Hey folks! I hope that your week has been pleasant and rife with Magic bliss! Everybody has a deck or three they really like. We have these decks built for years and play them regularly. They are like an old friend, returning for another night of fun. Playing them is often more about nostalgia than it is about choosing the right deck for the right moment. They are your allies. You built them, and now your children will always be with you.
No matter when or where, I’ve always had a build of Equinaut by my side during the last ten years. I’m fond of the little guy. Two weeks ago, I built a Commander version of Equinaut so I could continue the fun in my recent Commander games. I thought it would be a blast to share my latest Equinaut deck with you. Interested?
What is Equinaut? Back when Standard included Invasion Block, I came up with a deck for a local tournament built around Fleetfoot Panther and Equilibrium which I named Equinaut. Here is the original deck:
Creatures (16)
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 2 Mystic Snake
- 1 Thornscape Battlemage
- 1 Sunscape Battlemage
- 4 Meddling Mage
- 4 Fleetfoot Panther
Lands (24)
Spells (20)
A few things of note—because the original version ran Birds of Paradise and City of Brass, I was comfortable paying the red kicker on Thornscape Battlemage when needed. This version of the deck is much more spell heavy than later versions. It literally only has 16 creatures. Yuck! As I played the deck, we moved into a ton more creatures. It’s also mana light—24 lands is a bit on the light side for such a mana intensive deck. I like 25 minimum and 26 preferably.
The deck uses Fleetfoot Panther and Equilibrium to bounce, reuse, and destroy my opponent beneath an onslaught of tempo lost, cards countered, and beats established.
During the years since, many cards have seen play that have been incorporated or tried out. Some stayed; others went. Some essentials became the lifeblood of the deck. The single most important card printed for the deck in the years since is Watchwolf. You might think it’s something sexier or other combo pieces, but it’s not. They replaced my Meddling Mages and gave my deck the power and beef it has today.
Here is the Ravnica Edition of Equinaut:
Creatures (20)
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 1 Mystic Enforcer
- 2 Eternal Witness
- 2 Mystic Snake
- 4 Fleetfoot Panther
- 2 Loxodon Hierarch
- 1 Tolsimir Wolfblood
- 4 Watchwolf
Lands (25)
Spells (15)
Now we are at 20 creatures. (It grows more over time, no worries.) The spells are slowly ebbing in number. I’ll slide away from Fact or Fiction permanently once Azorius Aethermage is printed. Momir Vig will permanently replace a creature tutor, at this time Living Wish.
Eventually, this deck will be tricked out with lots of creatures, like Kor Sanctifiers, and fun stuff like Seaside Citadel. The land base will undergo a full revision.
The deck uses Equilibrium and Fleetfoot Panther to save your guys and reuse them for various triggers. By gating a creature while also activating the Equilibrium to bounce an opposing creature, you keep the board cleared of Sir Nasty and the Nasty Gang.
There are a lot of tricks to playing this deck. For the full version, I’ve written up an article over at GatheringMagic.com this week. You can check out the 6000+ words on Equinaut there.
You’ll learn all of the good cards and what makes the deck work there. Today, we’ll build a Commander version of Equinaut.
I knew this would change my deck a bit. For example, older versions of Equinaut always had four Fleetfoot Panthers. I would also add things like Tolsimir Wolfblood and Wilt-Leaf Liege. With these cards in the deck, the creature base takes a decidedly green/white turn.
In a 100-card Highlander deck, we have to lean on other gaters for our work. While I still suspect the vast majority of my creatures will be green and/or white, perhaps a small number of mono-blue creatures will sneak in. This is also an opportunity to include those cards I always wanted to try out but could never find the room, or that I wanted to play, but had to pull a while ago for better goods.
With that in mind, here is the project, in its full glory:
Creatures (43)
- 1 Birds of Paradise
- 1 Mystic Enforcer
- 1 Weathered Wayfarer
- 1 Eternal Witness
- 1 Mystic Snake
- 1 Shrieking Drake
- 1 Karmic Guide
- 1 Fleetfoot Panther
- 1 Utopia Tree
- 1 Werebear
- 1 Civic Wayfinder
- 1 Drift of Phantasms
- 1 Loxodon Hierarch
- 1 Primordial Sage
- 1 Selesnya Guildmage
- 1 Tolsimir Wolfblood
- 1 Watchwolf
- 1 Azorius Aethermage
- 1 Momir Vig, Simic Visionary
- 1 Patagia Viper
- 1 Draining Whelk
- 1 Gemhide Sliver
- 1 Saffi Eriksdotter
- 1 Serra Avenger
- 1 Dust Elemental
- 1 Stonecloaker
- 1 Stormfront Riders
- 1 Whitemane Lion
- 1 Tarmogoyf
- 1 Gaddock Teeg
- 1 Masked Admirers
- 1 Mulldrifter
- 1 Wilt-Leaf Liege
- 1 Noble Hierarch
- 1 Qasali Pridemage
- 1 Knight of New Alara
- 1 Jenara, Asura of War
- 1 Dauntless Escort
- 1 Acidic Slime
- 1 Borderland Ranger
- 1 Kor Sanctifiers
- 1 Fauna Shaman
- 1 Primeval Titan
Planeswalkers (1)
Lands (38)
- 5 Forest
- 5 Plains
- 1 Kor Haven
- 5 Island
- 1 Tundra
- 1 Tropical Island
- 1 Savannah
- 1 Treva's Ruins
- 1 Windswept Heath
- 1 Flooded Strand
- 1 Temple of the False God
- 1 Nantuko Monastery
- 1 Krosan Verge
- 1 Temple Garden
- 1 Breeding Pool
- 1 Hallowed Fountain
- 1 Tolaria West
- 1 Seaside Citadel
- 1 Rupture Spire
- 1 Graypelt Refuge
- 1 Misty Rainforest
- 1 Sejiri Refuge
- 1 Celestial Colonnade
- 1 Stirring Wildwood
- 1 Mystifying Maze
- 1 Command Tower
Spells (18)
The first decision I had to make was what Bant-colored Commander I wanted. I looked at the options and narrowed my choices down to Rafiq of the Many, Jenara, and Phelddagrif. I didn’t like the ones from Legends for my deck and Treva, the Renewer just didn’t fit. Of these three, I quickly eliminated the Phelddagrif and went back and forth on Jenara and Rafiq for a bit before settling on the Asura of War. I made this decision for a few reasons—flying is rare in this deck, so having a reliable flyer I can play every game was deemed very useful; the ability to pump her up to where she could fight down Dragons, Angels, and Sphinxes was deemed useful; and she’s the cheapest possible casting cost which helps to trigger stuff. Plus, Rafiq’s double strike and exalted only trigger when a creature attacks alone, and as we’ll see, we don’t have a lot of that in this deck (there’s too many creatures). Rafiq doesn’t even make the cut. If I had another legendary creature, Jenara still might. That’s the biggest point in her favor.
Equinaut is built around a few engines. In order of importance, here they are:
1). Self-Gaters: In order from best to worst – Fleetfoot Panther (aka Death Kitty), Whitemane Lion (aka Kitty Jr.), Stonecloaker, Shrieking Drake, Dust Elemental, and Stormfront Riders.
2). Equilibrium
And then a very distant:
3). Cloudstone Curio
5). Opposition and Glare of Subdual
6). Aura Shards
7). Momir Vig
8). Primordial Sage
Stormfront Riders is on there twice. The last time it’s an engine that makes 1/1 tokens when things are working. It’s the worst self-gater and the worst combo piece, so don’t rely on it too much for either role.
You can see my non-creature permanents here:
The deck is about two things. Don’t confuse yourself with all of the pretty lights. This deck is about quick smash and combo flash. That’s it—smash and flash. It’s about using your guys to abuse the engines. It doesn’t matter whether that engine is drawing a card, bouncing a creature, making a 1/1 dork, destroying an artifact or enchantment, tutoring for creatures or tapping something down. Just abuse it for wins and profit.
Suppose you play a simple Werebear. You can trigger a lot of combo stuff, like drawing off Primordial Sage, killing something with Aura Shards, and especially triggering Equilibrium and then you spend a mana to bounce your Weathered Wayfarer. You play it and draw a card, kill something artificial, and spend a mana on an Equilibrium trigger to bounce an opposing Aegis Angel. With just three engines out, you drew two cards and killed two artificial things, and bounced an opposing creature, and only spent five mana. Imagine if you had out different engines.
This deck does have creatures with ETB abilities, but don’t think of it strictly as a deck like that. Cards like Watchwolf and Tarmogoyf are better in this deck than Patagia Viper and Acidic Slime. Other than the gaters, the only ETB creatures are Mystic Snake, Mulldrifter, Acidic Ooze, Patagia Viper, Eternal Witness, Draining Whelk, Primeval Titan, Civic Wayfinder, Borderland Ranger, Loxodon Hierarch, Karmic Guide, and Masked Admirers. The Admirers, Hierarch, and Titan are played for reasons beyond their ETB ability. That’s just 12 creatures. It’s not like I should add Momentary Blink or something.
However, I do run Venser, the Sojourner. It’s nice to occasionally self-Flicker something. You can also exile out a land if you need too. A few engine triggers will activate when creatures return—like Aura Shards. You want to bump Venser to his ultimate because that will break this deck into little pieces of combo-tastic love.
Cloudstone Curio and Sol Ring are useful here, but they are the only two artifacts in the deck, so I really considering pulling them. I think the benefit of having a deck with no weaknesses to artifact removal and hate perhaps outweighs the advantages of having Sol Ring and Cloudstone Curio in the deck. They are both in for now, but after a few weeks more play, who knows?
Here are my nine instants and sorceries:
I’m trying out Familiar’s Ruse. So far, I haven’t drawn it in my games, so I’m not sure if it will work or not. I don’t like it in a 60-card deck, but with a smaller amount of gaters, it may be very useful for rebooting one or having yet one more round of triggers. Imagine self-bouncing Mystic Snake with it! Speaking about counters, if you’ve got them lying around, this is a nice home for an extra Mana Drain. If not, you can find lots of other counters that work. Perhaps guys like Voidslime might raise its head. Mana Drain’s colorless mana can be used to fuel a lot of self-bouncing on your next main phase.
The heart of my deck, the three and four drops, are here:
How about this mana curve? This is the number of creatures that cost each mana cost –
1: 4
2: 12
3: 9
4: 8
5: 5
6: 4
That’s nice and smooth. These dudes are the key cards in the deck and need to be cheaper on the manabase due to the theme. Looking over everything again, I would like a few more good one-drops. In retrospect, perhaps Serra Ascendant would have been a good call. I had to go with two-mana creatures that tapped for mana because there weren’t enough one-mana creatures that would tap for everything I needed. I considered and discarded Avacyn’s Pilgrim. If it tapped for one blue mana instead, I might have gone for it.
I don’t feel this deck ever needs the Wardens for combos and mad life gain. The obvious thing to do is to toss in Soul Warden, Essence Warden and friends, right? In Commander, you have enough of a life bump to not worry about it. When I play the deck, I’d rather have different cards when I’m going off. They just don’t fit into an already crowded deck.
Here are the one- and two-drops:
This is not a deck that benefits from a lot of traditionally played cards in these colors. With little death occurring, you won’t need Pattern of Rebirth. Tooth and Nail is way too expensive. Swords to Plowshares and similar cards don’t. There’s no Wrath of God, or anything similar. Heck, Seed Spark is only played because I don’t want that many five-drops (such as Indrik Stomphowler), and having one instant to take out something isn’t that bad (plus it makes creatures for stuff!).
Here is my small number of five- and six-drop creatures:
My creature to non-land and non-creature ratio is 43:19 including Jenara. I still felt bad about including a few of those non-creatures too. Maybe I’ll pull Mirari’s Wake and Seed Spark for other choices someday. My final three non-creatures were Wake, Seed Spark, and Fact or Fiction. Perhaps I should pull them for Elvish Visionary, Indrik Stomphowler, and Thran Dynamo? Or not…
Here were the five cards that were next on my list:
- Kitchen Finks—It should be in here, but this deck exists in real life, and I’ve run out of copies of the darn uncommon. I need to buy some more.
- Rhox War Monk—More gold beaters are always welcome.
- Scavenger Ooze—The deck has some built in graveyard hate (Stonecloaker), but this would be nice too.
- Cloudgoat Ranger—In a deck with cards like Opposition and Glare of Subdual, plus pump, this really works.
- Enlisted Wurm—I have a dream about abusing the crap out of this card with the bounce and rebounce theme.
Other cards heavily considered but not added included—Leyline of Anticipation, Vedalken Orrery, Grand Abolisher, Green Sun’s Zenith, and Sterling Grove.
Let’s have a big sad face for Meddling Mage and Loaming Shaman. I love ‘em, and each has been powerful in my 60-card decks. I don’t think Meddling Mage will really work all that well in a 100-card highlander deck. Loaming Shaman’s ability to extend the game also won’t prove that helpful either. It’s sad but true. On the other hand, I didn’t have to play favorites. Every time I build a quick 60-card Equinaut deck for playing, I always have to leave out cards that are awesome in Equinaut. Well, all of those cards are here! (Not Dismantling Blow, actually, but I had enough artifact and enchantment destruction, and it’s no longer necessary. I also can’t play Living Wish in Commander, or run Thornscape Battlemage and its red kicker symbol, plus Sunscape Battlemage is not nearly powerful enough in this particular deck. You grok the point though. ) I can bring back Saffi Eriksdotter and Tolsimir Wolfblood and Mystic Enforcer and Serra Avenger! It’s like a walk through every game I’ve played of Equinaut online and in real life over the last ten years. I love it!
We have a lot of non-basics, including dual lands and more. If it can make my colors, it’s likely in. Here they are:
Well, I hope that you enjoyed today’s Commander deck, based on my old standby, Equinaut. It’s not nearly as powerful in a 100-card format, but it’s always fun!
Until Later,
Abe Sargent
P.S.—Remember, you can check out my full and giant Equinaut Primer from beginning to end over at GatheringMagic.com and read all about it.