With the Born of the Gods now fully spoiled so we can all get excited about the shiny new toys that will be put in our hands at this weekend’s Prerelease, I figured I should take one of the new Gods out for a spin. Between all of the five new choices, it surprises me not at all that I would choose white and blue—after all, I have basically tried to play that color combination in Standard for most of the past decade, and I also have a known affinity for card-drawing commanders. That I could sate both urges in the same deckbuilding rush meant this was going to be a good day indeed, and we’re going to see just what happens when you put the God of the Polis at the helm.

As far as single-card strategies go, Ephara is going to be operating at maximum capability if we plan on taking advantage of the fact that in a multiplayer format she can trigger on each and every turn as long as we’re consistently playing a stream of creatures. This isn’t easy to do if for no other reason than the constraints of sorcery-speed Magic that most creatures operate under. We will have to put additional value on creatures with flash just for starters, but we run into another constraint along the way—having to play one card to draw one card but also having to play lands in sufficient quantity to get your deck online in the first place, you won’t draw a creature card for each card you draw off of Ephara because one out of every three (or so) cards you draw will necessarily be a land.

So in addition to valuing flash creatures since Ephara effectively makes them cantrips, we’re going to value cards that let us put creatures into play without being creature cards themselves. Maybe this means token generation off of instants, but while they may be more plentiful than blue or white creatures with flash, they aren’t fundamentally different. As long as you are investing one card for the right to draw a card off of Ephara’s trigger, Midnight Haunting and Zealous Guardian look pretty much identical as far as she is concerned. Where you can get multiple creatures over multiple turns off of the investment of just a single card, that’s where Ephara is going to shine, and even bad cardboard that meets those conditions will become awesome in this context.

We’re going to want things that play on the board and contribute to devotion, sure, but the way we envision winning the game is decidedly not through 21 commander damage using a card that is under many conditions not even actually a creature in play. We’re going to be buying ourselves cards in hand and considerable board presence turn after turn and looking to grind the opponent out through this steady stream of advantage. In order to do this, we’re going to want a steady stream of mana—it will prove to be our most rigid constraint because while plenty of cards exist to put tokens into play on other players’ turns they tend to ask for mana to do it.

We’re not going to be exactly a control deck, but we’re in very strong controlling colors so that’s going to happen at least somewhat accidentally. As we build around the strengths and weaknesses of our commander, we’re going to feel rather tempo-ish, something like a Caw-Blade or a Faeries deck with a variety of tactical options and the snowballing effect of cards getting us more cards so we can bludgeon you with raw cardboard power unless and until you do something to stop us. In the games where Ephara is online, we’re going to feel pretty rich, so we’ll have to strike the balance between Ephara enablers and stuff to do while we’re rich all while addressing the need for cards that help us out when our best-laid plans go awry.

Begin At The Beginning

For us here, that means the —we have to get that right before we can address anything else really. Some of that will be lands and some will be other stuff entirely, but we’re going to lump all of it in here together since it has to work cohesively if we’re to start firing on all cylinders in the middle of the game. This is actually going to pan out pretty easily—we know we want to spend our mana turn after turn on doing stuff.

So contrary to my usual trends for having a very busy land base with plenty of spell-like things that you could do with your mana if you wanted to, I’m going to be aiming for simplicity. And as long as we’re keeping it basic, we can get rewarded for playing so many basics in the first place—Emeria, the Sky Ruin is a very powerful incentive for a Plains-heavy deck, and having lots of basics means having lots of basics to pull out of your deck with Crucible of Worlds recycling fetch lands.

There will be some fancy nonbasic lands, but the ones with activated abilities you’d consider turn after turn are going to be limited to just Winding Canyons—all the better here in a deck that can reward you for playing creatures out of turn with another card in hand—alongside Kor Haven for its cheap defensive capabilities and Riptide Laboratory since we’re going to end up with a minor Wizard subtheme that will be improved by adding their tribe-oriented land. Other than that we’re pretty vanilla:

11x Plains, 5x Island

Riptide Laboratory; Kor Haven; Winding Canyons; Emeria, the Sky Ruin; Tolaria West; Mistveil Plains

Azorius Chancery, Mystic Gate, Tundra, Hallowed Fountain

Thawing Glaciers, Evolving Wilds, Terramorphic Expanse, Bant Panorama, Esper Panorama, Flood Plain, Marsh Flats, Misty Rainforest, Scalding Tarn, Arid Mesa, Flooded Strand

This gives us 37 total lands, fourteen total Plains, and plenty of lands to find them with, and most of our color fixing comes from fetch lands effectively acting as dual lands. The actual duals we’re playing are the two that count as Plains since they’re pretty special, plus Azorius Chancery thanks to the fact that it counts as a bonus land more or less when you draw it and Mystic Gate because it has the superpower of tapping a Plains to add two blue mana.

Everything else would have to replace an Island to add something that also makes white mana (when we’re already going to be plentiful in that department) or replace a Plains in order to add something that also makes blue mana (when we want all those Plains in the first place to turn on Emeria). Even Command Tower isn’t special while Azorius Chancery and Mystic Gate are in one way or the other, so that is why it stays on the sidelines despite being the awesome dual (or more!) land that you "must always play" in Commander.

With our 37 lands, we have 28 able to tap for white or find something that does and 21 able to similarly provide access to blue mana. While we could get a greater density of blue mana if we tried to, there are real prices to be paid for accessing more dual lands, and we’re going to have to aim to shy away from triple-blue casting costs like Cryptic Command instead. Powerful though a card may be, if it is that hard for us to cast, we need to bench it.

Artifice & Misdirection

Some of this counts as mana base, while the rest is going to serve as the firm foundation for the rest of the deck. For that reason alone this tends to be where my thoughts wander next over the course of building a deck, and given that I already had so few lands that tapped in strange ways for other effects, I decided I wanted to try a hoser card that I’ve been pondering adding to the rotation for some time now to see if it is as powerful in Commander as I think it will be.

A few of the additions are obvious. I like to add Sol Ring, Sensei’s Divining Top, and Expedition Map to pretty much every deck, and while Expedition Map has fewer fancy lands to target here, one of them is the reason we’re playing so many fewer interesting targets than usual and thus is more important to draw now that we’re making that sacrifice. Our deck is presumably better with Emeria online than without it.

I’m also considering Crucible of Worlds to be a part of my mana base, as it will help get us to the higher reaches of the mana curve over a long game so it acts basically like another Thawing Glaciers so long as we have enough fetch lands that we can reasonably expect to draw one in any hand that also has Crucible in it. We have ten fetch lands, so that should be plenty. (We could have fourteen if we really wanted to, but I don’t consider Naya and Grixis Panorama to be worth it and try to have some concept of budget realism in my building here so I limit decisions to cards I own. For Commander purposes I’ve acquired a Flooded Strand but not made that same quite expensive decision for Polluted Delta and Windswept Heath, so we’re sticking to just Zendikar fetch lands for half-on-color fetches.)

With those additions set in place, we’ll get more specific from here:

Oblivion Stone: We are going to be relying on board sweepers instead of pinpoint removal for the most part, and Oblivion Stone is a powerful one thanks to the fact that it hits not just creatures but all nonland permanents if we have a problem with a different class of threat. There will even be a neat combo worked in with this if we want to use it, though it’s a trick I’ve only actually had come up once in Commander.

Sword of Feast and Famine, Skullclamp: We’re going to have multiple ways to access each of these cards, and both amplify part of what we’re already building around very well. We’re going to have a fair share of token creatures appearing over the course of a game, and Skullclamp is a nutty card-draw machine when you have tokens to feed to it. We’re going to spend a bunch of mana to develop our board and make those tokens, which means SoFaF’s ability to effectively double your mana output will be especially valuable to us in this deck. (I pretty much love it in Commander regardless, but it’s true that we’re going to appreciate doubling our mana here quite a bit.)

Caged Sun: On the subject of doubling our mana, I usually shy away from this, but we’re both Plains-heavy (so doubling a specific color will have a high impact) and token-heavy (so the +1/+1 bonus will do a fair bit for us here presuming that the tokens are white [and a fair chunk of them are]).

Trading Post, Mimic Vat, Myr Turbine, Druidic Satchel, Spawning Pit: Each of these has the ability to put a token creature into play and thus assist with triggering Ephara and drawing an additional card each turn. Each also has bonus characteristics. Druidic Satchel can act as land ramp as well, and Mimic Vat can do some pretty sweet things if you can catch the right creature under it. Spawning Pit gives us a sacrifice outlet that we’d otherwise be quite lacking, as does Trading Post, which can also get silly when you add the ability to buy back relevant artifacts to the mix or even just act as a card-drawing mechanism, as it does adequately alongside our "boring" but efficient Myr Turbine.

Tsabo’s Web: As long as your mana base isn’t busy with all these complicated toys, why not add in an easy deck slot for something that might punish other players for being so overcomplicated sometimes? As a cantrip, it’s always going to replace itself, making it a reasonable card even when it is a low-impact permanent, but when it’s a high-impact card, it’s going to shut down all sorts of interesting things and potentially hold an opponent back if they’ve gone and done too many complicated things. (It should be noted that pretty much all of the lands you’re allowed to play with a colorless commander will be unhappy with Tsabo’s Web, but other than that uncommon corner case it’ll mostly do Maze of Ith duty and stop people who get too fancy.)

This Spells Your Doom

This is actually the least interesting portion, which was why I found myself trying to minimize it further and further in order to fit in more creatures and do more interesting things. Commander control decks can very easily relegate themselves to just being a big pile of card drawing and sweepers, and there are enough good ones of both types that I found myself lost in the woods without enough creatures to make Ephara work so I could fit in yet another counterspell and generic sweeper #6 and rely on Ponder, Preordain and Brainstorm to make sure I draw all these things in the right proportion.

Then I said "screw that," threw all of these things out, and decided I was quite happy relegating all card-drawing duties to Ephara herself. No Fact or Fiction or Mind’s Eye here because Ephara will draw us something like four cards over a complete turn cycle anyway!

Then I remembered Skullclamp and stopped being a purist because Skullclamp is insane.

Our objective here is to add token makers (of which there are not really that many good ones), enough countermagic to trigger our counter-specific cards (and upon closer inspection I found there are a fair number of counters that leave you with a token, thus triggering Ephara!), some spot removal and sweeper effects in order to fit the right balance, and a few things just because they make me happy. This is Commander after all—even when you’re being completely cutthroat, you can still usually find some room for things that make you happy, and "being happy" is part of that whole "having fun" dichotomy that you can’t completely cut out of the format. Even if you try there are a lot of sweet cards, and strange things happen all the time so you’ll still find yourself having fun completely by accident (happiness sure is ornery that way).

Luminarch Ascension, Sacred Mesa, and Mobilization are our token-making additions, and while I usually think of the Ascension as dirty pool for the format, it fits well here and shouldn’t be too oppressive so long as you don’t draw it very early. It’s only usually too good in the first four turns; after that there will be enough people able to throw at least a token attack your way to keep the card in balance. I also was really excited going over my obscure-card memories and coming up with Pegasus Refuge, which puts a token creature into play for the strange cost of putting a card in your hand back on top of your library—alongside Ephara that’s like a free token each turn for no mana, which is at least Bitterblossom good, so this never-ever-used card would actually shine with this new commander!

However, if you’ve clicked over the words "Pegasus Refuge" and seen the text come up yet, you’ve realized just as I did that this card is actually just awful, and looking over not my extended memory of obscure cards but actual Gatherer revealed that the obscure enchantment with the bizarre activation cost was either the completely unplayable Hidden Retreat or the completely unplayable Penance, so this imaginary Bitterblossom was a deception all along. Alas.

This trip down ancient Magic-lore lane did remind me of how interesting Desertion is, especially so in a deck where having your opponent’s creature come into play on your side would net you a fresh card for the effort on top of their shiny toy. I wanted to find more things like this, which sent me searching for the oddball "whenever you counter a spell" text on yet another Gatherer hunt but also saw me add Spelljack—it’s pretty comparable and even better in most cases not involving a commander—and the rather situational Repel Intruders and Summoner’s Bane. Then I had to add some boring stuff just so the deck would work right. It’s like the eating your vegetables of Commander, but if I didn’t fill these technical holes with the right cards, the deck just wouldn’t work right:

Swords to Plowshares, Path to Exile, and Oblation were added in order to be able to handle key problems on anybody’s turn, letting us build appropriate levels of defense by having a cheap and effective removal spell we could budget into our plans over the course of multiple turns.

Arcane Denial was added as the cheap no-frills countermagic of choice. I’m blue light enough that I don’t want UU if 1U would work instead, and I never mind giving an opponent two cards back for their awesome spell if that means I get my card back too.

Enlightened Tutor was added to help draw the right artifacts and enchantments at the right time. This color combination is somewhat weak on tutoring ability, and the problem of going down a card in hand just to play your tutor is not felt as sharply here in this deck since Ephara should keep the resources flowing plentifully. It’s still not as good as a tutor that puts the card right in your hand, but this deck has no problems when it comes to drawing cards. Beggars can’t really be choosers.

Austere Command and Fated Retribution were added as sweepers that could also address other problems. Since we have no planeswalkers, the Retribution won’t hurt us but can get key cards off the table, while Austere Command is flexible and customizable to whatever problem is at hand. Rout was added because instant-speed sweepers are very powerful and I wanted another one if I could get it after Fated Retribution. I made myself have to choose just one between Phyrexian Rebirth and Martial Coup and then elected the single X/X to the X Soldier tokens, especially when I would have to pay actual mana for X.

Back to interesting cards, on the subject of spending X, I pondered Entreat the Angels and Decree of Justice and then remembered that the playtest name of a card that always made me very happy was "OMG! Cat Festival!" and added White Sun’s Zenith. We’re very strong at generating a hefty mana base over the course of a game, like the draw a card subtly implied by White Sun’s Zenith being an instant, and can even appreciate the Zenith shuffling back in for later reuse. But mostly I enjoy the no-hoops-needed instant speed of the card and that each mana spent after that first three gets me a 2/2, not a 1/1.

Sure, Entreat the Angels might get me 4/4s instead and on the cheap, but only with the right setup and maybe still on the wrong player’s turn—drawing off of Ephara for last turn’s creature and getting to miracle Entreat sounds awesome, but not if there are two more players yet to go before you untap, either of whom can punish you for tapping out or just wipe the board before you get to do anything. White Sun’s Zenith makes a pile of power at the time of your choosing, which is to say immediately before you untap and probably attack someone for lethal.

Another solid token-making card that functions as an instant is Cackling Counterpart, the only concession I found myself willing to make to the usually plentiful Clone card department you can add if you try. I’ve gone so deep down this channel recently that I’ve hunted up a Vesuvan Doppelganger just to get another Clone handy because the first five or six weren’t enough by themselves, and that’s a deep well indeed to fall into. We don’t have the slots here. Cackling Counterpart got the beneficial nod thanks to being an instant (and thus with Ephara a cantrip) and also thanks to Flashback—not likely the biggest deal, but I’ll always take it as a freebie.

Around this time I thought about whether this was a Momentary Blink deck and decided sadly it was not. It was close to being one—I wanted it to be one—but the creatures that fit into the deck didn’t really benefit from a lot of blinking. I settled on using those creatures to blink things instead. I could still have the fun, but I’d have to use permanents in play as my setup cards instead of this pure-value instant.

I had just one slot left here to fill if I was still going to have enough creatures to satisfy me and remembered an interesting card I’ve been trying to advocate for but am very bad at actually finding a home for in my own usage: Oath of Lieges. Commander is a very acceleration-friendly format, and Oath of Lieges helps everyone at a table (which will include you because blue and white basically suck at it) ramp up your mana in order to keep up with whoever’s putting in the work to get a head start.

Even without anyone reaching for the Cultivates and Explosive Vegetations, this will tend to fire off on someone’s turn and then leave them ahead for the turn cycle after they play their own land, so even if no one’s actively trying to pull ahead of the table with ramp this will give people an extra land or three in the formative turns of the game and help make sure there’s enough mana going around for everyone to play a reasonable game of Magic. (But most importantly for us to be able to do so—we’re sharing but not out of caring.)

Creatures From The White & Blue Lagoon

Most of all I wanted to have a strong mix of creatures that work synergistically with the deck as a whole and well with Ephara, which meant among other things that I would need plenty of them. We’ve got room for 29 with this build, having filled up 60 slots with lands and support cards, and we want to bias toward things that turn on Ephara—creatures with flash take a certain priority as long as they’re good creatures. Maybe some more sweepy things or blinky things, and I know we can get more countermagic in here if we try.

But adding in the token subtheme more strongly will also be important for us even if that asks us to jump through some unusual hoops in order to get there. Anything that can be put to work in a different context than usual would be desirable, as I have no problem putting "staple" cards in my deck as long as they’re working a little bit differently here than they do in their typical usage.

That said, let’s get the kinda boring "good stuff" cards out of the way first:

Solemn Simulacrum, Stoneforge Mystic, Trinket Mage: Yep, that’s it. There’s a bit more good-stuff additions than that, but they all have at least somewhat of a different context than the typical here. I couldn’t exactly find myself trying to successfully argue that Solemn Simulacrum is special here because I can blink it or because I can use it to ramp me toward Emeria being online—that argument is basically saying "I am playing Commander!" so I won’t even try to claim it’s an interesting addition.

Starting in on the token theme, we begin with the obvious: Heliod, God of the Sun. He’s basically just another twist on the Mobilization line we’ve mined already, so the inclusion makes reasonable sense. It "counts as" a creature card, but it won’t usually function as one. Other fun token makers include Talrand, Sky Summoner; Meloku the Clouded Mirror; Pentavus; and Darien, King of Kjeldor. Emeria Angel also works here because we’re already building up a fetch land-based engine for the deck so we’ll frequently be able to trigger landfall on an opponent’s turn and thus collect a token while we’re at it, and Twilight Drover works as a token machine with just that first kick to turn over the engine by killing anyone’s token creature.

It doesn’t work effectively as a token maker by itself, but once that first +1/+1 counter has been added, it becomes quite self-sufficient from there. And one more suggested itself after coming to the conclusion I would have enough countermagic type things to get to use it, as Lullmage Mentor may never tap five Merfolk to counter a spell but can add that oh so valuable cantrip clause to my countermagic spells by adding the benefit of making a token to that counterspell. I was already pushed to the point where I was willing to play Repel Intruders with a straight face; I might as well go further down that route and bring in the Mentor.

Continuing down that route further brought us back to Desertion, and you can get Desertion on a stick (somewhat) if you try—Guile lets you hijack spells you’ve countered, which if added to a creature spell lets you get a creature on an opponent’s turn and thus draw a card. Yes, we’re getting a bit convoluted at this point, but Guile’s within the realm of an acceptable creature anyway. Who knows, maybe sometime you’ll counter something bonkers and have an excellent story for it. I’ve triggered this literally once in several years of trying in this format, but that’s not going to stop me trying again.

With slots rapidly disappearing, I wanted to make sure I had given a good look over the list of possible flash creatures and adopted as many as was reasonable before filling out the rest of the slots with blinky creatures and blink-worthy things. Draining Whelk and Venser, Shaper Savant made it in because I really like creature-based countermagic, while Snapcaster Mage suggested itself for much the same reasons (though there would be extra flexibility as well if a sweeper effect would be the more appropriate card for the situation instead).

And Vendilion Clique would prove especially solid with the Wizard tribe subtheme, working as a blink target as well to potentially give me an avenue to solve problems proactively rather than while they were on the stack. I don’t usually think of its 3/1 body as good enough for Commander, but heck, in this deck that’s a cantrip, so why not?

There was still room for fun creatures with flash, and nothing strikes me as more fun that Seht’s Tiger. Granting yourself protection from a color of your choice at instant speed is just such a weird ability—part Fog and part Counterspell but neither very reliably—and I’ve always found this card to be more powerful than I expect perhaps due to the fact that when it’s in your hand it’s half a puzzle just to figure out how to use it in the first place. And since I was on a damage-prevention kick and thinking of fun things to potentially blink and reuse, I decided I’d give Angel of Salvation a try again and see what happens. Everything looks promising suddenly when it comes with "draw a card" attached to it.

But there are a few other flash creatures that we can put to good work potentially acting as our more traditional card-draw spells. Control decks usually have something like Think Twice or Whispers of the Muse, and we can play a creature every turn "with buyback" if we really try to. Voidmage Husher is a cute oddball of a card—it’s got half of a Stifle built in and a trigger that puts it back in your hand with fair regularity so you can keep on Stifling things and keep on playing a creature every turn, drawing more cards as a matter of course.

And the last two additions basically just cheat at our goal. Stonecloaker and Whitemane Lion can be cast with flash and bounce themselves back to your hand, effectively saying 1W (or 2W): "You technically played a creature last turn. Trigger Ephara." I’d certainly rather play Whitemane Lion than Pegasus Refuge, that’s for sure.

The remainder of the deck is blinkers and things worth blinking. Our blink-based team is Deadeye Navigator (obvious card is obvious), Galepowder Mage, and Mistmeadow Witch—it’s a rather minor theme, but it’s a useful one nonetheless since blinking things lets us trigger Ephara without necessarily having invested a card into it. On that note, we can even add Aetherling to that list. In addition to being a heck of a hard card to kill or contain in this format specifically, it also effectively lets us spend a blue mana each turn in order to draw a card with Ephara, so it is especially awesome here in this deck.

The things worth blinking start with Sun Titan, which doesn’t actually need blinking to be good—he serves as sort of another Crucible of Worlds at the very least and has a cute trick with Oblivion Stone where you get to save the Titan and blow the Stone every turn if that is what you want to do. And since we have a fair number of creatures costing three or less and token makers that are likewise viable targets, attacking with Sun Titan can cover our requirements to put a creature into play this turn in order to draw with our commander.

Sunblast Angel can likewise get pretty bonkers, though if you pair it with Deadeye Navigator the game devolves into no one being able to do much of anything to end the game until this annoying combo is killed off. Just as a sweeper effect you can potentially reuse it’s pretty sweet, though attempting to reuse it with Galepowder Mage has catastrophically bad effects on your Galepowder Mage. Glen Elendra Archmage is solid just in general for our control the game perspective but is a Wizard for that slight recursion element and has Persist, which naturally allows it to help trigger Ephara after you use its ability to counter a spell.

Being able to return it to hand with Riptide Laboratory or blink it with one of our blink cards is just great, letting us add to our board control elements while still doing that playing creatures thing that pays us back so well. And the last addition, Duplicant, is just a solid removal effect that we can potentially Enlightened Tutor for (unlike Phyrexian Ingester, which is similar but arguably better as a creature) and reuse with our suite of blink tricks; a creature-based removal option is better than one that isn’t based on creatures because all creatures potentially say "draw a card" on them.

Putting it all together, we get the following:

Ephara, God of the Polis

Sean McKeown

Test deck on 01-28-2014

Commander

Creatures (30)

Lands (37)

I’m excited to see what the Born of the Gods Prerelease is like this weekend. Since I only used two cards from the new set in building this deck, maybe a little luck in what I open or some savvy trading will let me take a new Commander deck for a spin next Monday at my local gaming store’s weekly Commander league. Assuming that little bit needed goes my way, I’ll be at 20 Sided Store in Brooklyn on Monday giving this deck a spin to see just how strong Ephara is now that I’ve built her!

— Sean McKeown

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Dear Azami: Ephara Joins The Battle