Myriad Madness!

VERONICA

(Takes paper from drawer and starts composing aloud)

You might think what I’ve done is shocking –

…To me, though, suicide is the logical answer to the myriad of problems life has given me.

VERONICA

That’s good, but Heather would never use the word “myriad”.

This is the last thing she’ll ever write – she’ll want to cash in on as many fifty cent words as possible.

VERONICA

Yeah, but she missed “myriad” on the vocab test two weeks ago.

It proves my point more. The word is a badge for her failures at school.

(later)

MRS. POPE

I must say I was impressed to see that she made proper use of the word “myriad” in her suicide note.

This probably dates me a bit, but when I first heard that a new mechanic from Commander 2015 was called “myriad” the first thing I thought of was
the awesome movie Heathers starring the lovely Winona Ryder and bad boy Christian Slater.
The word “myriad” may be a badge for Heather #1’s failures at school, but for Commander fans the myriad mechanic promises the kind of epic stories we’ll
want to tell over and over again.

Wizards of the Coast’s Matt Tabak wrote about myriad in his column, Commander 2015 Mechanics:

Commander products are awesome because we get to design abilities that you probably wouldn’t see in a typical release. Myriad is one such ability.
Whenever a creature with myriad attacks, for each opponent other than the defending player, you get a token copy of that creature to attack that
opponent or a Planeswalker that opponent controls. No more agonizing over which opponent to attack. Just get them all! Or just some of them-the “may”
clause means you can decline to get tokens for some opponents, so you can be political if you’re into that sort of thing. Attacking a Planeswalker will
also cause myriad to trigger, as the Planeswalker’s controller is the defending player.

The tokens basically copy what’s printed on the creature with myriad and not much else. If Banshee of the Dread Choir has any Auras or Equipment
attached to it, those don’t get copied. The same is true for +1/+1 counters or any non-copy effect that has changed its power, toughness, or abilities.
But in Banshee of the Dread Choir’s case, the tokens will all have the last ability, so you may be causing multiple opponents to discard a card. At end
of combat, the tokens are exiled. They don’t go to the graveyard, so no abilities that trigger whenever a creature dies will trigger.

Another important point is that the tokens enter the battlefield tapped and attacking. This means they were never declared as attackers. If you have
any abilities that trigger whenever a creature attacks, those abilities won’t trigger. (Put another way, myriad won’t cause itself to trigger. Good
thing, too. That would cause an unstoppable army of clones that would not only draw the game but eliminate all forms of life in the universe. Glad I
saw that one coming.) This may come up if you give other creatures myriad. How would one do that? Excellent question.

If there are no other opponents, either because your game is down to two players or it started with only two, myriad doesn’t do anything. That’s okay
though. At that point there’s only one more player to eliminate before ultimate victory!

We first see myriad on the card Banshee of the Dread Choir, a creature that when it hits an opponent, he or she has to discard a card. Sounds okay, but it
also ensures a giant bull’s-eye on the Banshee from every opponent you have unless you can do some fancy political soft-shoe.

The next time we see myriad is on this magnificent bastard of a card:

Now this is the sort of magical blade that will carve out stories worthy of Homer or Shakespeare! It will strike fear in the hearts of your opponents and
draw gasps of excitement from onlookers.

It will certainly shift the way we build our decks. You will need to have an answer to this card or you will likely lose to it in glorious fashion.

Most of the time when I build a Commander deck I’m inspired by a particular legendary creature that looks interesting and cool, but occasionally there’s
just an individual card that calls out to build around. A card like Blade of Selves.

It’s not hard to see how amazing this card is going to be. Multiplayer formats like Commander are ones where value creatures already shine, so getting a
way to create copies of them for an equip cost of four and an attack step is a small price to pay.

So what creatures should we pair this thing with? Well truly, that’s an unanswerable question. Pull up your favorite card database and search for creatures
with “enters the battlefield” in its text box and you’ll get 1,530 hits (not including Commander 2015 cards). Then we’ve probably got dozens of
value creatures with “leaves the battlefield” triggers-some will overlap with the other list (like our good buddy Thragtusk) but you get the idea-just
about any color combination will yield value creatures you’ll want to equip with Blade of Selves and attack with. I fully expect a large percentage of
Commander decks going forward will include a copy of Blade of Selves.

For today’s exercise though, I want to build a deck that is focused like a laser to find Blade of Selves and go nuts with it. I want to strike terror
and/or peals of laughter from my opponents from the sheer absurdity of this piece of equipment. The first step is to make sure we find Blade of Selves.

Equipment Search

Quest For The Holy Relic, Steelshaper’s Gift, Stoneforge Mystic, Relic Seeker, Taj-Nar Swordsmith, Stonehewer Giant, Auriok Survivors

White has the best ways to search for equipment, so we definitely want to choose white as one of our colors. In fact, Stoneforge Mystic is a great both for
finding Blade of Selves and for being equipped with Blade of Selves, attacking and being able to search up even more great equipment-including of course
Masterwork of Ingenuity to copy Blade of Selves as backup or double your fun! Taj-Nar Swordsmith is another great card that can search up the relatively
inexpensive Blade of Selves, and when it attacks the copies that come into play can also be activated to search up equipment. I’ve included quite a few
inexpensive pieces of equipment to ensure I have the mana to do this reliably.

Auriok Survivors is technically a “value” creature, but I included it here in case someone is working hard to counterspell or destroy your special
equipment, it can “search” up the equipment from the graveyard and put it into play, bypassing the equip cost, and once you attack and make a bunch of
copies you can rescue any other equipment cards from your graveyard.

Value Creatures

Elvish Visionary, Riftsweeper, Eternal Witness, Skullwinder, Blade Splicer, Champion of Lambholt, Flickerwisp, Reclamation Sage, Mimic Vat, Angel of
Finality, Azorius Justiciar, Solemn Simulacrum, Stonehorn Dignitary, Thragtusk, Acidic Slime, Karmic Guide, Reveillark, Armada Wurm, Duplicant,
Greenwarden of Murasa, Sun Titan, Great Oak Guardian, Avenger of Zendikar, Hornet Queen, Tornado Elemental, Craterhoof Behemoth, Woodfall Primus

When it comes to value creatures, it quickly becomes clear that green is king. I especially wanted to go with green since it’s another way to reliably
retrieve Blade of Selves from the graveyard. If we’re going to go through all the trouble of searching up this card, you don’t want to be stymied by a
single Krosan Grip, so Eternal Witness is a non-white recruit #1. What an amazing card to equip with Blade of Selves and attack with, right? The new Commander 2015 card Skullwinder does the same kind of work but with the added political element of giving an opponent back a card too. I figured
you let all the triggers go to the least threatening opponent. We’ve also got Greenwarden of Murasa, which hits harder than both of those creatures.

Champion of Lambholt is a funky cool card to equip and attack with-all of the copies will add counters to the original card and make all of your creatures
more likely to get in untouched.

How about Stonehorn Dignitary? Let’s shut down everybody’s attack step! The new Great Oak Guardian can pump up your entire team multiple times, approaching
Craterhoof Behemoth levels. Ah heck, why not run Craterhoof Behemoth too? That’s a serious punch there.

Tornado Elemental with myriad will surely sweep the skies clear of any creatures, while Hornet Queen with myriad will fill the skies with 1/1 flying
Insects with deathtouch. Karmic Guide with myriad brings all your creatures back from the dead.

Riftsweeper is here to salvage Blade of Selves if an opponent is so rude as to exile it instead of destroying it.

Yeah, I think between green and white value creatures we don’t need to dip into any other colors.

Tokens

Sundial of the Infinite, Parallel Lives; Trostani, Selesnya’s Voice; Doubling Season

Since myriad makes token creatures and we’re playing green, we might as well take advantage of Doubling Season and Parallel Lives to double our fun. In
fact, having fun with the token theme leads me to picking my commander: Trostani, Selesnya’s Voice. We can use her populate ability to squeeze even more
value out of our value creatures with myriad.

Of course the downside of myriad is that any surviving tokens will be exiled at the end of combat. However, we don’t have to play by the rules-put the
exile trigger on the stack and then activate Sundial of the Infinite to end the turn and keep all your glorious tokens!

More Equipment

Skullclamp, Masterwork of Ingenuity, Basilisk Collar, Nim Deathmantle, Puresteel Paladin, Brass Squire, Sculpting Steel, Deathrender, Prototype Portal;
Nahiri, the Lithomancer; Mirrorworks

I’ve included some other powerful artifacts in the mix in case your opponents work really hard to keep your myriad action from happening. Puresteel Paladin
is a great card that turns all your equipment cards into cantrips and provides maximum discount to equip costs. Brass Squire bypasses equip costs too and
can equip at instant speed just by tapping. Masterwork of Ingenuity, Sculpting Steel, and Mirrorworks can make it so you can potentially get multiple
creatures to have myriad, or potentially one with multiple myriad triggers. Just to take things even higher, I was thinking Prototype Portal could crank
out a new Blade of Selves each turn. Yeah, this is pretty risky so I’d probably rather use Masterwork of Ingenuity here, but with Riftsweeper we can
recover the imprinted card if Prototype Portal gets nuked.

So here’s what I’ve got cooked up as of this writing-I reserve the right to tweak this list once we get the full Commander 2015 spoilers out in
case there are some more sweet green and white value creatures that come out!

Trostani, Selesnya's Voice

Bennie Smith

Test deck on 11-13-2015

Commander

Creatures (34)

Planeswalkers (1)

1 Nahiri, the Lithomancer

Lands (39)

Do you have any thoughts on how to push the concept even further? Can we break the calculator on our phones figuring out how many tokens we get from
multiple iterations of myriad? What are some of your favorite build-around cards from Commander 2015 that aren’t legends?

By the way, you know what makes fantastic myriad copy tokens?

Who’s got two thumbs and a bunch of these tokens and will be giving them away at the Commander Celebration at Grand Prix Atlanta?

Hmm, who indeed?

New to Commander?

If you’re just curious about the format, building your first deck, or trying to take your Commander deck up a notch, here are some handy links:

Commander Primer Part 1
(Why play Commander? Rules Overview, Picking your Commander)
Commander Primer Part 2
(Mana Requirements, Randomness, Card Advantage)
Commander Primer Part 3
(Power vs. Synergy, Griefing, Staples, Building a Doran Deck)
Commander Starter Kits 1
(kick start your allied two-color decks for $25)
Commander Starter Kits 2
(kick start your enemy two-color decks for $25)
Commander Starter Kits 3
(kick start your shard three-color decks for $25)