Neheb, the Worthy. Is in the best colors for it, has a high concentration of creatures in the deck, and can ensure that a lot of them end up in the yard.

River Kelpie

I think Dominaria gave us an answer for this one: Muldrotha, the Gravetide. River Kelpie will last at least two turns. During those turns, every time you make use of Muldrotha's ability, you'll draw a card:

- Whenever you play a land card from your graveyard, you'll draw a card from River Kelpie's first ability.
- Whenever you cast any permanent card from your graveyard, you'll draw a card from River Kelpie's second ability.

River Kelpie basically just reads: “Do what you were going to do with this commander anyway. Every time you do that, draw a card.” And once it dies for realsy with a -1/-1 counter on it, you can still cast it out again later.

It also plays very well with cards Muldrotha decks are likely to play anyway:

• The Gitrog Monster: Muldrotha lets us play the same land we sacrificed, relieving pressure to keep finding more lands. River Kelpie lets us also draw a card when we play that land. Heck, play both of your land drops this turn from the graveyard and you've drawn four cards total this turn. (1 from your normal draw, 1 from Gitrog, 2 from River Kelpie.)
• Rites of Flourishing: Already has a nice home in Muldrotha decks because it's one of those cards that benefits everybody but benefits the Muldrotha player the most. With River Kelpie that's especially true.
• You might be playing Prized Amalgam because you value the ability to easily get it back for free when you cast another creature with Muldrotha's ability. (Maybe you need sacrifice outlets, or zombie tribal, or something.) If so, Prized Amalgam nets you a free card draw when it comes out.
• You might be playing Splendid Reclamation because you expect to be self-milling enough with cards like Deadbridge Chant that you'll have lots of cards (and lands) in your graveyard available to ramp up with. If so, draw a card for each of those lands when you cast this.

Next card:
Dragon Throne of Tarkir

Lord of Tresserhorn

I've played about with the idea of adding Dragon Throne to my Lord of Tresserhorn Zombie deck as a pseudo-Overrun in Grixis. Giving all of my Zombies +10/+10 (or more) and Trample would potentially make even a reasonably average-sized horde of them an absolute nightmare for my opponents to survive.

Next card: Crosis's Attendant (aka Iron Man).

Marchesa, the Black Rose allows you to use the ability repeatedly after casting it only once. And with other sources of +1/+1 counters which you're probably playing, you could use it on each player's turn.

Next: Metathran Aerostat

Great with all those creatures that wish they had flash, but don't. However, since this is about the best general to lead these guys, you need to think about which generals might want to flash out with this (and why). The two that came to mind quickly were Arcanis and Sakashima, as they return themselves to your hand. Arcanis needs to protect himself, and really wants to flash in at EOOP, to use his ability on your upkeep (or right after draw). and the Aerostat can definitely help with that. However, for flexibility, Sakashima's copy ability means the flexibility of playing her out with aerostat on any player's turn at instant speed, to me, means she's the better fit for Metathran Aerostat. Add in things like Sakashima's Student and you have a ninja that also returns himself to your hand, but plays as aerostat for half-cost. RoR and other copy effects on aerostat can help bring all kinds of creature-based shenanigans to bear if you survive the target on your face.

Next Challenge: Memory Crystal

Grand Arbiter Augustin IV.

Nothing grants Buyback, so we're playing a deck that cares about casting the buyback spells, especially the 30 that cost mana otherwise we've no reason to play Memory Crystal. It can't be a green deck since we'd have so much ramp available (that can be used to cast any spell, not just buyback spells) that Memory Crystal couldn't make the cut.

Let's examine the buyback cards that seem worthwhile in multiplayer by the other colors:
Red (3): Haze of Rage, Reiterate, and Shattering Pulse.
Black (3-4): Corpse Dance, Evincar's Justice, Imps' Taunt. Maybe Disturbed Ritual.
Blue (2-4): Capsize, Forbid (not a mana buyback cost). Depending on the meta or your deck plan, also Clockspinning and Whim of Volrath.
White (5): Allay, Change of Heart, Evangelize, Invulnerability, Worthy Cause.

Red's got very cool spells available, but doesn't give us enough reason to include Memory Crystal. We'd be happy to play those spells even without Memory Crystal and Red can get them back for free with Charmbreaker Devils et al. Haze of Rage plus Memory Crystal could be pretty crazy, but a deck that could really exploit the storm count would be reaching into Blue for Goblin Electromancer, Arcane Melee, and many other cost reducers, and at that point has no reason to include Memory Crystal at all. Red's also out.

Instead we're going for a control deck piloted by Augustin. We're including Capsize, Forbid, Allay, Change of Heart, Evangelize, and Invulnerability. We have a ~47% chance to draw at least one of these by turn 3 each game. (See probabilities explanation here.) Augustin alone will reduce the costs of all of these spells, and including Memory Crystal makes most of their buybacks free (except for Forbid and Evangelize).

Let's include Whim of Volrath as well, on a whim. When we use this on Augustin, we can converge his mana discounts on one color, giving us a discount of {2} to just that color. We'll do this on turns we plan to spend multiples of just that one color of mana. For example, if we wanted to cast Allay 3 times whilst both Augustin & Memory Crystal are out, it costs us 6 mana normally (1W + 1W + 1W). If we use Whim first, it only costs us 4 mana (U + W + W + W).

Our plan is to use our buyback cards as threats we're holding available anytime that are totally repeatable. We force our opponents to play around those spells even if we never wind up casting them a second time, kind of like the effect a Perplexing Chimera has. Critically none of the buyback spells are too awesome so they probably won't paint an X on us, but it does influence our opponents' gameplay.

I don't think this is all that powerful a game plan, but I think it's the best fit that gives us a reason to include Memory Crystal.



Next card: Angrath, the Flame-Chained

Great analysis, thank you.


And that's what's great about Uktabi's "game" here; I never would have even considered this line of thought. My decks with Memory Crystal are Jund (Insects) and Jeskai (Prowess).

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.... This is a deck I'd only play against once. If your group is fine with it, cool.

I mean, I've considered running Angrath in pretty much every B/R/x deck I've ever built, but as for the generals that specifically go well with her(?)...

I'm going to have to go with either Prossh or Kresh for her. Both of them like to run cards like Doubling Season and Greater Good, both play a really strong Circle of Life strategy, both of them can benefit from the aggro portion of her minus, and both like to get a pretty strong reanimation package to abuse her plus. Prossh has the advantage of being a built-in sac outlet, as well as summoning a bunch of chump blockers. Kresh has the advantage of running more Proliferate effects and having more of an incentive to kill opponents' stuff to empower the ult. I don't think either advantage is enough to sway me in either direction, so this one is going to be a tie.

Next card, a new favorite of mine: Twisted Image

FTFY


My initial thought was "five color Zada," led by General Tazri, because I have a regular Zada deck and I wish I could play more cards like this.

But I think I have to give it to tradition and say Arcades Sabboth. It's expensive and not particularly dangerous for its cost (and upkeep). But it's in green for ramp and blue and white for control, so you can expect to get to lots of mana. Switching p/t could be hilarious and deadly.

Next: Death-Mask Duplicant

I have to thank you for proposing this card. I have an Atraxa keyword soup deck based around Odric, Lunarch Marshal and I totally forgot about this card.

Anyways, I think this fella wants to be in some kind of Odric deck, but I don't think Odric himself is a great general since mono-white doesn't have enough keyword monsters by itself and is missing one of the best keywords in haste.
When I was choosing a general for my keywords deck it was between Atraxa and Samut, Voice of Dissent. I think Samut would be the best for this card because she gives it haste already just being in play and in a pinch you can graveyard Samut and imprint her to get a hasty double-striking 5/5 to close out the game, whereas Atraxa only gives him flying.

Next card: Benefactor's Draught

I think the obvious and natural home would be Edric, Spymaster of Trest, as they combine to read "Whenever a creature attacks an opponent of yours, draw a card" (ignoring trample and double strike and super trample and whatnot). That being said, Edric tends to have a lot of unblockable guys and has enough card advantage already.

Now that I think about it, Pheldagriff is probably the best choice, since it gives all of your opponents a bunch of potential attackers and blockers.

Rending Vines

Glad you like it. It keeps coming up in my searches for Voltron cards that grant abilities to other creatures. It's not what I'm looking for, but it's kind of neat. I probably would have picked The Mimeoplasm, since you want to be stocking your graveyard with creatures with these abilities to support your commander anyway.



Hmmm, what commander wants so many cantrips that it will play a conditional overpriced Naturalize, and wants to keep it's hand size high, so it might do something? I'm going to say Masumaro, from the same set, since it can be a big threat, but it doesn't draw cards itself like Tishana,.

Next: Song of Freyalise

Song of Freyalise makes me think of tokens. Which makes me think of Earthcraft (though they are not the same); which makes me think of cheap token production (Squirrel nest for Earthcraft type stuff). So...

I'm going to have to nominate Captain Obvious (a.k.a. Ghave).

Ghave's heyday of overuse is in the past, but my Fungus tribal version I still one of my decks I find fun and different each time I shuffle it. But you don't have to be a tribal nut (like me) to get great mileage from the song with Ghave at the helm. You can work the obvious token swarm (all the better if Song of Freyalise stage three coincides with critical mass). You can use Ghave's pseudo-llanowar saprolings to power-cast a fattie deck. You can run things like Power Conduit to keep the song around turn-after-turn-after-turn. You can even go infinite with Thousand-year Elixir (or any haste-giver like Concordant Crossroads, Akroma's Memorial, etc.) and a token or counter doubler, if you are so inclined. With things like [/c]Reclaim[/c] and E-Wit you can recur the Song over and over.

But for my money, it's all about the thallids.

PS: am I the only one that thinks Freyalise's Song would sound like ABBA?

Next Challenge: Bottled Cloister

They really wouldn't be, hahaha. I should add a warning label. The deck would come with a Hazmat Suit (Used).


I hear Enya.



Strengths: +1 card draw, and outside of your turn nobody can mess with your hand because you won't have one.
Weaknesses: Can't cast spells during opponents' turns (you don't have any) and you can lose your bottled hand to artifact removal.

Bottled Cloister has the most relevance in metas heavy on discard and wheel effects, and ones that are untargeted at that (because otherwise you can just play Witchbane Orb instead). Those are all things other people bring to the table though, which means Bottled Cloister is only contextually good based on other factors we can't control in our own deckbuilding.

In these metas: use Padeem, Consul of Innovation or Slobad, Goblin Tinkerer. Both of those can actually protect Bottled Cloister and are different flavors of the same plan, and they make Bottled Cloister be pure upside.
- If you're using Padeem, you aren't playing a permission deck; you're playing with artifacts and creatures and anything you plan to do at instant speed is via a creature or artifact you control. You have Jace's Archivist and probably have Bident of Thassa. You benefit from having a CMC4 artifact which will beat out mana rocks.
- If you're playing Slobad, same plan. Instead of those blue cards you have Magus of the Wheel and Runehorn Hellkite and Wheel of Fate. You benefit from getting awesome card draw in red (read on). This will also turn on Lupine Prototype outside of your turn.
In both decks you wait until it's someone else's turn to activate your wheel effects: everyone loses their hand and draws 7, but you just draw 7 and get your hand back on your turn. Anyone else activating wheel effects similarly gives you just a flat +7. During your upkeep, you stack Wheel of Fate over Bottled Cloister to resolve first giving you +7 before you draw your hand (and wheeling everyone else). This is the limit of what you can really bring to the table to capitalise on Bottled Cloister though -- you're mostly leaning on other players creating the meta in which not having a hand during their turn is super awesome.

From what I can tell hellbent cards mostly maximize their value by you having an empty hand during your own turns, so whilst Bottled Cloister is relevant, a full-on hellbent deck probably wouldn't go for it -- it'd be working to make sure its hand is already empty by the time the end of its turn comes around. Slobad can however still play some of the red Hellbent cards to gain some advantage outside of his turns.

This isn't necessarily the best way to handle such a meta, but it's the way that involves Bottled Cloister.

Outside of those metas, don't play this card. It would never make the cut; it's too costly and too risky and there's far better ways to get +1 draw. Or use Zedruu the Greathearted to foist it off on someone else because it's bad.

Honorable mention goes to Damia, Sage of Stone whose ability combos with Bottled Cloister in the exact same way as Wheel of Fate above, but she's in the three colors with the most draw power and doesn't need Bottled Cloister. Also to Eight-and-a-Half-Tails and Archangel Avacyn for being able to protect Bottled Cloister as well, but they have nothing else to do with it, wouldn't want to give up off-turn combat step removal, and would probably just prefer playing Aegis of the Gods or Spirit of the Heart or Leyline of Sanctity instead.

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Descent of the Dragons