Tale of Doggo and Birb v8 (Commander / EDH MTG Deck)

Tale of Doggo and Birb v8

Commander / EDH Devotion Enchantment GU (Simic) Ramp Tokens Toolbox Value Engine

The_Warleader

Creature (39)

Land (34)

Sorcery (4)

Artifact (1)

1x Nyx Lotus

Commander (1)

Instant (14)

Enchantment (7)

This is a deck based on Fable of Wolf and Owl!

I made this deck about 6 years ago and have been working on it on and off ever since. You can read more about it below. Comments and suggestions are welcome! =)

Why Fable of Wolf and Owl?

This deck is really about my wife. Her favorite animal is the owl, mine is the wolf. Her favorite color is green, mine is blue (irl). Hence Fable of Wolf and Owl. I've tried to capture the essence of us in this deck. We've gone through many things together - Overcome every obstacle in our way through sheer Force of Will. She's taught me the importance of balancing Give / Take. She's bestowed upon me an appreciation for nature and animals. She's inspired me to work hard by getting a Double Major while we were at university together. She's also taught me to make things last, and Savor the Moment. But perhaps most importantly, she's helped me step outside of my comfort zone. Which in this instance I'm doing by playing - a color I don't normally find very fun. But she finds a way to make everything fun. Together, we make a Wild Pair. My hope is to display my tremendous devotion to her through these pieces of cardboard.

How the Deck Works

Simic doesn't have enchantment tutoring. And after experimenting with splashing to fit the tutoring, I found it to be very clunky and expensive. It just didn't fit the original concept. However, one day while browsing Scryfall for an answer, I stumbled upon Ethereal Usher. This card quickly became the linchpin of the deck. It can transmute to find Fable, since they both have a mana value of 6. And it's tutorable by a plethora of green creature tutors. So, the plan is to use any creature tutor to get Ethereal Usher and transmute Ethereal Usher to find Fable.

The idea beyond that is to ramp hard, set up an engine, and then just cast a bunch of spells. Mirrormade and Clever Impersonator are in the deck to copy Fable. Shrieking Drake and Dream Stalker are in the deck to help you go crazy. After that there are a couple of ways to close out the game - Beastmaster Ascension, Twenty-Toed Toad, Ezuri, etc. But sometimes just casting more spells than your opponents will do the trick. If you ever have a turn where you're creating lots of tokens but need to attack with them immediately, you can cast Savor the Moment to essentially give them all haste.

Card Choices and Themes

There are a few themes in this deck. Explaining them might clear things up before we get into card choices:

1.Most cards in the deck are in their original printing, or use a printing that mimics the old border styling of Magic.

The reason I wanted this look is because my wife collects old books, and looking at old printings of cards, some from multiple decades ago, is like looking at an old book to me. They tell stories of how the world used to be. And even though to some, 2015 isn't that long ago, for me some of the cards from around this time are beautiful, tattered pages of a book filled with memories.

2.There are no colorless spells in the deck (except 1).

You read that right. No Sol Ring. Or Skullclamp for that matter - which I'd argue would be even better in this deck than Sol Ring. I used to have 0 colorless cards in the deck, but after a long think - I've determined that Nyx Lotus is too thematically appropriate to not play. The deck has evolved in recent time to be more devotion heavy. Representing my own devotion to her. My wife is an artist. She likes to show me sunsets and we paint together on occasion. She brings color to my life and so this restriction is just here to say that life is better with color. It's also practical in the sense that every spell in the deck will trigger Fable at least once.

3.There are no foils in the deck.

Lastly, I don't like playing with foils. If the only printing of the card is foil, I simply won't play with the card. This was difficult to part with because I really wanted to play Earthshaker Giant.

Now that we got that out of the way, let's look at why I chose some of these cards. I'm not going to do a full card-breakdown because I find those are often tedious to digest. But I will go over some of the patterns and a few specific cards at least.

I tended to heavily favor gold cards. If it's a cheap, effective spell that's both and , I'm playing it or at least tried to play it. This kind of throws off the mana curve a bit - with many 2-4 drops and few 1 drops. But there aren't many Slippery Bogle's out there unfortunately, so 2 mana is pretty much the cheapest a Simic card can be while still actually doing something. An exception is Incubation / Incongruity, which is quite an effective 1 mana double-trigger on Fable. There are a lot of 2 mana Simic cards that didn't make the cut, just because there are so many of them. I'll mention a few in the next section.

Another heuristic I followed when building this deck was 'If there are several cards that perform the same function, always choose the one that's a creature.' If it's a choice between Mystic Snake and Plasm Capture, I'm choosing Mystic Snake. Creatures are usually better options because they are searchable by every tutor effect in the deck, they enable a critical mass of creature synergies between Beast Whisperer, Silverback Elder, Guardian Project, overrun effects, etc., and if they have an ETB effect or cast trigger you can recycle it via the numerous bounce effects in the deck.

The reason I am playing clone effects for Fable rather than token-doubling effects is because there aren't many cards in the deck that make tokens. So I feel it is better to have copies of Fable rather than various enchantments that might just do nothing if Fable is removed from the battlefield. Redundant copies of Fable make it harder for the opponents to get rid of it altogether. And it's also just more practical to have clones because they can copy your opponents' cards as well. Hence why I'm playing Mirrormade instead of Estrid's Invocation.

The land base is kind of... wonky. It's a lot better than it used to be, but a deck with 145 mana symbols is pretty hard to design a mana base for. If a land is colorless it has to do something major otherwise it won't make the cut. Casting spells is usually fine, but it can be a challenge every once in a while.

I kept Shardless Agent in mind when building this entire deck. There are those that would just take the 'L' on some of its triggers - but not me. I won't look like a fool (most of the time). Most everything she hits with mana value 2 or less is at least castable, albeit some hits are better than others. The exceptions are:

Neoform without a creature to sacrifice
Decisive Denial without both fight targets
Repulsive Mutation without another creature in play

Notable Mentions

To keep this section short, I'll just throw down a mutable list of cards that I've strongly considered or were even in the deck at one point:

Also, this deck used to have a different commander! Or rather, commanders. Originally this deck was helmed by Anara, Wolvid Familiar and Esior, Wardwing Familiar. It was incredible flavor, but it was just too mopey gameplay-wise. They just don't do anything and I was spending too much time trying to find Fable and little-to-no time actually casting spells with it in play. I've also used Tishana, Voice of Thunder, Momir Vig, Simic Visionary, Inga and Esika, and Thrasios, Triton Hero + Prava of the Steel Legion in the past. In the end, I ended up going with Ezuri, Claw of Progress because this card came out the year I met my wife and works quite well with Fable.

Pros and Cons

The most important part about the deck is that it's fun and represents me. That's really what matters in commander; As long as you're having fun and the people around you are having fun, nothing else matters. But that's not a fulfilling statement for this section by itself so I guess we can get more technical:

PROS :)

This deck can go absolutely crazy sometimes. As I said, the deck has evolved into something of a devotion ramp deck that aims to set up an engine and cast tons of spells in a single turn. If your opponents leave you alone with this type of deck (and the unexperienced often do, because it doesn't look like you're really doing anything), you basically will always win the game. The deck can easily gain access to 20,30,40 mana on turns 5+ and cast enough things to overrun the table with wolves and owls. And even if they don't leave you alone - I've added a good bit of protection to try and maintain a winning board state.

Another thing that's great about this deck is that it feels different every time I play it. There are multiple avenues to victory. Fable is the main win con, but Wild Pair can also win the game on its own as well as Twenty-Toed Toad. You would probably think that, since it's a theme deck based around a somewhat linear strategy, the deck would feel boring after a while. But that's not the case. I often find myself doing some hard thinking and challenged to find the win, even with cards I've played together hundreds of times. Keeping things fresh and fun is necessary to maintaining a long-term relationship, both with your commander deck and your life partner.

CONS :(

The biggest flaw to this deck is that it's kind of choreographed and can get bullied pretty easily. The plan is to do some tutoring and set up an engine among several sorcery-speed pieces and is therefor very susceptible to all forms of interaction.

Specifically the deck is really weak to wraths. With 40 creatures, we are committing a lot of easily-removable pieces to the board that are usually vital to preserve. Because of this, I do run some counterspells that are usually dedicated to stopping wraths. I'm not really a big fan of free counterspells but I do play them in this deck just because you end up tapping out to set up subsequent turns so frequently.

I've mentioned this before, but the deck does have trouble casting spells from time-to-time. There's just so many mana symbols that it will inevitably line up poorly sometimes. Again, it doesn't happen too often, but it still sucks when it happens.

Conclusion

Thanks for your time!

If you have any comments/suggestions feel free to leave those below. Let me know if you have any issues with readability: that was something I was worried about while making this page. Also let me know what your favorite Simic card is that you think I should be playing! And lastly I'd greatly appreciate it if you upvoted this deck if you liked it (my wife would think I'm popular ^_^ ). Cheers!

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Updates Add

Version 8! — Nov. 17, 2024

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After a very long process, I think the deck is finally nearing it's final iteration. I've found that devotion ramp and Gaea's Cradle effects are the way to go to get the most out of Fable while still keeping the game fun and not infinite. I will always be looking for new cards to play around with. But the deck has felt very solid and thematic lately and am happy with where it's at. Also - more alters! I'd like to give a special shoutout to Ryan Strand a.k.a. Rypie MTG Alters. He did the alter for Eternal Witness you see above and it came out just perfect.

OUT

Update 4! — Oct. 3, 2024

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Major Update (3)! + Alter Uploads Soon™ — Jan. 23, 2024

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Update 2 - New Commander! — May 22, 2023

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Update 1 - Wild Pair! — March 23, 2023

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Initial launch — March 10, 2023

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Top Ranked	Achieved #3 position overall 1 year ago Achieved #1 position in Commander / EDH Devotion 1 year ago Achieved #1 position in Commander / EDH Enchantment 1 year ago Achieved #1 position in Commander / EDH GU (Simic) 1 year ago
Date added	6 years
Last updated	3 weeks
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	7 - 0 Mythic Rares 50 - 0 Rares 19 - 0 Uncommons 10 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	3.15
Tokens	Bird 1/1 U, Copy Clone, Experience Token, Frog Lizard 3/3 G, Human 2/2 G, Plant 0/1 G, Wolf 2/2 G
Folders	My Personal Decks, Commander, Liked decks, intersting decks, Cool decks, Other Player's Decks, MTG EDH Decks, Ideas, Cool, EDH
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