Care to Make a Wager? [CEDH Primer]

Commander / EDH Blue Moon Coin Flip Midrange Multiplayer Primer Spellslinger UR (Izzet)

DreamRender

Instant (25)

• 1x Abrade
• 1x Brain Freeze
• 1x Brainstorm
• 1x Cyclonic Rift
• 1x Deflecting Swat
• 1x Delay
• 1x Depart the Realm
• 1x Disperse
• 1x Fierce Guardianship
• 1x Force of Negation
• 1x Force of Will
• 1x Frantic Search
• 1x Into the Roil
• 1x Lightning Bolt
• 1x Mana Drain
• 1x Mystical Tutor
• 1x Nexus of Fate *list*
• 1x Pact of Negation
• 1x Prismari Command
• 1x Pyroblast
• 1x Red Elemental Blast
• 1x Resculpt
• 1x Swan Song
• 1x Valakut Awakening  ^Flip
• 1x Winds of Rebuke

Sorcery (12)

• 1x Enter the Infinite
• 1x Fabricate
• 1x Gamble
• 1x Gitaxian Probe
• 1x Heat Shimmer
• 1x Merchant Scroll
• 1x Pyroclasm
• 1x Reshape
• 1x Temporal Manipulation
• 1x Time Stretch
• 1x Time Warp
• 1x Wheel of Fortune

Land (28)

• 1x Ancient Tomb
• 1x Cavern of Souls
• 1x City of Brass
• 1x Command Tower
• 1x Exotic Orchard
• 1x Fabled Passage
• 1x Flooded Strand
• 1x Forbidden Orchard
• 1x Frostboil Snarl
• 1x Gemstone Caverns
• 7x Island
• 1x Mana Confluence
• 1x Misty Rainforest
• 3x Mountain
• 1x Polluted Delta
• 1x Scalding Tarn
• 1x Shivan Reef
• 1x Steam Vents
• 1x Training Center
• 1x Wooded Foothills

Creature (13)

• 1x Dockside Extortionist
• 1x Drift of Phantasms
• 1x Dualcaster Mage
• 1x Laboratory Maniac
• 1x Phyrexian Metamorph
• 1x Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer
• 1x Sakashima of a Thousand Faces
• 1x Simian Spirit Guide
• 1x Snapcaster Mage
• 1x Spark Double
• 1x Tavern Scoundrel
• 1x Thassa's Oracle
• 1x Trophy Mage

Commander (1)

Artifact (16)

• 1x Arcane Signet
• 1x Basilisk Collar
• 1x Chrome Mox
• 1x Cursed Totem
• 1x Izzet Signet
• 1x Jeweled Lotus
• 1x Krark's Thumb
• 1x Lion's Eye Diamond
• 1x Lotus Petal
• 1x Mana Crypt
• 1x Mox Amber
• 1x Mox Diamond
• 1x Mox Opal
• 1x Scroll Rack
• 1x Shadowspear
• 1x Sol Ring

Enchantment (5)

• 1x Blood Moon
• 1x Copy Artifact
• 1x Mystic Remora
• 1x Rhystic Study
• 1x Underworld Breach

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Maybeboard

Sorcery (2)

• 1x Timetwister
• 1x Transmute Artifact

Land (1)

• 1x Volcanic Island

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Coinflips is making headway in CEDH, and it just got a brand new toy to play with: Yusri, Fortune's Flame! This deck has been fine-tuned to compete within my personal meta, as well as the macro-meta of CEDH.

Why Play This Deck?

Anyone who has ever been a pilot of an Ad Nauseam deck or a wheels deck will tell you that their deck strategy ultimately involves a bit of gambling. Sometimes an Ad Naus just falls flat and gives you all the wrong cards, and sometimes a wheel will end up filling your hand with a bunch of lands and mana rocks. But for those willing to take the risk of teasing fate, these strategies have proven time and again to be worth the gamble, to the point that they are some of the most prominent and powerful strategies in the format. So what do we get when we ramp up the gambling payoff and throw in a dash of masochism? We get the commander for this deck, who has insane card advantage written all over him for the low cost of some slight damage.

This deck is a midrange/adaptive/control deck that seeks to ultimately win the jackpot with the commander's ability and assemble a win from drawing 5 cards and having " Omniscience " until the end of turn. Because we want to win big, this deck features the coinflip staple Krark's Thumb , and plenty of artifact/creature copy effects to get lots and lots of flips in.

Because the deck's main plan is inherently risky, commander reliant, and somewhat slow, this deck also features a number of other wincons in the form of Underworld Breach lines and a Dualcaster Mage beats line to help secure victory when the cards aren't in our favor.

As far as metagame matchups go, this deck will have some trouble dealing with very fast turbo decks like most Ad Naus strategies. However, it is relatively unaffected by a good number of stax pieces, and it's grinding capability in long games is ridiculous.

PILOTING NOTES: This deck is much simpler to pilot than some of my other decks, and the main combo lines are not very hard to grasp or implement. However, the deck does have quite a bit to gain from an experienced and practiced pilot.

Gameplan 1: Flip Coins and Stack the Odds

Step 1: Start Flipping

Since the commander is the deck's main value engine and wincon, you will typically want to play him as soon as possible, either on turn 1 or 2 to squeeze as much value from him as possible. (Pro tip: you will almost always choose to flip all 5.)

Step 2: Stack the Odds

There are all manners of getting out Krark's Thumb in the deck, and many more ways of making copies of it. Getting this artifact out and copying it should be a high priority because it greatly increases the chance you win the jackpot on your commander. Another way to stack the odds in your favor is to remove the risk of damage by equipping your commander with either Shadowspear or Basilisk Collar , both of which effectively stop the loss of life from the flips.

Step 3: Yahtzee!

Hopefully after stacking the odds like a Vegas casino, you will hit the fabled jackpot of winning all 5 flips, drawing 5 cards, and gaining the power to freecast from hand for the rest of the turn. But just because we hit the jackpot doesn't necessarily mean the game is ours yet! We need to be able to put the card Enter the Infinite into our hand so we can draw the whole deck and put 1 card back. With all these cards in our hand, we can assemble any of our auto-wins which range from a Thassa's Oracle / Laboratory Maniac win to a Dualcaster Mage + Heat Shimmer win after we cast an extra turn spell. The point being that you should be able to win if you can cast Enter the Infinite without being stopped.

Gameplan 2: Backup Wincons

As mentioned in the previous 2 accordion blocks, this list has 2 main backups to win with. This section will go over them both.

Underworld Breach Lines

The goal of these lines is to put the whole deck into the graveyard and escape out a ThOracle or a Lab Man for the win. The lines will end up like the following:

Underworld Breach on the field. Use either Lion's Eye Diamond + Wheel of Fortune or Lion's Eye Diamond + BrainFreeze to make lots of mana and mill your deck out. Once your graveyard is full and the deck is empty (or very low), escape out either Thassa's Oracle or Laboratory Maniac and proceed to win with their ability.

Dualcaster Beats

This line is pretty simple, but plays very hard on the rules of the stack. The line goes as follows:

Get both Heat Shimmer and Dualcaster Mage in your hand with the mana to cast them. Cast Heat Shimmer targeting any creature. Hold priority on the cast of Heat Shimmer, and cast Dualcaster. When Dualcaster etb's, have his ability target and copy Heat Shimmer. The copy of Heat Shimmer will go onto the stack above the original Heat Shimmer. Have the copy make a token of Dualcaster with haste. When the token etb's, repeat the actions of the original Dualcaster by making a copy of Heat Shimmer. Repeat to make an arbitrarily high number of haste-y Dualcaster tokens and a random haste-y token of whatever the original Heat Shimmer was targeting. Then go to combat, hope nobody runs Rakdos Charm , and swing out killing your opponents.

Piloting Notes

Stax Pieces Choices

Stax is a very small subtheme for this deck, but running stax can be helpful if you need to slow your opponents down so you can catch up, or if you need to make sure they can't catch up to you.

In particular for this list, we have the cards Blood Moon and Cursed Totem . None of the cards here affect us when we have them in play to a major degree (Blood Moon only affects you if you didn't search for your basic islands with the majority of your fetches. Shame on you if you get caught by it. You saw how the deck's land base was constructed, you have no reason or grounds to complain.).

This part of the deck is what often requires the most thought when building. You must build the stax package to your meta. This list runs the hatebears and stax cards that put in work for its meta, not every meta.

The same statement can be made for the interaction/removal package in this list: You must build the interaction/removal package to your meta. Again, this particular list runs what works for it, but your version may need to run other options. Take some time to actually construct a decent interaction/removal package that works within your meta, and it will serve you much better than just auto-including cards.

Cards to Look Out For (aka, How to Hinder This Deck)

Because this deck's main plan of action and value engine is commander reliant, commander hate/repeated removal will be pretty disruptive, if not crippling in some scenarios. Other than that, watch out for draw hate ( Notion Thief ), artifact hate ( Collector Ouphe , Stony Silence ), and multi-spell hate ( Rule of Law , Stony Silence ). These effects will be very problematic for the deck, which is the main reason the removal package is very bounce-heavy.

Opening Hand Choices

Choosing an opening hand properly can differ depending on the pod, but in general, a good opening hand is one with 2-3 lands, a mana rock that lets us cast the commander on turn 1 or 2, some interaction cards, and hopefully a tutor. An "ideal hand" would be something like 2 lands, Jeweled Lotus , Mana Crypt , Krark's Thumb , and 2 interaction cards (free counterspells, etc). With this deck, you can mulligan pretty well down to 5 cards without feeling like you are losing out too much. Anything past that and it starts to feel pretty bad. On the other hand, this deck isn't as punishing towards greedy keeps due to the grinding value your commander.

Another good way to look at an opening hand would be to ask the questions: When can I cast my commander? Can I adequately support my commander after I cast him? Is there something more game-changing in my hand that I can cast instead of my commander? Are there any clear paths to victory?

If you can answer the first two questions with "By turn 2" and "Yes", then that hand is probably going to be decent enough. If you can't answer the first two questions that way, then you must lean heavily into the next two questions looking for good answers. If the hand can't adequately fulfil any of these questions in a satisfactory way, then mulligan.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading this Primer and checking out the deck! If you have any comments or questions, let me know in the comments below.

Date added	3 years
Last updated	3 years
Exclude colors	WBG
Splash colors	UR
Key combos	Dualcaster Mage + Heat Shimmer Lion's Eye Diamond + Wheel of Fortune
Legality	This deck is not Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	16 - 0 Mythic Rares 45 - 0 Rares 10 - 0 Uncommons 19 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	2.33
Tokens	Bird 2/2 U, Copy Clone, Elemental 4/4 UR, Foretell, Spirit 1/1 C, Treasure