Pattern Recognition #289 - Voltron Expanded

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

13 July 2023

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Good day everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut's longest running article series. I am something of an Old Fogey and a definite Smart Ass, and I have been around the block quite a few times. My experience is quite broad and deep, and so I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. Be it deck design, card construction, mechanics or in-universe characters and the history of the game. Or whatever happens to catch my attention each week. Which happens far more often than I care to admit. Please, feel free to talk about my subject matter in the comments at the bottom of the page, add suggestions or just plain correct me.

And so, once again, I come back to you all. Which is a good thing because I'm not giving up on you yet! Anyways, today's article is a rehash of one I did back in February of 2020, in which I talked a bit about the nature of Voltron, and what it is and how it works. And in re-reading that, I really used too many mana symbols and I wasn't sure I got across what I wanted with it. Still, go ahead and read it anyways. This article builds up from it, and expands on some of the concepts from there as I tended to focus more on the colours involved than anything else.

For those of you who skipped that link, and have no idea what I'm talking about, Voltron is a deck archetype that exists mainly in Brawl and Commander (but this is not to say that it doesn't in other formats) and takes its name from a show of the same name where the protagonists had access to resources where the whole of them were greater than the sum of its parts. I terms of Magic, Voltron is a style of play where you focus on one or two creatures and use various other effects to boost that one individual far past its normal capacity. There are various ways to do that that I will look at today, but the first thing I want to point out is that it is not.

First is that Voltron is not opportunistic. That is to say, that unlike casting Giant Growth or Blazing Crescendo in the middle of combat to swing things your way, Voltron is more planned out and has more fore-thought to it. You can't simply pick and choose the best result in the moment, where you hold you resources in a state of uncertainty where your opponent won't know what you're doing until you do it. Instead, Voltron tends to be more proactive in how it presents itself, it's not reactive in seeking out the weak points or mistakes of the enemy.

This isn't to say that Voltron can't be reactive; it certainly can. Rather, its strengths actually lay in its ability to build up its strength turn after turn without losing out on what came before. As you build up your strength, your ability to act becomes disproportionately big.

So how then, does Voltron work? Well, you start with a single creature - and this is why this archetype sees the most use in formats with a Commander; Brawl, Oathbreaker and Commander itself. You have a guaranteed creature in your Command Zone that you can build your deck around and craft with cunning knowing that when it's time, you have something you can start building up from.

There are a few qualities to the base creature that are important, and while people will disagree with me on a few things, I feel that there are some unifying schemas that matter. First and perhaps foremost is the protection of your chosen attacker. It is far too easy to load up your one special attacking creature, flagging for all to see what you're doing and who you're going to do it to - only to be hit with Celestial Flare, forcing all your hard work to go away and you're back to square one or worse.

There are various ways to do this across Magic, but one of the first things that a Voltron Player tends to do is put their attacker out of conventional damage range of the prospective blocker. Try, but not always succeed. But rather, the larger issues come with outright destruction of a creature, or as I mentioned above, if you are forced to sacrifice your creature instead. Now, the ways to protect your creature from this are pretty well known. Protection and Hexproof are both valid ways to prevent someone from simply targeting your creature and removing it at the worst moment for you. On the other hand, sacrifice plays are a far more insidious thing that absolutely loves to break out at the drop of a hat, and even at Instant speed, with things like the very recently printed Sheoldred's Edict. The ability top protect yourself from these effects are twofold. First is that most of these cards specify a target opponent is the one who does the sacrificing, so in that way, giving yourself Hexproof is vital. Shalai, Voice of Plenty and Blossoming Calm are examples of this degree of protection.

Of course, if something does get past all this protection, you still have the option to Flicker your permanent. However this is not an easy solution as flickering causes anything that was attached to that permanent to fall off in the process, either staying on the battlefield in the case of equipment or winding up in the graveyard if it was an Aura. On the other hand, the increasing option to Phase Out thanks to cards like Slip Out the Back preserve the stack of cards you have attached to the creature you are protecting but at the cost of you keeping your creature with all its abilities and combat capacity out until your next turn, giving your opponents the opportunity to mess with you without your best defender.

These factors combined is why Sigarda, Host of Herons is a good Voltron creature. The combination of Hexproof and the anti-sacrifice effect means that the bast majority of options that your opponents can have to take her out simply don't work, allowing her to do her dirty business without worry.

The next aspect that needs to be looked at is in how do you intend to make your attacking creature great, and a huge threat? I've tried to make the point that one-and-done effects do not a Voltron make, as those are regular combat tricks, but rather it is the gathering power from one turn to the next that matters most. In this way, there are two real ways of going about it, and you can run Voltron with either of them or even with both.

Auras are the first type, and the most classic. I have fond memories of playing mono- back in the old days of the 20th Century, and casting Blessing on my White Knight and just swinging in with a creature that I can throw epic amounts of mana into in order to kill the enemy. Have multiple such attackers, and the options for the defender quickly went out the window.

However, Auras have a serious use issue, and in fact are the source of the two-for-one problem in Magic, where a single removal spell can undo the work of multiple actual spells. In this case, without forethought and a Mask of Law and Grace. a single Terror could take out your creature before the protections could be laid down upon it. You would lose the creature, the Aura without its legal target, and anything else you had already set up before you have a chance to use it.

On the other hand, Auras do tend to be relatively cheap for their cost, and one or two of them tend to not draw hate, depending on what they do. A Vampiric Link isn't the same as an All That Glitters for example. In addition, Enchantments, especially for , can be easy to recur and protect in of themselves, though nothing really beats Heroic Intervention for that.

If you do go for this style of Vonltron, I recommend looking into Bruna, Light of Alabaster and Light-Paws, Emperor's Voice for this. Both of them lean hard into Auras, with the former allowing you to get them out of the graveyard during combat to offset removal losses, while the latter can quickly snowball into a hyper-lethal killing machine as it doubles up on what Auras you play.

The other, and far more popular way to make your Voltron creature amazing is through the use of Equipment. Equipment has the advantage of staying on the battlefield when the creature they were on dies, unless the card in question removes those as well. Eaten by Spiders is very... evocative, while Strip Bare is a hard counter to most Voltron decks.

Equipment also has (for the most part), the massive advantage of being colorless. No matter what your chosen attacking creature is, from Traxos, Scourge of Kroog to Cromat, you can still cast Mask of Avacyn and equip it to that creature. Now, yes, there are colored artifacts, and I will respect Vorpal Sword, Godsend, and Embercleave, the real strength of Equipment is on those that aren't colourless. However, if your deck does allow for such a thing, there is absolutely no reason you should ignore them at all. There are some excellent effects that are found in colored Equipment that you can't find on the colourless as thanks to some degree of respect for the color pie, cards with a color have certain options that those without do not have.

On the other hand, Artifacts are the second most easy card type to destroy in the game, with every color save having ready-made options from Shatterstorm to Nature's Chant. would rather try to Negate the Artifacts (and Auras) to make sure they don't become a threat in the first place, or Capsize them out of the battlefield at the most inopportune time.

The other issue with using Equipment is that while you can re-equip them to a creature that is either new or old, you have to pay for the equip costs every single time. And that cost can be ruinous as you pay for it either in bits and pieces, or try to desperately get your main creature back into the game.

Which leads into the last aspect that I want to touch on today. Cheating. No, not the kind of cheating that gets you black-balled from Events. Rather, looking at all the costs and bypassing them. Magnetic Theft is a one-time skipping of an Equip cost, and can be used to steal something from someone else before they take it back on their turn by equipping it to one of their creatures, but there's more to it that's come out over the past few years since I wrote the previous Voltron article.

I'm more thinking about cards like Sigarda's Aid, which bypass Equip costs when you cast an Equipment - and allow them all to be cast as Instant speed as well. By removing the need to pay for the equipping, Argentum Armor becomes far, far more useful than it was in my last Slow Grow deck, as that to put it onto a creature is a huge limitation, no matter the scale of the effect. Or cards like Syr Gwyn, Hero of Ashvale, who also reduce Equip costs for her Tribe, and Puresteel Paladin who has the effect that synergizes with having multiple artifacts in play.

Cloud Key is equally important, along with Foundry Inspector as they reduce the costs of the artifacts you care to cast, and the latter is also a creature you can equip things onto.

Cost reductions are vital for a lot of decks, and when you build your own Voltron styled deck, no matter the format, you need to keep an eye on how much things cost, because those costs can rise very quickly, and just as quickly price you out of your own game plan.

What do you guys think of Voltron? The good, the bad and the ugly. Comment below and discus!

So, thank you all for reading this expansion to my previous article from three and a half years ago, and I hope that you picked up a thing or two from it. Join me next week when I talk about something else. What, I don't know yet, but it will be something.

Until then please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!