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Dear Azami – Rosheen And Her eX’s

Sean takes a look at a Rosheen Meanderer Commander deck submission in this week’s Dear Azami. Which accelerants does Sean recommend, and what X spells would be ideal in a fun but competitive Commander group?

By

Greetings Sean!

I’m always a fan of your Dear Azami articles as they satisfy my craving for fun and interesting tweaks on untouched Commanders. I decided to submit a
decklist for my Rosheen Meanderer Commander deck that lacks a real focus other than “Hit ramp turn 2, play Rosheen turn 3, hope she doesn’t die, X’s
every turn after that.” Here’s the decklist that I have nicknamed “Rosheen and Her eX”

Rosheen Meanderer
Connor Opdyke
Test deck on 12-18-2011
Commander
Magic Arena

Creatures (19)

Lands (36)

Spells (44)

Magic Card Back


Comments: I enjoy this deck simply because I have a somewhat casual, somewhat competitive playgroup and this deck always does wacky things that make the whole table either rejoice or grumble under their breath. The deck works by ramping turn 2 (generally I can hit it) and then playing Rosheen on turn 3 for X goodies on turn 4.

A number of the cards resemble my Kessig Wolf Brown deck I had just reconstructed so that’s the basic explanation for Inkmoth Nexus and the Myrs. I’d like the deck to be a little more streamlined and a little less wacky so I can play a little more seriously rather than just doing something preposterous and then being wiped out the next turn because it wasn’t substantial enough, but I still like the wacky side of the deck that I’m pretty sure needs to be present because of how naturally wacky Rosheen is. Any help is always appreciated 🙂

Thank you,
Connor Opdyke

So, there is just one thing that nags me right off the bat that I don’t like. Helix Pinnacle takes so long to set up that I don’t feel
offended by it, but Mishra’s Helix is exactly the kind of card that makes people go frowny-face when your Commander tries to run with it.
Scorched Earth would be sad if it weren’t comical, with the X mana cost being easy for you to take advantage but the “discard X lands” probably
being highly impractical.

Given that a few things just aren’t any fun, and using a Mishra’s Helix against just one player should get you a righteous pummeling by the
other players at the table (lest they forget that it could just as easily have been them…), I’m going to shy away from that kind of stuff in
general concept. Yeah, you could use it to tap down one player’s Cabal Coffers, another player’s Maze of Ith, and every untapped
blue source at the table…but these kinds of heroic dreams are not how the card will usually get played. It’ll force un-fun escalation tactics
on your part and on the part of the opponent.

You’ve got a lot of good things going on here, it just looks to me like the balance is a little bit off. There isn’t much of a plan for
what to do if Rosheen is made inaccessible to you, and in fact given your current manabase it even looks as if just having Rosheen countered once is
enough to kaput your dreams of being involved in the game. You want to follow through with the Wolf Run Ramp / Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle theory of
‘clockwork consistency,’ and I dig that and want to help, but it means cutting sacred cows like Cultivate and Kodama’s Reach for the
mortal sin of costing three, and committing to the plan more fully.

Since the balance seems off, I’m just going to try and mix it up a little to straighten it out, and see where it goes from there. It looks like
fun, although I am certainly not the “play Wolf Run Ramp” kind of guy and tend to look down my nose at playing Primeval Titan in decks of fewer than 99
cards. I won’t tell you not to have your fun, or that your fun is ‘wrong,’ but there are a few ways you could give the deck a power
boost and we’ll go with it from there.

The Lands

Frankly, you have too few of them, even given your considerable amount of acceleration. To work like clockwork your deck will need to be able to play a
land every turn for the first three turns, and the third land needs to come into play untapped reliably even if you put it into play as your fourth
land. Copperline Gorge is a stinker on turn 3 as your fourth land, after all. Ironically, then, while I am advocating adding three lands to
your deck with none removed… all three come into play tapped, and one of them actively interferes with your ‘Plan A’ of being able to
play an early accelerant and Rosheen Meanderer on turn 3. It’s Thawing Glaciers, of course, and is basically your Plan B land by itself —
if Rosheen is taken out of circulation, Thawing every other turn will help you get to the level of mana you usually have for your X-spells.

The other two are Mountain Valley — a nice, inexpensive land that can find your Stomping Ground in addition to basic Forest and basic Mountain
— and Spinerock Knoll, which can potentially provide you with a full card’s worth of value for your efforts of casting X-spells, even if it
is kind of stinky with X-spells itself. Putting any artifact or creature under it will be a benefit to you, and it can even put a land into play so
long as you haven’t made your land-drop for the turn, so even a ‘miss’ on the Hideaway trigger can still be worth something.
It’s especially awesome with Primeval Titan, as I found out in my Animar experiments, and should not
be discounted from your deck just because it’s bad with an X-spell underneath it.

The Artifacts

Here, again, we gum up your mana-works, mostly because I do not believe the Medallions are pulling their weight. Accordingly, Ruby Medallion and
Emerald Medallion are to be replaced with artifact mana that actually taps for mana. Any mana artifact that costs more than two isn’t doing its
job, and thus Worn Powerstone and Thran Dynamo are cut in order to start doing said job. Mishra’s Helix is cut just because it is unpleasantly
un-fun, and has no really innocent use you can put it towards…spreading the love is just a pipe dream, and will make you no friends because you used
the card ‘so responsibly.’ Armageddon and Obliterate can be used responsibly, too, but that doesn’t make them fun either.

Mind Stone — I can never say enough good things about this most innocent of all possible mana rocks. Mind Stone is ramp when you want it, and
invisible when you don’t; it trades in for another spell when you have enough mana to work with, which in Rosheen’s case can come very
early on but leave you dry and looking for the next hit of X.

Everflowing Chalice — If only it was an X-spell in and of itself, Rosheen would love Everflowing Chalice forever. Instead, it’s just a solid mana accelerant with serious late-game potential, and it is that potential that draws me to it so attractively. Everflowing
Chalice can be used in the later turns of the game to simulate Rosheen Meanderer’s access to higher reaches of mana, and thus much like Thawing
Glaciers can give the deck more weight to work with when Plan A doesn’t work.

Dreamstone Hedron — It’s not that I don’t love Thran Dynamo. I do. It’s probably quite solid in your deck. What I do love
however is the option to pay a little more for it, and get a little more back out of it later. It’s three Mind Stones stapled together, and thus
if you want to have something that can help act like Rosheen when she is out of commission this will do nicely… and when she is working hard, it can
dig you to your next batch of spells to keep the haymakers coming.

Mirari — Not a mana rock, but it is downright vicious with X-spells, letting you spend just a little less mana on each X (three, to be exact) to
get twice the effect out of it.. You sorely lack card advantage effects thanks to your hyper-focus on turn 2 accelerant, turn 3 Rosheen
Meanderer, turn 4 spend nine mana and do stuff. That stuff will presumably be worth cards, while you’re at it, but for the most
part it won’t actually put new cards in your hand, so doubling up your benefits up front sounds perfect for you.

The Spells

We’re going to talk the most about this section, because it is not just the (very few) additions but the cuts that helps to balance out
the deck.

Kodama’s Reach, Cultivate — Lumped together due to being the exact same card. Unless you have a turn 1 Bird, Elf, or Sol Ring, this
doesn’t get cast on turn 2 and thus helps nothing for your designed Plan A of “cast Rosheen on turn 3”. Both will be replaced with a two-mana
spell that ramps your mana instead, in keeping with the overall concept of the deck’s rhythm and flow.

Unwilling Recruit — Just because this has an X in it, doesn’t make it automatically worth playing. Triple red is a harsh cost for you, and
a Threaten effect does not seem to be very much in the neighborhood of what you actually are trying to do with the game. That the X allows you to pump
power is cute when stealing someone’s Commander if you are trying to put it to 21 power, but that sounds like it probably doesn’t happen
very often. The benefit to your deck is that it stays on the focus it commits to, and this card doesn’t do that.

Flaming Gambit — Yes, you can do this twice. Yes, against an opponent with no creatures this is an instant speed Fireball with flashback. Is the
guy with no creatures the one that most needs to be picked on? Worse yet, is the guy with no creatures who has a Blinkmoth Nexus / Mishra’s
Factory / Mutavault / Celestial Colonnade / Kher Keep / Springjack Pasture not just going to make you very, very sad that this is your Fireball of
choice? Replaced with a Fireball that actually does this, instead of not.

Goblin Offensive — Cute? Certainly. Effective? Not terribly, though it’s not highly ineffective. I can however envision a way in
which you can get the same effect without having to commit all the mana up front and show everyone that a pile of 1/1’s is about to come their
way, which can stave off their being answered before the question is truly asked.

Scorched Earth — If this actually let Rosheen Meanderer just kill a bunch of lands, well, I’d still cut it under the same principle of why
I cut Mishra’s Helix, but I would understand it was damn good at its job before I gave it the axe. As it is, however, it trades at a severe
disadvantage and throws away a resource which is not actually plentiful to you, and thus it’s just ill-fitting all around.

Weird Harvest — Story time, children, gather ’round.

Back in the day, Weird Harvest was a powerhouse card in 60-card decks. We used it with Heartbeat of Spring to get a constant stream of Drifts of
Phantasms that we transmuted for Early Harvests, and got our Maga, Traitor to Mortals too while we were at it. Elf combo decks used it quite
nefariously to set up Nettle Sentinels and Heritage Druids to make so much mana it hurt. Literally. You died. However, when Early Harvests went awry, very bad things happened.

Once, I was playing Heartbeat combo against a blue-white control deck. I merrily went about my way, thinking that if I just set things up right I would
be able to win the game next turn, knowing my opponent could get Ronom Unicorns to go with my impending Heartbeats of Spring but that I’d still
get my mana’s worth out of them. I cast Weird Harvest for five and considered it smooth sailing when it resolved, because if my opponent had a
counter then clearly he’d have just done that, he had enough mana after all. Clearly I must have exhausted his countermagic, and now would only
have to face Ronom Unicorns and stuff like Keiga, Meloku, or Yosei, i.e. expensive trash cardboard.

Meloku, check. Yosei, check. Double Ronom Unicorn, check. What’s that weird hybrid card? Azorius Guildmage? Huh. I guess I lose then, right?

A year or two later, I was the one on the receiving end of an opponent’s Weird Harvest gone awry, and it feels much better from that side of the
table. I had two lands and a Counterspell in hand, my opponent had a messy pile of one-drop mana accelerants, played his third land, and cast Weird
Harvest for five. He got three Nettle Sentinels, another Heritage Druid in case, and the Regal Force that was going to seal the deal.

I Counterspelled the Regal Force, of course, of course, then untapped and played Engineered Explosives for one and popped it. I had to discard one of
the five creatures in my hand, but with Vendilion Clique, Mistbind Clique, and two Spellstutter Sprites I was not exactly worried about anything.

The moral of the story is: Weird Harvest is very bad when your resolving it does not immediately lead to a dead opponent. An
‘innocent’ Weird Harvest actually says the black mage who goes
next gets to win the game, and that is in the best of cases instead of the worst of cases.

Leaving storytime and going back to adding to the deck, the spare slots came mostly from this portion of the deck, and thus three lands appeared out of
nowhere — Spinerock Knoll should at least help keep some of this feeling spell-like, especially now that you have the line of play which includes
Primeval Titan for two Hideaway lands, use one, attack and get Gruul Turf to return it to your hand and hide away another day.

Explore — Turn 2 accelerant, turn 10 invisible, just like Mind Stone. It does its job without clutter or fuss, and when you need another chance
at gas it’s not just another gorram ramp spell. It does, however, require that you have a reasonable land count, which thankfully now you do.

Farseek — Another solid two-mana ramp spell, this time being able to get your choice of Mountain or Stomping Ground, instead of Rampant
Growth’s Forest or Mountain. Just as readily, if you want to bias for Forest or Stomping Ground instead, you have your choice of Three Visits
(hard to find and super-expensive) or Nature’s Lore (Ice Age common, in a Duel Decks, though I favor the Portal 2: Electric Boogaloo version myself. What can I say, maybe
I’m a pervy elf fancier, it’s not just for girls anymore. With the higher
value of red than green mana to your late game X-rated action, I figured Farseek was the tool for the job.

Devil’s Play — Instead of Flaming Gambit, this actually can just kill anyone regardless of whether they control a lowly 0/1 Plant
token. There is literally nothing sadder than seeing a Spellstutter Sprite counter a Flaming Gambit, and Devil’s Play will never suffer that
indignity. (Or at least it won’t unless something else entirely has gone horribly, horribly wrong.) Devil’s Play is the X-spell of
choice here when you need to kill somebody but it’ll take two uses to do it, and while it is locked to sorcery speed and thus lacks the surprise
insta-kill option that Flaming Gambit potentially has going for it, it always does the job prescribed to it.

The Creatures

We have more additions than subtractions in this section, thanks to the fact that we’re re-balancing some of the deck back over in this direction
to increase its effectiveness, and the cuts I am making are largely due to the question of effectiveness.

Hammer Mage — The cheap artifacts this guy will be killing? Largely yours. Meltdown’s solid, and I can see why it’s included, but
stapling a Meltdown to a 1/1 that has to survive in order to use its ability in the first place, and discard another card to boot, this just
seems to be asking for replacement.

Fungal Behemoth — Not very effective as an X-spell, sadly. I would perform murder to be able to get you an Aeon Chronicler in this slot, quite
possibly, but Fungal Behemoth is sadly just not very good. It can build up your small mana accelerant creatures an inch at a time, and then
maybe just die when it comes into play or certainly just not be very effective. Suspending Fungal Behemoth doesn’t get you anywhere near a
card’s worth of value each turn with this deck, and so is best off just being skipped entirely.

Palladium Myr — Cut, following the same argumentation that cut Kodama’s Cultivate. Three mana does not an effective mana accelerant to your
deck make, so it gets cut in order to play something that is effective.

Adding back into the deck, we have five slots to play with still, and I want to add a mix of early-game mana accelerants and things that work with your
overarching game-plan of being an explosive deck that challenges for the title of Expensive Sorcery Master.

Sakura-Tribe Elder — Easy peasy super-boring addition. This snake has been making mana like it’s his (her? its? its’sssssssss?) job for a
very long time now, and it would be a shame to give this snake the pink slip with that long of a resume.

Radha, Heir to Keld — Some people consider Radha as a Commander; you’re just playing her as a solid addition to your plan. You don’t
actually have that many instant speed X-spells for Radha and Rosheen to team up on, but when you do pull off that wicked union with a
ridiculous Comet Storm, Radha will have earned her weight in gold. As-is, Radha is a two-drop that ramps to four for Rosheen, which Palladium Myr
doesn’t help with. If you get no extra mileage out of her, she’s still doing a good job. Rofellos is a little bit too hard for you to cast,
but Radha should be able to work hard for you.

Arashi, the Sky Asunder — Another ‘X-factor’ creature for you, either as a surprise Hurricane from the hand or as the most proactive
spider in existence. A 5/5 for 5 is already an amazing deal, but then Arashi adds to that power by funneling Rosheen mana into dead Ionas. High powered
either in play or in your hand, Arashi is not to be underestimated just because Jiwari can kill more creatures you might expect to face.

Warbreak Trumpeter — A ‘cute’ card that I have been looking for ways to use for some time now, this is essentially a Goblin Offensive
with Suspend. Set up this way, you can actually get more goblins out of it, just like you are able to use Ventifact Bottle to hypercharge some of your
spells…you invest in the morph cost up front, and then at the end of an opponent’s turn at what appears to be an opportune moment, they get to
find out what your one morph is. And by breaking the investment up, you don’t have to commit to the X part of the spell until you’ve
already gone through the opponents’ turn cycles, meaning sorcery-speed responses at the very least are shut off before you have to commit to
making the kind of problems one usually answers with sorcery-speed solutions.

Wort, the Raidmother — Another fine Commander being put at your command, as another way to get access to a Mirari effect in your deck full of
fireballs. I wish I could say that this was an inspired addition, but it’s just a highly effective one. Having to pick between Wort and
Rosheen to power your deck, I favor the direction you’ve taken, but still want Wort to show up from time to time to make Rosheen work harder.

With these changes, this gives you the following final decklist:

Commander: Rosheen Meanderer

Rosheen Meanderer
Sean McKeown
Test deck on 12-18-2011
Commander
Magic Arena

Creatures (21)

Lands (36)

Spells (39)

Magic Card Back


With only a very few additions, and at a low cost too, you actually come in under budget for the first time in Dear Azami history
— we’ve come close before but missed by only a few dollars, and this time except for the $7 Thawing Glaciers everything is grabbable on the
very cheap. This clearly makes up for last week’s bandying about of ‘why don’t you add a Mana Crypt,’ this time the coupon for
participation can actually cover all of the changes and still provide a little wiggle room.

…unless you want a Three Visits, in which case that’s the coupon right there.

Join us next week as we explore the crypt of Shirei, Shizo’s Caretaker…

— 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, likeLuis’ Olivia Voldaren deck or Aaron’s Konda, Lord of Eiganjo
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!

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