You’ve been wanting to jump into the fun, casual format known as Commander for a while now, and just recently picked up the new Starter Commander decks from your local store. Perhaps you’ve played a few games and want to make the deck better? Let’s take a look at what your deck does, find a path you want to play into, and what cards you need to make that more efficient on a budget. Are you going to win a tournament with these upgrades? Absolutely not. But if you’re looking to just up your game amongst your friends, this is a great way to start.
Let’s take a look at the White-Blue First Flight deck…
Commander: Isperia, Supreme Judge
What does the deck do?
This deck leans into the Flying Mechanic hard. Cards like Favourable Winds, Thunderclap Wyvern, Kangee, Sky Warden, and Gravitational Shift all give benefits to your Flying creatures that you can quickly make with cards like Sharding Sphinx, Storm Herd, and Migratory Route. Other cards give you advantage due to having flyers, like Archon of Redemption and Aven Gagglemaster gaining you life based on your flying creatures, and Tide Skimmer drawing you a card when you attack with two or more flying creatures. This deck is about one strategy… flying
Our Goal
To build a better flyers deck on a budget.
The Changes
To start with, we’re going to change commanders. Isperia, Supreme Judge may have the three best words in Magic in the text box (“draw a card”), but it isn’t inherently playing into the Flying Mechanic strategy. Instead, we’re going to put Kangee, Sky Warden at the helm. He is one more mana cheaper than Isperia, and has rules text based around the Flying mechanic.
Next, let’s look at what parts of the deck are feeding into what you need to win the game. The key pillars outside of your deck’s theme to look at are: Ramp (gaining mana faster than the normal one land drop per turn), Draw (card draw… not art), Removal (reducing your opponent’s available pieces), and Control (slowing down your opponents so they don’t outpace you).
The artifacts already present in the deck represent a solid foundation for artifact-based ramp. Let’s add the following cards to round out your ramp: Sword of the Animist for the extra land from attacking, and Mind Stone and Azorius Locket for the dual task of drawing a card if you need to. Let’s take out a Plains, an Island, and the Hedron Archive. Also, you can likely replace Cartographer’s Hawk with Scouting Hawk to guarantee the extra land instead of relying on it to hit the opponent that has more lands than you.
Next, let’s talk Removal. The deck comes with some decent removal but we can replace them with more efficient versions. Let’s replaceTime Wipe with Farewell and Condemn with Path to Exile. With 7 permanent removal pieces in the deck, it feels pretty interactive for a regular game of commander. Anything more and you would start looking into higher value cards like Cyclonic Rift.
Next up is Control. There’s a dearth of counterspell and attack taxes we can maneuver into the deck. Let’s start by replacing the following: Negate with Lofty Denial; Absorb with Dovin’s Veto; Vow of Duty with Ghostly Prison; and Gideon Jura with Propaganda. This should beef up your counterspell capabilities, and both Ghostly Prison and Propaganda at a two mana tax each per creature attacking you. So you’ll get to sit back and let your opponents fight amongst each other while you enact your plan. Finally, let’s be really mean and replace Soul Snare with Magus of the Moat. Now only flying creatures can attack (which remember, is your entire deck). Game controlled… for now.
And finally for the four pillars, let’s focus on Draw. Both Isperia, Supreme Judge and Ever-Watching Threshold are pretty weak draw engines for your deck. They require your opponents to attack you and, with the Control elements now punishing your opponents for attacking, it seems more unlikely to happen. So we’re going to replace them.
Reconnaissance Mission and Coastal Piracy give you card draw for each creature you control dealing damage to your opponents, and that’s what we’re aiming for, so they make ideal replacements. Because your commander is a pretty important element of the deck and you’re likely to get them onto the board, Loyal Drake makes a pretty good card draw creature on a budget, so let’s replace Angler Turtle as it’s kind of just ‘existing’ in the deck.
I don’t like Sphinx of Enlightenment. Sure, it gives you three cards, but also gives an opponent a card. If you have no way of triggering the Enters-The-Battlefield effect multiple times, six mana for draw three is ok at best. Let’s replace it with Dream Trawler. We’re keeping with the sphinx-flying theme, it has the same mana value (though requiring a few white that you’ll likely have access to by the time you can play it anyway), has built in activated protection, and has potential to net you more than Sphinx of Enlightenment will over the course of a game.
Outside of that, you have Winged Words, Commander Sphere, Sphinx’s Revelation, Mind Stone, Azorius Locket, Skyscanner, Cloudblazer, Tide Skimmer, Windreader Sphinx, Inspired Sphinx, Bident of Thassa, Staggering Insight, and Faerie Formation all giving you card draw options during your game in various scenarios.
We have the four pillars covered and you’re able to play the game, let's deal with actually playing the game in your deck’s strategy.
Let’s start with the cards that really play INTO the strategy:
- Gravitational Shift; Sephara Sky’s Blade; Steel-Plume Marshal; Aven Gagglemaster; Skycat Sovereign; Thunderclap Wyvern; Empyrean Eagle; True Conviction; Kangee’s Lieutenant; and Rally of Wings are your combat-focused pieces.
- Emeria Angel; Faerie Formation; Sharding Sphinx; Skycat Sovereign; Storm Herd; and Migratory Route are your token-generation pieces.
Notice there are cards here doing multiple duties across the deck, be it control, draw, or even both strategies (Skycat Covereign you minx you). So those cards are a lower priority for replacement. Remember, the more things a card does on balance with its mana-cost, the more efficient it is to play.
The easiest adjustment we can do here is increase your token-generation capabilities. If there wasn’t a budget in place, I’d tell you to immediately track down an Anointed Procession to double the number of tokens created. You’d instantly be able to amass an army of feathered warriors. But instead, let’s beef up the tokens by getting Divine Visitation. Now every token you create is a 4/4 Flying Vigilance Angel. Storm Herd does what now?! But what card do you replace it with? Let’s swap out Skyscanner. Apart from drawing a single card when it enters, it doesn’t provide much else other than an Artifact Creature body to trigger Sharding Sphinx. So let’s replace it with a single card that will beef up six others.
With only one other Artifact Creature in the deck, and one other creature able to make Artifact Creatures (albeit expensively), Sharding Sphinx is a hard creature to justify. Sure, it makes more Artifact Creatures, but there isn’t a payoff outside of more 1/1 flyers. It will take a few turns to see any real value from it. So instead, let’s replace it with Prognostic Sphinx. It’s one mana less and allows you to scry three cards every time it attacks, setting up your next turn. I understand we’re dropping one of our token-generating pieces for it, but the added Scry swaps out the loss from Skyscanner, which we removed for Divine Visitation to expand our token generation results.
I think that covers it for modifications. Anything more and we’d be treading into high value staples like Smothering Tithe, Rhystic Study, Mana Drain and Ledger Shredder. Is this the most efficient the deck can get? Absolutely not. But making these changes will improve your deck’s capabilities at a regular game of Commander.
MODIFICATIONS SUMMARY
Out:
1x Plains
1x Island
1x Hedron Archive
1x Cartographer’s Hawk
1x Time Wipe
1x Condemn
1x Negate
1x Absorb
1x Vow of Duty
1x Gideon Jura
1x Soul Snare
1x Isperia, Supreme Judge
1x Ever-Watching Threshold
1x Angler Turtle
1x Sphinx of Enlightenment
1x Skyscanner
1x Sharding Sphinx
In:
1x Sword of the Animist
1x Mind Stone
1x Azorius Locket
1x Farewell
1x Path to Exile
1x Lofty Denial
1x Dovin’s Veto
1x Ghostly Prison
1x Propaganda
1x Magus of the Moat
1x Reconnaissance Mission
1x Coastal Piracy
1x Loyal Drake
1x Dream Trawler
1x Divine Visitation
1x Prognostic Sphinx
TOTAL UPGRADE COST: APPROX $71.50AUD (at time of publishing)
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