Dear Azami: Melee!

Conspiracy: Take The Crown is now upon us, and it’s a surprisingly interesting set for Commander players. There’s a little something for everyone, actually, but any set with five interesting legendary creatures is going to catch our attention these days, since we’re used to getting them in ones and twos. Legacy players get Sanctum Prelate and Recruiter of the Guard to play around with, as well as a Berserk reprint that undoubtedly makes the format’s Infect deck more accessible, and Modern players get the same from that Inquisition of Kozilek reprint.

Cube fanatics get to play around with the new Conspiracy cards if they want to as well as the numerous draft-mechanics cards that make Conspiracy sets so interesting for Limited play, and Standard players… if nothing else, they get a few weeks of distraction as they wait for Kaladesh and the big rotation that will finally take Collected Company and Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy out of the format.

But to my mind, the most interesting part of the set is the melee mechanic. It’s fun to think about goading things for fun and profit, and there’s even a Commander you can do that with if you want to, but “multiplayer politics deck” is already a well-established vein to mine if that’s your thing. Phelddagrif Hug decks exist for a reason, and its opposite philosophy might very well be the Grenzo, Havoc Raiser “poke” deck that aims to hit a critical mass of violence not with its own creatures but with yours.

It’s interesting, it’s probably very fun, but there have always been ways to Bullwhip a creature and/or Mindslaver the attack phase if that is what you wanted to do. For elegance, it’s melee that has my attention – usually we want to attack one player in order to have the largest effect by taking them off the table, or we want to spread the attacking around in order to keep parity relatively intact, but with a commander like Adriana, Captain of the Guard, you can do both at the same time. “Spreading the love” does not usually maximize the pain, so when it does you’ve got my attention.

Building around Adriana offers us a lot of options. If we want to maximize our damage output, it means attacking three people at the same time, preferably with multiple creatures, while also keeping a five-mana 4/4 on the battlefield for at least a little while. The more creatures the better, so we’ll want lands that can be creatures and lots of ways to pump out tokens, and the faster those creatures can attack, the more damage we’ll deal to boot. Adriana really helps amp up the damage output quite nicely, without the usual problem an aggro deck faces in this format that you’ll take one player out and then get stymied by the other two and be the second player ousted.

We begin with the manabase. I usually like 37 lands in this format, but for a deck that really wants to make its first five land drops without putting any of those turns on finding lands or playing ramp effects, I’ll start at 38 and play a few other cheap effects to find lands while we’re at it, namely Land Tax and Tithe. Sol Ring is too cheap not to play and Mana Crypt is absolutely bonkers, so they’re both in, committing 42 slots to mana development in a deck that doesn’t actually want to spend a lot of mana on any of its spells. We get some of that space back by getting creatures out of our mana supply, helping us keep the pressure on and hopefully dodging sweepers while we’re at it, since lands are often sacrosanct in this format.

We skip Inkmoth Nexus because we want to deal real damage; even with fully-active Melee bonuses, that Inkmoth will take three turns to kill somebody and it’ll get the entire table twitchy in the meantime. That slot instead goes to Kjeldoran Outpost, the old-school “Dude Ranch,” because those tokens have great value over time and the price is right.

For utility lands, we have a few to help with defense and a few to keep the damage pouring on, because that is what Boros does best…

Opal Palace is theoretically a utility land too, if a weak one, while also being a weak two-color land. The remainder of our slots will go to actual two-color lands and plenty of basics, plus a Windbrisk Heights, because attacking with three creatures is already our Plan A, so we might as well get a spell out of it. Spinerock Knoll would probably be fine too, but we’re focusing more on spreading damage around than hitting the same player with everything, so it’s not necessarily at its best here and we don’t want too many lands entering the battlefield tapped. I’m not adding it, but I am adding a note in my head to keep track of how much damage we’re generally attacking opponents for when we have untapped mana.

Red and white are both very good at manipulating Equipment, and whenever they are working together they also have my favorite equipment in the format, Sunforger. Free spells are awesome, and Sunforger says that time plus mana equals tutoring plus card advantage. Godo, Bandit Warlord and Stoneforge Mystic are obvious inclusions when you want Equipment cards, and Batterskull is an obvious Equipment to include when you play either of them and is on-theme for our token shenanigans, as well as giving us something worthwhile to do when the game becomes a grind. Lightning Greaves is obviously going to be great because giving haste to Adriana, Captain of the Guard will help pour on the damage, but for the last Equipment slot, we are going to start getting a little weird in our pursuit of maximizing melee.

To some degree this is going to involve keyword searching – maximizing melee involves attacking in threes, which also means triggering battalion and that anything with myriad will meet that condition by itself. To a lesser degree, battle cry will also go towards maximizing our damage, so anything cheap with that keyword is going to be worth considering too. Blade of Selves is especially awesome because it triggers enters-the-battlefield abilities while we’re at it; equip this to a Cloudgoat Ranger or something of that ilk and watch the shenanigans. Plenty of our token-makers are going to work with this especially well; about the only thing we’re going to miss out on is the fact that these extra attackers will not themselves gain the benefits of melee, since the attack trigger that generates them is also the point in time that melee goes on the stack.

If you dig down hard enough, you can find even Wrath effects that are token-makers, so our search for ways to fill up the battlefield without overextending too much real cardboard can fill out the deck very nicely. Starting with the noncreature spells, we have the following:

Add a Hammer of Purphoros for good measure to get a haste effect that can also turn token-generator when we have extra lands just lying around and we’re off to a strong start. We want to pack more creatures in, of course, and we want those creatures to bring more creatures with them. Red and white are both “beatdown” colors, so they excel at bringing extra attackers to the party and pumping up the damage those attackers deal in a variety of ways.

Since myriad does this so well by itself, we’ll add Herald of the Host and Warchief Giant even though neither has particularly impressive stats. Boosting those stats is Adriana’s job, so theirs is to make sure melee offers +3/+3 instead of +1/+1. They’re not token-generators in the traditional sense of things, but if you stack those melee triggers before the myriad trigger, it works just fine for what we’re trying to accomplish.

For more traditional token-making, we’ve got these:

Sure, they’re not all a great deal – four mana per token is a lot to ask for, but Sunhome Guildmage offers tokens or a pump effect on a two-drop, so it’s too good at what we’re trying to accomplish for us to walk on by. Commander is often the home of cards you haven’t played in any format outside of Draft, often alongside high-powered formats’ greatest hits like Monastery Mentor or Goblin Rabblemaster.

We have one more token-maker to play, but I pulled it aside so I could add all the battle cry creatures at the same time. Hero of Bladehold is super-powerful with battle cry and enough token generation to fully power up melee by itself, but we’re also interested in the other cheap battle cry creatures and will also add Hero of Oxid Ridge, Accorder Paladin, and Goblin Wardriver to help increase the damage we deal each attack. Signal Pest is certainly an efficient creature, but it frankly doesn’t do enough for our 99-card deck, even though it’s long since earned a home in Modern Affinity.

…actually, we have two more token-makers; it’s just that the second one had gotten pulled aside into the “sweeper protection” class of cards and thus likewise deserves its own special mention. Hallowed Spiritkeeper is not actually that powerful on the front side as a three-mana 3/2 attacker in a format where Avenger of Zendikar is likely to finish out your average game… but for our melee-centric deck, its ability to generate multiple tokens after a battlefield wipe will help keep the pressure on. Archangel Avacyn and Selfless Spirit likewise merit inclusion for the same reasons, granting our team indestructible will be a great way to prevent a battlefield wipe that would otherwise ruin our day. Since battlefield wipes in this format are about as common as pinpoint removal in Standard or Modern, we have to be prepared to face them and build the deck with sweepers in mind.

If having melee once is good, having it twice should be better… so even though Custodi Soulcaller, Deputized Protesters, Grenzo’s Ruffians, and Wings of the Guard are humble-looking Draft creatures, we’ll nonetheless get a lot of damage out of them. Even that two-mana 1/1 flier can attack as a 7/7 with our Commander out, innocuous though it may be at first look. And since satisfying melee means attacking with three or more creatures, the worthwhile battalion cards also deserve a look here. We’ll add Legion Loyalist as a way to push lethal damage through, Firemane Avenger because that trigger is pretty cool, and Frontline Medic because indestructible is a strong ability to grant your team and can help make sure that those Wrath effects aren’t completely miserable in this deck. We’re able to plan such that at least sometimes those Wraths will be one-sided, and that Sunforger we added can also help make sure that’s true, so we’ll have that particular interaction come up pretty darn often.

But before we finish out those spells, we have one last creature to add – because we’re a beatdown deck and one-mana 6/6 fliers are too good to skip, even before granting melee to all of our creatures. Serra Ascendant is just going to be an incredible amount of pressure and result in an unfair number of free wins, so we can’t possibly skip it.

We have nine slots left, and so far the only card we can tutor for with Sunforger is that Tithe we added alongside our lands. We’ll want a little bit of spot removal and I promised the ability to make the team indestructible, which in this deck is effectively our flavor of Counterspell. We actually get to play a counterspell too if we want it, and I think we do even though it’s admittedly “just” an overpriced Memory Lapse – color bleeds deserve our attention, so Lapse of Certainty makes it in as a Sunforger target at least.

We aren’t playing any of these because they’re great in Commander, per se; we’re playing them because they answer a problem we can see coming from a long way off. This is a deck designed to over-extend onto the battlefield, and we need something to cover the massive vulnerabilities that entails. Just one would be good enough for inclusion as a Sunforger target, and that would presumably be Boros Charm because it comes with two other modes, but we want this ability enough to play three or four copies of it so long as those copies remain cheap to cast. We could get more of this effect but at much higher costs, so we’ll cut it off at these three plus Archangel Avacyn and trust that our needs should be met between these spells and the search-for-Sunforger package.

Speaking of Sunforger, we need some more utility spells for it to cast:

Master Warcraft effectively reads “win the game” in a complicated battlefield state, whether by acting as a Falter during your attack or by Mindslavering an opponent’s attack phase to take down everyone else. Normally I’d include a Dawn Charm in the Sunforger package, but we can already counter a spell if we need to and Master Warcraft can also play Fog by preventing an opponent from attacking us, so it’s less important here than would otherwise be the case.

Swords to Plowshares and Path to Exile are here as our cheap removal spells to prevent things from going too badly wrong on us, while Abeyance can buy us a turn against a combo opponent and Hallowed Moonlight stops the worst graveyard-reanimation shenanigans like Living Death while also shutting down Tooth and Nail. Since both of those last two are cantrips, even when they aren’t particularly necessary you should be able to find a beneficial spot to use them for a little extra value. This isn’t really a value deck, but it helps that our silver-bullet answer cards have at least some utility when they are drawn when they aren’t important to us.

Putting it all together, we get the following:

Commander: Adriana, Captain of the Guard

Sean McKeown

Test deck on 11-30--0001

Commander

Creatures (31)

Planeswalkers (1)

1 Elspeth, Sun's Champion

Lands (38)

This is far outside of my normal range for a Commander deck; attacking with two-drops is not usually what I focus on, and “the nut draw” with Mana Crypt is probably a Mountain and a Goblin Rabblemaster that leads to a turn-three Adriana. My creature curves tend to have a lot at five, six, and seven, but besides Adriana herself, we’ve just got a few other five-drops and only Godo and Chancellor of the Forge above the five-mana mark. This deck is tightly focused on staying low to the ground and attacking quickly, as we’d intended.

Even our mass removal is focused on us getting back into the fight quickly – Martial Coup for five followed up by Adriana turns around to attack for twenty so long as we split those attackers up across all three opponents, and I don’t even know the last time I’ve seen a copy of Kirtar’s Wrath. It may involve playing some goofy cards to get there, but this is definitely the kind of deck where Adriana shines.

Perhaps a less narrowly-optimized version would be better, aiming to slow down a bit in order to play better cardboard and thus be able to play an attrition game more readily. After all, playing Goblin Wardriver in a format with Titans and Eldrazi feels like you’ll be prone to getting overpowered whenever your beatdown plan doesn’t work out.

We could also focus on enters-the-battlefield triggers more to take advantage of Blade of Selves while also working cards like format all-star Mimic Vat or even Conjurer’s Closet turn after turn, so it’s not like this is the “only” way to play Adriana, Captain of the Guard. But it’s probably the fastest way to play her without resorting to cards like Goblin Guide and Isamaru, Hound of Konda, and with cards like White Sun’s Zenith and Elspeth, Sun’s Champion, we are going to be surprisingly good at bouncing back from trouble.

Which of the other Conspiracy: Take The Crown commanders has sparked your interest? Let us know in the comments, or better yet, put together a first draft of a deck and email it in to us at the address below!

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Creatures (31)

Planeswalkers (1)

Lands (38)

Spells (29)