Hello all and welcome to this weeks Budget Brews! Winning is nice, but it isn’t our main goal here at Budget Brews, instead we just try and have some fun! We tackle a few different ways to build here at Budget Brews, we either look at trying to make the more competitive decks cheaper on the wallet, or we just come up with something new that’s easy on the wallet!
Commander Part Two: Nekusar, take the Wheel!
Yeah, you read that right. This week we're delving into the format I've only gone once in before: Commander!
I went out and bought the pre-constructed “Mind Seize” Grixis Commander deck, so I'm in a bit of a commander mood. I've only played Commander on paper once in like eight years, with the pre-con deck, and I got my ass kicked to some Mono-Blue deck that relied on tokens. His general spit out tokens like you wouldn't believe.
I'm going to be looking at a pretty neat Grixis General:
With a general like him, we're punishing opponents for doing things what everyone likes to do in Magic: Drawing cards.
“Draw a card” is after all the most fun phrase in Magic, so why not ping the player every time they do it? In fact, let's take it a step further, and not only love when they a draw card but let's MAKE them draw lots of cards!
So, first let's take a look at the deck:
Woohoo! Even for a 100 card Commander deck we can follow the rules we set up last week. The deck comes in around $87 TCG Mid (US), which leaves you a few bucks to play around with. If anything I'd probably play around with the mana base, as that usually seems to be first thing to be cut for budget reasons.
From what I can tell through my testing, so far the deck is a blast to play, and it doesn't have the things that initially drove me away from Commander: Infinite combo's.
I may be a bit of a combo player in other more competitive formats but Commander to me is meant to be played as a fun casual format. It's a format design for spending hours at a kitchen table with friends in mind. Commander however seems dominated by people who want to go-off as soon as they can by making infinite turns, drawing infinite cards, and winning the game.
Either way, no matter your personal feelings about the format, the deck is fun and can be fun to play at a kitchen table with some friends to waste a couple of hours.
Initial Punishment
These are all cards that punish our opponent for everyone's favourite phrase “Draw a card”.
The Wheel
These three cards all do the same basic thing: Replace your your opponents hand. If you're able to play any of these cards with any of the punishing effects above you're pinging your way to victory.
Double Punishment
These are cards that make the initial punishment listed above become only half of the sweet feel good's. Waste Not is a card that is all value in a deck where we continue to make our opponent discard multiple cards, adding either mana, bodies to the board, or drawing us more cards.
Liliana's Caress and Megrim are two cards that are going to punish the opponent for keeping seven cards in their hand at all times. All of this damage adds up rather quickly and can you the win out of nowhere in top deck mode. Tutors can seal the deal quicker obviously.
That's right, we get them coming and we get them going.
Thanks for joining me while I try to Untap the Multiverse!
As another little thing, I'm going to start a Youtube Channel where I host video's of my brews and playing the decks over Xmage.
Have an idea for something you'd like me to brew up? Give me a shout in the comments!
Or in the usual social media ways -
Twitter - @maibuddha
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCii1H4HLwrHDWT4JGVlVajQ
Personal Blog - Untapping the Multiverse (https://untapthemultiverse.wordpress.com/)
