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Borrowing Stuff At Cutlass-Point: Pirates In Commander

As Aura Graft’s flavor text says, “It’s not really stealing. It’s more like extended borrowing.” Sheldon Menery plays Pirates under Admiral Beckett Brass on a quest to bag the most bounteous booty in Commander!

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We’re in a golden age of tribes for Commander. We’ve always had and will continue to enjoy Goblins and Elves and Dragons, but now we’ve turned the corner toward new and exciting tribes like Cats, Dinosaurs, and finally Pirates. There have been Pirate decks in the past, but the selection wasn’t particularly strong, especially since Ramirez DePietro was until recently the only legendary Pirate. With Ixalan, the winds have shifted. The most excellent Admiral Beckett Brass and her team of swashbucklers open the hatch to adventure. Let’s get right into the list I’ve drawn up, “Borrowing Stuff at Cutlass-Point.”

Borrowing Stuff At Cutlass Point
Sheldon Menery
Test deck on 03-29-2018
Commander
Magic Arena

Creatures (34)

Planeswalkers (1)

Lands (37)

Spells (27)

Magic Card Back


Why Play It?

It’s always exciting to play the new tribe on the block because we haven’t seen yet what it can do. While a Dinosaur deck will be loads of fun, it’s somewhat linear. Pirates, on the other hand, lends itself to builds that you need to think about and play around with. The cards aren’t quite as straightforward and you’ll have plenty of decisions to make. Getting more mileage out of cards or synergies than initially presents itself is always rewarding.

You’ll Like This Deck If…

. . . you like pretending that you’re going to borrow stuff, but really have no intention of giving it back. I took some ideas for this deck from my The Threat of Yasova, which takes the theme to an extreme. You’ll like this deck if you’re a fan of alternate win conditions, since it contains two different ones. You’ll also like this deck if you’re worried that sometimes Grixis decks can be a little mana-hungry without the ramp support that green offers. These Pirates run a tight ship and make a middling amount of mana go a long way.

You Won’t Like This Deck If…

. . . you want to dump cards on the table and just win. I wouldn’t consider it a Tier 1 deck at all; in fact, it’s probably best in a beer-and-pretzels-type group, in which the players want to see what wacky things they can do and have some laughs along the way.

You also won’t like it if you don’t like creatures and battling. While it has a few alternate win conditions, for the most part it’s about getting through with lots of Pirate damage.

What Does It Do?

The deck makes use of Threaten-like cards and mechanics to borrow creatures and other permanents from your opponents—to then smash them in the face with. For the most part, the long-standing “rule” in the format is that when you steal something from someone, you have to send it back to them. It’s fine to violate this rule when strategically advantageous or tactically appropriate. I mean, no one is going to blame you for taking out the player that’s about to get (or has gotten) out of hand.

One of the primary directions the deck heads it toward Treasure. Many of the Pirates create Treasure tokens, as do some of the spells. Playing it, we’ll have to decide whether we want to spend that Treasure for the short-term gain of mana or have the tokens around to fuel a much larger spell—or, of course, to win with either Revel in Riches or Hellkite Tyrant.

The deck takes advantage of some enters-the-battlefield triggers and then potentially sends them into overdrive with Deadeye Navigator. It seemed like it couldn’t avoid playing one of the most talked-about cards in the format, since there are other Deadeye Pirates. There are the usual suspects to soulbond with Deadeye Navigator, such as Zealous Conscripts, Solemn Simulacrum, or Sower of Temptation (of course, once you’ve made use of what you borrowed), but there are new tricks in the Admiral’s arsenal. Blinking Dire Fleet Ravager will get life totals down in a hurry. In combination with Pirate Ship or Staff of Nin, Fathom Fleet Cutthroat will take down even the largest creature. Prosperous Pirates will make more Treasure tokens.

The deck casts its Pirates more cheaply, leveraging cards like Herald’s Horn and Urza’s Incubator. Making them cost less mitigates one of the issues Grixis frequently faces and tightens up the deck. The great part about cost reducers is that they’re effectively giving you one mana (or more) for each spell, which can end up being well more mana than a single land could produce.

Card draw is in a less-than-traditional form, but it should be sufficient nonetheless. Herald’s Horn, Vanquisher’s Banner, and Kindred Discovery are all good enough, but they’re even better when we have Arcane Adaptation on the battlefield. Kindred Discovery is particularly spicy, since it doubles up—drawing a card when a creature of the chosen type enters the battlefield and when it attacks. Almost makes me wish there were more creatures with haste running around.

What Doesn’t It Do?

The deck doesn’t use all the available Pirates. It specifically doesn’t make use of the raid mechanic, which simply seemed a little underwhelming unless we were going to fully commit to all battles all the time (which would certainly be a reasonable direction to take it). Choices obviously needed to be made, and I chose a direction that’s a little different from what I’m used to.

The deck doesn’t provide much control over the battlefield. It has very few answers to other players’ spells and permanents, so if you’re a control player, this one probably isn’t for you. Most of the control that the Grixis colors provides means that creatures tend to die; we’d like to keep ours alive for a good long time so that they can go out Pirating.

I specifically avoided Rishadan Brigand, Rishadan Cutpurse, and Rishadan Footpad, which make opponents sacrifice permanents unless they pay mana. There’s a place for those cards, but it’s in a more controlling deck. They go especially nicely with Deadeye Navigator (but sure, lots of stuff does). I’d play them if I were to make some kind of reanimator build, so that I could bring back what people sacrificed. I do that a fair amount in other decks, so doing something different with the new tribe is a fine idea.

The deck doesn’t take specific advantage of artifacts entering or leaving the battlefield, such as with Grinding Station or Disciple of the Vault, respectively. Reckless Fireweaver seems like a card which could pay some dividends, but now we’re headed off into an entirely different direction, another which the deck could easily head with some modification.

Unfortunately, but as often happens with Grixis, the deck doesn’t do any land ramping save for Myriad Landscape. Creating Treasure tokens to produce mana is meant to mitigate the lack of additional lands. The good news is that we’re way less likely than everyone else to get killed with Acidic Soil or Treacherous Terrain.

How Does It Win?

The deck wins by going wide with Pirates which have been buffed up by their fearless leader, or by one of the aforementioned alternate win conditions. An unchecked Door of Destinies can lead to it going quite tall as well. If you avoid sacrificing too many of the Treasures, Deadeye Plunderers will be rather large.

We can win by stealing or borrowing someone else’s huge creature; it’s certainly a great deal of fun to team up with an opponent for a two-fer on commander damage against another opponent who’s in danger of wiping out everyone. Of course, it’s eminently enjoyable to simply kill someone with their own commander. The explore mechanic pairs reasonably well with Roil Elemental, putting the lands into our hand, which we’ll later use to get landfall triggers.

One of the deck’s main combos is Captivating Crew and Conjurer’s Closet. Captivating Crew’s Threaten-on-a-stick mentality is nice, but by using Conjurer’s Closet on the creature you borrowed earlier in the turn, we can keep it for good. Same goes for creatures you’ve taken with Sower of Temptation. In the unlikely situation that we haven’t killed people with Insurrection, we can hang onto the biggest or best creature which came over to you this turn.

We can’t use Admiral Beckett Brass’s ability to steal something and then keep it with Conjurer’s Closet, since they’re both end of turn trigger, but the happy news is that you don’t have to. The good commodore’s ability doesn’t have a duration; we can save Conjurer’s Closet for something else, like what we took with Dominus of Fealty, assuming it was a creature, so I suppose it’s time to point out that some folks forget Dominus of Fealty is just like Zealous Conscripts in that you can borrow any permanent. My favorite is taking a planeswalker the turn before it goes ultimate.

How Does It Lose?

The biggest creature swarms are likely to be problematic. There isn’t any real mass removal other than Kindred Dominance, since that tends to be counterproductive with Insurrection. While the deck isn’t particularly mana-hungry, it likes to operate in the mid-range, so stumbling on a few lands drops could put us behind enough to not be able to catch up. To some extent, use of the explore mechanic is there to prevent such problems.

Because there are no real control elements, combo decks will likely give this deck some fits. Then again, I’m not likely to play in an environment with too many combo decks, since none of my local group leans that direction. If your environment is different, you’ll have to consider a new direction to take the Pirates. There are single cards, like Humility, which we simply have no way to get out from under, save for other players taking pity on us and dealing with the Humility player.

Cards That Aren’t There

Deadeye Quartermaster seems like the most glaring omission.

It was on one of the early drafts, but there simply weren’t enough relevant Equipment or Vehicles to be worth it. Either of those directions could be viable, but in this case, I didn’t want to go into a theme half-heartedly.

Adaptive Automaton fits thematically, but since I had just put it into the Dinosaur deck last week, I didn’t want to go right back to that well.

Patriarch’s Bidding is a card which situates nicely in tribal decks, but without more graveyard control than Deadeye Tracker and no real big hits coming back from the graveyard (like Zombies do with Noxious Ghoul), it was more risk than I was willing to assume.

Perhaps some addition help getting around defenses could aid the Admiral’s ability to trigger. Cards like Archetype of Imagination or Sun Quan, Lord of Wu will smuggle your Pirates into the coves of profit.

Admiral Beckett Brass and the Future

Rivals of Ixalan will certainly have more Pirates to consider adding to the deck. By that time, I’ll have played it enough times to see how I need to readjust. It might be that those Pirates will continue along the paths we’ve traveled here; it might be that they’re too good to ignore but head in a different direction. I look forward to finding out which will happen.

Idiotic Combo

I frequently ask various folks to contribute to Idiotic Combo. I edit them for space and clarity and then present them to you. This time, I’m just going to let Sir Squab on the official Commander forums do all the talking (with a few grammar fixes), since they’ve ramped up the idiocy to new levels:

This is a dumb combo that needs a lot of things. We’ll begin with Mind Over Matter, Arcanis the Omnipotent, and one of the original Eldrazi titans (yeah, I know this could just win you the game. Shush.) Point is, the only practical way to do this is with infinite mana and recursion. It’s a little unwieldy, but the payoff is worth it. At least, I think it is.

So now for some shenanigans. Let’s start off with a Mycosynth Lattice. Then let’s throw in a Crucible of Fire. Let’s make a bunch more of them with Saheeli’s Artistry. But you know what? That’s kind of greedy, isn’t it? Let’s Donate some to each player. Share the love.

Now we’ll play Arcane Adaptation and reveal that all of our creatures are secretly Dragons—but that’s not all. We’re going to copy it with Saheeli’s Artistry and Donate a copy to each player, because it turns out all creatures are secretly Dragons.

Now, Form of the Dragon. Copy it, give away the copies. Because all players are also Dragons.

Finally, the master stroke. March of the Machines.

All permanents are now Dragons.

The players are also Dragons.

Everything is now Dragon.

Then, like, I don’t know, play Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund or something.

Since we’re on Dragons, this week’s Deck Without Comment is Karrthus, Who Rains Fire From The Sky.

Karrthus, Who Rains Fire From The Sky
Sheldon Menery
0th Place at Test deck on 12-30-2012
Commander
Magic Arena

Creatures (27)

Planeswalkers (2)

Lands (37)

Spells (33)

Magic Card Back


Check out our comprehensive Deck List Database for lists of all my decks:

SIGNATURE DECKS

Purple Hippos and Maro Sorcerers; Kresh Into the Red Zone; Halloween with Karador; Dreaming of Intet; You Did This to Yourself.

THE CHROMATIC PROJECT

Mono-Color

Heliod, God of Enchantments; Thassa, God of Merfolk; Erebos and the Halls Of The Dead; Forge of Purphoros; Nylea of the Woodland Realm; Karn Evil No. 9.

Guilds

Lavinia Blinks; Obzedat, Ghost Killer; Aurelia Goes to War; Trostani and Her Angels; Lazav, Shapeshifting Mastermind; Zegana and a Dice Bag; Rakdos Reimagined; Glissa, Glissa; Ruric Thar and His Beastly Fight Club; Gisa and Geralf Together Forever.

Shards and Wedges

Adun’s Toolbox; Angry, Angry Dinos; Animar’s Swarm; Ikra and Kydele; Karrthus, Who Rains Fire From The Sky; Demons of Kaalia; Merieke’s Esper Dragons; Nath of the Value Leaf; Rith’s Tokens; The Mill-Meoplasm; The Altar of Thraximundar; The Threat of Yasova; Zombies of Tresserhorn.

Four Color

Yidris: Money for Nothing, Cards for Free; Saskia Unyielding; Breya Reshaped.

Five-Color

Children of a Greater God

Partners

Tana and Kydele; Kynaios and Tiro; Ikra and Kydele.

THE DO-OVER PROJECT

Animar Do-Over; Glissa Do-Over; Karador Do-Over; Karador Version 3; Karrthus Do-Over; Kresh Do-Over; Steam-Powered Merieke Do-Over; Lord of Tresserhorn Do-Over; Mimeoplasm Do-Over; Phelddagrif Do-Over; Rith Do-Over; Ruhan Do-Over.

If you’d like to follow the adventures of my Monday Night RPG group (in a campaign that’s been alive since 1987) which is just beginning the saga The Lost Cities of Nevinor, ask for an invitation to the Facebook group “Sheldon Menery’s Monday Night Gamers.”