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[Mid] Yuriko: Ultimate Ninja, Assemble!

Commander / EDH Equip UB (Dimir) Voltron

kremsers


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[Mid]: This deck is designed for mid-power games as defined by PlayEDH--very expensive cards and highly-efficient wincons are deliberately excluded.


Are you excited about the dozen new sets coming out next month? Great! Neither am I. Let's go back to an old favorite that was already a throwback to a much older set when it first came out and see if reinventing the wheel nets us some fun jank. Yuriko is a commander who wants to keep landing combat damage on players, and sure, evasion is a good way to do that--the good way to do that, really, where Yuriko is concerned--but there's more than one way to keep a single creature swinging. Yeah, you know what I'm thinking!

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"But kremsers," you ask, "if that is your real name, why Voltron a creature with a base power of 1 and no inherent combat tricks? Surely there are better candidates for this archetype!" To that objection, I raise the following counterarguments:

  • Shut up
  • One of the biggest problems with Voltron decks is that the linchpin of your strategy will be removed over and over, getting more and more expensive, until it's simply locked in the command zone for the rest of the game, forcing you to rely on Marit Lage to finish the job, or else some smug Eldrazi with its smug Eldrazi face and its smug Eldrazi tentacles. Yuriko, on the other hand, is one of the most difficult cards in the game, perhaps the most difficult, to lock in the command zone. Yuriko herself can be plans A through Z, and that's what's best in life!
  • Yuriko gives you free card advantage just for brute-forcing your opponents' life totals down, which is what you want to do anyway in a Voltron deck. That card advantage becomes more equipment slapped onto Yuriko to make her better at doing her one job. Unless you're a professional Magic player, nobody is paying you to think, so a deck that swings in order to get better at swinging just makes sense. Work smarter, not harder!
  • Using a different commander for Voltron would require you to run a commander who isn't Yuriko. Why would you ever want to do that?

We still want some of that old Yuriko charm to help us power through the early game, assemble Voltron, and redeploy Yuriko when needed, but we need a lot less of it than a normal Yuriko deck does. Because we're buffing our power, a couple of the old tricks, such as Access Tunnel and Tetsuko Umezawa, Fugitive, won't work here. Whispersilk Cloak also won't work because equipping Yuriko is central to the deck's strategy. There are still a few ways to make Yuriko unblockable and a few other creatures that are or can count as ninjas, but it's generally going to be easier to give Yuriko flying or trample and get your Yuriko triggers that way. I've never seen much reach nor flyer spam in EDH pods, so you should probably be fine. Losing Yuriko hurts a lot more than it normally would, of course, but she should be relatively easy to rebuild.

Bitterblossom is a card-efficient way to get evasive bodies, and I've considered other 1/1 token spam options, but they didn't make the cut for this version of the deck. They might find their way in after some testing, along with Wound Reflection, which is always good in a deck with Quietus Spike and would also complement just buffing Yuriko's power. There's a lot of other equipment that also might fit well here; for instance, Skullclamp just barely didn't make the cut because there's not much 1/1 token generation, and Kusari-Gama just barely didn't make the cut because it doesn't synergize with deathtouch, but either one could potentially be a good inclusion.

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96% Casual

Competitive

Date added 1 year
Last updated 1 year
Legality

This deck is Commander / EDH legal.

Rarity (main - side)

7 - 0 Mythic Rares

38 - 0 Rares

27 - 0 Uncommons

15 - 0 Commons

Cards 100
Avg. CMC 2.27
Tokens Ape 3/3 G, Bird 2/2 U, Elemental 4/4 UR, Faerie Rogue 1/1 B, Frog Lizard 3/3 G, Manifest 2/2 C
Folders Ready to Print
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