Welcome to the CommandersGathering.com! I imagine that it’s customary to introduce yourself during your first article, but I’ll try to keep it brief: I started playing Magic: the Gathering during the release of the Onslaught block perhaps a decade or so ago, and I’ve been off and on since that time (as is the case of most Magic players—we just can’t stay away for long!). That said, since the release of Zendikar, I’ve been an exclusive Magic Online player. I haven’t touched a paper card in over a year and a half, unless it’s been to sell them to a vendor to pay for my online addiction. Well, that’s enough backstory for now. You’ll have to read my future articles for a few more hints into my personal history.
So, here’s the deal with my current article series. I’m almost completely new (as of this writing) to the Commander format. That’s right. A writer for a site dedicated exclusively to Commander is admitting to his inexperience. All that said, it’s my personal belief that innovation and understanding happen when two groups, the experienced and the inexperienced, collide. That’s part of the goal of these articles: to give new players a perspective similar to their own, and perhaps to aid them in avoiding some of my mistakes as I approach a new format, and also to give experienced Commander players a bit of a fresh outlook (as well as a charity case to take pity on, and demonstrate their much vaster knowledge of Commander).
I’d like you to think of these articles as cataloguing a ‘Hero’s Journey’, of sorts. I’m the poor peasant farmer-boy, and I’m on an epic journey to become the greatest Commander player who ever lived! These articles are meant to, in part, narrate this journey through a relation of the actual games, but they will also contain asides about the Commander format in general, a breakdown of decklists and card impressions, and maybe a few tips here and there (some of which, perhaps, you might not have known before).
An Auspicious Beginning
Let’s talk about my Commander selection and get some actual decklists in here. For those of you who cheated and already scrolled down, you know which Commander I selected. For the rest of you, allow me to present: Rhys the Redeemed. Here’s another of those little personal details I hinted at above: I’m a huge fan of everything about Rhys, for several reasons. 1) He’s green 2) He’s also white 3) Those are my favorite colors 4) He makes tokens and copies (of copies) of tokens. Out of all of that, I’m not sure what there’s NOT to love.
Alright, enough teasing—here’s the decklist.
Rhys the Redeemed Commander Deck
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Before you point it out, I’m sure there are a lot of sub-par cards in there, or cards that should be replaced with something much more powerful (or perhaps obvious). Actually, I would love if in the comments you would include card suggestions or replacements. What I don’t want to know is how dumb this deck looks (or might look), because there’s a reason for that. When selecting the cards for this deck, I wanted to start with a pretty bare list, so that I could get a feel for the general function of Rhys as a commander, and actually have a creative space in which to improve the deck. Starting with a perfect deck might make things a little boring. Though, as I said, I would love suggestions and I most certainly plan to gradually improve the quality of the deck based on said suggestions, and also on my own experiences playing the deck. More than likely, I’ll stick with the Rhys deck for the next several articles before moving on to something else.
The funny thing about Singleton, and having a deck with 100 different cards, is that there are games that could potentially last for hours, but you still won’t see every card. For that reason, I’ll restrict myself to comments only about the cards that I have, at this point, actually casted and used. Since this deck initially started out as a stock list for Rhys that I found online, there may be some cards that, even after playing, I still don’t fully understand. I’ll try to point those out, and It’d be great if any Commander veterans out there wanted to elucidate a point or two on certain cards.
The First Cut is the Deepest, The First Commander Game
As per my nature, I decided to just jump straight into a Commander game online and let the beatings commence. For my first game, my opponents (in order, clockwise) were using Garza Zol, Plague Queen, Kazuul, Tyrant of the Cliffs, and Ezuri, Renegade Leader. There’s really not too much to say about those selections, except that Kazuul can be (and often is) a complete beating against token decks, so I was a bit sad to see him (but by no means daunted, since if token decks are known for something besides insane amount of creatures, it would be insane mana generation).
One of my first plays of that game was a Turn 2 Lightning Greaves. Though I may be in danger of stating the obvious, that card is absolutely awesome. The danger of playing with Rhys is that his body is so small, and his abilities are so potentially devastating. He becomes a giant target that nearly anyone could deal with, in one way or another. Shroud, however, considerably changes the game, and makes him almost irremovable, short of mass-removal, or artifact destruction.
I’m not going to give a play-by-play of each game I’ve battled, because for one I don’t have a perfect memory (just perfect screenshots), and that would probably get a bit tedious to read. So I’ll just give a few highlights.
In a Rhys deck, generating elves each turn, Priest of Titania is amazing. That’s some incredible mana, and that’s really the secret of this deck. It only makes sense that in order to generate crazy amounts of tokens, you’re going to need some pretty crazy mana sources. I had her and quite a few elves out by Turn 4, which allowed me to do something that I thought was pretty epic: cast Tooth and Nail, with entwine (that’s right). Looking through my deck provided a bit of a challenge. For one thing, I didn’t want to grab any huge game changers, because that would obviously set me up to get dominated by three players at once. That said, a spell as epic as Tooth and Nail deserves some suitably amazing creatures. I eventually settled on Essence Warden and Seedborn Muse. Both of those cards are game winners, in some manner or another, though they might appear somewhat underwhelming (well, perhaps not the Muse). The Essence Warden provided me with a nice counter to my opponent’s Blood Seeker (a nightmare for a token deck), and the Seedborn Muse essentially acted as a Time Walk (or a fully leveled up Lighthouse Chronologist). During each of my opponent’s turns I got to untap and activate Rhys again, until I had a pretty formidable army. Well, formidable until the same opponent blanking me with their Blood Seeker cast Living Death. Oh, well. It was fun while it lasted.
Let’s skip to some individual card evaluations:
Asceticism: Troll-shroud (or should I called it Hexproof?) for all of my creatures? Immunity to everything but board-wipe, and perhaps that as well, since with tons of mana I could regenerate every creature I own. Suffice it to say, this card is awesome, and is definitely going to be staying in the deck.
Heartbeat of Spring: This is one of the cards that admittedly I haven’t played, but not because I wasn’t able, but because I chose not to. Part of that is from fear. I have no idea what sort of nastiness my opponents are sitting on, and to my mind, if you’re going to double everyone’s mana, it seems to me that you’d want to be pretty sure that whatever you are going to be doing with that mana is several orders more nasty than anything your opponents can do. But perhaps I’m thinking of that card incorrectly?
Quest for Renewal: This is a rather special card, since I wasn’t actually the one to play it, but rather my fellow elf-wielding Ezuri opponent. It’s almost like having a second copy of Seedborn Muse, except that it only untaps creatures. That said, that would still be awesome! With a Priest of Titania out, I would have nearly unlimited amounts of mana anyway. Who needs to uptap lands in that case? And the card activates whenever a creature becomes tapped. What a dream! In a token deck, you’re saying all I’d need to do is activate Rhys six times, or attack some random player with six 1/1 tokens or my Eldrazi Spawn? This card is definitely being added.
Awakening Zone This card is good, but it’s not the beating that I had thought it would be. Having blockers out in the form of 0/1 tokens is pretty cool, and having all that extra mana is pretty nice. All in all, a very solid card, but not something I ever got really excited about.
Oran-Rief, the Vastwood: I don’t think I should even be commenting on this card. It’s just completely nuts, and works so well with tokens. You mean every token I put onto the battlefield with Rhys is now a 2/2? Sounds good.
So, the first game I play goes on. We all play some cards. Pretty simple stuff. Until the guy playing mono-red unleashes a pretty big bomb. I’m going to share the sequence of events for you, because it’s pretty nuts. Some of you may already be familiar with all of the cards I’m about to talk about. That said, I still imagine this doesn’t happen every day. So, everyone is pretty much tapped out, and it’s Mr. Red’s turn. He unleashes with a Mana Geyser and adds 17 mana to his pool. Pretty impressive stuff. Then he casts a kicked Urza’s Rage. I think, “That’s pretty neat. Someone’s going to lose a lot of life.” That’s not the end. Then he casts Radiate. Now he makes a copy of a kicked Urza’s Rage, and targets every creature on the board and every player. Luckily, I have my Asceticism still up, so he doesn’t get to destroy any of my creatures. Phew! A close escape? Not hardly. As a clincher, he casts Wild Ricochet. He redirects the Urza’s Rage targeting his own Commander, hits my life total, and then copies it again and directs that also at my life total. One of our opponents concede (the guy playing with the Grixis wedge, Garza), and for the rest, I’m sitting at 10 life, and the other guy left is looking at a life total of 9. He finishes up by hitting me with a Jaws of Stone (with 11 Mountains on the board). I didn’t stay to watch because it was late, but I imagine he cleaned up the last opponent pretty easily. But even if he didn’t—that was quite a sequence of events.
And that was my first foray into Commander. So how about the rest?
In for the Long Haul, Another Commander Game Online
Just to provide a little place of reference, I played four Commander games this week to supply this article. That’s where my card evaluations and format impressions are at the moment. It will be interesting to see how things change over the next several weeks.
The next game I play has a few interesting Commanders: Gwafa Hazid, Profiteer, Ambassador Laquatus, and Sheoldred, Whispering One. For some reason, prior to this game I never really understood how Gwafa Hazid worked. Thankfully, this game provided a much needed education. I guess I never read the card correctly, and just assumed that every creature with a bribery counter drew it’s controller a card each turn. I thought that was a pretty bad tradeoff for the Hazid player, in exchange for a creature not being able to attack of block. Turns out, it just draws them one card when the ability happens. Silly me.
Also, it’s rather nice to see a player using Sheoldred as Commander. Personally, I think she’s too expensive to be that useful, but it’s pretty sweet to see New Phyrexia cards getting some Commander action.
There’s really not much to say about the early game here, except that I drew Lightning Greaves again, and played my Rhys early, as I am wont to do. I tried playing a Mirror Entity at some point, which should be an amazing card with tokens, but had it unfortunately countered (thanks blue for ruining my fun). To make things more fun, this same opponent performs an act of Blatant Thievery and steals my Island of Wak-Wak and the Neurok Stealthsuit from the Hazid player. As another note, one of my opponents, the one playing mono-black, decides about 10 minutes into the game that it’s taking too long and they don’t have enough time to play (which they apparently didn’t realize would happen). I think this subject deserves its own aside, but I’ll leave myself something to talk about for a later article.
Let’s fast-forward a few plays: a Martial Coup clears the board, I replay my Rhys and start over making tokens, a Marshal’s Anthem from the Hazid player brings back a Baneslayer Angel and makes his tokens from the Coup bigger until the blue opponent recurs his Blatant Thievery and steals it. All this time I’m quietly (or not so quietly) casting an Avenger of Zendikar and building up an army of plants with the help of some opportune land drops and Rhys.
Around this time, the mono-blue player drops his Commander, Ambassador Laquatus, and with the help of Training Grounds, starts milling out the Hazid player. That’s pretty efficient: 1 mana to removal 3 cards from a target opponent’s library! At this point, I’m thinking Mr. Mono-blue is going to win, especially since he needs only one turn to finish out Hazid, and come after me. Things are never that easy though, especially in Commander, are they? The Hazid player ultimates with an Elspeth Tirel he played a few turns earlier, and wipes the board of everything except lands and…tokens! Also, a little bit of irony: my Avenger of Zendikar which had been neutralized by a Journey to Nowhere, comes back and makes a few more plants. At this point, I’ve got quite the token army. Now that the mono-blue player’s board is empty though, Hazid goes in the for kill and there are just two of us left. He plays a Clone on my Avenger, and gets his own set of tokens. He then tutors up a Rite of Replication, and I know that next turn he’s going to replicate his Avenger of Zendikar, make a few million plants, and run me over. And then I topdeck an Eldrazi Monument, and that’s that. How quickly the tide turns!
Concluding Thoughts
I’ll stop at narrating two games, otherwise this article will never end. I’ve got a few more stored up, which I’ll talk about at a later date: there’s some pretty cool things that happen there. At this point, I’m getting a handle on how to play with Rhys. There are still some cards that I have yet to use, and others that perhaps I have used incorrectly. But I have discovered that I love this deck. Rhys is such a beautiful and efficient Commander. Let me close with one last card that I have been loving in the deck: Krosan Verge. It reminds me of the common fetches from the Alara Block, except it grabs two lands. I’m not sure why I love it so much, except perhaps that every time I’ve drawn it, it’s gotten me out of some pretty bad mana issues and allowed me to come back. Pretty efficient. And here’s a bit of a combo that I discovered while playing. For those who haven’t checked out the interaction between Flagstones of Trokair and Crop Rotation, well, it’s nice.
Let me know what you think of the deck in the comments, and remember that you’re helping a poor novice realize his dream. Also, let me know what you like about the article, or what you dislike, and what you’d like to see more/less of in future.
