The Prime Speaker's Directive

Speaker. Prime Speaker.

Sometimes you dust off an old favorite deck, play it, and put it back. Sometimes you play it and wonder why you’re not playing it more often. The latter is what happened last week when I pulled my Zegana and a Dice Bag deck off the shelf for my Thursday trip to the game shop. I had so much fun playing it in the first game that I loaned it to fellow Monday Night Gamer Todd Palmer, who played it twice over the course of the evening before handing it back to me to go once more unto the breach for the evening’s final battle. Like it says in every high school prom photo layout, good times were had by all.

Let’s look at the list:

Prime Speaker Zegana

Sheldon Menery

0th Place at Test deck on 02-17-2013

Commander

Creatures (47)

Lands (37)

Spells (16)

History

I built the deck in the wake of the Gatecrash Prerelease, initially porting over my then-existing version of Animar, Soul of Elements. The deck has remained remarkably true to theme in the four-plus years since. Dragon’s Maze obviously brought us a few new toys, most importantly Vorel of the Hull Clade. The deck got updates every now and again with most new sets when a truly fitting card came along.

The only other large update (eight total cards) came after the Fate Reforged release, as there were quite a few cards with abilities taking advantage of +1/+1 counters. The two major cards from that update were Battlefront Krushok, which makes value blocking quite difficult, and Biomass Mutation, which plays extremely nicely with creatures with counters on them—since it raises their base power and toughness, which in most cases is very low and in some cases (like with Spike Weaver and Spike Feeder) zero.

Why Play It?

Play this deck if you love Simic and you love creatures. You’ll want to play this deck because it features cards that you might not otherwise see in your Commander battles. Sure, it has a few staples, like Yavimaya Elder or Woodfall Primus, but it also has cards like Bioshift and Plaxcaster Frogling. Plaxcaster Frogling!

If you can’t have fun playing the only Frog Mutant in Magic (outside of Shapeshifter), then the giggly kind of fun might not be your thing. I swear that folks who have never seen the card always wrinkle their nose when they read it—and then sing its praises after they either play with it or see it in action. “Who knew?” is a frequent exclamation.

Play the deck if you love drawing cards. Not only does the commander help you keep a full grip, but a card like Mindless Automaton draws way more than you would it expect it to. You don’t even need to discard cards; the deck’s other engines will just put more counters on it. Because there’s no mana in the activation cost, you can respond to nearly anything that will kill the Automaton (not than anyone is targeting it unless it has a stack of counters on it) by activating its ability. Same goes for the lifegain of Spike Feeder, a card I’ve loved since I had it in my first Living Death deck—back before some of you were born.

Also play it if you have an awesome collection of dice you want to show off, because you’ll need them.

You’ll Like This Deck If…

. . . you like to attack and do stuff with creatures on an ever-changing battlefield state—even if your creatures remain the same. The deck thrives on the ability to move around counters, double up counters, and do head fakes because of counters. If you like having lots of Fogs available due to an ever-growing (and battle-worthy) Spike Weaver, this is your kind of deck. If the absurdity of doubling up counters with Vorel of the Hull Clade and then re-doubling with Solidarity of Heroes or Evolution Vat—perhaps even more than once with the latter—then this deck is for you.

I don’t think I’ve ever needed to use the strive ability on Solidarity of Heroes to copy it more than once. Note that tapping with Evolution Vat is part of the resolution of the ability, which means you can attack with the creature and then activate the Vat; tapping it at that point doesn’t remove it from combat or anything. I’ve also used Evolution Vat as an emergency defense system, tapping down a potentially lethal attacker.

You’ll love the tomfoolery in which the deck can engage. Most of that comes from moving around counters, but one of the seriously janky but effective cards the deck plays is Dismiss into Dream. The best use of Dismiss into Dream is with Simic Fluxmage. The activation cost of Simic Fluxmage is only 1U and tap. It doesn’t have to have a counter on it (although it’s quite likely to have more than one at any given time).

Activate Simic Fluxmage, targeting a creature which annoys you. Dismiss into Dream will trigger, destroying that creature—and since the Fluxmage’s ability is countered on resolution due to no longer having a valid target, you get to keep the counter. Unfortunately, the same doesn’t work with Spike Feeder and Spike Weaver. Sure, you can use their ability to still target something and kill it, but you lose the counter because removing said counter is part of the activation cost. Unfortunately, Forgotten Ancient doesn’t target the creatures it moves counters onto, meaning you can’t machine-gun someone else’s battlefield.

You Won’t Like This Deck If…

. . .you’re a control player. The deck casts creatures, attacks, draws cards, and performs some shenanigans. If you want to cast lots of spells on other players’ turns, you probably won’t enjoy this one too much—although there are quite a few abilities to activate.

As I’ll discuss in a little more detail below, the deck certainly has its vulnerabilities, so if you’re a fan of making absolutely sure that you’ll always be able to do everything you want to do, you might not like it.

If you love infinite combos, this also isn’t the deck for you. If someone else has Aether Flash on the battlefield, you might get a good deal of mileage out of Vigor / Woodfall Primus, but for the most part, the deck doesn’t do anything infinite—and not doing so is a strong personal preference.

What Does It Do?

The deck empties your hand by casting creatures and then refills it by casting the commander. Prime Speaker Zegana carries strong value even if you have only a midrange creature on the battlefield. If you have something appropriately huge, like Phyrexian Metamorph copying someone’s Malignus, things start to get out of hand. The deck gets a reasonable number of commander damage kills out of Prime Speaker Zegana. Sometimes those kills come the “normal” way, from two or three hits when it’s medium-large. Other times they come from an opportunistic moment of shifting a bunch of counters off of Forgotten Ancient, or even better, from a Bioshift out of nowhere.

The deck takes advantage of its Hydra creatures as well. The question with Genesis Hydra is how long to hold it. You’ll likely hit something even casting it for as little as four, but it always seems like the value play it to make it larger. Hooded Hydra provides some insurance for the inevitable board wipes which come along, getting you restarted with a plethora of Snakes. Kalonian Hydra is one of the cards which helps the deck get kind of ridiculous—and it’s one of the reasons you’ll want to remember to spread counters around with Forgotten Ancient.

Lifeblood Hydra is another which you’ll want to closely and clearly evaluate the board state in order to cast at an optimal time. Generally, I’d rather wait until after one of those battlefield wipes in order to maximize the amount of mana I’m willing to put into it (since there are no other abilities to worry about activating). An early-turn Managorger Hydra will be pretty large by the time the turn comes back around to you. Oran-Rief Hydra is pretty straightforward—and half of your basic land drops are going to add two counters instead of one.

Another of the cards which helps the deck careen off into craziness is Master Biomancer. Once you move a few additional counters onto it, your team gets very large very quickly—and that team gets lethal once they all have trample from Crowned Ceratok.

Vigor makes the deck pretty wild if you can protect it at all, because every combat either deals lots of damage or makes your creatures larger. In one of the games the other night in which Todd was playing it, someone cast Blasphemous Act just to get rid of the Vigor, knowing it would make the rest of the creatures huge. I recall that person having the backup plan of a Fog of some kind, but it shows you the kind of desperate acts to which Vigor can drive people.

The most well-known combo in the deck is probably Doubling Season and Forgotten Ancient. Doubling Season doesn’t need much help to be just bonkers on its own, but when you start moving counters around and doubling them every time, things get downright foolish.

What Doesn’t It Do?

As mentioned, the deck doesn’t control the battlefield state. It has few ways of getting rid of problematic permanents belonging to other players. Creeping Corrosion is great, since you’ll wreck everyone else’s artifacts but you only have the one (plus a few creatures). When I played the deck the other night, I almost felt bad casting Creeping Corrosion because one of the regulars, a cool guy name Aaron, was playing his relatively low-power Sydri, Galvanic Genius deck.

The deck doesn’t control other players’ creatures all that well. It has Wash Out, which helps a little. Aetherize is one of good Fogs around, but that’s about it.

How Does It Lose?

The deck doesn’t fare all that well in environments which are highly hostile to creatures. You can get away with playing around a Wrath of God or two, but if someone’s playing a deck full of Wrath effects, you might be in for a long night. Decks which inhibit attacking are equally troublesome—although if it’s just Ghostly Prison or Propaganda keeping you down, you can make something (or a few somethings) large enough to be able to pay for a lethal attack.

Thief of Blood and Aether Snap are two cards the deck really hates, the former seeing far more play and the latter criminally underplayed. That said, there aren’t enough Thief of Blood-like effects going around to motivate me into not playing the deck.

I’ve actually lost once or twice over the years with the deck getting locked out by my own Sages of the Anima. For the most part, the card is kind of absurd, given that there are 47 creatures in the deck and it eventually goes away due to mass creature removal.

Cards That Aren’t There

The deck could probably use a few more things which protect the creatures. Inspiring Call is a grand respond to a battlefield wipe, but the addition of another card, like Heroic Intervention, might help a great deal.

There are way more cards that would be good in the deck than there are slots in which to put them, but I’ll highlight a few. I moved off the whole proliferate angle a while back just to do something new. Fuel for the Cause is still there as a leftover from those days. Contagion Engine would be a quite valuable card, as it could do double duty of making our creatures larger and someone else’s smaller. Inexorable Tide is another which would capitalize on the things the deck wants to do—cast spells.

Cyclonic Rift is probably the most glaring absence. Remember, the deck was built in the set just after Return to Ravnica came out, and I try to not cram the same cards into decks over and over. For the most part, I always look at my whole suite of decks as opposed to optimizing any individual one. That might lead them to being slightly underpowered from some players’ points of view, but it leads to a broader scope of enjoyable experiences for me. Your mileage is certainly welcome to vary—and I fully expect, if anyone uses this deck as a template for their own, that a card like Cyclonic Rift would make it into theirs.

There are probably enough cards which tap to do things in the deck that would make Paradox Engine valuable without being broken. Gyre Sage in and of itself would be pretty saucy. We already talked last week about how strong of a card Selvala, Heart of the Wilds is, but that would be taking the deck in a different direction.

Prime Speaker and the Future

One of the first things I look at when new sets come out is if there are any “+1/+1 counters matter” cards. When there are, I look at what might want to come out of this deck in order to put them in. In fact, Prime Speaker Zegana has priority when it comes to such cards, since I feel like that’s it’s “thing.” Even if a card might be better-served in a different deck (remembering that I try to put only one copy of any new cards into my whole suite of decks), the right thematic choice is to put it in this one. There will be plenty of cards in future sets that do just that, so I suspect I’ll have enough cards to rotate into this deck for a good, long time.

The short version is that the deck is simply a blast to play. It’s obviously a second-tier deck as far as objective power goes, but it captures the Timmiest heart of the format. It takes several cards for really epic things to happen with the deck, but they happen often enough (especially in a similarly powered environment) that you’ll nearly always great fun when you shuffle this one up.

This Week’s Idiotic Combo

For a little pass-around-the-table foolishness, combine Starke of Rath, Thornbite Staff, and Mass Hysteria. Of course, some spoilsport might ruin the fun by simply choosing to not activate Starke of Rath, but especially on a table on which everyone has things worth killing, you’ll likely find more than enough willing participants.

This week’s Deck Without Comment is the very-absent-of-+1/+1-counters Karrthus, Who Rains Fire From The Sky.

Karrthus, Who Rains Fire From The Sky

Sheldon Menery

0th Place at Test deck on 12-30-2012

Commander

Creatures (27)

Planeswalkers (2)

Lands (37)

Check out our comprehensive Deck List Database for lists of all my decks:

SIGNATURE DECKS

Purple Hippos and Maro Sorcerers; Kresh Into the Red Zone; Halloween with Karador; Dreaming of Intet; You Did This to Yourself;

THE CHROMATIC PROJECT

Mono-Color

Heliod, God of Enchantments; Thassa, God of Merfolk; Erebos and the Halls Of The Dead; Forge of Purphoros; Nylea of the Woodland Realm; Karn Evil No. 9

Guilds

Lavinia Blinks; Obzedat, Ghost Killer; Aurelia Goes to War; Trostani and Her Angels; Lazav, Shapeshifting Mastermind; Zegana and a Dice Bag; Rakdos Reimagined; Glissa, Glissa; Ruric Thar and His Beastly Fight Club; Gisa and Geralf Together Forever;

Shards and Wedges

Adun’s Toolbox; Animar’s Swarm; Karrthus, Who Rains Fire From The Sky; Demons of Kaalia; Merieke’s Esper Dragons; Nath of the Value Leaf; Rith’s Tokens; The Mill-Meoplasm; The Altar of Thraximundar; The Threat of Yasova; You Take the Crown, I’ll Take Leovold; Zombies of Tresserhorn

Four Color

Yidris: Money for Nothing, Cards for Free; Saskia Unyielding; Breya Reshaped.

Five-Color

Children of a Greater God

Partners

Tana and Kydele

THE DO-OVER PROJECT

Animar Do-Over; Glissa Do-Over; Karador Do-Over; Karador Version 3; Karrthus Do-Over; Steam-Powered Merieke Do-Over; Mimeoplasm Do-Over; Phelddagrif Do-Over; Rith Do-Over; Ruhan Do-Over

If you’d like to follow the adventures of my Monday Night RPG group (in a campaign that’s been alive since 1987) which is just beginning the saga The Lost Cities of Nevinor, ask for an invitation to the Facebook group “Sheldon Menery’s Monday Night Gamers.”

The Prime Speaker’s Directive

Creatures (47)

Lands (37)

Spells (16)

History

Why Play It?

You’ll Like This Deck If…

You Won’t Like This Deck If…

What Does It Do?

What Doesn’t It Do?

How Does It Lose?

Cards That Aren’t There

Prime Speaker and the Future

This Week’s Idiotic Combo

Creatures (27)

Planeswalkers (2)

Lands (37)

Spells (33)

SIGNATURE DECKS

THE CHROMATIC PROJECT

THE DO-OVER PROJECT