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Lover of Shiny Things [A Primer]

Commander / EDH Casual Control GWU (Bant) Midrange Value Engine

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Creature (29)

Instant (13)

Sorcery (9)

Artifact (3)

Commander (1)

Commander: Lagrella, the Magpie

Land (36)

Enchantment (7)

Maybeboard

Creature (31)

Sorcery (7)

Instant (4)

Land (1)

Artifact (6)

Enchantment (3)

Planeswalker (1)

TLDW: Hate cats, not Magpies

The Magpie exhibits a repertoire of chatters, whistles, trills, and warbles. Upon cursory inspection, Lagrella appears like other birds of similar color, but she is much more complex!

Lagrella's playstyle can have a lot of depth. She displays characteristics to support an ETB strategy with little bit more to spice things up and keep your opponents on their toes. This deck is an attempt to create an interesting, casual but strong, Lagrella.

Back when I played Magic Arena, I was provided a preconstructed Azorius Control deck with Dovin's Acuity and the Instants with the Addendum ability. I really enjoyed this style of play. My aggro opponents would come out the gate swinging and I would parry their threats by absorbing some damage, playing some combat tricks, gaining life incrementally, and unsummoning their attackers, while drawing just enough cards to ensure that I would hit my land drop every turn. Turtle play, essentially. With the modest lifegain and card draw, I could stall and turn a game from having 1 life left to my opponent out of gas and topdecking. Then, with my hand full of cards, I would start regaining life, drop in a Dream Trawler and watch for the inevitable resignation. I wanted to capture the same feeling in EDH and Bant flicker/blink value was where I ended up. I was planning on using Roon up to now, but lo and behold, Capenna brought us Lagrella, the Magpie! This new uncommon commander was exciting and I quickly got to brainstorming.

Deck Philosophy: Like a lot of mid-range decks, we accept early potshots, accumulating value through ETB triggers. We play for the late game. Core themes include value blickering, life padding, and control.

I’ve put together a rough decklist of physical cards I have as a foundation and I have gotten the ball rolling on analysis and general direction. At this point, I will not limit the direction in which this deck can develop. I very much enjoy constructive discussion and I know there are others who have played Bant Flicker for longer than I have and can offer valuable insight. As I test the deck in my meta and acquire additional cards, I will swap them out and update the change log. Cards in the Maybeboard are either my own ideas or the community's suggestions, which I intend to explore and test.

Thanks for stopping by and your contributions/feedback are appreciated!

My Meta:
Competitiveness: Casual, Tuned (no infinite loops)
Budget: Moderate (limited fast mana, land base < Shocklands)
Styles: Aggro, voltron, copy spells, jank
Commanders: Kalamax, Feather, Adeline, Dina, Phenax, Zedruu, Rograkh/Keleth, Ludevic, Ruxa, Shorikai, Kaza, Prosper...

From my background in chess playing and coaching, I start my planning by initially observing and then following that up with analysis . That will be the structure that our analysis of Lagrella takes on. To start off, a few characteristics can be spotted:

  • Mana Value = 3
  • Mana value consists of only colored pips
  • Vanilla 2/3 Body with no keywords
  • A unique ETB ability that can be confusing upon reading at first. The gist of it is: when she comes into the battlefield, for each player, choose up to one target creature to hold hostage in exile until she leaves the battlefield. You can't choose her.
  • NO built-in card advantage
  • She puts (2) +1/+1 counters on your creature when it comes back into play
  • She has an aquarium in the background

Let's draw some ideas from each of the characteristics listed above.

We have access to blue, green, and white. Blue is powerful in card draw and preventative control. Green is powerful in ramping our resources and giving us access to tall creatures. White gives us excellent spot removal and board wipes as well as lifegain. All together, we are in colors that encourage ramping our resources, digging deep in our deck, surviving, and controlling. Many of these actions are attached to creatures in the form of enters-the-battlefield triggered abilities. We will use as many of these as possible, especially because these colors also give us some of the best flicker/blink effects in the game. A possible plan may be to focus on accumulating value, surviving with lifegain, and controlling big threats until we're able to drop one of our finishers or run our opponents out of gas, which is when we can pull ahead.
Lagrella, unlike Roon, can come down quite quickly. We should have no problem dropping her into play with a minimal ramp package. One awkward characteristic of 3-drop commanders is that curving into them is not a smooth process. We can play a land turn 1, a land with a Signet/Talisman on turn 2, and we have to wait until turn 3 to cast her, which we would have been able to do with no ramp and just hitting all our land drops. However, as we will look at later, We are not looking to drop our commander in play as quickly as possible.
Something we should consider when building her is that she demands one pip of each color. A moderate color-fixing package may be required to make sure we have the correct pips for both her and the other cards we choose to play in the same round of turns.
Lagrella doesn't boast strong stats or have built-in evasion or protection. This makes her quite lackluster in combat. We know this and our opponents know this. We can do either one of two things. We lean into what she is on paper and play into our opponents' expectations or we buff her up at instant speed and go for commander damage. Unfortunately, cards like Hatred are not available in Bant and I think Colossification is too slow and janky.
Here we have it, the main ability we play Lagrella for. We have an advantage over our opponents, because most Magic players at your local LGS are bad at reading and comprehension. When they understand finally what she does, they will rage and we will smile.

The Magpie has a triggered ability when she enters the battlefield. Her ability is like a Fiend Hunter that holds up to one creature hostage in exile for each player (yes, that includes a creature you control). When an exiled creature enters the battlefield under your control this way, you put 2 +1/+1 counters on it. Note that with the way she's worded, we can't blink her with her ability on the stack and permanently exile things like the old Oblivion Ring. She is written more like Banishing Light

So what do we do with this? She can hold key creatures hostage or be used as a removal spell for each of your opponents' commanders. She can also hold one of our creatures and bring it back to the battlefield, like a really slow blink effect. So we want to have a lot of creatures with impactful ETB effects. All this means we are probably not looking to drop her very early. We want to ideally drop a creature or two in with ETB trigger abilities and then play her when we really need to control some creatures and get some vale out of our ETB effects.

But wait! We can exploit a rule in our favor. Creatures entering the battlefield from exile come into play under their owners' control unless explicitly stated otherwise. Lagrella exiles creatures controlled by different players. What if our opponents each controlled creatures that we owned? We could exile 1 from each of them and have them return to the battlefield under our control. Now we're getting into it! We can play a variety of creature control-swapping effects and get our creatures back by casting or flickering/blinking our commander.

Nice. Now let's go a little deeper. How will our opponents adapt when we pull out our commander to play a game of EDH? In a pod with little familiarity with our entire deck, they are bound to think that we're going to use our commander to imprison their best creatures. They may even be afraid that we will spot remove their commander. That will likely cause them to wait a bit to drop their important pieces on the board until they have some kind of creature removal/protection. For decks relying on creatures, we will effectively slow down the game playing like this. We don't mind this. We like to play slow, accumulate value, and control key pieces. The nice thing is that we always have a control threat in the command zone and that will prevent people from overcommitting. But once they remove her once, then the feeling of relief overcomes them and they will start committing to the board. That is where symmetrical bounce spells come in. There are many layers to piloting this deck. Just watch your opponents and get a feel for how they are making decisions, when they are hesitating, and when they are starting to play more freely and you can adjust your strategy accordingly.

Lagrella doesn't draw us cards or help us dig deeper into our deck. Therefore, it's prudent to include a suite of creatures that can do this, ideally as part of an ETB trigger.
This is the area I've done the least analysis on. Fathom Mage was pointed out as a cheap Mulldrifter when returning from Lagrella's effect. Section needs more work.
Lagrella comes from Streets of New Capenna. Disrespect her and you will be sleeping with the fishes. Believe it. You can literally see what are presumably Piranhas in the background of her image. Therefore, we are obligated to include water/wave themed cards so our opponents feel like they are drowning. This is not Pokemon, but every time we play a water spell, we exclaim "Sleep with the fishes" in our best gangster accent.
We have to build a foundation for this deck where we can dig for our answers over the long term. Below are the pieces we are currently playing in the card advantage suite, categorized by how strong I feel they are. It's worth noting that Mulldrifter, Soul of the Harvest, and Reveillark can trigger Risen Reef, which is synergy worth exploring. I am a big fan of the ETB Lifegain/Card Draw/Flying bodies. I think they offer a nice payoff which can be repeatedly used and they can block well. The lifegain itself doesn't put us closer to victory, but it pads our life total to get us through the early game. A lot of our early game involves ramping and building our resources so it's nice to have the lifegain to recover from the attacks we're going to absorb in the early game. If you're facing voltron, save some control pieces to buy some time against it. Finally, a lot of these creatures can be picked up from the death trigger on Reveillark, which is another reason to include them.

At the time of writing, about 1/4 of the deck is sitting in the 4-5 Mana Value range. We are going to need a solid ramp package to pull us through to the middle game, where we start putting down our value pieces and begin blinking them in and out for value. A lot of these cards are primarily in the generic card advantage category and have a chance to ramp instead of draw so they are not reliable. It's likely that we will need more solid cards in this category. It may be controversial, but I don't think Sad Robot is very good. It's overcosted for the only ability we truly care about, which is the ETB effect. The following are cards in this category:

This is one of the spicy categories. We can exchange our creatures for our opponents' and then blink/flicker them back to our side as long as we are using the correct cards. Many cards in this category haven't made it into physical copies yet and are sitting in the Maybeboard, which is a good place to check for these type of effects. We should run a modest suite of these effects as our commander can always get value our of them.

This is one of our strongest aspects not only because we are Bant, but because we always have access to a creature imprison effect in our command zone. This lurking pressure should cause our opponents to play more carefully, which in itself is an advantage we can play around. We will build another layer of control in our creature ETBs so we can have multiple avenues of removing big threats. I think we have to discriminate on how we use these control pieces. The threat is always stronger than the execution. There should be plenty of life padding built in to keep us from succumbing to aggro so use the control pieces sparingly and only when necessary. It should be mentioned that creature swap is a pseudo-control effect and should be considered as a supplement to this category. If you can't get rid of it, take it for yourself!

Sometimes an incisive warning is not enough to keep our opponents from disrespecting us. At this point, we have no choice but to take them out for a swim with some complementary concrete shoes. We will employ a variety of water & wave themed cards to drown them in hopelessness. Can our opponents adapt to the looming threat of a prison effect in the command zone? How about the spot removal we use to hamper them further? No problem, you say? Okay, what if we steal your creatures? Still doing fine? If our opponents get past all that, they will surely be relieved to finally build their board state up. At this point, we get to the next phase of our control and play our wave cards for mass board lift to hand. The strategy behind symmetrical board lifts works extremely well for this deck. On a strictly creature-based consideration, when we lift the board, we break parity because everyone is even in creature count, but we still gained from our ETB value abilities, drawing cards, playing extra lands, and gaining life. Moreover, we should be able to rebuild our board faster than our opponents can, which should increase our lead. There is also an outrageous nuclear option included here. Use wisely as it will cause utter devastation. We have a total of 6 here at the moment and should probably cut down to 4.

Our utility suite is too vast to list here and will have to be elaborated on in the future. The utility choices generally fall into these categories:

  • Recursion
  • Flicker/Blink Enablers
  • Life Padding
  • Card/Mana Advantage
In every grindy EDH deck I make, I tend to have approximately 4 win conditions. I found that to be the sweet spot. Here are the current win conditions in the deck:

  • Dream Trawler: Ahh, the classic Azorius Control Beatdown card. This card is seriously difficult to remove once it sticks to the board. Our plentiful hand will feed the hexproof ability and board wipes can be dodged by blinking it. This creature gives you massive lifegain swings. I will elaborate more on this card as I get some games in with my group. There are some synergies that are not so obvious at first.
  • Swans of Bryn Argoll: What in the world are these birds going to do, help our opponents draw cards? What is this? Only Swans players will understand. Will elaborate more on this at a later date as well.
  • Approach of the Second Sun: We've got enough resilience to support an Approach victory
  • UNDECIDED: I really don't know what this last one should be yet. I was thinking about globally enabling maximum hand size and using cards like Iron Maiden to punish, but this slot is still open.
I recognize that there are some cards that I would like to swap out. Since I mainly move cards around on Cardsphere, it takes some time to get specific cards. I've listed these planned swaps below or just listed the cards I would consider replacing.

  • Eternal Witness for Archaeomancer (Strict Upgrade)
  • Diluvian Primordial (Not sure how good this is, needs testing)
  • Ixidron (Thought it would be interesting since I can reliably flip my cards over, but not sure how good it is)
  • Mystic Snake (Not sure how good this is, needs testing)
  • Meddling Mage (Not sure how good this is, needs testing)
  • Paradoxical Outcome (Not sure how good this is, needs testing)
If you're looking to go more of a combo route, there are some cards and tech that can help your deck get there:

05/01/2022 - Page Created, Rough Decklist Added
05/13/2022 - Primer Initial Draft Completed

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Date added 5 years
Last updated 2 years
Legality

This deck is not Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)

2 - 0 Mythic Rares

34 - 0 Rares

16 - 0 Uncommons

17 - 0 Commons
Cards 98
Avg. CMC 3.69
Tokens Copy Clone, Illusion X/X U, Insect 1/1 G w/ Flying, Deathtouch, The Monarch
Folders Brainstorm
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