fbpx

Dear Azami – For The Birds

Sean McKeown loves taking on a challenge, and trying to work on a casual Kangee, Aerie Keeper Commander deck is definitely going to take some finesse. Send in your EDH decks to Sean, and he’ll offer handy deck advice.

By

Hi Sean,

I’ve read your articles for a while, and even spoke with you in length at the Charlotte Invitational. I have been playing (sadly) only competitive Commander, and it has started to lose its luster. I don’t enjoy simply clobbering some new player, leaving them with a very feel-bad impression where neither party is satisfied. So I have ventured into the land of tribal Commander with a tribe I have always enjoyed… BIRDS! I bought most of this deck in foil and have enjoyed playing it for the last couple of weeks, but it has some awkwardness to it still. Just as an extra restriction, I am avoiding adding too many “overpowered” cards in order to keep the power level low.

Kangee, Aerie Keeper
Chris Nixon
Test deck on 01-29-2012
Commander
Magic Arena

Creatures (26)

Planeswalkers (5)

Lands (39)

Spells (29)

Magic Card Back



Favorites: Dovescape, Soraya the Falconer, Door of Destinies, Gravitational Shift, Keeper of the Nine Gales (all capture flavor of the deck)

Unfavorites: Standstill, Hydromorph Gull, Wingbeat Warrior, Aven Liberator, Venser, the Sojourner (all don’t interact well with deck)

Overall: Deck has problems with opponents’ artifacts and mana ramp / mana-fixing… I value tribal flavor first in this deck with no non-bird creatures allowed (sorry, Elesh Norn), and making it a lower power-level deck is something I am trying to maintain.

Thanks,

Chris Nixon

I like a good challenge, and casual Kangee is exactly that. Noting that this is for a more casual style of play than a cutthroat one, I’m looking to restructure the deck along its own linear axis, and that is going to be the tribal theme and combat phase Magic just like in the good old days. I am, unfortunately, going to break your rule of no non-bird creatures allowed for exactly one addition, but I do so only with the caveat that Soraya the Falconer and Emeria Angel already do, and replacements that are likewise still within the Bird theme are completely okay, right?

Most of what you have as your problem seems to be a bit of a lack of focus. You’ve taken the high-power cards out intentionally, but still have Mystical Tutor to try and find them, when they just aren’t there to be found—Time Stretch will not magically appear on top of your deck because you cast Mystical Tutor, and the Mirage-block tutors are only really applicable when they more than make up for the loss of card advantage by providing something so worthwhile that the missed draw phase is worth the while. Just good old basic Counterspell, well, ain’t that.

Focusing in on the theme, you want to play a bunch of Birds and pump your Birds, have a defensible board position AND the ability to actually kill an opponent with what are ostensibly some 1/1 or 2/2 creatures. To make this actually happen will take some doing, but since we have a happy Tribal theme going the first thing to do will be to load up Gatherer and do a search for “Bird” and see what comes up, which shows some surprising facts have come through the errata process—who knew what creature type Clockwork Avian currently was? Not me, that’s for sure.

Working in sections always keeps life interesting, and as I hunted down to find just the right support spells I realized that your mana was going to be just a little bit off—one too many, especially with the artifact mana you have included, but also that you needed more basic Plains to work with if one of the spells was to go off just as well as I wanted it to… cue foreshadowing!

Playing with the mana, then, I started by cutting the mana artifacts and working on the lands. Considering the overall low mana curve (or at least, low for Commander) your birds have, the artifact acceleration won’t do much more than fuel Kangee’s kicker cost. That being more of a late-game effect anyway, I felt the focus could be diverted to making sure that the mana was there, but not necessarily very cheaply. As I’d said, I wanted there to be more basic Plains to work with in the deck, and considering the mana overall is very good in a two-color deck I felt some of the fixers could go towards helping out with that instead of just being your usual fare of fancy dual lands.

Subtractions:

Coalition Relic, Thran Dynamo, Mana Vault —Accelerating into Aven Brigadier just isn’t exciting enough to me for Mana Vault, and the vulnerability of artifact mana in this format is pretty well-known.

Reflecting Pool, Flagstones of Trokair, Adarkar Wastes, Nimbus Maze, 4x Island—One land is cut outright (it will be pretty effectively replaced in the ‘spells’ section, with an extra helper in that department) and the rest help increase the number of plains you will have in play over the course of an average game.

Replacements:

Mind Stone, Dreamstone Hedron —My appreciation for these two is well-known, and especially in a deck so plainly fair as yours, the Hedron stands out much more importantly than Thran Dynamo would have. Thran Dynamo accelerates you to turbo Windbrisk Raptor, where others are powering out Memnarch, and the fact of the matter is with a less powerful deck overall, the extra card draw you get as an option to pull yourself out of a late-game slowdown or mana-flood makes both of these well worth the less-powerful investment.

Seat of the Synod —Added to give Tezzeret at least one artifact land to work with. I would add Ancient Den, too, except that the desire to increase the basic Plains count is strong and so cutting one for the sole benefit of a planeswalker that may have better things to do already doesn’t make sense.

Flood Plain, Terramorphic Expanse, Evolving Wilds —You have very few lands that come into play tapped, and can afford fixers of this type to help keep your colors consistent while still potentially offering to count as a plains when you want it to.

Moorland Haunt —Late-game consistency will be a little bit of a problem to you, and while this doesn’t make Birds, you can at least get it altered to look like it does. There are enough other cards that work with potential tokens going on that it’s worth overlooking that little bit of Puritanism in the case of this land, after all, Soraya the Falconer is totally not a Bird, and neither is Emeria Angel, but that doesn’t keep them from being here.

Emeria, the Sky Ruin —See also ‘additional late-game plans,’ and one of the reasons to work towards more basic plains in your mana-base. Already your creatures have to work harder than average to get a reasonable impact out of them, it would be beneficial if there was at least the possibility later of getting to recur your missing feathery comrades.

One slot has been noted as shifted over to another category—when I build Commander decks, I tend to have four lists, one each for lands, artifacts, creatures, and other spells—while the last artifact slot is not yet filled in (but wasn’t moved over to a mana slot, and thus had escaped immediate attention). With the need now, however, to address the missing artifact, I present to you:

Riptide Replicator —Sure, it’s expensive and goofy. Isn’t that what Kangee does, already? You can’t hold it against the card on that principle alone, surely. Yes, for a ridiculous sum of mana you get the future right to make a very big Bird every turn, and this does not sound too terribly impressive. Riptide Laboratory doesn’t make it fly, after all. But it can provide some late game power to the deck, and my experience playing it (naming ‘Scarecrow’) in my Reaper King deck has been surprisingly positive—it has earned more than one Vindicate-plus-eye-roll combination in recent months, so I’d say give it a try and it may help power up your tribal theme a little.

Moving on to the spells, I wanted to do a lot of work here, simply because it is apparent to me that there were a lot of additions that said ‘this sounds good to me.’ Mystical Tutor in a low-power deck doesn’t really impress, and in fact I was surprised at first that it wasn’t Enlightened Tutor you reached for—able to find Land Tax, Umezawa’s Jitte, Door of Destinies and your other favorites, it seemed the more practical choice. I’m still averse to tutors that don’t replace themselves in generally lower-powered decks, however, so I wouldn’t advise either. I’m one of those weird Commander players who totally has a Vampiric Tutor—in fact, I think right now I might own two—but doesn’t think it belongs in many, or even most, commander decks with black mana.

Standstill and Venser both get cut for the ‘good stuff’ effect of being there because they seemed good but not actually interacting with the deck, while Concentrate gets cut in order to add totally bird-themed card drawing in its place… my search for creature type: bird revealed several key wingmen that drew cards or otherwise helped improve your hand, and I felt those made more sense to include than ‘the blue Harmonize.’

Counterspell got cut for not doing enough—raw mana efficiency wasn’t really where it’s at, so I had to wonder whether another counterspell might not be more appropriate for what you are trying to accomplish, and inevitably concluded there certainly were better options. Likewise, I adjusted out Wrath of God to find a better solution card overall that had a less-efficient mana cost, with mana efficiency not being the only prevailing characteristic of importance in this format.

After that, my cuts were made just based off whether something fit, and in so doing I noted that Gideon Jura was considerably less powerful in a four-player game where the average creature size is a 5/5 than he is in a two-player format where it’s more likely a 3/3 is the top end of threats, and keeping him around seemed impractical. Acquire and Standstill both seemed to be ‘good spells,’ but that’s not enough to keep me interested in them, even if you’ll still pull off a few cheap wins once in a while with Acquire for someone’s Blightsteel Colossus. (Not being a Bird, clearly that’s the only way to recruit him to your side, bribery or outright purchase of his services.)

Blatant Thievery and Control Magic were indeed pretty decent blue cards, but not in-theme, although not blatantly so (and there’s more than a few times that Blatant Thievery for the three best permanents will switch the balance of power in an eye blink). Sure, I guess Blatant Thievery can address your problem with artifacts by stealing ‘em, but there are other ways to address that concern.

With ten cards out, I end up putting nine cards back in, meaning we shift over two cards to the creature department overall (which was why this was put off till last, as other numbers shifted to allow more to fit). I wanted to focus more here on ways to control the board and ways to improve your chances in combat, and that meant streamlining away from good cards towards a theme that made more sense instead—moar birds!

Battle Screech —My unfortunately encyclopedic knowledge of Magic cards suggests this one to be an awesome addition for you, providing four birds for the price of one card and four mana, super-efficient and quite potent with Kangee.

Time Stop —My choice of replacement counterspell, based on the fact that it is the corner-case card that is usually the only exception to many an ‘unanswerable’ card. Obliterate? No problem. Emrakul? Banned, but before then, no problem. So many seemingly unanswerable things are resolved by the conclusion of a Time Stop that it warrants inclusion, and I don’t think it trips the ‘power level’ switch that would make including it ‘cheesy.’

Austere Command —Upgrading your wrath effect to something that can dodge some or all of your team, while also being able to hit artifacts and enchantments if that is your problem, was clearly worth the extra two mana.

Oath of Lieges —Opponent’s ramp got you down? Catch up for free, and make friends doing it! Just want to get more mana into play and not have to work very hard for it? Same card! Oath of Lieges also happens to be quite good at getting you additional plains to work with for the cards that seem to care, just like Land Tax is, and thus it helps enable your own cards and prevent Primeval Titan from being game-endingly oppressive.

Teferi’s Realm —Okay, this one you’ll probably have to go read.

Confused yet?

I sure was, when I opened this as one of my junk rares at the Visions prerelease. (I was totally stoked about my Relentless Assault, though, and not only won matches with it, I succeeded at trading it at the price tag of $20 at the time. Ah, the innocent bygone days when we were all terrible at Magic…)

Teferi’s Realm specializes in clearing the board of problematic artifacts and enchantments when it is time for the birds to fly over. Propaganda lockdown problems, or a lack of mercy got you down? Not on your watch. Ideally, I wanted to have World Queller, but nooooo, not a bird, I can’t have it, so I got a little creative and pulled this out of the dark nether-cockles of my cerebellum, and realized it could actually make for some very interesting chaos while we’re at it—call ‘creatures’ and let an opponent whose army phases back in kill a player who goes after them but would otherwise be too well-defended, hilarity ensues. But you cited ‘artifacts and enchantments’ as potential card-types that create problems for you, and Teferi’s Realm can help with that in interesting fashion, at least as far as attacking is concerned.

Hold the Line —You kind of stink at combat. Adding a Might of Oaks to each blocker should help with defending yourself, and interestingly enough it does not care who the player is that is defending, I totally thought this said ‘your’ until I read it and realized, um, it doesn’t. Mucking up another fight you’re not even involved in by turning the tables on someone is an amusing trick, in addition to the self-defense aspect that it clearly comes with.

Gerrard’s Battle Cry —Another way to increase your birds to substantial size, I wanted to find a multi-pump effect and stumbled upon this antiquity. Later in the game, this can be your mana sink for a rather impressively large power boost in a pinch, to help make up for the otherwise potentially small size of your creatures.

Stir the Pride —Sorry, sorry, I know it’s not Stir the Flock. Ask a card alterist to correct this shortcoming, if you must. However, adding another way to crank up your creature size and beneficially alter math by padding your life total while you’re at it seemed well worth it to me, as it is both a race-altering card for your own defenses and a game-closer that can kill an opponent who thought the attack wasn’t anywhere near that bad for them.

Which brings us to our last gem, the remaining ‘plains matters’ card:

Charge Across The Araba —Ah, yes, I know this one almost certainly needs to be read as well, but that is Commander’s inherent joy, isn’t it? This is another hugely swingy pump effect, able to turn a small attack force into a major force to be reckoned with, and should help Kangee and his fine feathered friends have a little bit of weight to back them up.

Moving on to the creature spells, we have two slots available plus any subtractions we make, so it’s time to start pulling out cards that don’t feel like they fit and adding better birds for the job.

Subtractions:

Hydromorph Gull —You said you weren’t in love, and frankly I don’t blame you, there is not a lot of ‘card’ for this piece of cardboard. The ability does nothing, and the stats aren’t impressive, so. Gone.

Wingbeat Warrior, Aven Liberator —Not exactly what I would call impressive Morphs, these also get cut.

Beacon Hawk, Soulcatcher, Stormscape Familiar —1/1 fliers for two mana have to actually do something in order to be worthwhile. Thrummingbird actually does—these, however, don’t.

Fitting new cards back in, we have your Bird-based restriction and eight slots to fill. As you’ve proven with Adaptive Automaton, Soraya the Falconer, and Emeria Angel, however, we’ll play just a little bit fast and loose with this requirement, and I trust you’ll still be satisfied even if not every creature specifically says creature type: Bird.

Jotun Owl Keeper —‘Not a bird,’ yes, but certainly in keeping with the ‘Birds matter’ theme. Over the course of a few turns, you’ll accrue the ability to make a fairly decent number of bird tokens when he dies, so it is worth consideration. Token generators are hard to come by for your tribe, and this seems like a reasonably decent one.

Mirror Entity —If you squint, it has wings! It’s another way to pass out meaningful pump effects on a massive scale, and happens to be able to ‘fix’ Jotun Owl Keeper, Soraya the Falconer, and Emeria Angel’s chronic shortcomings.

Crookclaw Elder —Bird-based card draw. A little expensive, but it can actually help push the game along nicely in your favor, so I say it’s well worth including.

Crookclaw Transmuter —A little bit of a trick attached to a decent body with Flash. A funny answer to the Commander this article title pays homage to, or even just Doran, the Siege Tower.

Mindshrieker —Some of the cards on top of people’s decks cost seven to twelve mana. This is a bird with attitude, and that’s what you need in your 1/1 fliers… the ability to crack for 20 once in a while.

Murder of Crows —More bird-based card draw. It only filters, instead of actually increases your hand size, but that’s still plenty worthwhile.

Thieving Magpie —Moar! It’s going to be a little bit hard for you to connect with this for a card every game, but hey, on a one-power flier you can always just ask for a small political favor—”Hey, I need a card, can you just not block this please?”

Raven Familiar —Another bird that puts a card in your hand. Part flier, part Impulse, probably pretty awesome with Emeria, the Sky Ruin active.

Putting it all together, you have a deck that has a little bit more oomph in the creature department, and can draw cards a little bit better while you’re at it. The noted issues of having a problem with artifacts and enchantments has hopefully been addressed a little bit more, and the focus on theme brings us back together by tightening the deck up: make Birds, attack with Birds, pump Birds’ power. There is more offense AND more defense allowed, as well as a stronger late-game, though still not especially strong of one for a Commander deck. And we didn’t have to resort to yet another blue deck taking infinite turns to make attacking with Birds something worth doing. The final decklist is here:

Kangee, Aerie Keeper
Sean McKeown
Test deck on 01-29-2012
Commander
Magic Arena

Creatures (28)

Planeswalkers (3)

Lands (38)

Spells (30)

Magic Card Back


As always, there is a $20 coupon to the StarCityGames.com store for your participation, which should spend pretty far considering the price of many of the cards I selected was very low—I priced the deck additions out at just over $30, and a fair share of them are cards you might find pretty easily just lying around, like a spare Mind Stone somewhere.

Next week will be our last look at Commander before the release of Dark Ascension—I intend to do an overview of that set from the perspective of the Command Tower right after the prerelease, so I will be looking for an extra-special submission to get my attention and those creative juices flowing once again before looking at what new Commanders there are to bring to the table, and what impact (if any) the new mechanics and new Planeswalkers bring to the table. If nothing else, a whole pile of new Zombies make Zombie tribal decks worth reconsidering, because cards like Gravecrawler will absolutely shine in Commander!

— Sean McKeown

Want to submit a deck for consideration to Dear Azami? We’re always accepting deck submission to consider for use in a future article, like Noah’s Lady Evangela deck or Jiggs’ Shirei, Shizo’s Caretaker deck. Only one deck submission will be chosen per article, but being selected for the next edition of Dear Azami includes not just deck advice but also a $20 coupon to the StarCityGames.com Store!

Email Sean a deck submission using this link here!

Like what you’ve seen? Feel free to explore more of “Dear Azami” here, in the Article Archives! And feel free to follow Sean on Facebook… sometimes there are extra surprises and bonus content to be found over on his Facebook Fan Page, as well as previews of the next week’s column at the end of the week!