Commander Deck Of The Week: Izzet Wyll, Blade Of Frontiers

I built a deck around Wyll, Blade of Frontiers this summer after Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate came out. As a long-time fan of Dungeons & Dragons, I was excited about all the dice-rolling cards from Baldur’s Gate and last year’s Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, and wanted to find a home for a lot of the cards. Wyll seemed like a great commander for it, and it quickly became clear that I should pick a blue background to accommodate a bunch of other dice-rolling cards. I eventually settled on Shameless Charlatan.

The concept is: keep adding +1/+1 counters to Wyll, and once there’s a good creature on the battlefield that has a large body, evasion, and ideally some other sweet ability, cast Shameless Charlatan and have Wyll become a copy of that creature.  Only bigger, because of all the +1/+1 counters!  It’s important to note that Wyll won’t pick up any more +1/+1 counters while he’s a copy, though he’ll retain the ability to copy another creature if a better creature shows up later.  What I particularly like about this plan is that it scales nicely with what your opponents are doing; if they’re playing busted huge creatures, we can copy one of them, but if they’re playing medium-power creatures, we can copy the best of them.

Okay, let’s dive in!

Dice-Rolling Creatures

As a dice-rolling deck, I want to have a lot of dice-rolling effects, and a bunch of creatures do it for us. Delina, Wild Mage is one of the best, especially with cards that let you roll extra dice and pick the best for the result, potentially letting Delina copy a bunch of times on attack.  I was fortunate enough to open an Ancient Copper Dragon in a Set Booster, so I’ve got it and the blue Ancient Silver Dragon in the deck for the big d20 rolling effect.

The other creatures are definitely sub-par for Commander, but I think I need them to pad out the number of dice-rolling effects. But if I must make cuts to squeeze in some other cards, they can go on the chopping block.

Dice-Rolling Artifacts

I was pleased to see Unfinity brought a couple of solid new additions to the dice-rolling club!  I love that Clown Car lets you roll multiple dice at once and scales as the game goes on, hopefully netting you some 1/1 token creatures and a Vehicle of medium size.  Celebr-8000 is cool too, though with Wyll on the battlefield, you won’t often roll a 1 to add a +1/+1 counter to it.  Wyll could very easily tip the scales on Strength-Testing Hammer as the highest-power creature on the battlefield to net us an extra card.

Wand of Wonder’s chaos magic makes each activation a fun spin of randomness to see what nifty instant or sorcery we might find in each opponent’s library. And Wyll makes it pretty likely that your activation of Treasure Chest should net something awesome and not the dreaded trap!

Dice-Rolling Enchantments

There weren’t too many dice-rolling enchantments to choose from, but I’m happy to slot both of these in here.  Netherese Puzzle-Ward’s scry ability is a nice way to keep the cards flowing during your draw step, and it will occasionally net you an extra card here and there.  Maddening Hex brings the Curse game to Wyll, with it moving around like a hot potato each time it triggers.

Dice-Rolling Instants and Sorceries

Rounding out the dice-rolling cards are the one-shot spells, instants and sorceries. I particularly like Diviner’s Portent since this deck can use the constant flow of extra cards, and with Wyll there’s a decent shot you can get the awesome 15+ result where you get to scry X and then draw X cards.  Wyll’s Reversal is a nice surprise to hijack a targeted spell or ability, and with Wyll’s +1/+1 counters boosting his power, chances are pretty good that I get the 15+ result.

Dice-Rolling Matters

Pixie Guide provides an additional backup to Wyll’s ability to get advantage on your rolls. Feywild Trickster generates the adorable 1/1 Faerie Dragon tokens. These two cards are a big reason why we wanted a blue background for Wyll.

Barbarian Class is another way to add to the dice-roll advantage, and Level 2 can help Wyll punch past blockers with menace. Vexing Puzzlebox is the perfect mana rock for this deck, letting you roll a d20 whenever you tap it for mana, while storing up charge counters for each die roll result.  Once you reach 100 charge counters, you can cash them in for an artifact card from your library and put it on the battlefield. I don’t currently have an artifact worth cheating out like that, but I’ve been considering something like Darksteel Colossus, which would make a pretty good target for Wyll to copy with all of his +1/+1 counters.

Card Draw

The first few times I played the deck, it felt like I ran out of gas too often, so I’ve been tweaking the list to add more and more card draw.  I feel like it’s in a pretty good spot now, with Triskaidekaphile even adding an alternative win condition to the deck.

Removal

I wish there were more removal spells that involved dice-rolling, because I’d ideally want more than this in the deck. I’ve certainly been considering cutting a couple of the sub-par creatures to add Blasphemous Act and one or two other removal spells. What do you think?

Call In a Professional might look a little odd, but I really like this effect in a deck that wants to win with combat damage, since otherwise it can get easy to be locked down with some sort of recursive Fog effect. I used to run Skullcrack for this reason, but Call In a Professional is more versatile.

Interaction

If I’m running blue, I do like to have a few counterspells in the deck for the occasional emergency, either to stop someone from killing me or to stop someone from stopping me from killing them. Sword Coast Sailor is great in the 99 as a way to give Wyll evasion against an opponent with the highest life total.

I’ve been adding Sardian Avenger to more and more decks. It’s a great punisher of decks that rely too heavily on Treasures, and its trample ability makes it a pretty good target to copy with Shameless Charlatan.

Mana Ramp

The deck is mana-hungry, and there are plenty of mana sinks, especially ones that draw more cards to keep the mana train going. Always, always run Midnight Clock in your blue decks. It’s a great way to accelerate your mana early, and then later in the game, it can give you a brand-new hand and occasionally protect you from getting milled out.

Other Stuff

Witch’s Clinic provides a nice way to gain some life without costing a nonland slot in the deck. Hall of Storm Giants is an incredible creature-land that can attack someone hard after they’ve tapped out to sweep the battlefield of creatures. Soulbright Flamekin can give a large Wyll trample, and in a pinch, you can convert six generic mana into eight red mana for a big spell.

Astral Dragon slid into the list once I added Cursed Mirror, since casting Astral Dragon with a Cursed Mirror on the battlefield can just flat-out win the game. Astral Dragon enters the battlefield and makes two tokens that are copies of target noncreature permanent, except they’re 3/3 Dragon creatures too; so have the two tokens copy Cursed Mirror, and then copy Astral Dragon, making two more tokens, and so on. Note that Cursed Mirror copies have haste, so you can make as many as you need to ride to victory – hopefully without a Fog effect to ruin the fun!

The Decklist

Okay, here is the full decklist:

Here are the deck stats from our friends at Archidekt:

What other dice-rolling cards would you put in your Wyll, Blade of Frontiers deck that I may have missed here?  Would you choose a different background from Shameless Charlatan?

Talk to Me

Do me a solid and follow me on Twitter!  I run polls and get conversations started about Commander all the time, so get in on the fun!  You can also find my LinkTree on my profile page there with links to all my content.

I’d also love it if you followed my Twitch channel TheCompleteCommander, where I do Commander, Brawl and sometimes other Magic-related streams when I can.  If you can’t join me live, the videos are available on demand for a few weeks on Twitch, but I also upload them to my YouTube channel.  You can also find the lists for my paper decks over on Archidekt if you want to dig into how I put together my own decks and brews. 

And lastly, I just want to say: let us love each other and stay healthy and happy.