Bloomburrow previews are in full swing, and we’ve already seen a bunch of fun new legends to build Commander decks around. Today, I wanted to do a deep dive on a legend that looked like a very, very cool design — Wick, the Whorled Mind!
Wick cares about Rats, triggering off itself or another Rat I control entering. And for your trouble you either get a 1/1 Snail creature if you don’t already have a Snail, or you get to add a +1/+1 counter to a Snail you control. So why in the world would you want a slowly-growing Snail on your Rat team?
Read on: Wick’s activated ability costs a blue, a black, and a red and sacrificing a Snail, to have Wick deal damage equal to the sacrificed creature’s power to each opponent, and then you draw cards equal to the sacrificed creature’s power. This gives you an incentive to make a Snail big enough to deal real damage and draw a significant number of cards, all the while doing Rat typal stuff along the way. Sounds fun. Let’s dig in!
Snails?
How many Snails are in Magic? Turns out just one—so far! Which is fine—just playing your Rat cards will make you a Snail and start to grow it. If you have Infinitokens Dry Erase Tokens – and if you don’t, you should, they’re awesome – be sure to draw SpongeBob’s pet Gary as your Snail token for fun!
Rats!
Looks like Bloomburrow is bringing on a bunch of new Rats, so as previews continue the list of options will grow. Shoreline Looter seems like an excellent way to filter through cards early on, and once you have threshold it’s going to be pure card drawing. Plus, being unblockable makes it a nice ninjutsu enabler if you’re playing the Rat Ninjas in the deck. Vren, the Relentless is an excellent way to create more Rat tokens whenever a creature an opponent controls is exiled, including Vren’s ability to exile creatures that would die. Marrow-Gnawer and Lord Skitter, Sewer King can also generate extra Rat tokens, and Ashcoat of the Shadow Swarm can turn your army of Rats into an army of huge Rats.
You can certainly round out your Rat ranks with multiple copies of Rat Colony, or if you want to make this a Relentless Rats deck have at it!
Rat Ninjas
There’s a fair number of Rats that are also Ninjas, so we might consider having them in the mix. I’m a big fan of Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni, which is a huge Rat with a powerful combat damage trigger to reanimate and steal creatures in the opponent’s graveyard. I also really like Nashi, Moon Sage’s Scion, which also has a really nice combat damage trigger that can let you cast a spell from any player’s library and cast it by paying life instead of mana.
Changelings
We can fill out our ranks of Rats with Shapeshifters featuring the changeling ability, but since they also count as Snails, Wick’s ability won’t make a Snail token but instead let you put a +1/+1 counter on one of the changelings. Amoeboid Changeling can give any target creature all creature types, so if you want to make a particular Rat into an honorary Snail for +1/+1 counters, you can!
I don’t often find Fire-Belly Changeling worth a slot in a deck where changelings fit in, but in this particular instance, the Firebreathing ability can pump up its power to make its sacrifice more potent.
Maskwood Nexus and Arcane Adaptation can make all your Rats also Snails, so you can distribute +1/+1 counters wherever best makes sense. Or you can have a Rat pick up and wield the Runed Stalactite!
Typal Support
There are a ton of typal deck support available that we can tap into to strengthen the Rat synergies. Blue offers two powerful cards in Titan of Littjara and Kindred Discovery, giving us card drawing engines. Door of Destinies will do great work here, especially if you’re playing a good number of changelings that are both Rats and Snails and can potentially be quite large to be sacrificed to Wick. It’s awesome that Cover of Darkness got a reprint in Assassin’s Creed so it’s much cheaper now and will do great work making your Rats harder to block.
Kindred Charge is going to give you a ton of enters triggers for Wick; even if you have legendary Rats you copy and have to sacrifice the copy immediately, you’ll get that trigger.
Power Boost
I think we’d want additional ways to boost the power of our Snail to make it a very juicy sacrificial escargot meal. Stoneforge Masterwork and Transmogrant’s Crown seem awesome for this, and if you’re playing a good number of artifacts, you might consider Cranial Plating too. There are a lot of strong Equipment cards with cheap equip costs that can boost your Snail by even a small amount that can still be worth it. Shuko is about as cheap as you can get, so if you already own one, it might be good to slot in the deck; unfortunately, thanks to the brokenness of Nadu, Winged Wisdom in Modern, Shuko’s singles price has spiked hard.
Even though this is a Grixis deck, you can run Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth to make all lands also Swamps, and then use Lashwrithe and Nightmare Lash for big size boosts.
Hatred could be really spicy if you’ve got enough life to spare, boosting your Snail for a massive infusion of cards and forcing all your opponents to share in the dwindling life totals. I’d also consider one-shot spells like Brute Force or Titan’s Strength, which are typically used as combat tricks but here will deal extra damage and draw extra cards.
The bigger your sacrificed Snail, the larger your hand will fill with cards, which makes Empyrial Plate a cool choice here too!
Damaging Opponents
Wick’s activated ability deals damage to each opponent, so you can steal a sneaky victory with an instant-speed card like Tainted Strike giving Wick infect until the end of the turn. Glistening Oil can be held in hand until you’re ready for the big play before you cast it.
If you give Wick lifelink, then you can gain life from the damage dealt, so I’d strongly consider Shadowspear, Basilisk Collar and Whip of Erebos. Exquisite Blood will do the trick too, since damage dealt counts as loss of life.
Curiosity is another cool option; notably, it doesn’t mandate combat damage to draw cards, just damage dealt.
Mana Ramp
Wick’s activated ability isn’t overly expensive, but three mana isn’t nothing either, so I’d not scrimp on running plenty of mana rocks in addition to Sol Ring. But I’d also want to run some temporary infusions of mana that can let you cast one or more spells in the same turn as you activate Wick to sacrifice a Snail. Dark Ritual is a classic, and Jeska’s Will is just a flat-out powerful card that you’d likely want in your deck anyway. I also like Burnt Offering since it can create both black and red mana which satisfies two of the three colors of Wick’s activated ability.
Turnabout is an incredibly flexible spell that can generate extra mana if you’ve got enough lands to let you float extra mana over the four mana it costs to cast the spell. Black Market is a great enchantment when you’re planning on sacrificing your own creatures and can wrack up a lot of charge counters the more creatures die no matter who controls them.
Sword of Feast and Famine was also reprinted in Assassin’s Creed, so it’s the most affordable it’s been for quite some time, and it’s an excellent way to get extra use of all your lands after combat, assuming you deal combat damage to an opponent to get the trigger.
So which cards would you add to a Wick, the Whorled Mind Commander deck that I didn’t mention here? And which new legendary creatures from Bloomburrow are you most interested in building around?
Talk to Me
Do me a solid and follow me on Twitter! I run polls and start conversations about Commander all the time, so get in on the fun! You can also find my LinkTree on my profile page there with links to all my content.
I’d also love it if you followed my Twitch channel TheCompleteCommander, where I do Commander, Brawl, and sometimes other Magic-related streams when I can. If you can’t join me live, the videos are available on demand for a few weeks on Twitch, but I also upload them to my YouTube channel. You can also find the lists for my paper decks over on Archidekt if you want to dig into how I put together my own decks and brews.
And lastly, I just want to say: let us love each other and stay healthy and happy.
Visit my Decklist Database to see my decklists and the articles where they appeared!
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