Shake Up Your Commander Group With Commander 150!

Have you ever been working on a great Commander deck idea, and you have too many cards? That happens to me all of the time. I’ll get a nice idea, and then
start pulling cards from my deck stock that fits the theme. Then I count my cards and I’ve got a stack of 120 or 130 cards without even adding in basic
lands. It’s hard to cut my deck down. It just feels wrong.

Has your metagame grown a little stale? Are you seeing the same cards over and over again? Has the increase in quality cards for multiplayer generally and
Commander specifically led to fun cards getting cut from the decks of people you love? Have you played Commander for such a long time that it feels like
you’ve solved it?

There are a lot of reasons why you and your playgroup might be looking for a few things to zest up your next casual Magic night. Let’s take a look at one
simple way to make a change to the format for your playgroup…

We can remove that 100 card requirement and instead embrace a 150 card variant in order to flesh out your deck and give it room to breathe. Shake up that
metagame! If you are spending a lot of time seeing too many of the Greatest Hits, then why not force folks to play with enough cards to make people stretch
those deck-building muscles!

Commander 150

This is a simple variant of the typical Commander format. Instead of building a deck around 100 cards, you build it around 150 cards. Other than that,
everything else is the same.

So your challenge for the next Magic night is to build a few decks that are rocking 150 cards. For me, this is a great excuse to build another deck or two
in real life. But you don’t have to; you can just add 50 cards to an existing deck. To make things malleable, you could even add a 50-card booster that has
a slightly different set of sleeves (maybe almost the same color or a different feel) so you can remove the extra stuff card from your deck quickly if you
need to trim back for games. After all, not everyone would be down with 150 cards. (Although, to be fair, this just weakens the deck.)But some people won’t
like the fact that someone at the card shop or in-between rounds at a major tournament has a deck which is technically illegal (since a deck must be
exactly 100 cards, no more and no less).

What would you do if I sat across from you with a fun 150 card EDH deck without us specifically setting aside a day for C150?

So what would a deck that is built around 150 cards look like?

Obviously, it’d still have a lot of the same stuff. Cards like Sol Ring and Solemn Simulacrum are just as important in a 150 card deck as they are in a 100
card one.

Let’s build a 150 card deck for you right now!

Commander 150: Prime Speaker Zegana

Abe Sargent

Test deck on 11-17-2014

Casual

Creatures (50)

• 1 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Spike Weaver
• 1 Triskelion
• 1 Spike Feeder
• 1 Forgotten Ancient
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Mindless Automaton
• 1 Cytoplast Manipulator
• 1 Cytoplast Root-Kin
• 1 Experiment Kraj
• 1 Novijen Sages
• 1 Plaxcaster Frogling
• 1 Simic Guildmage
• 1 Sporeback Troll
• 1 Vigean Graftmage
• 1 Draining Whelk
• 1 Vigor
• 1 Fertilid
• 1 Woodfall Primus
• 1 Gilder Bairn
• 1 Glen Elendra Archmage
• 1 Mycoloth
• 1 Acidic Slime
• 1 Sphinx of Magosi
• 1 Plaguemaw Beast
• 1 Scavenging Ooze
• 1 Primordial Hydra
• 1 Predator Ooze
• 1 Fathom Mage
• 1 Simic Fluxmage
• 1 Zameck Guildmage
• 1 Prime Speaker Zegana
• 1 Simic Manipulator
• 1 Master Biomancer
• 1 Sapphire Drake
• 1 Crowned Ceratok
• 1 Vorel of the Hull Clade
• 1 Renegade Krasis
• 1 Kalonian Hydra
• 1 Sylvan Caryatid
• 1 Prophet of Kruphix
• 1 Kiora's Follower
• 1 Courser of Kruphix
• 1 Kruphix, God of Horizons
• 1 Academy Elite
• 1 Realm Seekers
• 1 Chasm Skulker
• 1 Hooded Hydra
• 1 Tuskguard Captain
• 1 Longshot Squad

Planeswalkers (3)

• 1 Jace, Memory Adept
• 1 Garruk, Primal Hunter
• 1 Kiora, the Crashing Wave

Lands (59)

• 17 Forest
• 18 Island
• 1 Tropical Island
• 1 Slippery Karst
• 1 Remote Isle
• 1 Maze of Ith
• 1 Tranquil Thicket
• 1 Lonely Sandbar
• 1 Winding Canyons
• 1 Yavimaya Coast
• 1 Breeding Pool
• 1 Novijen, Heart of Progress
• 1 Simic Growth Chamber
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Vesuva
• 1 Llanowar Reborn
• 1 Flooded Grove
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Oran-Rief, the Vastwood
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Hinterland Harbor
• 1 Alchemist's Refuge
• 1 Simic Guildgate
• 1 Opal Palace
• 1 Thornwood Falls

Spells (38)

• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Desertion
• 1 Skullclamp
• 1 Lightning Greaves
• 1 Titania's Boon
• 1 Thran Dynamo
• 1 Far Wanderings
• 1 Doubling Season
• 1 Evolution Vat
• 1 Voidslime
• 1 Krosan Grip
• 1 Everflowing Chalice
• 1 Recurring Insight
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Contagion Clasp
• 1 Steady Progress
• 1 Contagion Engine
• 1 Inexorable Tide
• 1 Fuel for the Cause
• 1 Beast Within
• 1 Tezzeret's Gambit
• 1 Swiftfoot Boots
• 1 Increasing Savagery
• 1 Staff of Nin
• 1 Chromatic Lantern
• 1 Death's Presence
• 1 Cyclonic Rift
• 1 Mystic Genesis
• 1 Hindervines
• 1 Give
• 1 Plasm Capture
• 1 Bow of Nylea
• 1 Primal Vigor
• 1 Peregrination
• 1 Solidarity of Heroes
• 1 Hardened Scales
• 1 Commander's Sphere

It would be easy to demonstrate the 150 card format by running a simple archetype like Azorius Control or Esper artifacts. Nah, I wanted to do something a
bit different with an actual theme built around a popular two-color option. Simic counters!

Prime Speaker Zegana is a fun card that has huge build-around-me potential in a lot of different strategies. It draws cards and has some counters. You can
run it with anything from Tooth and Nail, See the Unwritten, Natural Order, Show and Tell or other cards to drop big critters right into play. Or you can
use Zegana with counters a-go-go.

That’s what we’re doing.

This deck is a huge place to intersect many different mechanics from Magic’s history. You can run proliferate, scavenge, graft, persist, outlast, devour,
reinforce, and evolve. Lots of strong stuff makes a case for inclusion. Because we have 150 cards above, we have room to breathe and really to flesh stuff
out.

The perfect example is proliferate. A normal deck like this might run a few of the proliferate cards, like Fuel for the Cause and Tezzeret’s Gambit. But we
have Plaguemaw Beast, Inexorable Tide, and Contagion Clasp/Engine. Shoot, I’d run Viral Drake if I thought poison counters weren’t out of flavor for the
deck.

We can really delve into a lot of great stuff! Sure, we have the prerequisite stuff, like Doubling Season and Primal Vigor, along with Hardened Scales,
Kalonian Hydra, and Master Biomancer. These are obvious cards to run. Those are engines that make the deck hum. As does mass token-giving from tricks like
Oran-Rief, Renegade of Krasis, Forgotten Ancient, and Titania’s Boon. Token lords (Crowned Ceratok, Sapphire Drake, Tuskguard Captain, and Longshot Squad)
are nice additions too.

So those tricks take up a lot of space. But 150 has room to grow. So what else?

Next up are fun cards that use +1/+1 counters for things. Triskelion is a classic card that’s been in decks like this for way too long. It’s still awesome
too! (Get a nice Antiquities version for your deck). Mindless Automaton joins Academy Elite and Novijen Sages who can churn tokens into cards (while Sphinx
of Magosi churns cards into tokens). Meanwhile, Spike Weaver and Feeder make Fogs and Life, respectively. Realm Seekers and Fertilid will fetch out some
lands.

It doesn’t stop with that either. We have a lot of graft engines here. We have some of the cards that will spend some mana to give nice abilities to an
en-countered (with +1/+1) creature. Sporeback Troll can give you regeneration and Plaxcaster Frogling can shroud another. Mycoloth is awesome as a
creature-making engine that keeps on going. You don’t even have to devour any creatures to get saprolings from it.

From death triggers of Chasm Skulker and Hooded Hydra to the stylings of Vigor and Predator Ooze, there are a lot of fun critters here.

After the obvious creatures (and other entries like Solemn Simulacrum and Acidic Slime for support), we dip into some fun stuff in other areas. I love
Hindervines, because a one-sided Fog effect will devastate a board. You can blow out a combat with it. Another combat trick is Solidarity of Heroes, who
can double the counters on some stuff to change combat math. Besides, who doesn’t want to double counters in a dedicated counter deck?

I wish I could’ve found space for some more planeswalkers. They work well with stuff like proliferate and Doubling Season that are already in the deck. I
suppose that even in a 150 card project, there will be things I just can’t squeeze into the deck. Kiora gets you some quality lands, while the Memory Adept
and Primal Hunter play well with the theme. Teferi, Temporal Archmage is a grand old card to try out here too. Some folks won’t really fit in (Nissa
Revane; Jace, the Living Guildpact). But we could always use a Garruk Wildspeaker or some such.

And the deck is basically done. I’m not going to bore you with a comment on every single card in a 150 card deck. But the project does give me the chance
to really flesh out our Prime Speaker deck!

You can dig into a lot more directions. Fangren Firstborn. Lifeblood Hydra. Golgari Grave-Troll. Helium Squirter. Deadbridge Goliath. Incremental Growth.
Decree of Savagery. Jugan, the Rising Star. All jump onto the table as neat suggestions.

So shake things up for your next Commander night by just adding a few more cards to your decks. Turn your night from ho-hum to yum!