Notes:
Though many decks have Fblthp as a combo piece with
Proteus Staff
or
Laboratory Maniac
and
Jace, Wielder of Mysteries
or other cards of the like, I don't like infinite combos much, especially lazy ones such as this, and I believe that there are other commanders that can still be budget and accomplish this much better (safer and more likely, but maybe not faster) I do see the apeal of the combo with Fblthp's cost being very cheap and him drawing you cards, but I don't think it's consistent enough, or entertaining enough. If this deck makes it to the contest I hope you feel the same, I will admit I have seen some pretty decent combo decks for very cheap in my studies.
I am also not a huge fan of tribal decks (though some niche ones are interesting like angels or pegasuses, pegasi?) If you wanted to do homunculus tribal, Fblthp is probably the best canidate, with the only other being
Zndrsplt, Eye of Wisdom
who is more suited to coin flipping and stuff, but gives you access to red with his partner commander.
Spells can't target only Fblthp or they fizzle when he is shuffled away before they resolve. Unless you want them to fizzle.
Since Fblthp costs 2 he will almost always come out on turn 2 to draw you a card. For this reason mana ramp is sometimes better than mana ramp; but only sometimes. It detracts from storming off if you're into that.
To get full effect from playing Fblthp, the idea is to shuffle him in and try to play him from your library, and sometimes from your hand, but generally not from the command zone. Cards related to casting from the command zone should be excluded, and the focus of the deck should be casting Fblthp from deck, and effects related to casting from the top of your deck, etc. However most of these effects reveal the top card of your library, so playing politically is encouraged, as well as not playing anything that will make your death a priority (though I can't think of many budget things that would do that, many krakens or leviathans I imagine would.)
Polymorph
-ing Fblthp however, is not a bad strategy due to him being shuffled into the library to pull another creature, but you can't do it with
Polymorph
because it will fizzle, and ideally you do not want to sacrifice Fblthp with similar effects, because his usefulness as a cantrip is then effectivly lost, and you might as well be playing
Jalira, Master Polymorphist
as your commander instead.
If you wanted to run a more spells focused deck you could probably run
God-Eternal Kefnet
as your commander instead too (though that card will probably never be budget, just like
Sen Triplets
:( sad ) and it's still advantageous to run many spells in Fblthp.
Precognition Field
is a card of contention for me for this reason, because it doesn't let you cast Fblthp, but it does give you access to a lot of top deck card casting, which is a primary theme of this deck.
Another wall i've run into is with mass bounce like
Whelming Wave
or
Engulf the Shore
because they bounce everything. Returning Fblthp to your hand, while not a negative is ultimately not the goal (and really not in the spirit) of the deck. It creates problems however when you bounce your tokens, blue is very good at creating token copies of things, and bouncing your opponents best creature and your copy of it isn't great unless their creature is also a token. So not only do these cards not really fit with the commander, but they also prevent you from using a whole variety of good cards. Also needing to cast
Magus of the Future
again is kind of a bummer. Multi-target bounce is still fine, even if it poses as a weakness to hexproof or shroud creatures, they were going to be a threat anyway.
So key pieces in this deck are obviously cards that help you cast Fblthp from your deck like
Future Sight
, but if you were to generate infinite mana with some nonsense, you could cast every card that isn't a land from the top, and if you were to draw or scry you could go quite deep. More reasons to play the lab man and new jace, but you could just do this for value, after all it's still difficult to get the combo. Like playing Godo and Helm and 98 lands.
Counter spells in this deck are weaker too for the top deck reasons, so I think a more creature-based strategy could go over well, stealing them and copying them and flickering or bouncing them (not the tokens of course) as that is kind of your aim anyway with the multi-target spells, most of them are bounce for fblthp, if you don't want to bounce enemy creatures then you can bounce more of your own.
