Deckbuilder's Challenge XXIV: Casting Call

{Comments} Introduction



Going into Mythics only, you might notice a few practical strategies that you can do that don't look too out of place in the limited cardpool - Omniscience and Show and Tell, for example, or and easy control shell setup featuring Counterspell, Force of Will, and Brainstorm. (It shouldn't surprise you either that the vast majority of these cards are Blue.)

Well, you know what card would totally be cool to exploit? Jeweled Lotus, a 0-mana artifact that does nothing outside of Commander!

But wait... it does!



So Jeweled Lotus actually has a grand total of one very unusual interaction with its fellow Mythic brethren - since Omnath, Locus of Mana only cares that we hold Green mana in our mana pool, we can crack the Lotus while Omnath is out, and permanently boost its P/T by +3/+3 unless our opponents happen to be running that pesky old Mana Short. This this end, we pack 12 "discount" Lotuses - Jeweled Lotus, Lion's Eye Diamond, and Lotus Petal to try and live the dream of swinging with a giant 10/10 Omnath as early as turn 2.

With that in mind, the next few cards I added were cards that worked naturally with this package - Ox of Agonas to turn Lotuses inside the graveyard into extra fuel for a creature, and Ancient Stirrings to help us dig for even more Lotuses.

Expanding the Deck Further



So I tried a few options at this point but eventually focused on a Painter's Servant + Millstone combo package, which goes naturally with Ancient Stirrings because both are colorless artifacts. Ideally, by the time we've got both cards in hand as a Plan B, it doesn't matter if Ancient Stirrings is rendered useless by the color-assignment, because we try and trigger the infinite combo all in one turn with a combination of artifact mana (or Lotus Cobra + Fetch mana if we tutor it up). A lot of the support cards are thus chosen accordingly - we expect to throw a lot of cards into the graveyard and may have to "switch" Lotuses at times to get the most out of our situation, so Goblin Welder is a great cheap utility creature to have around. Most of our important creatures can be found by Imperial Recruiter, so we run 4 of it to tutor up the creature we need to fill our current combo.