Pattern Recognition #337 - Not Pauper, But Really Cheap Commander

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

29 August 2024

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!

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And welcome back everyone! Today's article is brought to you by a fun tournament I went to last week that had a couple special rules to help try and make thing different from the norm. The first was that every deck had to cost less than $100.00 USD as per Card Kingdom when deck-checks were done. To that end, it was highly recommended that each player prepare their deck and have it listed on the ManaBox App for ease of reference. In addition, there were no infinite combos allowed. This wasn't to say that you couldn't have the pieces for one, but you couldn't fire it off.

This was a ranked tournament, where at each table, first got 4 points, second got three and so on and so fourth. However, for the whole of the evening, if your chosen Commander wasn't in the top 150 most popular Commanders according to EDHrec - or Nadu, who at the time of this writing was ranked 223 - then you got a bonus point. In addition, if your deck came in at under $50.00 US, you got an additional bonus point. Also, Basic Lands didn't count for your deck's cost.

So I went to a couple places online and I took the rules with me and solicited suggestions. The most common refrain was some manner of Boros Voltron as there are a lot of cheap equipment, and the Commanders for that tend to be well out of the most popular because of the lack of Infinites.

One cheeky person suggested I run Zhang Fei, Fierce Warrior, and 24 dollars of commons. I politely told them off with an equally cheeky understanding that they weren't being serious. After all, it's $150ish!

I acknowledged their advice, and made my choice.

Ghalta, Primal Hunger

Ghalta is cheap, only $2.29, and is very simple. Ramp and slam face. A huge body and some cheap combat tricks means one-shotting someone with Commander damage is an incredibly viable strategy, and for the most part, I was already familiar with the deck as I have it built as my "Teaching New Players" Commander deck.

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Here is the base from which I started. Naturally, to trim costs, I removed The Great Henge and a few of the more expensive cards, added in some more creature-based mana ramp and a couple sources of Double Strike, like Fire Shrieker and Brass Knuckles to really drive Ghalta home. I took it to a couple of Friday Night Magics to see how it performed, and realized I was missing Enchantment/Artifact removal, so I wound up trading in Naturalize, Return to Nature and even a Tranquility for removal. Lessons learned!

But, as Sun Tzu wrote, All Warfare is Based on Deception.

I built a Ghalta deck. I tested a Ghalta deck against more powerful decks. I made it clear what I was doing even when I rolled it onto Cockatrice for a couple games as well.

I went to the tournament with this as my Commander...

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As of this writing, this specific Partner matchup is ranked #1426 on EDH.rec, and the Commanders cost about $6.00 between the two of them. Yes, I went with Boros Voltron in the end because it's a deck archetype that is near and dear to my heart and I know what I'm doing with it. And the arguments put forward by my sounding boards were compelling and agreeable. So I advertised one deck, and rolled up with a similar, but definitely different deck.

Building the deck was both quite easy and quite hard at the same time. It was easy in that I already knew what I was doing, how the deck worked and interacted with itself and a lot of other decks. On the other hand, it was hard because I had to make a lot of painful and harsh cuts of cards that I would have loved to have had, and then replace them with cheaper versions or just different cards entirely.

The first and most important thing about a Voltron deck, after the Commander(s), is the quantity and quality of the Equipment and Auras that go into it. For this deck, cards that I would have included without a second thought, including Shadowspear, Lavaspur Boots, Swiftfoot Boots and the like were simply too expensive to really use. I had to go with options that were better suited to my design goals.

I wanted the deck to come in under $50.

My first goal was as much in the way of equipment that was cheap on the mana value and the cost. You see, I knew that I would be drawing fire from my opponents, so I had to be prepared to re-equip my Commander the hard way, and not depending on Ardenn's cheating to do so. There are far too many decks that depend on a single trick to win, and if that trick is gone, the deck is useless. So I have to be prepared to deal with problems both active and passive, and in this case, the Equipment is intended to be cheap. Yes, there are exceptions, like the mistake of Colossus Hammer in this deck which really shouldn't have been in here, but for the most part, no cost under . Hero's Blade is an exception as it's great on the re-casting of a Commander for the free equip. Brass Knuckles provided me with Double Strike for an upfront cost of , but I accepted that as an outlier as well.

In the end, I wound up with nearly 30 Equipment that met my criteria, with Colossus Hammer, Champion's Helm, Mask of Avacyn, Blackblade Reforged and Loxodon Warhammer being over a dollar each. With my self-imposed goal, each card this expensive meant dollar value cuts elsewhere, and I'm sure when you look at the final deck list, it'll show.

Next, was the backup creatures. Having a solid Commander pairing is all well and good, but I needed backup plans and contingencies, and if there's anything anyone who has ever seen me deckbuild has watched me do, is have at least two alternates for everything I do. Heck, my Ghalta deck held Goreclaw, Terror of Qal Sisma, Ulvenwald Oddity  ^Flip, and Rampaging Brontodon for use when Ghalta was down and out.

And this deck was no exception. While Sram, Senior Edificer was cut, Champion of the Flame, Goblin Gaveleer and Valduk, Keeper of the Flame all work very well with the mass of Equipment I planned on having. People will jump on the obvious threats like Danitha Capashen, Paragon, or Bruenor Battlehammer that they'll skip the far more lethal cards still to come.

From there, having plans for when things go wrong is all well and good, but I should also look into making sure that it won't happen in the first place. A suite of Protection spells (and some equipment) are necessary. I threw in six such spells, from Blacksmith's Skill to hopefully protect Equipment, to Gods Willing and Shelter to help with more active protections on my Commander. In addition, Protection means the creature can't be blocked, which meant that in a late-game pinch, I can bypass blockers to kill someone. Hopefully. Selfless Samurai and Selfless Savior rounded my options out.

Sun Titan was a surprisingly cheap option to include, and the ability to recur cheap permanents meant that he could get back pretty much all of my equipment and creatures if needed. Slow, but still viable.

I had room for nine card draw spells, including Akiri, Fearless Voyager as well as a pretty standard suite of 's 'Discard and Draw' spells that should be familiar to anyone in that color and format. I added a splash of removal, but nowhere near enough, and a couple of combat tricks for people who thought I was too pure into Equipment, and called it a day.

In fact, here is the final deck:

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Note the Lands. A little on the heavy side, and all Basics. As I told people, I was running my mana-base Pre-2000. Which meant all Basics and no Rocks. This was a huge money saver in the end as even the cheapest of dual lands would have added to my budget and I was already pushing $49 last week.

But the biggest weakness of the deck was threat removal. I just didn't have any, which bit me in the ass a couple times. I couldn't throw down any sort of spot removal for creatures or better yet, mass removal and I think I could have trimmed a couple of equipment for things like Angelic Ascension, Argentum Armor, Brightflame, or things like that. It wouldn't have helped in the long run given what I faced, but that was that.

But I suppose that now that I've talked about the deck, it's time to go over my rounds.

ROUND 1 - FIGHT!

With 22 people in the tournament, we wound up with four tables of 4 and two tables of 3. First round, I was at a table of three with Killian, Ink Duelist and Ygra, Eater of All. As it turns out, I was one of four players who managed to get both bonus points, which was pretty nice. Anyway, three decks that were all about making your Commander Huge And Swingy meant that the game was relatively fast paced.

Except that the Killian deck was running Auras, and they discovered to their amusement that when you Pacifism my Kediss when Ardenn was on the table, I can move the Pacifism off of Kediss without issue. And my turn 1 drop of Hedgewitch's Mask would mean that my opponent's Commanders couldn't block my chosen Commander after they were sufficiently big.

I was able to batter down Killian with Kediss before he was able to come up with a response, then it was me and the Wolf. And no, I don't care about your grammar rules!

But the effort to take down Killian meant that Ygra was in a position to take me down as I was out of chump-blockers, and stuck on five mana to fail to drop Sun Titan for infinite Selfless Saviors and thus infinite blockers of his Commander. So with no cards in hand, I draw Strength-Testing Hammer and Equip it. There's nothing to it, so I decide to go out in a blaze of glory and attack. I roll a Four on the hammer, but Ardenn isn't more powerful than Ygra so I don't draw another card. I swing at my opponent, who blocks with everything, and we count up the damage.

He has one health left over after the swing.

ONE.

If I had rolled a five or six on the Hammer, I would have won, but I didn't! A 1/3 chance of winning, and I didn't see it because I was too focused on the Commander damage, not regular collateral damage from my Commander combination. But if he didn't block with everything, then I would have killed him with Commander damage, so he couldn't just Food his way back to more health when I swung.

I took the crackback and took second place.

ROUND 2 - FIGHT!

It's me, Sauron, Lord of the Rings, Riku of Many Paths, and Hamza, Guardian of Arashin. Hamza and myself are two of the four sub-$50 card decks. We all reveal our Commanders, the Riku player looks at mine in more detail because he's never seen that before. I show him. Hamza is off to a very bad start, so I get some free damage in on him, and the rest of the table realizes what is happening very quickly. The game quickly devolves into a game of Archenemy and they work together to lock me down. Riku goes on the offense against me with his Trampling Commander, Sauron starts rolling control against me to keep me from building up further and Hamza presents removal in case I go for the easy kill. I come in forth, but it was well fought.

ROUND 3 - FIGHT

It was getting late, and I needed to go to work in the morning, so I wasn't giving it my A game. I do remember that the blue player to my left had the single worst threat assessment that I have ever seen given his early removal of cards to my player's left and across from me, leaving me to develop enough to be a threat. Even a 5/5 Double Striker is lethal when my left has Sunken Hope in play and I have a spare creature to bounce without worry. I get everyone down to 'Oh crap, anyone gets hit and we're all dead' status, and it's Archenemy all over again and I lose. Oh well, them's the breaks. In summary, and from talking to people afterward, people were very complimentary of my deck. It was extremely lethal for the restrictions I had placed on it, and a lot of people were surprised I was able to keep it as cheap as I had. Going to the full $100 limit would have allowed me to add a lot of good cards to the deck to give me a bit more oomph and speed to get lethal on more people. Sadly, it wasn't the case. Had fun though! I still have the deck beside me, and I think I might tweak it for FNM this friday. I think it'll be time to get _mean_.

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Thank you all for reading! Please leave your comments below, and I look forward to talking with you about my subject matter. Join me next week when I talk about something! What? I don't know yet! Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job (now), but more income is always better, and I can use it to buy cards! 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!