When I first looked at Flubs, the Fool, I was not initially that impressed. I don't like to discard cards. While it's not an unfamiliar feeling, I also don't love playing Magic with an empty hand. I've gotten better at building draw into my decks, but Flubs seems to take a lot of what I've learned about deckbuilding and turns it on its head.

This happy-go-lucky Frog Scout will let me play an additional land on each of my turns. Whenever I play a land or cast a spell, I'll draw a card if I have no cards in hand. Otherwise, I'll discard a card.

Discarding a card every time you cast a spell isn't the sort of thing I'd force upon even my most hated tablemate, but the idea is that when you play Flubs you want to have no cards in hand. That way you get to draw a card every time you play a land or cast a spell. Finding a way to make this froggy little puzzle work is the real trick with building and playing a Flubs deck.

There are a lot of ways you could go with Flubs but I ended up deciding that I would lean into what Flubs is already providing, and I would lean into it hard.

Extra Land Drops

Flubs will let me play an extra land and if I'm empty-handed I'll draw a card. That's great so long as I can both hit my land drops and draw non-lands if I no longer have land drops to make. One way to help deal with that challenge is to make sure I can get as many extra land drops as possible.

Making extra land drops does several things for me. It will help me not get stuck as often by drawing a land when I really want to draw a spell to cast. If I'm making three, four, or more land drops per turn, that's a lot of room for accidentally drawing a land when I would rather draw a spell. I'll just play the land and keep digging. Those extra land drops will also help me have the mana to play out more spells on my turn. This is far from a spell-slinger deck, but there's no reason a late-game Flubs turn might not see me play three or four spells, drop three lands, and still have open mana.

Playing lots of lands naturally points me towards building a landfall deck. Landfall feels like something I've written about a lot in recent months, but it's hard to argue it isn't a good fit for Flubs, and in red I've got options I don't usually see.

I'm running many of the usual staples of landfall decks. Lotus Cobra will give me extra mana. Scute Swarm will give me insects or more Scute Swarms. Avenger of Zendikar is a classic, making a 0/1 green Plant token for each land I control when it enters and then putting +1/+1 counters on my Plant creatures. I am not running Craterhoof Behemoth, but if you wanted to push this deck up in power you would likely want to run both of them along with Tooth and Nail.

Larger token creatures are nice even if they don't go quite as crazy as Scute Swarm. Rampaging Baloths is in the list as a way to make 4/4 Beasts, and Greensleeves, Maro-Sorcerer will be happy to push out a 3/3 Green Badger every time a land hits the field under my control.

Phylath, World Sculptor is a Gruul take on Avenger, creating a 0/1 Green Plant token for each basic land I control. It has a landfall trigger that puts four +1/+1 counters on target Plant I control.

Diving more heavily into Red, Moraug, Fury of Akoum is a 6/6 Minotaur Warrior with a dandy landfall trigger and a neat ability. Each creature I control gets +1/+0 for each time it has attacked this turn. Whenever a land enters the battlefield under my control, if it's my main phase there's an additional combat phase after this phase. At the beginning of that combat phase I'll untap all creatures I control.

I'll want to have my Moraug landfall triggers happen in my second main phase if at all possible. If they happen in my first main phase I'll get my extra combat steps before my regular combat step, and creatures don't normally untap at the beginning of your regular combat step.

Both Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait and Tatyova, Benthic Druid are in today's list and can draw me a card when I play a land. The latter will also have me gain a life. Landfall card draw is going to be a little weird in Flubs. I can order my triggers so that I draw my Flubs card first and then draw my extra card. If I then play a land or a spell I'll discard the extra card I drew, so it will function more like card selection than actual card draw.

How We Win

This deck is built around playing lots of lands, so my decision to play a lot of landfall cards seemed sensible. My landfall triggers could give me enough creatures to win by just swinging with a huge army. I want a few other options, as there may be many games where I don't end up drawing a single token generator.

I could have played as many spells with Madness as possible to try to get some use out of all the cards I'll be discarding. I could have leaned into playing hydras and X spells, or playing lots of permanents that have abilities that I could put mana into. I ended up not doing any of those things, though I am running a Genesis Wave that I'll be excited to play for a huge number if things go well.

You may have noticed that Greensleeves has a power and toughness based upon how many lands I control. I've leaned into that theme pretty heavily.

Both Zendikar Incarnate and Rubblehulk are Gruul Elementals with a lands-based power and toughness. The latter has an additional Bloodrush ability that will let me discard it to give target attacking creature +X/+X where X is equal to my land count.

Cultivator Colossus is in the mix alongside Abundance, both for its lands-based P/T and for the combo I might pull off that puts all of my lands into play. If I've got a land in hand I can play it when the Colossus enters the battlefield and if I do I can draw a card and repeat the process. Abundance lets me choose to draw a land or a non-land. That will work great with both Colossus and Flubs. Hitting all of my land drops in a turn will be easy if I'm able to choose to draw a land if I still have land drops to make.

Blackblade Reforged may not give evasion, but it will give +X/+X where X is the number of lands I control. Flubs won't often be a threat to win with commander damage, but with this equipment on the field and a Rogue's Passage it might just happen.

Keeping Things Simple

I've got a reasonable amount of ramp and removal, but this deck is oddly lacking on one of the most important things for any EDH deck: card draw. The reason is simple - I think I actually want to get down to zero cards in hand. That sounds crazy, but my theory is that the deck will perform best when I'm hellbent.

Beyond extra land drops, landfall triggers, and some pretty serious beaters that will scale up as I ramp, there's not a lot of complexity to this deck. I don't think that's a problem - some of my favorite decks are very straightforward. Producing a ton of mana and spending it well goes a long way towards winning games of Magic. The biggest risk is that I'll have trouble keeping Flubs on the field, and without Flubs and without a hand I won't be doing much. Every game plan has its risks. The biggest risk with Flubs is that you'll have something of a non-game. All that ramp should help to get Flubs back out, but if you just hate having an empty hand, Flubs might not be for you.

Flubs, the Fool | Commander | Stephen Johnson

• Commander (1)
• 1 Flubs, the Fool

• Creatures (29)
• 1 Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait
• 1 Aftermath Analyst
• 1 Allosaurus Rider
• 1 Ashaya, Soul of the Wild
• 1 Avenger of Zendikar
• 1 Azusa, Lost but Seeking
• 1 Courser of Kruphix
• 1 Cultivator Colossus
• 1 Dryad of the Ilysian Grove
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Greensleeves, Maro-Sorcerer
• 1 Harbinger of the Hunt
• 1 Lotus Cobra
• 1 Lumra, Bellow of the Woods
• 1 Mina and Denn, Wildborn
• 1 Molimo, Maro-Sorcerer
• 1 Moraug, Fury of Akoum
• 1 Oracle of Mul Daya
• 1 Phylath, World Sculptor
• 1 Rampaging Baloths
• 1 Rubblehulk
• 1 Sakura-Tribe Elder
• 1 Scute Swarm
• 1 Tatyova, Benthic Druid
• 1 Timeless Witness
• 1 Ulvenwald Hydra
• 1 Wayward Swordtooth
• 1 World Shaper
• 1 Zendikar Incarnate

• Spells (22)
• 1 Aetherspouts
• 1 Arcane Denial
• 1 Beast Within
• 1 Chaos Warp
• 1 Counterspell
• 1 Cyclonic Rift
• 1 Deflecting Swat
• 1 Fierce Guardianship
• 1 Harrow
• 1 Heroic Intervention
• 1 Pongify
• 1 Rapid Hybridization
• 1 Swan Song
• 1 Animist's Awakening
• 1 Blasphemous Act
• 1 Farseek
• 1 Genesis Wave
• 1 Nature's Lore
• 1 Rampant Growth
• 1 Scapeshift
• 1 Splendid Reclamation
• 1 Three Visits

• Enchantments (2)
• 1 Abundance
• 1 Exploration

• Artifacts (6)
• 1 Amulet of Vigor
• 1 Blackblade Reforged
• 1 Crucible of Worlds
• 1 Ghirapur Orrery
• 1 Lightning Greaves
• 1 Swiftfoot Boots

• Lands (40)
• 13 Forest
• 7 Island
• 7 Mountain
• 1 Boseiju, Who Shelters All
• 1 Castle Garenbrig
• 1 City of Brass
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Lotus Field
• 1 Mosswort Bridge
• 1 Rejuvenating Springs
• 1 Rogue's Passage
• 1 Scalding Tarn
• 1 Spire Garden
• 1 Training Center
• 1 Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth

Buy This Deck Export text

If you wanted to power this list up, you could do pretty well to load in fast mana and the kinds of low CMC cards that might let you launch into some pretty big storm turns. I'm genuinely unsure that Flubs can make it into high powered play with such a big, weird downside. Discarding cards when you play lands and cast spells is no joke, and it's hard to play high powered EDH without any cards in hand.

I'm not sure how much you might need to do to power this list down. You might drop out Scute Swarm, Scapeshift, and some of the more powerful spells, but it feels like the kind of deck that should be able to play at mid powered tables pretty well. Until I've been able to play the list a few times I won't know for sure where this one lands on the power scale.

Final Thoughts

I didn't enter into 2024 with any expectation that I'd have a single Frog deck in my EDH collection, and now that I've finished this deckbuilding exercise, I'm thinking about building my second in paper. My Clement, the Worrywort deck is the only Bloomburrow EDH deck I've built that has won a game. I missed about three or four weeks of gaming thanks to COVID, so most of my Bloomburrow first drafts have only seen a single game so far, and haven't yet been tweaked to fix what isn't working. It's also worth remembering that a one game sample size at a table where power levels are all over the place isn't the best way to evaluate a deck.

One of the things I love about Flubs has nothing to do with how the card plays. The art is evocative of the tarot card The Fool, and I think it works really well. I'm not sure if I'm going to build Flubs in paper, but I've been looking at Helga, Skittish Seer, and wondering if it would be a fun build. I don't know that I really need three Frog EDH decks, but I could see building them just to give my tablemates their choice of Frogs to play against.

It's a long weekend here in the States, so this column had to be wrapped up a little early to make sure it got to my editors in time. If you're a regular reader you know I rarely give you a short read. I prefer to make sure you get your money's worth and all my thoughts on a new deck find their way into each column. You never know what will stick with a reader and help them later on, so I don't like to hold back.

That's all I've got for today. This goes up on Monday so if you're enjoying a long weekend, I hope it's a great one! Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!