#so it can use Umori as companion

[farsight-the-char]

This is a card I have been looking for my 60-card stompy deck for a while. Another draw creature-based draw engine.

[niuttuc]

The Graveyard Gang

Did you know Golgari likes the graveyard? Read the cards carefully next time you face a golgari deck, and you might notice it. As a result, a lot of Golgari commanders like the graveyard a whole lot, and specifically creatures being in there. So I made a deck for them, a deck that can use any of its ten commanders, randomly selected before each game. And their companion, Umori, just to make deckbuilding a bit spicier. Here's the gang as a whole!

They all have equal chance of leading the deck every game, and even if they don't show up in the command zone, they'll be somewhere in the 99. They're all in special versions when possible and all in foil, the only foils in the deck, as to be able to find them easily when sifting through the deck to pick one at random before every game. They're of differing power levels, but that's fine! If you end up rolling one that's too strong or weak for the table, you could always reroll, or worse, pick one of them, but that's less fun.

As far as strategies, we're playing only creatures, so I wanted to lean onto creatures that get really strong from having many of them in the graveyard, so there's lot of that! Their large bodies are our wincons, either through regular attacks or throwing them at people's faces with Jarad.

Of course, we're playing commander, so we're also eating our veggies, with plenty of ramp, card advantage, interaction, and in this case, self-mill.

This deck WILL fold like wet paper in games featuring plenty of graveyard hate, but that's the life of a graveyard deck. And we can survive a reasonable amount of it. Just don't get your graveyard exiled when it's your entire library, before you can recycle it with Endurance.

Speaking of, Endurance is here as a safety valve. If we do our plan TOO well and end up milling out, like this deck is known to do on occasion, the combination of Genesis triggering on our upkeep and Endurance having flash can ensure we shuffle our graveyard into our library to avoid dying. We may have a lot of work to do once again milling all that, and a couple */*s may die, but that's a worthwhile price to stay alive.

Is Umori optimal for this deck? No, I haven't used it once. But this is a deck with ten commanders all wanting slightly different things and trying to be alright with all of them. We're not here for optimal.

[askkrenko]

Krenko’s Guide to Creature Types: Ooze

Art by Simon Dominic

What is an Ooze (flavorfully)?

Oozes are semi-fluid, animate blobs made of countless single-celled organisms fused together to work as one. Oozes have no distinct body parts on anything larger than the cellular level, an amalgamation of amoeba-like creatures acting in unison, like a group of robot lions combined into a single, larger robot.

Oozes are free to grow to any size, can split apart, and exist solely to find food.

Though real-world oozes are rarely larger than a square inch or so, many in Magic’s multiverse are large enough to easily devour a human whole. Though oozes appear on most planes, they’re thankfully quite rare everywhere outside of a Simic lab.

What is an Ooze (mechanically)?

Oozes are primarily green creatures and tend to have mechanics based on growth, multiplication, or both. Though this is usually in the form of +1/+1 counters or making Ooze tokens, it’s far more likely to get weird than a Hydra is, such as having power based on the number of something you control or in your graveyard or somehow absorbing other creatures.  Starting size for an ooze varies wildly, but even the small ones tend to have a lot of potential for growth.

Can I make an Ooze deck?

Ooze Tribal is absolutely possible. It’s not the fastest midrange option, but there are enough strong Oozes that can be hard to deal with and ways to flood the board that Ooze tribal’s got some answers for most problems. The biggest issue is going to be dealing with aggressive fliers while you build up, so you may want to devote a bit of extra removal for that. Fortunately, Green gets access to both fight and flying hate. For 60 card, mono-Green should work fine.  If you’re a very casual playgroup, try finding a playset of S.N.O.T for the one-drop creature this deck could really use.

For Commander, you’re going to need to expand into other colors to get enough Oozes. Black and Blue are both options, neither really having quite enough Oozes to be happy with but both providing a lot of options in their other spells. I’ll always lean Black in tribal decks for Patriarch’s Bidding and Haunting Voyage as board wipe protection that a lot of tribes really need. Despite the existence of Red oozes, they’re just not good options. Two of them have cumulative upkeep costs and one is basically useless. Bloodhall Ooze can be amazing, but not worth running the color for.

The Mimeoplasm makes for a reasonable commander, providing all three colors, but its abilities don’t really leverage an Ooze tribal strategy. Aeve, Progenitor Ooze, absolutely leans Ooze tribal, but comes with the drawback of locking you into mono-green.

Umori makes for an interesting commander option as a Green/Black option. Ignoring the companion ability, it’s still a 4/5 for 4 that makes your creatures cost 1 less. You don’t need to limit your deckbuilding if it’s your commander.

Sluurk, All-Ingesting, is not inherently the strongest, but its ability is clearly built for +1/+1 counters that Oozes often have and that keyword of “Partner” opens up many, many options. Most notably, Reyhan, Last of the Abzan works very well with many Oozes. Unfortunately, the only Blue-Black partner is basically useless for our purposes.

If you don’t feel the need for your commander to be an Ooze, Muldrotha is in the right colors and is honestly just a complete monster. Cazur and Ukkima can work quite well, too, as Cazur’s ability to put +1/+1 counters on your creatures naturally combines with the primary Ooze plan. You could also pair Reyhan with any Blue partner to get all three colors.

Is Ooze a good creature type?

Ooze is a great creature type. Ooze stands alongside Hydra as a clear example of Green’s idea of unmitigated growth but does it in a very different way. While Hydras often have X in the cost and can come in at any size based on the mana spent on them, Oozes tend to start small and grow over time. Some of them get big, some of them multiply, but it usually succeeds at that sense of the slow consumption of everything around them.  Oozes have a bit of tribal support, but it’s all weird and unique tribal support. Even the traditional “Lord” for Oozes, Biowaste Blob, reproduces to give increasingly larger boosts. 

It’s no secret that Ooze is one of Mark Rosewater’s favorite creature types, and the careful love we see for Ooze and the unique Ooze designs aren’t a coincidence. Ooze is a well designed type with a lot of great stuff going for it, and even if it’s not going to become the big sensation in any set it’s still going strong.

[shyguythemasquerage]

Ikoria Companions and Commander

I know this is not my usual content but I need to rant about this somewhere or I will explode. If you don’t care about MtG then feel free to ignore.

TLDR: Salty Commander player rants about the new Companion mechanic.

Ikoria, Lair of Behemoths, the latest set of Magic: The Gathering has been fully revealed and a new mechanic in this set is Companion. To summarize, these ten new Legendary Creatures can be played in your deck as normal, but if you build your deck in a specific way, you can have these cards be your Companion, which is a card that is outside of your main deck that you can play at any time. Since these cards were made with Standard in mind, that means these function as your 61st card provided you built your deck to meet the requirements of the Companion ability. Wizards of the Coast (the creators of MtG) have stated they did this to allow Standard players the option of playing similar to how Commander plays, since Commander is now one of, if not THE most popular format right now. They even stated that these companion abilities will be legal in Commander, and Companions will function as your 101st card AND sort of a second Commander.

And this is where the problem starts. Companion was made with Standard in mind, not Commander. And while these Companion restrictions are fine in Standard, in Commander, they are not created equal.

And that is what I am doing today. I am looking at each of these Legendary Creatures and judging them solely on their viability as Companions. I will be doing this by seeing how many current Commander decks they could be the Companion of and ranking them into a tier list.

A Tier:

The Companion restrictions of Umori and Keruga bring about some interesting deckbuilding challenges, but does very little to effect what Commanders they can be Companions for. All Commanders that have black and green in their color identity can have Umori as their Companion (even Lord Windgrace if you name Planeswalkers) for a total of 98 legal Commanders and 42 pairings of the C16 Partner Commanders.

Keruga has less total legal Commanders, but that has more to do with there being less Commanders with both green and blue in their color identity. In fact there is currently only one green/blue commander with less than 3 CMC and that is the Partner Commander Thrasios. This gives Keruga a total of 87 legal Commanders and 28 legal C16 Partner pairings.

B Tier:

The restrictions made by Obosh and Gyruda force you to build a deck with only odd CMC cards or even CMC cards respectively. As expected, this cuts the number of legal Commanders quite a bit. Obosh comes out ahead with a total of 60 legal Commanders and 16 C16 Partner pairings, while Gyruda only has 53 legal Commanders and no C16 Partner pairings.

C Tier:

It’s at this point where the Companion restrictions are not just heavily limiting deckbuilding, but also the number of legal Commanders. Zirda only has access to a total of 30, Jegantha with only 23, and Kaheera with only 14.

We also see how because of the differences between Standard and Commander, the Companions like Jegantha are heavily effected. While all of the other Companions only had two colors in their identity, and were legal in any deck that had those colors, because of Jegantha’s tap ability, it has all five colors in it’s color identity. This isn’t a problem in Standard, but in Commander,  this means that Jegantha is only usable in five color decks, whether or not it is used as a companion.

D Tier:

Because the Companion restriction of Lurrus makes it only able to have permanents of CMC 2 or less, this means that there are only 2 legal Commanders for it (Karlov of the Ghost Council, and Ayli, Eternal Pilgrim). It actually upsets me that Lurrus only allows for 2 CMC permanents, but it has a CMC of 3. I suppose if its mana cost was reduced to only 2 or its ability allowed for 3 CMC permanents it would be too powerful for standard, but that is why designing the Companion ability for standard and allowing it for Commander was not a good idea. And we see that taken to the two logical extremes with the last two Companions.

F Tier:

This is it. This is the WORST companion ability for Commander. Yorion has ZERO legal Commanders, but it has nothing to do with the Commanders themselves, but instead with Commander as a format in general. While Standard has a minimum deck size of 60 but could theoretically have as many cards as you want, Commander must have EXACTLY 100 cards in the deck, with one of them (or two in the case of Partners) being your Commander.

All the other Companions we’ve seen so far could always get more legal Commanders in the future. But, given the restrictions of the format, it is, and forever will be IMPOSSIBLE to have Yorion as your Companion. But at the very least, you can have Yorion in the 99 or even build around it as your Commander. The next Companion isn’t so lucky.

S Tier BANNED:

While the Commander format works against Yorion in a cruel way, the format works WITH Lutri in an even more cruel way. Lutri’s restriction makes it so all nonland cards in your deck must have different names. In Standard, that provides an interesting deckbuilding challenge, as to make your deck more consistent, you usually want multiples of your best cards. Commander however is a singleton format, meaning every card in your deck, barring basic lands and a few other exceptions, MUST be different. In the Commander format, Lutri’s restriction doesn’t restrict anything.

If Lutri was allowed to be your Companion, it would be an auto-include for every deck that had both blue and red. Of the 32 possible color combinations you can have, 8 of those would have the advantage of getting a free Companion without having to change anything about the deck. I mentioned earlier that Umori and Keruga had access to nearly all of the Commanders that could run their colors, but they at least still had to build the deck with the Companion restrictions in mind. Lutri has no such handicap. As a result, the Commander Rules Committee has universally agreed to ban Lutri. But because the RC doesn’t like complicated bans, they decided to ban Lutri entirely. It cannot be your Companion. It cannot be your Commander. It cannot be in the 99. It cannot be used at all.

And the worst part about all of this? Lutri was one of the FIRST Companions that were revealed. Lutri’s ban was made about a week ago, while the final Companion (Yorion) was spoiled today. If all the companions were revealed at the same time, would the Rules Committee have even allowed Companion to be used at all, knowing how incredibly imbalanced this mechanic is?

If it wasn’t clear by this point, I am a Commander player, not a Standard player. And while I love the new Ikoria set as a whole, the Companion mechanic, which I was initially cautiously optimistic about, has left a bad taste in my mouth. I get it, this is a Standard set, not a Commander product. Hell, alongside Ikoria, WotC is releasing this years Commander product early! And it’s Ikoria themed!

WHY AM I SO SALTY?!

Well, it is because I feel the Companion mechanic is a broken promise from WotC. They told the Commander players not to worry, that Companion would be fine in our format. They then proceeded to reveal the most viable Companions first along side one that was insta-banned as soon as it was revealed. Then they trickled out the remaining not as viable Companions and capped it off with the one that can never be a Companion in our format.

In my opinion, the Companion mechanic should be banned in Commander all together. But the Companions themselves should all be allowed as Commanders or usable in the 99. None of them are broken in that regard, and they are all fun to build around as Commanders. But I feel that this isn’t going to happen, as none of them are broken as Companions either. And even though I made this list with the intent of showing how many legal Commanders work with each Companion, that actually isn’t a good method of determining how good any of the Companions are! The C and D Tier Companions don’t have that many legal Commanders compared to the A and B Tier ones, but the ones that ARE legal for the lower Tiers synergize far better than most of the legal ones for the higher Tiers.

And then there are poor Yorion and Lutri. One unable to be a Companion in Commander, and one banned from the format entirely. And so long as the Companion mechanic is legal in Commander, neither of them will ever Companion anything in our format.

END RANT.