Welcome! This is a Magic: The Gathering blog focusing on the Commander format with an emphasis on theme, flavor and deck interactions. You can expect to see deck lists, card analysis with the format in mind, card art, and posts about new sets and products. Thanks for visiting!
Hi folks. Quick update just to let you know that a few of my decks have had some changes that are now reflected here on the blog. My decklists for Experiment Kraj, Gishath, and my recently added Godzilla Series list for Biollante have all been adjusted to match the current physical version. I have another decklist post planned soon for the next part of the Godzilla Series, so stay tuned for that if you’re interested.
Check out below for specific mentions as to what’s been changed.
Most of these changes are minor, consisting mainly of just a handful of cards that help the lists with their specific gameplans. Experiment Kraj gained a Heronblade Elite which features a fantastic mana ability. The fact that it can make any color is a big addition to this list - most of the multi-mana producers that were available before this could only make green, so a card like this goes a long way for this deck.
Gishath received three cards, the most prominent being a Cavern of Souls which I was finally able to track down for the list following the card's reprint in the new edition of Double Masters. Cavern is obviously a massive boon for any tribal list so it's nice to finally have one for the deck. Other additions include Blessed Respite and the absolute classic Reinforcements from all the way back in Alliances. Both of these cards add a bit of staying power to the list and let Gishath get his friends back into the game after a boardwipe or other problematic removal. There aren't a ton of options for recursion in this tribe when you're sticking as close to it as I am, so these options are very helpful.
Biollante's list is the newest one among the updates, but I am always experimenting with changes to keep my lists fresh and help their gameplay. I added a Vivien on the Hunt to this list as I think it's a very solid addition to the overall flow of the deck. While this isn't a dedicated pod-style list and doesn't actually include a Birthing Pod, I think that the versatility of this new Vivien adds enough options that it's worth including in a list like this. Manipulating the graveyard to the deck's advantage using Vivien's first and second abilities helps to prep Biollante for an explosive turn, and in a pinch the Rhino token that the third ability makes can be an emergency mutate target after a wipe to help the deck get rolling again.
Overall these are not huge changes but I think all of them add more than enough to their respective builds to be worthwhile. As always, I will continue to work on all my active lists, testing new options as they appear and keeping an eye out for cards that I may not have noticed before. Keep watching this space for more changes to my lists as they happen. You can see all the lists I've posted, both those actively in rotation and my archived decks, by checking out the Decklists tab in my blog's sidebar.
Welcome to the first in a new decklist series here on Command Tower focusing on an ongoing project of mine. I’ve been a fan of Godzilla and kaiju movies for just as long as I’ve been into Magic, and so when the Godzilla series was first unveiled as part of the Ikoria set treatment, I was very excited. Since the set has come out, I’ve been in the process of building a Commander deck for each of the unique kaiju represented on a legendary creature card, and now that I have a few of them finished, I thought I’d share them here on the blog.
Today we’ll be looking at my decklist for Biollante, the kaiju version of the White-Black-Green legendary creature Nethroi. The antagonist kaiju of the 1989 film aptly titled Godzilla vs. Biollante, this creature is a man-made hybrid of Godzilla’s own cells and genetic information from a species of rose, and after being defeated in its original beautiful and melancholic Rose Form, it revives as a massive reptilian maw atop an enormous, misshapen mass of intertwined vines and roots. True to that idea, this deck utilizes Biollante’s unique mutation trigger to manipulate the graveyard and return a multitude of powerful creatures to the battlefield. By filling the yard with creatures that have zero power until they enter play, this deck can effectively bypass the restriction of its Commander’s ability and reanimate many more bodies and much more power than it might seem at first glance.
In the early turns, Biollante’s deck gets started by preparing the graveyard for her arrival. Cards like Jarad's Orders and Buried Alive quickly build up a presence of potential reanimations, and when backed up by early creatures like Fauna Shaman or Mindless Automaton that can pitch any higher-cost creatures trapped in your hand, it’s easy to get a head start on the later gameplan. Ideally, a card like Old Stickfingers or Wrenn and Seven will let you really get a leg up, quickly pushing for more value.
Because Biollante specifically looks at the power of the creatures in the graveyard, it’s possible to cheat the system a bit by utilizing cards that have zero power outside the battlefield. Cards such as Phantom Nishoba, Sekki, Seasons' Guide, and Multani are all powerful bodies that have zero power until they come into play, and so when Biollante looks at them in the yard, they don’t add anything to her total. As an added bonus, cards like these are amazing to mutate Biollante onto as well as she reaps the bonus of their +1/+1 counters or abilities that increase power.
Despite utilizing creatures that apply counters to themselves and each other, this deck isn’t really interested in manipulating those counters, so there are only a few pieces that interact with them once they’re in place. Most of the cards that do this are in here for other reasons, such as Yawgmoth's ability to draw cards and get creatures from play back into the yard or Kalonian Hydra and Ghave having zero power for Biollante's trigger. For the most part, the plan is to push for a lasting presence over moving the pieces around too much. Once the board is set up in this deck’s favor, it’s pretty easy to stay in the lead - traditional boardwipes are mostly ineffective against this list as Biollante can simply bring everything back again. Exile based wipes are a bigger problem, but the majority of them can be handled by a few creatures in the list that can sacrifice each other, allowing you to place your best options back in the yard for another round before they’re blown away. The new uberwipe Farewell is still a problem here, but if the deck gets set up quickly enough, it can deal with the players most likely to be running it to keep itself safe.
Overall, this is a fun and fast list that keeps coming back for more once things start going its way. It has the tools to defend itself simply by continuing to play to its gameplan, and its aggressive go-wide playstyle makes it fun to pop off with and watch the gears mesh into place. Biollante is one of my favorite of the Godzilla kaiju stable, and this deck really showcases her as the central piece of the puzzle.
COMMANDER
Biollante, Plant Beast Form [Nethroi, Apex of Death]
Hey again folks, I’m back with another round of decklist updates for you to check out. This time, I’ve updated my lists for Yeva, Nature’s Herald, Erebos, God of the Dead, and Experiment Kraj. Each of them is now up to date with the current physical version, including changes up to Adventures in the Forgotten Realms.
If you’d like more details about the changes, you can read about them below.
The main name of the game with this round of updates was improving the speed and consistency of these lists. These three decks are among my longest-lived Commander decks and are often the most difficult for me to effectively change just because they’ve become so tightly packed with powerful cards over their lifetimes, but I really wanted to improve some of the card selection in them.
Yeva’s deck received a pretty sweeping overhaul, obtaining a number of new tools for its arsenal. Not the least among them was an Allosaurus Shepherd, replacing Gaea’s Herald as my cheap counter option due to its improved utility, reduced cost and the removal of the symmetrical aspect. It’s kind of a shame, because the Herald has one of my all time favorite pieces of art in the game, but the Shepherd is just an all-around better card. Other changes include the addition of a Kogla, the Titan Ape, a powerful piece of removal that plays very well with Yeva’s addition of flash, and a Vivien, Monsters’ Advocate, which I’ve talked about previously as one of the best cards for Green decks to come out of this past year. The suite of ramp spells was also tweaked in this list, swapping Cultivate and Kodama’s Reach for Three Visits and Nature’s Lore. Since Yeva costs four mana to play, swapping the three mana ramp spells for two cost alternatives allows for smoother play into a Commander drop without a loss of tempo. I also swapped out the Snow-Covered Forests for regular options as the deck no longer makes use of snow mana after this recent change up, and I don’t really feel like getting blown out by a Break the Ice. Lastly, I recently came into possession of a few copies of The Great Henge thanks to lucky pulls from promo packs at my local store, so I added one to this list. It’s just an all-around great card for any deck that runs Green, and this list definitely loves to draw cards as it casts creatures.
Kraj has always had a bit of trouble with turn consistency, and so the biggest thing I wanted to improve with the changes to this list was the turn-by-turn progression, smoothing out ramp options and card draw a little nicer. A previous upgrade removed the spell-based ramp in the list in favor of more mana dorks for Kraj to copy, but I’ve opted to re-add a Cultivate to the list just for a bit of assistance in case of emergency. Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy was an easy include here and adds a lot of options for the list, offering a boost to mana production as well as the ability to dig for options. Branching Evolution and Vorinclex, Monstrous Raider join the list as additional static counter buffers, allowing for faster and more explosive buildup, and The Ozolith helps to reduce some of the blowback that comes from losing creatures to removal. Kraj’s spellbook was enhanced a bit by a visit to Strixhaven, picking up some excellent modal pieces in Decisive Denial and Quandrix Command that improve the list’s available options in various situations. This list also gets a Great Henge, and it’s honestly probably even better here than it is in my mono-Green list as Kraj directly benefits from the Henge’s counter distribution. I think the cards I've added here will help a lot with the deck’s overall progression, and the games I’ve played with this version have already felt much smoother and more involved.
Erebos has mostly been upgraded to allow for increased speed. He’s seen the inclusion of a number of new, slimmer-cost options compared to his previous cards that help to get him into the game faster, and a fair amount of new mana ramp options through additions of cards like Forsworn Paladin for some improved early-to-mid game progression. Feed the Swarm came in thanks to its unique capacity as a targeted enchantment removal in mono-Black, and Baleful Mastery replaced another piece of targeted removal thanks to its cost reduction option. Dauthi Voidwalker and Opposition Agent were added as lean-costed cards that can severely hamper other decks’ gameplans, which is true to what this deck was always trying to do. Rankle, Master of Pranks was introduced to the deck due to the versatile suite of options available to him, offering a customizable selection of abilities that can change to fit a number of situations. I’ve also chosen to add Boseiju, Who Shelters All to protect some of my win conditions like Torment of Hailfire or Exsanguinate. I decided to leave the snow lands in this list as it still makes use of them through cards like Extraplanar Lens and Dead of Winter, although that may change if I start seeing more copies of Break the Ice in my local meta.
Overall, I think these changes will help to keep these decklists viable as Commander continues to evolve as a format. Even though these are some of my longest-maintained decks, they’re also some of my favorites, so I’m happy to see new options that help to keep them updated.
If you’d like to take a look at all of the lists I’ve posted to the blog, past and present, you can check out the archive of my deck posts by using the Decklists tab in my blog’s sidebar. If you missed the previous list of updates I made to some of my other active decks, it’s available here. I have a number of new lists I’ve been working on over the past while that I’m prepping to share as well, so if these lists were to your liking, please stay tuned for more content like this to come. Thanks!
aruzeus said: Thanks for sharing! I’m a big niv enthusiast (currently building a niv reborn edh.) Im surprised not to see curiosity/ophidian eye here, but that’s a fairness choice
Hi, thanks for your comment. I'm glad you liked taking a look at my list! I've been working on it for a long time - it was a Dracogenius deck originally before I took it apart and then rebuilt it later under the Parun version. Earlier versions of the list did indeed run cards like Curiosity, Ophidian Eye, and other things like Charisma and Sigil of Sleep, but I eventually started pulling them they weren't really what I wanted out of the list. You're right that it's partially fairness concerns, but also in this case it came down to those types of cards not "feeling right" for the way I wanted the list to run.
I know it's kind of a strange, half-baked response, but getting the deck to feel right is a big part of the enjoyment of playing for me; building the deck so that it has the proper flow and function for the theme and the commander it's representing is part of my process when I sit down to build a list. Mechanical strength and flavor intersecting just the right way is one of the reasons why I like Commander as a format, so I hope you can understand what I mean. Unfortunately I haven't had much chance to test the latest changes I've made yet, but from the little time I've been able to get in with it, it's feeling really good in its current iteration.
Thanks again for your comment. Good luck with your five-color Niv build, I'd love to see the list when you're finished if you want to share.
Hi folks. Still trying to get everything in order after the last time I tried to update, but in an effort to show I’m not dead again I updated some of my active decklists. My lists for Gishath, Sun’s Avatar, Hope of Ghirapur, Niv-Mizzet, Parun, and Mina and Denn, Wildborn have all been changed to reflect their current physical versions.
For those of you interested in my thought process, there's a brief rundown of what's new below.
Gishath’s changes were fairly minor. He got a minor rework to his land base to rebalance the color distribution a bit, and I added a Farseek to his ramp suite to grab the nonbasics with land types. Most prominent is the inclusion of Thrasta, Tempest’s Roar, a big dinosaur with the unique ability to trample over planeswalkers that I wanted to include in the list’s toolbox. I also swapped out Vanquisher’s Banner for Garruk’s Uprising, since the Dinosaurs are coming in off of Gishath’s ability more often than being cast, and also because of that sweet thematic art.
Hope of Ghirapur was given a few cards from Commander Legends that are silly with a colorless commander, specifically War Room and Commander’s Plate. I also added a Forsaken Monument from Zendikar Rising for obvious reasons, and a Wandering Archaic for a bit of roundabout interaction. Lastly, I dropped in a Tome of Legends for a bit of card draw that takes advantage of Hope’s cheap mana cost.
Niv-Mizzet had a serious rework thanks to Strixhaven, getting a bunch of new cards like Archmage Emeritus, Prismari Command and Storm-Kiln Artist. He also got the new modal Rowan and Will which offers a lot of value on both sides for a list like this. I added Veyran from Strixhaven’s Commander lineup and a Harmonic Prodigy from Modern Horizons II to push for more explosive interactions between the cards in the list, and also added Torbran to increase the damage of the machine gun once it gets online. There was some reworking of the spell lineup that the deck runs, mostly to refocus things a bit. Lastly, I specifically did not add in a Thassa’s Oracle because I think it’s more fun to win through the deck’s actual game plan, although I can see a case for it if the deck starts to power through its cards too quickly with these new additions.
The most dramatic change was to Mina and Denn, who had evolved pretty hard thanks to all the new Landfall cards in Zendikar Rising. The new version of the list is pretty similar in game plan but it has additional land-matters cards now that really push individual turns even harder than before. The majority of the new Landfall cards were added to the list to add more power to each land play. Cards like Scute Swarm, Valakut Exploration and the more recent Tireless Provisioner all do a ton of work and really add to the already-established gameplan. Ashaya is a very silly addition to a list like this that pushes what the deck was already doing over the edge into new, absurd territory. The addition of Ancient Greenwarden has given this deck the opportunity to dig into the yard a bit more than it could before, and so I’ve tweaked the land base a bit to include a few fetchlands for some land play loops that will help the deck go deeper. Sword of Hearth and Home was an inclusion I was very excited to try, and one that I think will do a lot of work in the future. The deck does still sometimes run out of juice when it plays out too quickly, so to help dig for some additional options I also added a Jeska’s Will.
Feel free to use the Decklists link in my blog’s sidebar to check out all the decks I’ve put up so far. I have a few more lists that I’m still working on upgrading at the moment, so check back if you’re interested in seeing how they evolve as well.
Sorry about the lack of updates recently, folks. I've been having ongoing issues with the editing tools on Tumblr, and attempting to fix it resulted in several aspects of my layout breaking and becoming unusable. I have done my best to rebuild it manually, so hopefully there's not a big difference visually, but it took a while to get things going again and I still haven't fixed the initial problem I had in the first place. I'm doing what I can to get things back in order. Thanks for your patience while I figure it out.
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