Aristophanes - Tuned

Commander / EDH Frog GU (Simic) Tempo

ragnil

Creature (31)

• 1x Bellowing Crier
• 1x Cemetery Prowler
• 1x Clifftop Lookout
• 1x Coiling Oracle
• 1x Dour Port-Mage
• 1x Dreamdew Entrancer
• 1x Koma, Cosmos Serpent
• 1x Lilysplash Mentor
• 1x Long River Lurker
• 1x Mistbreath Elder
• 1x Mockingbird
• 1x Octomancer
• 1x Plumecreed Escort
• 1x Pollywog Prodigy
• 1x Pond Prophet
• 1x Prowling Serpopard
• 1x Scrapshooter
• 1x Skyskipper Duo
• 1x Solemn Simulacrum
• 1x Splash Lasher
• 1x Stickytongue Sentinel
• 1x Sunshower Druid
• 1x Three Tree Scribe
• 1x Thundertrap Trainer
• 1x Tishana's Tidebinder
• 1x Trailtracker Scout
• 1x Treeguard Duo
• 1x Twenty-Toed Toad
• 1x Valley Floodcaller
• 1x Valley Mightcaller
• 1x Waterspout Warden

Enchantment (4)

• 1x Fable of Wolf and Owl
• 1x Fisher's Talent
• 1x Fortune Teller's Talent
• 1x Innkeeper's Talent

Land (36)

• 1x Alchemist's Refuge
• 1x Barkchannel Pathway  ^Flip
• 1x Botanical Sanctum
• 1x Command Tower
• 1x Dreamroot Cascade
• 1x Fabled Passage
• 1x Flooded Grove
• 8x Forest
• 1x Fountainport
• 1x Hinterland Harbor
• 8x Island
• 1x Lilypad Village
• 1x Oakhollow Village
• 1x Path of Ancestry
• 1x Rejuvenating Springs
• 1x Reliquary Tower
• 1x Tangled Islet
• 1x Tanglepool Bridge
• 1x Thornwood Falls
• 1x Three Tree City
• 1x Vineglimmer Snarl
• 1x Waterlogged Grove

Artifact (8)

• 1x Arcane Signet
• 1x Door of Destinies
• 1x Fountainport Bell
• 1x Herald's Horn
• 1x Maskwood Nexus
• 1x Patchwork Banner
• 1x Sol Ring
• 1x Strionic Resonator

Commander (1)

Instant (14)

• 1x Cyclonic Rift
• 1x Growth Spiral
• 1x Heroic Intervention
• 1x Illusionist's Gambit
• 1x Into the Flood Maw
• 1x Invert the Skies
• 1x Long River's Pull
• 1x Once Upon a Time
• 1x Once and Future
• 1x Overprotect
• 1x Peerless Recycling
• 1x Polliwallop
• 1x Rapid Hybridization
• 1x Voidslime

Sorcery (6)

• 1x Croaking Counterpart
• 1x Cultivate
• 1x Season of Gathering
• 1x Season of Weaving
• 1x Splash Portal
• 1x Wear Down

---

Maybeboard

Creature (5)

• 1x Eternal Witness
• 1x Forgotten Ancient
• 1x Mystic Snake
• 1x Plaxcaster Frogling
• 1x Reclamation Sage

Sorcery (2)

• 1x Aggressive Biomancy
• 1x Pull from the Deep

Land (1)

• 1x Command Beacon

---

Welcome! This is my Clement, the Worrywort deck Aristophanes, bringing the frogs of Fountainport together in a chorus of creature-bouncing and frolicking fun. I decided to make a secondary listing of this deck and tune it further to make it a more "tuned" version of the Vorthos build I originally started with. My hope with this deck is to provide a higher-powered means of playing without venturing too far into pricey cards or busted strategies. Below you will find an in-progress deck breakdown ruminating on the choices of the deck and the overall strategies I hope to employ:

Overview

What is this deck aiming to accomplish?

• this deck wants to bounce its creatures for various ETB and/or leave effects

• this deck wants to be pseudo-Frog tribal to take advantage of Clement's ability

• this deck wants to win by employing "tempo" tactics or go-wide with Fable of Wolf and Owl

What are potential weaknesses of the deck?

• anything that can counter or invalidate the ETB effects of its creatures

• anything that can prevent the deck's creatures from returning to the hand

What are the deck's main threats?

• Fable of Wolf and Owl

• Fisher's Talent

• Invert the Skies

• Koma, Cosmos Serpent

• Twenty-Toed Toad

Breakdown

Engine Pieces

We start out this section with the commander itself, Clement, the Worrywort. Clement provides the inherent ability to return creatures back to the hand based upon their overall mana value, so in building a list of creatures I needed to ensure there was at least one of each CMC, leading up to Koma at the top of that curve. Outside of my commander, several of the deck's frogs provide a means to returning creature cards to my hand, such as Mistbreath Elder, Dour Port-Mage, and Stickytongue Sentinel.

Bouncing isn't the only means to trigger my creatures' effects: fewer in number are a couple of "blink" abilities that don't require re-casting to proc, such as Long River Lurker, Lilysplash Mentor, and Skyskipper Duo. Including these in the deck grant additional flexibility and conditional protection to my creatures from opponent interaction at instant-to-near-instant-speed.

Rounding off the engine pieces are one-off spells like Into the Flood Maw and Splash Portal, low-cost cantrips that wait in the hand and are cast as-needed.

Win-Cons

Taking advantage of the bounce and blinks are the list of cards who stand to gain the most from the overall strategy, and threaten tables to win if left unchecked. In trying to secure various means of victory, I included three "main" avenues in Fable of Wolf and Owl, Twenty-Toed Toad, and Valley Mightcaller:

• Fable of Wolf and Owl enables a go-wide strategy taking advantage of the various re-casting of my creatures to build a plethora of 2/2 Wolf and 1/1 Bird tokens, ultimately benefitting from the different ways they can be boosted in power

• Twenty-Toed Toad is the true "alt win-con" of the deck, providing an indirect means of victory in the way other cards like Laboratory Maniac or Thassa's Oracle seek to skirt around combat. Cards like Innkeeper's Talent and Reliquary Tower skirt around the base conditions of the card to ease the path of victory

• Valley Mightcaller is the standard bruiser of this deck, with inherent Trample and an easy +1/+1 counter accruement allowing it to get out of control easily and swing for big damage

Other cards and combos like Fisher's Talent + Octomancer or Invert the Skies with all the tokens the deck can generate stand as fair threats of their own, and round out the portfolio of lethality while working with various other aspects of the deck itself.

Date added	1 week
Last updated	1 hour
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	5 - 0 Mythic Rares 40 - 0 Rares 21 - 0 Uncommons 18 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	2.84
Tokens	Bird 1/1 U, Copy Clone, Fish 1/1 U, Frog Lizard 3/3 G, Human 2/2 G, Koma's Coil 3/3 U, Octopus 8/8 U, Shapeshifter 2/2 U, Shark 3/3 U, Splash Lasher 1/1 U, Thundertrap Trainer 1/1 U, Treasure, Wolf 2/2 G