I know it’s a pretty underwhelming mechanic, but I absolutely love venturing into the dungeon, whatever form that may take. It’s exactly the sort of nickle-and-dimey, incremental and ultimately small-ball thing that I love doing, but in this case turned up to eleven in the fact that there are three dungeons with so many different paths to take. Now, I understand that there is a whole pre-constructed deck built around doing this along with some other graveyard stuff. It is a cool deck! The thing is, though, that I want to make this mechanic work outside of a face Commander that was specifically designed to make the mechanic shine. Let’s see what is in the core set and mine it for everything it has to offer! I’ve built three different dungeon decks at the moment, each with a different focus, and hopefully by exploring those ideas a little bit we can all be inspired to take things a little further.
The first deck I envisioned in the dungeon space revolves around Hama Pashar. I had the pleasure of drafting the set a few weeks ago with friends and was able to pick up two of these for my deck — I was immediately hooked. With all said and done, the only thing left to do was replicate that experience in Commander. The obvious risk here is that the objective is to do a bunch of venturing, but not having that capability granted through the command zone. Having to rely on enablers in the 99 to have your commander function at all can be an off-putting prospect. It just becomes super easy to pick apart these setups if that’s what your opponents decide they want to do.
But you know what? With risk, there is reward! A good number of these venture cards in blue and white combine nicely with a tried and true (not to mention on-color) blink sub-theme. Something to chew on! From there, double your triggers even further with your Panharmonicons, Strionic Resonators and Lithoform Engines. I’m not going to try and convince you that it isn’t a shakey infrastructure, but you do get a lot of room triggers to compensate. In my experience both running complex simulations and playing with this shell, a deck like this really benefits from Dungeon of the Mad Mage, simply because the amount of setup you get in the scry triggers and card advantage, nestled into the back half of the dungeon, benefit a grindier, more midrange archetype like this in a really big way. Not to say Lost Mine of Phandelver isn’t fine, but you really have to shoot the moon once you start venturing to keep the gravy train rolling. Assuming you’re able to protect your ETB venture pieces, things should turn out alright. Nothing quite beats reaching the end of Mad Mage and triggering the last room two or three times.
Shifting gears — let’s talk about Acererak the Archlich. This was the first card spoiled that got me really interested in the dungeoneering aspect of the set. It’s a compact design that can be really versatile depending on what you’re looking to do. The intention is pretty clearly to push through Tomb of Annihilation so you can get Acererak to stick; however, that is not my intention, dear reader. What if the rules text simply read “2B: Venture into the Dungeon”?
Well, I’ll tell you what if that. It probably isn’t impressive enough. Luckily for us, though, there are a very large number of ways to bring his cost down. Cards such as Urza’s Incubator, Heartless Summoning, or the oft-overlooked Semblance Anvil function best in this space, since they can singularly reduce Acererak’s cost to a single black mana. Outside of these, there are still cards like Cloud Key, Jet Medallion, Undead Warchief and others to mix and match and ultimately get that double generic mana cost reduction. Now, with our commander only costing one black mana, we can easily cast him over and over for venture triggers until we can find other combo pieces to end the game. I’ve achieved this primarily through Carnival of Souls, allowing us to infinitely cast our commander from our hand, coupled with any number of cards that trigger off of casting spells over and over again (Ayara, First of Locthwain, Bontu’s Monument, Tendrils of Agony, Aetherflux Reservoir, etc). The interesting thing about facilitating it through Acererak, though, is that we can generate enough resources by venturing the keep ourselves afloat while we’re trying to find our combo pieces and drift into a midrange/combo gameplan.
In my own playgroup, I’ve been really happy with venturing primarily into the Lost Mine of Phandelver with this commander. It’s short enough that you can cycle through it a bunch of times pretty quickly, and can provide you with enough token fodder to gum up the battlefield or extra mana to push things along. That’s to say nothing of the fast turnaround between the scry at the beginning and the card draw at the end, or even the small life-drain in the middle, which seems innocuous but starts to add up quickly considering the speed at which you can clear and subsequently re-clear this dungeon over and over again. It hits all the right notes in terms of what you need to survive in the game, while also being short enough to repeatedly provide you those few important things — very handy when you’re trying to find just the right time to execute your combo and stay alive until that happens. If the game ends up being more of a race to the finish line without the need to line up and time your execution in a specific way, I’d probably encourage you to pivot to Dungeon of the Mad Mage, simply because you get to see so many cards off the top of your deck. Just pay close attention to what your opponents are up to; There is a lot of nuance here, but Phandelver tends to have an edge in more interactive games, while Mad Mage is at its best in less interactive games.
So we’ve pretty much talked a ton about Lost Mine of Phandelver and Dungeon of the Mad Mage so far. “What about the Tomb of Annihilation?” you are certainly asking aloud to the device you are reading from. Well, I have been saving the best for last. As far as commanders that lend themselves particularly well to venturing into the dungeon, I think that Hama Pashar and Acererak are the low hanging fruit. One that’s a little more ambiguous is Varis, Silverymoon Ranger. Obviously this one seems a little less powerful, since his venture trigger can only occur once per turn, and his big payoff only happens when a dungeon is complete. That being said, I think he’s pretty perfect to center around venturing into the Tomb of Annihilation.
So first thing’s first — a quick word about the infrastructure we’ll need to make everything work. Obviously, we’re going to have to try and maximize Varis’ venture triggers, so we want to make sure that we are taking advantage of creatures that have flash, and cards that give all of our other creatures flash. We want to make sure that we are able to venture on each player’s turn. There are a fair number of creatures with flash that are worth including on their own merits. Look to cards like Slippery Bogbonder, Endurance, or Guardian Augmenter that can provide significant utility. Outside of the creatures with actual flash, I include cards like Vernal Equinox, Vivien, Champion of the Wilds, Yeva, Nature’s Herald, and my favorite build-around, Aluren. Because our strategy centers around venturing as much as possible, we need a ton of redundancy to make sure we can cast our creatures on all of the turns.
This is where the Tomb of Annihilation comes into play. Green is already really good at populating the battlefield and refilling the hand. That being the case, we can leverage these strengths into a way to break parity with Tomb’s room triggers. Creatures that replace themselves in our hand allow us to easily avoid losing life when we can very readily discard a card in the Veils of Fear. Completing Tomb not only gives us an Atropal token, but Varis also provides us a wolf to sacrifice to the Sandfall Cell next time through. There are so many cards out there that can fill that role as well, providing a body we can sacrifice while replacing itself in hand with a card to discard. Look at something completely unassuming like Borderland Ranger and it’s analogs. They give us a land into our hand, and also a body to the battlefield to satisfy all demands of our current delve through the Tomb. So we play those. Elvish Visionary and cards in that similar design space do the same thing, so we play those too. All said and done, we have the ability to repeatedly, with very little cost, spam through the Tomb over and over again. Our opponents, on the other hand, may not be as uniquely set up to deal with the constant barrage of sacrifice and discard. Sometimes they’ll discard, sometimes they’ll take the two life, but every time it will be a decision they’ll have to negotiate — since most of our creatures are two-for-ones, we get off a little easier.
Obviously, alongside this framework we include other powerful green venture cards. Ellywick Tumblestrum and Wandering Troubadour are the best, and simply adding that single extra venture per turn makes a huge difference in our Tomb velocity. And that really is the name of the game here — velocity. Assuming that our opponents neither discard nor sacrifice, there is five life to be lost for each Tomb completion. When you break it down to the individual rooms it doesn’t seem like much but it truly does add up.
And that’s pretty much the central idea; nickle-and-diming your opponents to death is sort of a running theme across all three of the strategies we’ve gone over here. Unfortunately, red doesn’t fare so well with venture cards. It kinda stinks that my single favorite color is the one least set up to take advantage of a new mechanic that is right up my alley. Who knows, maybe there is something to do out there with Zalto, Fire Giant Duke. Until such a time as that becomes clear, I’ll just be sticking with what I’ve got here. These three deck ideas really scratch a spectrum of itches, and I’m looking forward to refining them. So go disassemble that Sefris pre-con and get to work, already, why don’t ya.
commander, dear reader 