flicker me timbers

While I dip my toes into all sorts of things when it comes to brewing Commander decks, the one archetype I always find myself coming back to is flicker decks. Essentially, decks that generate their card advantage and momentum in a game by repeatedly taking advantage of creatures with ETB (“enters the battlefield”) triggers. This is primarily done with cards that “flicker” the target — a mechanism named for the card Flicker, from Urza’s Destiny, that involves instantly removing a target from the battlefield and having it immediately re-enter.

This is a tool that has been iterated on a ton as new sets are designed and released, and there are now a huge multitude of variants that all take their own little spin on the old classic. Not only that, but the amount creatures we have access to that gel really well with this approach has really swelled. It seems like there is no better day than today to be a player with an affinity for flicker decks, and so I want to take some time and really dive into how I approach building them, and how you can brew them too, with your own cards, in your own home. Ok let’s go!

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ruvisiting ruhan

Alright, huddle up, Ruheads™. I think the time has come to put The Big Guy front and center once more. I don’t think that there has been a set in recent memory just as good for Our Large Adult Son as Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. I admit, to my great shame, that I am something of a fair-weather friend here — Ruhan is probably the commander that I build and disassemble most frequently. I’m a simple guy that likes to turn my Ruhan sideways, and it’s tough to want to do that when I’m encouraged to do boring nonsense like tutor up my Sword of Feast and Famine literally every game because it’s the best thing to always be doing. That all said, there are some super sweet cards in Neon Dynasty that change the calculus on Ruhan pretty substantially. Having just put together a new iteration of The Galoot, Himself, I’m going to go over some of that stuff here, in the form of a list of the OFFICIAL TOP FIVE BEST RUHAN CARDS IN KAMIGAWA: NEON DYNASTY FOR SMASHING, IN ORDER.

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everything i know about love and life i learned from baleful strix

With Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty releasing in paper somewhat imminently, I decided to take one last look over the full set to take stock of the things I would need to get my grubby little paws on to properly tinker with my Commander decks. As I went through, card by card, it began to dawn on me just how many great individual tools there are in this set to bolster a tremendous amount of different decks and strategies. As I was furiously taking notes on where different cards might fit, I got to thinking™. I really wanted to take a step back and take a serious look at the ways my favorite cards from this set appealed to my Magic sensibilities — using these new cards from Kamigawa, perhaps I could better evaluate the types of cards in the abstract that I tend to gravitate towards, and achieve a greater understanding my own deck building processes. Prone as I am to rabbit holes of self-reflection, particularly in terms of my relationship with Commander, I wanted to see if I could find the language to discuss not so much the qualities of decks I want to build, but what defines the individual cards I want to be building with. A brand new set on the precipice of release just seemed like a great time to take this dive.

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more like aristoCRAPs

Alright gang I just gotta come out and say it: I’m really over traditional aristocrats decks in Commander. For the those of you who are unfamiliar with the jargon, an aristocrats deck refers to a deck whose strategy involves sacrificing creatures for value as a primary means to win the game. It’s a very popular strategy, and one that’s been around and iterated on for years upon years. For your consideration, the usual suspects:

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dereks clerics

I am constantly building Commander decks at home. Every preview season, if there is any newly unveiled legendary creature that I think is cool, I immediately start pulling piles and piles and cards from my collection to sit around until those new toys are officially released and I can assemble the decks I’ve envisioned for weeks. And then I play them all once and take them apart because something just doesn’t jibe the way that I expected. It is a vicious cycle. Rarely does anything stay together for more than a week or so, and the routine of collating, unsleeving and resleeving cards takes up very real time and headspace. It gets so easy to feel burnt out on the format, and also to buy into the idea that there isn’t a deck out there that’s just right for you. In a format built on self-expression, that can be a pretty alienating feeling!

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modern commander dot deck

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.

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these are a few of my favorite fogs (to the tune of ‘my favorite things’ from the sound of music)

Fog is an old card. An ancient card, actually. Over the years, the effect has undergone many changes to how it’s printed, to the point where I truly believe that it has lost a lot of what made it so charming initially. So, let me clarify what I consider a fog to be. A fog is a spell that prevents all combat damage dealt. There are cards out there that prevent all combat damage dealt to you or creatures you control. There are cards out there that prevent combat damage dealt by sources your opponents control. There are even cards out there that just prevent combat damage dealt to players alone. These are not fogs. A true fog does not discriminate in terms of those what damage it prevents, dear reader. In the eyes of Fog, all damage is created equal, and all damage is thus prevented equally. That being said, here are my favorites.

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fangren marauder: stay out of his swamp!

I feel like there isn’t enough discourse encouraging people to play Fangren Marauder. This card is absolute gas in the current Commander ecosystem and I feel like whether you actually build your own deck to maximize it or not, this strapping young lad will provide many happy returns. He’s just the perfect Shrek for this specific moment in Commander history.

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venture in to the fun dungeon (fungeon)

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.

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a primer about squee the immortal

Squee, the Immortal is a perfect card for Commander. It’s legendary, very innocuous, and leaves a lot of room for interpretation. It’s just completely non-prescriptive (a space that is being increasingly crowded out with the last few years worth of legendary creature offerings) and does a great job of re-contextualizing a lot of cards that go overlooked nowadays. Thus, perfect.

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