dualcaster Mage
• 1 Gilded Drake
• 1 Goblin Electromancer
• 1 Guttersnipe
• 1 Heidar, Rimewind Master
• 1 Izzet Chronarch
• 1 Lore Drakkis
• 1 Mnemonic Wall
• 1 Talrand, Sky Summoner
• 1 Walking Ballista
• 1 Venser, Shaper Savant
• 1 Young Pyromancer

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Ral, Storm Conduit

• Instants (26)
• 1 Arcane Denial
• 1 Blue Sun's Zenith
• 1 Brainstorm
• 1 Capsize
• 1 Chain of Vapor
• 1 Comet Storm
• 1 Cryptic Command
• 1 Cyclonic Rift
• 1 Dramatic Reversal
• 1 Expansion // Explosion
• 1 Force of Will
• 1 Fork
• 1 Mana Drain
• 1 Muddle the Mixture
• 1 Mystic Confluence
• 1 Mystical Tutor
• 1 Narset's Reversal
• 1 Pact of Negation
• 1 Release to the Wind
• 1 Rescue
• 1 Reverberate
• 1 Stroke of Genius
• 1 Swan Song
• 1 Turnabout
• 1 Unsummon
• 1 Wild Ricochet

• Sorceries (8)
• 1 Capture of Jingzhou
• 1 Gamble
• 1 Merchant Scroll
• 1 Ponder
• 1 Preordain
• 1 Temporal Manipulation
• 1 Time Warp
• 1 Walk the Aeons

• Enchantments (4)
• 1 Impact Tremors
• 1 Mystic Remora
• 1 Rhystic Study
• 1 Underworld Breach

• Artifacts (14)
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Crystal Shard
• 1 Extraplanar Lens
• 1 Fellwar Stone
• 1 Isochron Scepter
• 1 Izzet Signet
• 1 Mana Crypt
• 1 Mana Vault
• 1 Mox Diamond
• 1 Panharmonicon
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Talisman of Creativity
• 1 Thought Vessel
• 1 Twinning Staff

• Lands (30)
• 1 Arcane Lighthouse
• 1 Buried Ruin
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Scalding Tarn
• 1 Shivan Reef
• 1 Steam Vents
• 1 Sulfur Falls
• 1 Volcanic Island
• 12 Snow-Covered Island
• 7 Snow-Covered Mountain
• 1 Academy Ruins

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The more I think about it, the more I think we should probably just thumb our nose at the Commander Rules Committee and just "rule zero" Lutri into the format as a commander. Today's list is strong, but it certainly isn't oppressive like Iona, Shield of Emeria and Painter's Servant. It doesn't suck all the fun out of the game like Leovold, Emissary of Trest and Teferi's Puzzle Box.

This little otter is probably one of the most interesting legendary creatures I've seen in a long time and it's a shame we have to use rule zero to be allowed to build decks around it, but we do. I think we should #freelutri, but until the R.C. comes to its senses, there's really no good reason we can't enjoy this clever little otter as a commander or in the 99 of a deck.

Final Thoughts

I'd love to hear your thoughts on today's decklist. How would you build a cEDH or even a semi-competitive Lutri decklist? What did I and my buddies from NexGen comics miss? Would you rather see Lutri unbanned and companions just run out of the command zone in our format?

Before I sign off, I need to include a small shout-out.

Years ago, my kid and I were just getting into Commander when the store we started playing at abruptly closed. We had a brand-new Commander league on our hands and no home store to play at.

The good folks at NexGen Comics in Pelham, New Hampshire not only took us in and gave us a place to play every Saturday, but they never asked for league players to pay any extra admission or fee and they didn't require that we implement any prize structure or other way to funnel money to the shop.

They rightly saw the creation of a Saturday afternoon EDH League as an investment in the local community and trusted that our players would repay them with our patronage. Lots of stores wouldn't have done that, but NexGen did.

We began as a free league for casual play and have attracted over a hundred players pretty much every year since we moved to NexGen Comics. The league has grown into a cornerstone of the local community. I probably wouldn't be sitting here writing these columns if not for Stephen and Mike Hinkle and the kindness they extended to me and to the players in our league.

The Coronoavirus pandemic has hit local game stores hard, not just in New England but everywhere. NexGen has started a GoFundMe campaign not only to help get through this difficult time but also to expand and renovate their space. I don't know how "social distancing" will fit in with multiplayer EDH, but having a little extra space to spread out will certainly help. The store is hoping to expand into an adjacent space and that's not the kind of thing that comes easily or cheaply.

If you've enjoyed my work over the years, I'd like to ask you to throw a few coppers into their campaign and to share their GoFundMe link.

Even $5 would be amazing. NexGen Comics is why I'm here, trying week in and week out to contribute to the Commander community, encourage folks to start up leagues, and do my small part to help grow EDH into the most popular format of Magic in the world today.

I'm also a huge supporter of CoolStuffInc.com, so if you can't see donating to the GoFundMe campaign (or even if you can), please consider picking up your singles and Ikoria product through this site. They've certainly been a huge supporter of the Commander community, bringing you new content, new decklists and new ideas each and every week.

That's all I've got for today. Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!