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Commander: Rule 0 Mono-Red

GoblinsBeatElves

Exile (23)

• 1x Spinerock Knoll
• 1x Birgi, God of Storytelling  ^Flip
• 1x Chaos Wand
• 1x Crush the Weak
• 1x Flameskull
• 1x Furious Rise
• 1x Galvanic Relay
• 1x Jeska's Will
• 1x Laelia, the Blade Reforged
• 1x Light Up the Stage
• 1x Prophetic Flamespeaker
• 1x Valakut Exploration
• 1x Chandra, Fire Artisan
• 1x Chandra, Torch of Defiance
• 1x Chaos Channeler
• 1x Ignite the Future
• 1x Outpost Siege
• 1x Tectonic Giant
• 1x Vance's Blasting Cannons  ^Flip
• 1x Stolen Strategy
• 1x Syr Carah, the Bold
• 1x Etali, Primal Storm
• 1x Dream Pillager

CardAdvantage (8)

• 1x Bonders' Enclave
• 1x War Room
• 1x Magus of the Wheel
• 1x Valakut Awakening  ^Flip
• 1x Wheel of Misfortune
• 1x Reforge the Soul
• 1x Urabrask the Hidden
• 1x Wandering Archaic  ^Flip

Wincons (4)

• 1x Laelia, the Blade Reforged
• 1x Stolen Strategy
• 1x Chandra, Awakened Inferno
• 1x Etali, Primal Storm

Interaction (15)

• 1x Chaos Warp
• 1x Crush the Weak
• 1x Deflecting Swat
• 1x Viashino Heretic
• 1x Bolt Bend
• 1x Chain Reaction
• 1x Chandra, Torch of Defiance
• 1x Fiery Confluence
• 1x Nevinyrral's Disk
• 1x Transmogrify
• 1x Hour of Devastation
• 1x Chandra, Awakened Inferno
• 1x All is Dust
• 1x Scour from Existence
• 1x Blasphemous Act

Lands (38)

• 1x Ancient Tomb
• 1x Bonders' Enclave
• 1x Desert of the Fervent
• 1x Forgotten Cave
• 28x Mountain
• 1x Myriad Landscape
• 1x Scavenger Grounds
• 1x Smoldering Crater
• 1x Spinerock Knoll
• 1x Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
• 1x Valakut Awakening  ^Flip

Support (5)

• 1x Birgi, God of Storytelling  ^Flip
• 1x Blood Moon
• 1x Hazoret's Monument
• 1x Magus of the Moon
• 1x Throes of Chaos

Commander (1)

Ramp (15)

• 1x Ancient Tomb
• 1x Myriad Landscape
• 1x Commander's Sphere
• 1x Cursed Mirror
• 1x Darksteel Ingot
• 1x Jeska's Will
• 1x Seething Song
• 1x Skyclave Relic
• 1x Worn Powerstone
• 1x Leyline Tyrant
• 1x Solemn Simulacrum
• 1x Treasonous Ogre
• 1x Gilded Lotus
• 1x Mana Geyser
• 1x Rousing Refrain

Combo (4)

• 1x Flamekin Harbinger
• 1x Impact Tremors
• 1x Runaway Steam-Kin
• 1x Grinning Ignus

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Note: I'm aware that Wild-Magic Sorcerer is not a legal commander. This deck was mostly built for fun, and as a submission for the 'Orctober' deckbuilding challenge on the DeckTuner discord server (choose any nonlegendary orc in MTG, and build a creative deck around it). This definitely isn't intended to be a competitive deck, but hopefully it can hold it's own in a more casual meta.

P.S. DeckTuner is a really great community, and fantastic resource for fine-tuning on your EDH decks. Come check us out: https://discord.gg/4UK9njMdvB

Gameplan

This deck aims to exile cards for value, and eventually cast 3 cmc cards with our commander out to tutor into one of our three combo pieces, Flamekin Harbinger (tutoring Grinning Ignus), Impact Tremors, and Runaway Steam-Kin. We build the deck with an artificial restriction of only having 3 cmc or higher nonland cards in our deck, so we guarantee a hit on one of pieces with every 3 cmc card we cast from exile. And with our commander wanting to exile stuff anyways, it shouldn't be hard to impulse draw and find some that are 3 cmc.

It was inspired by the cascade Footfalls/Living End decks of modern that I know all too well. If you're not familiar with the decks, the decks aim to use cascade spells (Shardless Agent type stuff) to cast a spell with no mana cost like Crashing Footfalls or Living End, and not having any other cards with cmc 2 or less in the deck, so you guarantee a hit on one of your no-mana cost cards, without having to go the normal suspend route.

Looking around online, I found a few attempts at building one of those types of decks in commander with Maelstrom Wanderer, but being restricted to only play cards 8 mana and up just seems like a bad idea. With Wild-Magic Sorcerer, I think the cascade strategy from other formats might be at least somewhat viable, if only at a more casual level.

The Combo

The combo I chose to use for this deck was Grinning Ignus + Impact Tremors + Runaway Steam-Kin . I tried to find the combo with the lowest cmc pieces I could, to minimize the downside of only being able to play cards above that mana value (for the cascade plan to work). Flamekin Harbinger acts as the third cascade target alongside Tremors and Steam-kin, to tutor up Ignus, allowing us to play 3 cmc cards in our deck.

After we have Tremors and Steam-kin on the battlefield, we can cast Ignus for 3 mana, spend 4 to return it to hand (-1 net mana), repeat this process two more times (-3 net mana), remove three counters from Steam-kin to give us 3 mana (0 net mana), and repeat the sequence as many times as we want. We will have to have 3 mana to start the combo before Steam-kin helps refund us, but after it starts going, we ping our opponents to death with Tremors.

Grinding Station + Mana Crypt + Underworld Breach (combined with something like Reckless Fireweaver is the only other mono-red combo that was entirely under 2 mana, and I did like that it enabled you to play a mana rock as part of it, but the issue with that one was that it doesn’t necessary always win you the game. Sometimes, you’ll run out of cards to mill before an opponent’s life total hit 0, which just made it too variant for what I was going for. In addition, that combo requires cascading 4 times to find all the pieces, with makes the combo plan a bit slower.

Exile effects

Impulse draw (exile ___, you may cast some cards from exile) is the backbone of this deck, allowing us to cast spells from exile, triggering our commander, and cascading into the combo pieces. I won't go through every spell in detail here, since there's a lot, but they're all under the 'exile' category in the deck viewer here.

Ramp/Interaction/Card Advantage

The bread and butter of any EDH deck, we're obviously going to need some ramp and interaction if we want to make this deck work. Unforunately, this is probably where our 3+ cmc only plan hits us the hardest.

Not being able to play cards like Sol Ring, Arcane Signet, and Mana Crypt hurts, but given we're not playing this is a super competitive meta, we're probably going to be okay, it'll just be a slow first few turns. Although we can't play most of the cheap mana rocks/ramp, there are still some decent options at 3 cmc or higher that we can use, which I've listed under the 'ramp category' here.

Interaction is difficult with the 3 cmc restriction, as any cards like Pyroblast, Earthquake, or maybe Tibalt's Trickery are out of the question. Still, we have some decent options, including some spells that cost less or are free if we meet a criteria, such as Blasphemous Act, Bolt Bend, and Deflecting Swat. For once we're actually glad those cards have a naturally high cmc! Most of the other cards are some decent interaction I could find given the restrictions, with one stand out member being Crush the Weak. It's a pretty bad boardwipe, but does have the added utility of having foretell, which, importantly, casts from exile. Therefore, if we have our commander out, we can cast Crush the Weak and immediately tutor up a combo piece, since it's 3 cmc! Pretty cool, I think.

As far as card advantage, we obviously have the ton of impulse draw, but there's a few decent non-exile related options in the deck too. Wheels like Magus of the Wheel and Reforge the Soul can hopefully give us a bit more gas to play if we're run out of cards, and most of the others are either mono-red spells that let us get a few more cards in our hand (like the back side of Wandering Archaic  , or engines we trigger off if we need the cards (such as War Room or Bonders' Enclave).

Alternate Wincons

As hard as we can try to combo off, sometimes it won't always come to fruition, so it's good to have some back-up wincons in case something disrupts our combo.

Etali, Primal Storm, Chaos Wand, and Stolen Strategy all function essentially the same way in our deck, stealing our opponent's (hopefully splashy) stuff and letting us use it against them. Not predictable at all, but we can potentially get some value off of these and win the game through that.

Laelia, the Blade Reforged is great in our deck, since it allows us to both get some impulse draw, and grow bigger every time we exile stuff, which we aim to be doing a lot in this deck. Laelia can sometimes grow big enough where they'll be able to close out the game on their own.

Finally, Chandra, Awakened Inferno is mostly just in the deck for value and the minus abilities (having access to repeatable removal is pretty nice, as there's not a ton of options in mono red with our cmc restriction), but the plus ability should be able to help us close out the game if we need, albeit slow.

Combo Support

In addition to the rest of the deck, this deck has some cards meant to support the combo game plan a bit.

Wild-Mage Sorcerer, our commander, is our means of finding the combo pieces, since we can cast a 3 cmc card from exile and guarantee we hit one piece.

Blood Moon, Magus of the Moon, and Urubrask the Hidden help to hopefully slow the game down a bit and give us time to execute our game plan.

Birgi, God of Storytelling   is a replacement effect for Runaway Steam-Kin in the combo, or helps us be mana positive if we have Steam-kin out as well. While it can’t be tutored up with the cascade plan, it does give a bit of redundancy to the combo.

Hazoret's Monument lets us filter through our deck whenever we play a red creature spell, counting Grinning Ignus. This allows us to infinitely loot to find Impact Tremors if we already have it, Ignus, and Steam-kin on the field, making us able to combo off a turn sooner, since we don’t have to wait to cascade and get Impact Tremors.

Finally, Throes of Chaos let’s us tutor up one of our combo pieces, if we have our commander on the field. We can only hit either a 3 cmc spell or a combo piece, and if we hit a 3 cmc spell, our commander will notice it was cast from exile and cascade into a combo piece from it. It serves to be able to tutor up multiple pieces in one turn (since our commander can only do 1 per turn), and so accelerate the combo a little bit.

Date added	3 years
Last updated	3 years
Key combos	Grinding Station + Mana Crypt + Underworld Breach Grinning Ignus + Impact Tremors + Runaway Steam-Kin
Legality	This deck is Commander: Rule 0 legal.
Rarity (main - side)	7 - 0 Mythic Rares 41 - 0 Rares 16 - 0 Uncommons 8 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	3.89
Tokens	Copy Clone, Emblem Chandra, Awakened Inferno, Emblem Chandra, Torch of Defiance, Foretell