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Spellheart Chimera Voltron & Cantrips

Pauper EDH* UR (Izzet)

Scarecrow1779


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This is a pretty straight forward deck to play in 1v1, but requires more careful play in group games. The basic game plan is to get instants and sorceries into our grave fairly early, then beat our opponent to death with a big, evasive, trampling commander.

Your commander does most of the work, so the rest of the deck is support structure, not win cons. For example, there are 18 cards that can do the job of protecting your big scary commander, from Whispersilk Cloak and Elgaud Shieldmate, which keep the Chimera from ever being targeted, to Dive Down and Counterspell, which would be instant speed responses to removal spells or abilities. There's also a fair array of combat tricks, including 7 ways to give first strike at instant speed, and a few ways like Twitch to untap your commander for a surprise defensive maneuver. There's also a handful of walls and other creatures that benefit from instants and sorceries being played, which will help keep you safe from counterattacks and give you redundancy. If your commander gets thrown under an Arrest or Pacifism aura, you can also use bounce spells to get it back out from under those pesky enchantments.

The one other major thing to point out is how the instants and sorceries in the deck were selected. As many as possible were made to be cantrips, so that our hand doesn't dwindle too much. While there are certainly plenty of dedicated draw spells in blue, this deck is aggressive, so we need our spells to be giving us SOME other utility other than drawing. While not every spell can be a cantrip, as we certainly need some of them to be cheap so we can do things like stack double strike on top of +3/+0 buffs. However, I have found the current mix in this deck to work pretty well.

Going back to what I said at the top of this description, in 1v1, you can just go full out offense and try to smash your opponents' face in with your buff spells and double strike. However, in group games, if you do this, you will be leaving yourself wide open and giving people good reason to attack you. You'll need to rely on doing a lot more things during other peoples' turns to buy time. Once your grave is full enough, then you can start attacking and quickly killing, without giving your opponents' as much time to gang up and kill you. You'll also end up relying on double strike instants for surprise kills. It's also important to note that counterspells like Exclude and Deny Existence are some of the most effective ways to hinder your opponents' ability to hurt you when used the first time they cast their commander. It is often well worth waiting a turn to cast the Chimera in order to do this because it starts filling your grave so your commander actually has some power once played.

If you wanted to tailor this deck to your own meta, you might remove some of the bounce spells if your group doesn't use a lot of Arrest or Narcolepsy auras (which can lock your commander out for whole games). You might also remove some of the first strike sources if your group doesn't use many deathtouch creatures with flying/reach. These could probably be replaced with more generic good stuff like more removal (additional counterspells or Flame Slash) and more generic buffs (like Built to Smash and Brute Force).

If your group runs a fair amount of grave hate, you'll probably want to swap the commander to Crackling Drake. While the overall framework of this deck still goes well with Crackling Drake, you'll probably need to adjust more of your buff spells to include trample (like with Brute Strength). On the upside, once you're ok with exiling your spells, it opens up cards with flashback and jump-start as good sources of card advantage outside of cantrips.

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Date added 6 years
Last updated 5 years
Legality

This deck is Pauper EDH legal.

Cards 100
Avg. CMC 2.56
Tokens Spirit 1/1 U
Folders Pauper EDH
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