Blue Bicycle: Llawan, Cephalid Empress

“Wait…what color is my permanent?”

Hello all!! Welcome back to I Need Mana, your source for weird and unique EDH Commanders from Magic’s history. This week we’re exploring Mono-Blue with the ultimate cephalid herself, Llawan, Cephalid Empress. Cephalids may have fallen off in popularity (at least in Wizards eyes), the last time they were really powerful was several years ago in Legacy with a deck called Cephalid Breakfast, a deck that used Cephalid Illusionist and en-Kor creatures to infinitely mill itself into it’s combo pieces. But we’re not running Cepahlid Breakfast here! We’re using Llawan and cycling cards to make a deck I’m calling Blue Bicycle.

This deck, wow, I’m excited to talk about this deck. If you’ve never come across Llawan before, she’s a pretty unique commander. She keeps our opponents from casting blue spells, and she bounces blue creatures back to our opponent’s hands. This means if we have a way to control the color of our opponent’s creatures we can bounce all of and prevent them from ever attacking again. This card is historically busted with a certain Painter’s Servant. Painter’s Servant makes all permanents and all cards in all players decks blue. So our opponents essentially just can’t cast creature spells anymore. This two-card combo, while really effective, is a little old school and even a bit too mean-spirited for me. Today we’re looking at an ultra-budget version ($80 bucks at the most!) of the popularized cycling decks that have been floating around lately, usually helmed by Gavi or Golos. What our deck seeks to do is exploit Llawan’s bounce and control ability paired by pairing her with the advantage of cycle cards, in particular the card Escape Protocol. Escape Protocol makes it so that whenever we cycle, we can also flicker Llawan, and whenever we flicker Llawan we get to bounce blue creatures our opponent’s control back to their hands. This means, if we pair Llawan with some sweet color control effects, we should be able to ride this little blue cycle all the way to victory!

Deck Breakdown (You can also find the full decklist HERE)

Cycling Cards: 39

First up, let’s talk about cycling cards, highlighting some specific and valuable ones, as well as discussing the reasoning behind our number. We’re running a LOT of cycling cards (and you thought we were running a lot of ramp in the Glissa deck). We’re going with 39 because it almost guarantees that whenever we cycle a card, we’ll hit another cycle card. Almost half of our deck cycles, or has something to do with cycling, and we also run cards that help us draw even more cards of those cycles. Given that we don’t stumble, or have terrible luck, we almost have a 50/50 chance that every card we draw will cycle. Now, we don’t want to start running too many more because then we won’t ever hit other cards that we need, like tutors, interaction, etc. So 39% is where we landed. Our best cyclers are either One colorless mana, or Two colorless mana. This is because with cards like Fluctuator we can make sure that we’re never spending mana to cycle, and also have some open to flicker our Llawan, or any other threat we may have. These are cards like Miscalculation, Countervailing Winds, and Imaginary Threats. The cyclers that aren’t One or Two colorless generally have an ability, or can, though we usually want to avoid it, be cast as some form of interaction. These are cards like Hieroglyphic Illumination, Censor, and Nimble Obstructionist. You’ll notice, that even though not all of them are great spells, the ones we mentioned could be cast if it came down to it. You generally want to avoid cyclers that are just creatures, because we aren’t playing any kind of reanimation game. We want spells and cheap cyclers, this guarantees we always have a play or a way to flicker our payoffs.

Cycling Payoffs: 9

Speaking of Payoffs! Llawan isn’t the only card we want to flicker with our Escape Protocol cards. We’re also running Sphinx Mindbreaker and Manic Scribe. Both of these cards mill “each” opponent whenever they enter the battlefield(Manic Scribe eventually triggering during each player’s upkeep), and are our primary ways of winning once we’ve gotten our cycling enablers online. Sphinx Mindbreaker hits every opponent for 10 cards when it etbs, so we only need 9 maximum bounces with it to mill our opponents out. If we’re struggling to get there with the mill route, we have Ominous Seas and Drake Haven as alternative ways to amass a threatening board state, all while keeping our opponent’s creatures at bay with Llawan. Eventually, we’ll have enough 8/8s and 2/2s to kill our opponents one by one. Cunning Survivor makes an appearance as well, just as another threat to guarantee some damage gets through on our turn, so long as we’re cycling. Another reason we’ve gone with cycling is it gives us a way to make the new Teferi’s Ageless Insight absolutely insane for us. Once we get Fluctuator and/or New Perspectives going each cycle is free, and each draw is doubled by Ageless Insight. So long as we have one of our payoffs in play we should have no trouble out grinding our opponents with card advantage. Speaking of Fluctuator and New Perspectives, I can’t overstate how important these cards are for the deck. We’ll discuss how we guarantee having these cards a little later, but for now, bear in mind you’re always going to be looking for an opening hand that either has these cards or has a way to get these cards.

Bounce/Flicker: 4

We’ve talked at length about Escape Protocol, but only having one source of flicker isn’t really going to cut it in our deck. Here I’ve included several other options you can use to bounce you Llawan and your mill creatures to get the effects. Thassa, Deep-Dwelling is the runner up for second best, it triggers on your end-step, and it is indestructible, where our Escape Protocol is easily destroyed with any kind of permanent removal. Conjurer’s Closet is a close runner up, and can be grabbed with our artifact tutors if we don’t have Thassa or Escape Protocol. The main drawback to these cards are we can’t control the flicker, so if our opponent goes to kill Llawan, we’re out of luck. A consideration for some flicker spells could be had, but I don’t want to dilute the deck too much. Llawan herself is a mass bounce spell in our command zone, so long as all our opponents control blue creatures (which we’ll cover in a bit).

Color Control: 6

Here’s where things get a lil complex. If we just ran cycling cards, and no way to take advantage of our commander’s abilities, Llawan wouldn’t be our ideal candidate for this style of deck. As it is, we’re running several recurrable spells that either a) change the color of a permanent or spell, or b) changes the text of a specific color permanently. Let’s break down each effect and why we want them. Effects that change the color of a permanent like Shifting Skye, which is all permanents, and Indigo Faerie, which hits one permanent until the end of turn, are useful so we can make more use out of Llawan’s bounce effect. If we play Shifting Sky, name blue, and either play or flicker our Llawan, just like that we’ve created a one sided Evacuation. This same thing can be achieved with Indigo Faerie and Distorting Lens, only a little slower. I like Distorting Lens in this deck because it is a cheap artifact that requires no mana to activate and can be tutored with our various blue artifact tutors. The second category of color control is changing the instances of color words on spells and permanents. The card Swirl the Mists changes every instance of a color word to a different color. This is particularly useful with Llawan because if we use these cards to change her text to read “return all ‘Black’ or ‘Green’ creatures your opponents control to their hands” we’ve effectively locked our opponents out from playing their creature spells, until we so choose to change the color word to something else. While this can get difficult to manage, these cards give us variance and flexibility with where our commander is concerned. And they are especially useful when talking about our next section:

Control: 4

So we can now change the text of permanents to specific colors. What do we do now? Enter Chill and Douse. With any of our color spells we can change Chill to tax whatever color that is most vexing us. If it isn’t red, we simply play Glamerdye during our opponent’s upkeep, and tax whatever color they happen to be on. Glamerdye also has retrace, so as long as we have a land at our disposal we can continuously use this effect. Douse is another enchantment that specifically says counter target “red” spell, but so long as we have color-changing abilities, or we’re getting them back, we can now counter whatever color spell we choose at any time. If we’re ever backed into an awkward position by a permanent we can’t really deal with, or if we need to take the biggest threat on board and make it our own, Crystalline Resonance is here to answer it all. A clone effect that triggers whenever we cycle is a pretty sweet deal, and it hits any permanent! I think this is kind of versatility that makes the cycle theme worth it, and it keeps us protected if our mass bounces keep getting shut off.

Recursion/Non-Cycling Advantage: 5

Since we’re going to be discarding a lot of cards to all our cycling abilities, we’re going to want to run cards that give us access to the spells in our graveyard. Scholar of the Ages (could also be Archaeomancer if you want something cheaper) guarantees us two spells, usually cycling spells, that allow us to keep digging through our deck. Scholar’s ability is on ETB as well, so we can play her, get back cycling cards, cycle, flicker her with Escape Protocol, and keep the chain going. It’s such a sweet synergy and makes it hard for our deck to fizzle once we have her in play. Abandoned Sarcophagus might seem like an absurd card in our deck, but it’s honestly a bit of trap. A lot of our cycling spells aren’t great as cast spells, but there’ no sense in not having access to them if we can. Sometimes you might want to cast a Miscalculation on something, and if it’s in your graveyard with Sarcophagus in play YOU CAN! I think it’s great to have the options available to you, so it gets a spot. Academy Ruins protects our artifacts from being removed permanently–this feels really bad, so we have to find whatever ways to protect ourselves from this that we can. The other two cards, Sol Ring and Brainstorm, are just too good not to play. Brainstorm is cheap and can set up our draws, and while we don’t need a lot of acceleration mana wise, sol ring is cheap enough that we can run it. I don’t like running a lot of mana rocks in a deck like this because it actually pollutes our draws, and keeps us from getting to our cyclers. We have to make choice between mana rocks and color control, and color control effects are better for us.

Tutor: 7

Our deck needs several key pieces to function at 100%: We want our Fluctuator, we want our Escape Protocol, and we want our color changers. This can definitely be a lot of pieces to have to track down. Luckily, mono-blue has plenty of ways to grab whatever tools we need out of our deck. Drift of Phantasms and Muddle the Mixture are great tutors, their transmute ability allows us to grab any card that shares a converted mana cost with them. In Muddle’s case this means Fluctuator, Escape Protocol, Chill, Indigo Faerie, and in Drift’s this means Abandoned Sarcophagus, Shifting Skye, and Douse. In fact, I didn’t even name everything these cards can be exchanged for because it’s honestly quite a lot. Our deck has a toolbox quality to it that I think makes it very versatile, even with it being single colored. With additional artifact-specific tutors like Tribute Mage, Fabricate, and Whir of Invention we shouldn’t have any problem completing the puzzle that is our deck. Once we’ve gotten our blinkers and our cycler enablers, we’re going to need to get ahold of our game ender cards. Long-Term Plans is our only sure-fire way of grabbing cards like Sphinx Mindbreaker or Scholar of Ages, but we’re digging so deep with our cycling that it shouldn’t take long to hit them. Also, cards like Long-Term Plans, with the drawback of placing the card third from the top, just isn’t really a drawback for our deck when we’re drawing a bunch of cards every turn.

Lands: 34

35 mana sources, 5 of which can be cycled. Some utility lands worth mentioning here: Academy Ruins is a key land for this deck. We really need our Fluctuator effect and our bounce effects, so look for Academy Ruins to help you rebuild if they get hit with targeted removal. Castle Vantress allowing us to scry before we start cycling gives us a lot of control over our draws, not to mention if we ever needed to we could manipulate this land with Cloud of Faeries and Vizier of Tumbling Sands to get multiple looks. And, as always, I’m packing Scavenger Grounds as our graveyard hate. This deck used to run even less lands, but I started to feel the tax of our mana hungry abilities, so I decided to up it to 35. You really want to try and mitigate the flood with this deck, as they don’t do you any good when you’re trying to draw through your deck.

End Step!

I really enjoy using Blue in my lists, but rarely have I built Mono-Blue, so this was a bit of a challenge for me. This past week has been crazy with Zendikar Rising spoilers and Mythic Invitational, all of them begging for my attention (I’ve been itching to start brewing with the new commanders all week!). Still, distractions aside, I’m happy with where this deck ended up. I think it’s a great casual deck, at super-budget level, and avoids some of the crazy un-fun synergies of Painter’s Servant+ Llawan = your opponents are deadlocked out of the game. That’s not to say you won’t get some stares for sitting down with Llawan. You’ll just have to assure them Painter’s Servant isn’t in the deck (unless it IS in the deck, in which case Godspeed to you!)

With Mono-Blue taken care of, it means we only have one more color to check off our list! Join me next week where we explore the world of swamps with Mono-Black!

As always, you can follow me on Twitter @HampTheHuman for all my brewing updates, and weird musings!

Thanks for reading!! Cheers!!

Great Ball of Fire: Shimatsu the Bloodcloaked

“Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!”
Jerry Lee Lewis

Hello all!! Welcome back to I Need Mana, your weekly source for weird and unique EDH Commanders from Magic’s history. This week we’re exploring mono-red with a commander that was almost certainty made for the 16-year-old-weeaboo inside us all: Shimatsu the Bloodcloacked! Case and point, he’s a demon, his qualifying adjective is “bloodcloaked”, and he’s got a massive tentacle tongue; anime demon requirements fulfilled. One look at this Dragon Ball Z looking villain and I knew he was the one for us.

His ability, to sacrifice permanents and enter with +1/+1 counters, is actually an early iteration of the Devour mechanic. First showing up in Shards of Alara, Devour works as such:

702.81.Devour

702.81a Devour is a static ability. “Devour N” means “As this object enters the battlefield, you may sacrifice any number of creatures. This permanent enters the battlefield with N +1/+1 counters on it for each creature sacrificed this way.”

The biggest difference between Shimatsu and Devour, is that Devour can only sacrifice creatures, where Shimatsu doesn’t care what we sac. This gives us a huge advantage at what we can use as fodder. He’s actually got quite a lot of synergies to a certain modern Boros commander you may be familiar with: Feather the Redeemed. Both of these commanders want to make themselves bigger by playing smaller seemingly innocuous cards – Feather chains together a bunch of small spells, and Shimatsu chains together a bunch of small permanents. Our end result wants to be the same: make one massive creature that we can use to deal massive amounts of damage by either throwing it at our opponents face, or by slamming in during the attack step.

Since Shimatsu doesn’t have a card advantage engine like Feather’s, we want to build a deck that works with us as we build up a board state big enough to sac. That means running cards that ping our opponents for sacrificing and killing (Warning: this deck can be a bit of a glass cannon, but then, I Need Mana is not here to play a cowards game!). So to get this demon-train moving we’re going to have to start by making a bunch of tokens of any kind, artifact, goblin, etc, to feed to our boy.

Deck Breakdown (You can also find the full decklist HERE)

Token/Treasure Producers: 12

Of the many token producers we have, the most important are Gadrak and Krenko. Gadrak nets us one treasure per nontoken creature that died as long as he’s still around by the end of turn. And this triggers with either our opponent’s or ours! While the mana advantage here is nice, we’re not so much interested in these tokens around for sacrificing. Use the treasure when needed, but remember they’re more like fodder than resource. Krenko is huge game with just a couple goblins on board (and it turns out a fair amount of creatures we want to run are goblins, see Dockside Extortionist and Siege-Gang Commander! Spicy!). We can easily turn out more than enough to make a massive Shimatsu very quickly with a Krenko on board. Some of the other cards worth noting in this list are Surly Badgersaur, Shiny Impetus, and Curse of Opulence. Both (relatively) new cards that net us treasures just by being on the battlefield. Shiny is a steady stream of treasures each turn cycle, and Surly combos with our card advantage sources (most of which are wheels). Myr Battlesphere and Anax can make us some reliable bodies when they etb or dies, a Anax is especially useful at setting up a second Shimatsu (if it comes to that). Mimic Vat is here to help us keep casting Shimatsu if we can’t quite get him to go off the turn we play him. Reducing the cost of our legend to 3 instead of 4+ each time we cast him is definitely where we want to be.

Pingers and Doublers: 7

Once we’ve gotten enough fodder for Shimatsu, we need to make the turn we cast/sacrifice him worth it. So here we have cards like Havoc Jester and Hissing Quagmire to turn the creatures and permanents we, or someone else, sacrifices into direct damage. Throw in recent addition, Terror of the Peaks to deal even more damage as our creatures enter the battlefield (ANY), and you have a recipe for a quick death. Terror plus a massive Shimatsu is crazy deadly for anyone who’s not at a healthy life total, and while it only targets one thing at a time, we want to make try and set up for turns where we send multiple fire balls at our enemies. And of course… the doubler and tripler: Fiery Emancipation and Dictate of the Twin Gods. These cards make all our little pings and sacrifices into real clocks, with Shimatsu sitting in the wings just waiting to come in and finish the job. They also provide us with another way to win the game if our opponents keep preventing us from flinging a Shimastu at them. There is one card on the list you may be tilting your head at, Double Vision. Now, Double Vision makes it so we copy the first instant or sorcery spell we cast each turn. This is particularly important for our next section, where we go over the spells we use to throw Shimatsu’s power at people. It gives us multiple instances of fling effects, and multiple ways to kill players. Finally, we should note Ferocity of the Wilds, because it’s another solid back up plan if we can’t get the utility spells to fire. Giving out creatures, almost all of which are non-human, trample and +1/+0 while attacking is tough to handle in most cases.

Utility Spells: 7

Alright! So we’ve got a big Shimatsu. And maybe we’ve pinged some fools, and thrown some damage at face. Now comes the BIG fireball aspect of our deck. These spells either a) make it so we deal direct damage equal to Shimatsu’s power to players and creatures or b) make it so we have multiple instances of those fling effects. Chandra’s Ignition is our best spell by far. It’s the only spell that specifically says your opponents and their creatures. So if we cast this on a 15/15 Shimatsu, only their creatures and our opponents take the damage. If Fiery Emancipation happens to be on the field, well…they just die. We are also packing Fling, Soul’s Fire, Rupture, and Gravitic Punch to act as slightly worse, yet cheaper, versions of Chandra’s Ignition, the worse being Rupture and Fling because we loose our Shimatsu. All in all, we aren’t lacking in ways to make use of our demon spirit. Bonus Round is here to give us another easy way for to make sure our fling spells land on multiple players, or deal enough damage to kill a player or two. We also are packing a very powerful utility spell, and one of my favorite additions to the deck, in Unleash Fury. This card is sooooo bonkers. It basically reads, cast Shimatsu as a big boy, double that big boy, now you can sac it for practically lethal guaranteed.

Removal: 8

With the addition of Gadrak to our deck we are even more rewarded for killing our opponent’s things! BUT we do want to try and keep some of our stuff around, so I’ve included cards like Comet Storm and Pyrokenisis to give us more controlled ways of picking off threats. We don’t just want to wipe the board if we can avoid it because every creature token we have is valuable to Shimatsu (oh kind, and benevolent demon!). Subterranean Tremors over cards like Blasphemous Act and Earthquake because we are almost guaranteed to net creature tokens with it. Mob Rule is here because it functions like a board wipe with our commander. Now true it’s a half board wipe, only hitting 3 or less or 3 or more costed creatures, but say our opponents have a bunch of tokens in play, we yoink them, then sacrifice them all of them to Shimatsu. Boom, we’ve got a 20/20, or something. I think this card gives us the kind of versatility we want, while not being 8 mana like Insurrection (however, play this is you really want to end friendships and alienate strangers). To help save us from our worst nightmare, which would be casting a Chandra’s Ignition to kill the board, only to have it countered by cheap interaction like Negate or a Counterspell, we’re packing some protection in Red Elemental Blast and Pyroblast. We really need our fireball to land on the first try if possible, so these cards are huge. Mogg Salvage is a great free card, but could possibly be swapped out for a token generator like Release the Gremlins. I Just like free interaction where I can get it! And of course, Chaos Warp gives us some insurance on permanents we don’t want to see but don’t have easy answers to (planeswalkers for one).

Card Advantage: 10

The card advantage is really just wheels. Outside of that, cards like Endless Atlas and Bonder’s Ornament now exist, so we don’t have to play ALL wheels, but it is still tough to have to discard some combo piece or another to a wheel (luckily we are packing a fair amount of recursion due to this, which we’ll see in a a bit). Memory Jar is probably our most key source of advantage here, we can sac it, wheel, and then recur it later with a Daretti, or a Goblin Welder for more advantage later. Wheel of Fate is here over Wheel of Fortune because Fortune is around $130 right now (PLEASE WIZARDS REPRINT???), so I haven’t included it. But once again, definitely play it if you got it! Tectonic Reformation is cute, but it adds a bit of built in advantage if we have extra lands we want to discards to our Surly Badgersaur (this nets us mana/tokens, as it generates treasure tokens on discard!). And of course, Runehorn Hellkite is a great unassuming wheel that we can either wheel away, and play later, or sac to Shimatsu, and wheel later.

Ramp: 11

Our ramp section is a little mixed here, seeing as how we also produce a fair amount of mana up in our token section. Of course, we’d rather sacrifice those tokens, so we’ve still included a separate sections for pure ramp. Some solid generic ramp here, Sol Ring, Fire Diamond, Fellwar Stone, etc., just to make sure we have enough mana to go off the turn we play Shimatsu. It’s key that we have enough mana to play, sac, and kill all our opponents, so sometimes we’re gonna need a little help, that’s where Treasure Nabber comes in. This little guy 1) is a goblin, for Krenko, and 2) is also quite useful at stealing your opponent’s ramp for us to use with our Shimatsu. Because we’re not giving them back, we’re gonna sac them all to our hungry lad, and make our opponents sad. Ashnod’s Altar and Treasonous Ogre provide us with cheap effective ways to either generate extra mana for life, or generate extra mana at the cost of one or two of our extra token creatures. We’re a mana hungry deck, so we want to be constantly looking for more ways to gain mana advantage as the game progresses.

Recursion/Protection: 8

Here’s were our more artifact heavy build really shines. We’re running a fair amount of mana rock, artifact token generators, and utility artifacts, so getting blown out by mass artifact removal feels pretty bad. Luckily, red has lots of access to mass artifact recursion. Our best sources of recursion are Scrap Mastery, and Daretti, Scrap Savant. These cards return whatever we need, and at a small price to pay in say a Myr token or a treasure token. Conquerer’s Flail, while having no instant speed equip tricks, is great at shutting our opponents down the turn we want to go off. Interaction is our least favorite thing, so if we can have the flail attached to a creature when we play Shimatsu we should be in the clear to kill our opponents (Boseiju is here for a similiar reason). Underworld Breach, another new card that, helpful for when we wheel away our instants and sorceries needed to throw Shimatsu at people. Since we’re running lots of wheels, and sacrificing so many permanents, the graveyard should be full and ready for us to use whenever we drop Underworld Breach – it’s insurance, and really solid insurance. A previous build of this deck used to run Past in Flames, but it turns out Underworld Breach is just that much better!

Tutor: 4

Being mono-red, we don’t get access to a ton of tutors, so we’re running what we can. Gamble can get us anything we need in a pinch, and discarding it isn’t the end of the world because of all our recursion cards. Imperial Recruiter can grab us mana accelerants like Treasonous Ogre and Dockside Extortionist, but it can also get us Goblin Welder if we need to grab something from discard, or token creators, like Anax, and Captain Lannery. Expedition Map is here for grabbing utility lands like Boseiju, or Hall of the Bandit Lord, etc. One way we can stumble in our deck is if we cast our big fireball but lack a solid way to fling the dang thing. Running Hall of the Bandit Lord makes it so we can start swinging the turn we play him. Sarkhan’s Triumph makes the list, effectively acting as second copies of any of our dragons: Gadrak, Terror, and Runehorn. It may not seem too useful, but Gadrak and Terror are pretty important for us, so we want to guarantee we have access to as many as we can.

Lands: 34

Your key lands here are Boseiju and Hall of the Bandit Lord. Boseiju grants our fling spells uncounterability, and one of the only ways outside of our Pyroblast effects we have at protecting our spells when we go off. Hall of the Bandit Lord, as mentioned previously, let’s us attack immediately with our massive Shimatsu, if it comes to that. I don’t always need the haste on him, but it’s good to have the insurance, just in case. We’re also packing several token producing lands in Kher Keep and Dwareven mine, just to ensure we always have the fodder count high while maintaining low costs; Dwarven is free, and Kher Keep cost 2 mana to activate, and is repeatable. The rest are lands I tend to run in just about any deck, with Scavenger Grounds being our only piece of graveyard hate, so use that Expedition Map wisely!

End Step!

So there we have it! Hot enough for you?? Shimatsu is an explosive commander, with the ability to either go BIG, or go home. I found that the deck was almost aristocrats in style, making lots of small things to ping our opponents, and could easily kill without ever having to throw Shimatsu at people. If you end up building this list I’d love to know how it does for you. Proper resource management, and setting up protection for the turn you go off is key to success! He was a lot of fun to build, and I think they he’s only gotten better as the years have given red more and more support to sacrifice mechanics.

Be on the lookout for next week’s article where we continue our exploration of mono-colored commanders with Mono Blue! As always, you can follow me on Twitter @HampTheHuman for all my brewing updates, and weird musings!

Thanks for reading!! Cheers!!