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Different Shades of Red
by Daniel Beach
My favorite thing about Magic: the Gathering is the strategic depth, and the Commander format permits strategies that are not viable anywhere else to have their five minutes of fame. Mono-red, however, has a reputation of being linear and simple; this just isn’t so. Despite not having certain valued abilities ready at their disposal, mono-red decks are still capable of operating in varied and complex ways. This is a point Mike has alluded to a couple times in talking about his Big Red Standard deck, and here I will show it by comparing his mono-red Commander deck to mine.
A couple years ago I built a mono-red Commander deck. The general was Rakka Mar. I built it badly and it failed miserably. But when Mike built Fumiko, I was curious to see if he could get it to work. After The Dorks took a crack at fixing it and Mike put the deck up for listeners’ suggestions, I decided I would take a second crack at a mono-red Commander deck.
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Mike’s Fumiko CMDR Decks Video
A few months ago, Chewie talked me into filming a marathon session of videos for the CMDR Decks channel, and we sent them over to be placed in the queue for future release. Presumably you’ve already seen the Dakkon Blackblade video (check it out, if not), and the second one is the second Commander deck I ever built: my Fumiko the Lowblood deck. Note that I go and make tweaks to my decks fairly often, especially if I get to thinking about them for some reason, so some of the details aren’t exactly accurate anymore. You can look it up on TappedOut to see the up-to-the-minute current list. As always, let me know what you think in the comments here, or in the comments section on YouTube if you feel so inclined. To be honest, there’s no guarantee I’ll read the YouTube comments, as I do my best to avoid reading any YouTube comments as a general rule (that stuff will rot your brain). Recording all these videos was a lot of fun, and I want to thank Uriah Oxford and Gathering Magic for featuring them on the CMDR Decks channel.
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Chewie’s Spirit of the Night CMDR Decks Video
So here’s my Spirit of the Night video! I’ve always loved the Spirit. I consider him the original Akroma. No really, look at ALL THOSE ABILITIES! On one creature! It’s crazy! Admittedly, I could have chosen any of the nine other legendary dudes to be the general, but I really loved the idea of the Spirit hitting the table with a massive THUD and punching someone in the face.
This deck can generate a truly stupid amount of mana, what with the various mana-doubling effects and two varieties of Coffers. Because it’s mono-colored, I have lots of Swamps. Because I have lots of Swamps, I wanted to be sure to throw in as many “cares about Swamps” effects as I possibly could. It’s a lot of fun to play, and isn’t that the whole point?
And as always, a big thank you goes out to the roommate and webmaster Scott who used his nice camera to record this for me in bright shiny hi-def and helping me be sure to get everything on camera and in frame and not looking completely stupid. Because without him, it would have. Trust me on this.
Big Red Game Day
Game Day for Dark Ascension was February 25th, and I’d been itching to play in a Standard event for a while. When it turned out I needed to go by my folks’ house in Hillsborough that weekend to pick up a package that was accidentally shipped there, I decided I would go to the event at The Toy Factory, a shop I used to frequent in high school and during the summers in college. I’d been thinking about playing some sort of Red deck for weeks, owing to the good cards available and my general comfort with the buildable archetypes, but I didn’t start putting together a list until Friday afternoon, the day before the event. The initial build was an Aggro deck with a heavy Goblin component, also running Hellrider and Hero of Oxid Ridge. It looked good on paper, but it definitely didn’t turn out that way in practice. What I eventually ended up with was completely different.
I didn’t have everything I needed for the deck, but thankfully Chewie had the rest, and he was willing to let me borrow it. That night, I went to visit him to do some borrowing and last minute brainstorming, and to play a few friendly games with the deck just to see how it felt. It felt awful. Game after game, it was being mercilessly crushed by the casual decks Chewie was picking out of his boxes, without even trying to pick any that would be a tough fight. It was well after midnight when we tore my deck down and started over, and eventually we realized my existing sideboard was essentially a method of transforming the maindeck into an anti-token/anti-swarm Big Red deck. It was 2 in the morning before I was finally in the bed, but the extra effort was well worth it. My first game with the new and revamped deck against another person was Round 1 of Game Day, and I ended up 2nd place among the 14 players in the event.
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EDH Story Circle from Episode 219
Holy crap, this is quite possibly my most favoritest Story Circle we’ve ever done! No really! We did this on Episode 219, that we recorded with Bennie Smith. He was a blast to talk to, and if you haven’t listened to the episode yet you need to get on that! Why are you even looking at this if you haven’t listened yet? Hoping for spoilers? That’s silly.
But we went back to Legends again for our random general this week, after skipping over two creatures that we already have leading decks. We didn’t want to be biased, after all. So we settled on our buddy Johan, as you can see to the right. He’s awesome. He gives your guys vigilance without actually giving them an ability. And you don’t jump through hoops, have a card that does nothing else, or live in utter fear of a Goblin Grenade. Also, it sidesteps all the various methods of destroying tapped creatures.
Also, this is the first instance (that we remember, I’m sure someone will remind us if I’m wrong) of cheating on the Story Circle! Mike threw out a Shard cycle of three guys for one pick! Then later he tried to name off two similar creatures and we overruled him. Be sure to torture him, since I doubt he’ll actually read this.
But no really, this is my favorite of the Commander Month Story Circles. Mike opened a Johan in the 3-man Winchester Draft with Chronicles that we did with Scott, so I’m totally gonna trade that from him. Then I’ma build a variation of this deck with a bit of a Chewie twist, of course. Keep an eye out for that, I’m sure I’ll do it eventually.