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Feather | Mono Spellslinger Voltron | $20 Budget

Commander / EDH Aggro Budget Creatureless RW (Boros) Theme/Gimmick Voltron

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Power (27)

Utility (8)

Protection (16)

Control (9)

Land (36)

Commander (1)

Commander: foil Feather, the Redeemed

Draw (12)

Evasion (8)

Tired of getting your auras, equipment, and commander removed? Just want to smash with a huge creature? Boy have I got the thing for you: Spellslinger Voltron. Without having to rely on big permanents like Argentum Armor that take a bunch of setup to smash with, we can reliably protect and attack with our commander with the help of cheap instants and sorceries.

This is all possible with the newly spoiled Feather, the Redeemed . Her ability makes all of our instants and sorceries cast on our creatures return to our hand at EACH end step. This means sucky cards like Expedite or Defiant Strike become insanely good repeatable cantrips.

If you like the deck or idea, feel free to leave an upvote as any help is appreciated.

We can cycle through our deck with instants that cantrip when we play them. Most of the time, we don't even care about their effects other than that they draw a card. This means, when we start our turn 4 with Feather in play and Crimson Wisps in hand, we can spend all 4 of our mana over the course of ours and our opponents turns casting Wisps over and over again to draw a card each time. That's 4 mana to draw 4 cards which Boros has never seen the likes of before.

Don't be afraid to cycle a few of these cantrips on our opponents' creatures early if we need land drops, especially plains in order to play Feather on turn 3. We have a lot of them, and we only really need one cantrip to start drawing a bunch of cards.

Power

This is a Voltron deck, so of course we'll be winning with commander damage. Feather starts with 3 power, meaning ideally, we need to get her to at least 11 power and double strike to kill a player in a single turn. We have many cards that can help toward this outcome, and can consistently do it around turn 5+ (4 if we're lucky):

Turn 3 Feather, the Redeemed

Turn 4 Kill: Assault Strobe + Borrowed Hostility + Brute Force + Bull Rush

Turn 5, we regain all of those pump spells to kill or begin to kill another opponent.

Protection

To make sure Feather, our only creature, is protected in order to keep dealing damage each turn, we have a myriad of protection spells. These include cards that give her protection from colors to stop her from being targeted by our opponents' removal, give her indestructible to stop her from being destroyed or dying in combat, and blink her to protect from basically everything.

Evasion

Multiple cards we have grant trample, and Feather has innate flying. This means she's already really hard to block, but on top of that, our cards that grant protection can be used to make sure she isn't blocked.

Rituals

Cards like Mana Geyser and Desperate Ritual aren't recastable with Feather, but they do help our mana problems a bit. Mana is Feather's biggest weakness, so we need to minimize it as much as we can within the restrictions of the deck.

Strategy

To play it on the safer side, make sure to leave up mana to protect Feather as we don't want to spend all our mana killing someone just for our opponents to get rid of our only wincon. Speaking of which, Feather being removed is something we should never let happen. We have a good amount of protection, so we must make sure she's always alive to minimize the amount of mana we need to spend (on getting her back).

Another safety precaution is to wait on playing Feather until we have the mana to protect her. This is slow, but against a group that used to getting killed once she's out, they'll be on the lookout, so we should be as well. We have haste enablers, so playing her later won't always suck.

Also, if you're not used to playing Voltron, make sure you're playing to your strengths. Politics are useful to be sure you don't make too many enemies. People will often be happy to ally with you if it means they're protected against dying early.

  1. Magnetic Theft : Other Voltron decks are unacceptable. We will be the only one. This allows us to steal the fake voltron's equipment and give it to us. Nice masterpiece Darksteel Plate you have there opponent, it'd be a shame if it were used by a $20 budget deck. Keep in mind that our opponents still control the artifact, so beneficial effects like the untapping lands with Sword of Feast and Famine will still apply to our opponent when we deal damage with it. However, it's still usually preferable to deny our opponents the bonus power and grant it to ourselves by repeatedly giving their equipment to our commander.

  2. Intimidation Bolt : This is our repeatable Fog . It's expensive, especially when used over the course of multiple opponents' turns, but it can be a lifesaver.

  3. Niveous Wisps : This card looks bad at first glance, but it's primary use is the invaluable card draw. Just always be sure to use it when Feather is already tapped or you know you won't be needing her untapped. It can be used on an opponent's creature in a pinch.

  4. Chandra's Ignition : This is the most expensive CMC card in our deck, so it would have to be good. Thankfully, it's one of our best cards as a repeatable damage dealer and boardwipe.

As you may have noticed, other than our lands and Feather herself, this deck has no permanents. This is a deck-building restriction I'm using to make the deck more fun and interesting. If you feel like including equipment, auras, ramp, etc. that's fine to do (and might actually make the deck better lmao). However, some advantages come with playing mono-spellslinger:

  1. The spells we're using are dirt cheap. No one used to buy cards like Brute Force or Fall of the Hammer , so they're very inexpensive. Feather is one of the only commanders than can support a deck that doesn't need staple stuff like Sol Ring , Smothering Tithe , Insurrection , etc. to compete incredibly well.

  2. A lot of our opponents' removal and interaction will blank on us. Nearly all EDH decks play some form of artifact, enchantment, or creature removal. Because we don't play artifacts or enchantments and we have many ways to protect our only creature, they will have to use these cards on each other (making enemies for themselves). Even counterspells have very few targets in our deck. Other than our commander and a couple notable things like Aurelia's Fury , cards like Double Cleave will feel shitty for our opponents to counter when they know we have a bunch more and spent very little mana on it.

Some upgrades I recommend getting if you don't care about being Mono-Spellslinger and or have more of a budget (in no particular order):

  1. Sol Ring

  2. Better two-color lands

  3. Reliquary Tower and Thought Vessel

  4. Swiftfoot Boots but NOT Lightning Greaves : Shroud makes it so we can't target Feather with our own stuff. Hexproof is fine.

  5. Blasphemous Act

  6. Insurrection : It doesn't really synergize with our deck but it sometimes wins the game on its own.

  7. Grafted Exoskeleton

  8. Smothering Tithe

  9. Sunforger

  10. Aurelia's Fury

  11. Balduvian Rage

At the time I'm making this deck, 4/8/2019, tappedout says it comes out at $21.26, however, tappedout usually inflates the pricing a little bit compared to the real price. If you really are on a tight budget, make sure you're buying moderate to heavily played cards. This should probably cut the deck's price down to a little less than $20.

Also, this deck is especially flexible when it comes to card choice since most of the absolutely necessary cards are like $0.10 each. Cutting the more expensive cards might be a good idea depending on your budget.

In addition, Feather's price is currently $8 at preorder (DO NOT BUY HER AT THIS PRICE). She will inevitably go down as hype dies. I'm estimating she'll be around $3-5 at launch and $5-10 if she sees standard play (I don't play standard, I can't speculate on whether she will). However, if she doesn't see any standard play, she'll probably be $2 tops.

If you have any suggestions for card choices or ideas, please leave a comment and I'll reply soon. This deck is subject to change, especially since it's early and we're in the middle of a spoiler season at the moment.

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RIP Aurelia's Fury & Balduvian Rage — April 11, 2019
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Aurelia's Fury expectedly spiked due to obvious power with Feather; however, Balduvian Rage unfortunately did as well. Now that I'm looking at it, it makes a lot more sense because of its only printing in coldsnap. These losses are pretty sucky for the deck, but we're resilient to losing some pieces because of our redundancy.

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Revision 4 See all

(5 years ago)

+1 Accelerate main
Top Ranked
Date added 5 years
Last updated 5 years
Legality

This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)

2 - 0 Rares

17 - 0 Uncommons

50 - 0 Commons
Cards 100
Avg. CMC 1.80
Folders Budget EDH, Budget, Resources, EDH ideas, Cristi, Decks to think about, Decks, Decks to suss, feather_the_redeemed--spellslinger, Budget Commander / EDH
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