On Twitter (web site to the stars) the other day, Commander maven Shivam “ghirapurigears” Bhatt assigned some homework to the class. In what is seemingly the first in an ongoing series of deck building prompts/stipulations, we are to build a deck for Commander utilizing Modern-legal cards, excluding those designed with Commander or Brawl in mind. This is a good idea! Teach needed my report on his desk ASAP, so once I processed the request, I was off to the races.
My initial approach involved starting with the more broad and established strategies in the format — I wanted to take something old and make it new. As a proof-of-concept, so to speak, I started with the question of what an enchantress deck would look like completely ported into a modern card pool. There has been a lot of support added over the years, but some of the more powerful archetype staples would have to be left to the wayside. Things like Carpet of Flowers, Elephant Grass, Argothian Enchantress, Replenish, and Serra’s Sanctum, among others, are gone. While those necessary substitutions do involve some interesting cards making the cut for me, it still didn’t feel too far removed from the sorts of decks we already had in that space from a power and novelty perspective, especially since a lot of key pieces had just been printed into Modern via Modern Horizons Two — Solitary Confinement, Sterling Grove, and Enchantress’s Presence spring immediately to mind. Also, we have Sythis, Harvest’s Hand to be in the command zone as something of a “final form” in terms of suitable commanders for this particular strategy. It just all felt a little boring.
I had a similar experience with a loose reanimator deck before realizing that this approach really just wasn’t for me. The lists of cards that would form the necessary infrastructure of these decks just didn’t feel, to perhaps be a little too on-the-nose, modern. While I am a big fan of taking established strategies and finding alternatives to the long-accepted staples, I just really wanted to build a deck that was centered more around modern design from conception. Long story short, I shifted my focus onto planeswalkers.
I was hesitant at the outset. Planeswalker strategies in Commander generally leave a bad taste in my mouth. It has less to do with the cards themselves, but more about the suite of cards that usually appears alongside them. Doubling Season is obviously the worst offender, so I won’t waste too much breath there, but the proliferate mechanic has always been a complicating factor. Ever since Atraxa, Praetor’s Voice invigorated the archetype in a really profound way, the focus on planeswalkers has seemed to be on how they can be abused or exploited rather than their merits as generally pretty solid mid-range tools. At that time, other proliferate options were pretty sparse. Inexorable Tide and Contagion Engine were really novel designs, but the other cards featuring the mechanic were a little too inefficient otherwise, and oftentimes relegated only to the lists that were really looking to push their redundancies.
War of the Spark is where things got a little dicey. Of course, in a standard legal set structured around planeswalkers, proliferate is a mechanic that can play really well. However, when some of those cards made their way into Commander, they became ripe for exploitation. Two of the clearest examples to me are Evolution Sage and Flux Channeler. The nature of resources in your average game of Standard of Limited keep these cards reasonably in check, but in Commander, those restrictions, for the most part, just don’t exist. Putting an inordinate amount of lands on the battlefield at a rapid pace has become easier and easier over the years, as has stringing together long sequences of spells. When adding loyalty to planeswalkers becomes trivial, it gets really easy to think of them just in terms of their “ultimate” activation, with the other aspects falling to wayside. I do not like that!
So at this point, dear reader, you may be asking yourselves why I would want to build a deck around planeswalkers if I harbor such disdain for the context under which they exist in Commander. Well, the answer ended up being pretty simple: Mila, Crafty Companion. It turns out that when you cut green and blue out entirely, there is a lot of room for other more interesting things to exist. White has picked up a surprising amount good planeswalker support, and gives us a great baseline to start from. It turns out that when you are able to shift the focus away from stacking up as much loyalty as possible as fast as possible, you end up with some really good bones on which to build a solid midrange deck. And Mila is really well suited to that task! Not only does she provide two distinct roadblocks between your opponents and your planeswalkers, but she also can just be a planeswalker herself.
So if the goal is to build a planeswalker deck, it makes sense that we first address the planeswalkers that we want to be running. While there are a lot that do a ton of cool things, I want to focus on three as a starting point. Ajani, Steadfast is a card that has the capacity to add loyalty to your other planeswalkers. This is a pretty rare ability in these colors, especially considering the lack of proliferate cards we have access to. The best part about it is, honestly, that the effect has a very real loyalty cost and feels really well balanced. Sarkhan the Masterless serves as a great primary win condition. Turning your planeswalkers into dragons is dope, and it’s an awesome way to close out a game for an archetype that doesn’t always have it’s win conditions clearly defined. Lastly, I would recommend finding space for Gideon Jura. When you are building your deck around permanents that can be attacked, cards that manipulate combat become very powerful. The ability to force people into attacking Gideon rather than your other planeswalkers is a great thing to have in your back pocket. These are the three that I think provide a really well-rounded starting point, but there are plenty of options out there, and I encourage anyone else building a deck like this to try a bunch of different configurations to find the cards you respond to most.
One of the cards that I’m personally very excited to try out is Grandmaster of Flowers, which has some pretty sweet defensive capabilities to enable his transition into Big Beautiful Bahamut™. One of the more unique aspects of the red and white planeswalkers, that I honestly just overlooked until I had them laid out in front of me, is just how many of them can turn the corner and beat down our opponents. We have our many Gideons, famous for his ability to tussle in combat. Sarkhan, the Dragonspeaker can turn into a flying threat, while Sarkhan the Masterless turns EVERYONE into a flying threat, and the aforementioned Grandmaster levels up into a dragon himself. This is something that I wouldn’t have paid much mind to in other planeswalker decks, but the restriction on our color identity forces these elements to the forefront, which is really fun to engage with from a deck building perspective.
The other signifcant aspect of a deck like this is the means by which we protect our planeswalkers on the battlefield. Commander Staple Emeritus Ghostly Prison is great in most decks, but one of the cool things I’ve noticed as time marches on is how the template for these effects has changed. Whereas Ghostly Prison only taxes creatures that attack you, the player (and is much less desirable here), more modern designs in this space, like Archon of Absolution, Archangel of Tithes, Baird, Steward of Argive, and Norn’s Annex, tax creatures that attack your planeswalkers as well. Kazuul, Tyrant of the Cliffs is also a complete banger, since he doesn’t care whether or not creatures are coming at you or your planeswalkers — he will trigger just the same. Also, since the easiest way to interact with with our strategy is through combat, we benefit from some amount of fog effects in our back pocket. Dawn Charm can pull a lot of weight in a list like this, and is not something that people see coming very often.
And that really is the crux of it — you have your planeswalkers, and you have your means to protect them. From that point there is just a ton of customization possible filling in the blanks. While it certainly is not blazing new trails, taking something established and divorcing it from its most recognizable aspects can leave us with a familiar strategy in a new space. Commander is at it’s best when we are able to re-contextualize cards we thought we knew, and limiting ourselves to a strictly modern-legal card pool without the assistance of cards designed for Commander or Brawl does just that. Mila is dope and this deck was sweet to build.
The list, as I continue to work on it, is here.
commander, dear reader 