MTG Commander Deck Of The Week: Duggan, Private Detective

Doctor Who Commander has inspired me to build yet another Commander deck in paper, this time around the Simic character Duggan, Private Detective:

By the way, if you’re a card alterist, it would be fun if you painted Gavin Duggan‘s face on this card for him. Gavin is on the Commander Rules Committee and is a genuinely nice guy, and for all the work he’s done for Commander and the Magic Community, it would be fun for him to have a Duggan alter. Me, I’m always going to think of Gavin when I play this deck.

The Most Important Punch in History

Most Simic commanders don’t appeal to me much. So many of them in recent years are basically “play a game of Commander, profit!” by tying benefits to ramping lands and/or drawing cards, which are already some of the best things you can do in a Commander deck. Now, Duggan does appreciate it when you’re drawing cards, since his power and toughness are tied to the number of cards you have in your hand, but the rest of the text box offers up more interesting abilities.

When Duggan hits the battlefield or attacks, you get to investigate, so you can certainly build a cool Clue-centric deck with Duggan at the helm.  But there are already legends available that do that better, so I didn’t go that route. For me, I was much more interested in that last ability, The Most Important Punch in History!  For 1G, tap Duggan to deal damage equal to twice his power to another target creature, which is bonkers!  But there’s a catch – you can only do it once.  Just once!  So you must make sure it counts… or just reset Duggan with a blink effect so that it’s a “new” version which hasn’t used that ability yet. That, or Duggan dies, as creatures so often do in a game of Commander, and you just cast it again and have the punch ready to go.

What was most fun about building this deck was the overall goal of keeping my hand full of cards so that Duggan’s size is as large as possible. How many card draw effects can you cram in one deck and still be able to develop your battlefield?  Let’s find out!

Cantrips

I often cut one-mana blue cantrips from my blue decks as I’m building them, but this time I’m running all of them, and I’m excited because I’ve picked up really cool versions of them over the years. In this deck, I like that they’ll help me smooth my draws, pushing away more expensive card draw engines in the early-game, or searching for them later. Elvish Visionary and Fblthp, the Lost can provide early chump blocking duties when needed without sacrificing a card in hand. Eternal Witness and Timeless Witness aren’t technically cantrips, but they do “draw” the best card from your library when they enter the battlefield. 

Card Draw Engines

These cards are investments in future card draw, so I think they’re worth casting even if they shrink Duggan in the short-term. I’m stoked to find a home for The Reality Chip, since if you’re playing spells and lands from the top of your deck, you aren’t playing them from your hand, keeping Duggan nice and buff. Even though I don’t have a way to generate a ton of mana to make Thrasios, Triton Hero truly busted, it still does splendid work in this deck, where you can simply dump your mana into its ability rather than playing more spells from your hand (at least until it eats a removal spell). 

I’m also thrilled to find a home for Edric, Spymaster of Trest, which can come down and immediately get value from creatures you’ve cast earlier; plus, there are the political implications of enticing your opponents to attack each other rather than you. 

Raw Card Draw

Then of course there’s just the power of raw card draw, from classics like Deep Analysis and Harmonize to new hotness like Lórien Revealed and Ancient Silver Dragon. You can even use Pull from Tomorrow for a combat trick if someone tries to gang-block Duggan. 

Card Draw Matters

Wizard Class leveled up can really turn all the card draw into growing one or more smaller creatures on the battlefield into big threats. Body of Knowledge has power and toughness equal to your hand, just like Duggan, but its ability to soak up damage and draw you more cards is sweet in the face of cards like Blasphemous Act. I also wouldn’t hesitate to have Duggan punch my own Body of Knowledge to draw twice my hand size, assuming I had something like Reliquary Tower to keep me from having to discard all those extra cards. 

Ninjas

Okay, here’s where things get weird. While searching through my green and blue cards, I kept running across Ninjas, and eventually it occurred to me that using their ninjutsu ability means that you end up with the same number of cards in hand. It would be awesome to return something like Elvish Visionary to your hand to recast and draw another card. And many of the Ninjas have card draw abilities too. In a pinch, you could even return Duggan to your hand with ninjutsu to recast him and reset the punch ability, but I don’t see doing that too much. 

Reset Duggan

These are the more traditional ways to reset Duggan, along with anything that has a sweet enters-the-battlefield trigger. I’ve been looking for a good place for Displacer Kitten. After counting all my noncreature spells, I feel like I have enough of them to be able to leverage this Cat’s ability quite well. 

Removal

All the various card draw spells ate up a lot of the flex spots that I’d traditionally fill up with removal spells, but at the same time, all the card draw will help me dig to find one of these when I need it. Kogla, the Titan Ape gets an extra boost here since my commander is Human, letting me return Duggan to make Kogla indestructible until the end of the turn, and how nice that we’ll get to reset Duggan by casting him again!

Ezuri’s Predation is an asymmetrical green Wrath of God, and even though it’s expensive, I think it’ll be well worth having in the later part of the game when the battlefield has gotten a bit cluttered. 

Interaction

Giving Duggan lifelink with Witch’s Clinic is going to be a nice boost to my life totals, especially when The Most Important Punch in History is involved!  If someone is trying to race you with combat damage, Witch’s Clinic will give you a distinct advantage. 

I like Dream Fracture and Mystic Confluence for counterspells since they can replace themselves with card draw. I couldn’t find an Arcane Denial when pulling this deck together but once I do, I’ll probably add it in here too.

Mana Ramp

With all the card draw, I plan to make land drops pretty much every turn, but I wanted to make sure I had some ramp in the deck too. Each choice other than the required Sol Ring replaces itself with another card in your hand, so I’m hewing close to the primary theme even here.

The Deck

Okay, here’s the full decklist!

Here are the deck stats from our friends at Archidekt:

What must-have cards might I have missed including here?  What creatures do you enjoy giving myriad to the most?

Talk to Me

Do me a solid and follow me on Twitter!  I run polls and start conversations 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.