Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day by Giovanni Antonio Canal (1732). Progenitus by Jaime Jones.
Last week we set sail on the Good Ship Zedruu. Today we are maneuvering our way through the congested waterways of a quiet seaport. Men with fear in their eyes yell warnings from boat to boat in a half dozen languages. They are clearly preparing to flee the still-awakening city, and as your eyes lift to the distant sky, you understand why...
Progenitus is an apt choice for this week's artwork but this week's post is not about the giant hydra looming in the background of today's header art. Today we'll be talking about "pet cards" and the first cycle would make a great fit for the big fellow if he didn't have "protection from everything". Before we jump in, let me digress and explain what I mean when I talk about "pet" cards.
Pet Cards & Secret Tech
EDH isn't a solved format.
That's one of the things I love most about it. You can play casual Commander and not run into the same few deck types again and again and again. It helps that the vast majority of Commander players aren't obsessed with winning prizes and often just play for fun. I won't deny that there are tiers and builds that are "optimal", but I probably lost those players last week when I devoted an entire post to Zedruu the Greathearted. Now that it's just us filthy casuals reading this blog, let's have some fun.
Because we have the entire history of Magic to draw from, our format sees an incredible variety of mid-range decks and of course, an even greater variety of bad decks. We even see single commanders with a wide variety of different and viable builds. As an example, I've seen Narset built around equipment, around enchantments, around token generation and even around goofy chaos cards. The better builds have extra turns and loads of evasion, but the decks I have seen showed an impressive amount of variety.
I want to talk about "pet" cards.
These are cards you stumbled upon that have stuck with you and which you go out of your way to include in decks. I'm not talking about the Krosan Grips and Lightning Greaves of the format. Pet cards aren't cards that are universally seen as good and that everyone knows about. When I talk about pet cards, I'm talking about cards where you feel like you might be the only one who knows about them, or at least knows how good they are. Of course, these cards aren't objectively good in a way that would result in everyone knowing about them. They're good in just the right situation, for just the right commander.
When you get a chance to put them in a deck and play them in an impactful way, you don't just feel good.
You feel smart. Clever. Wise beyond your years.
Pet cards, at least for the purposes of this article, are like secrets you have uncovered.
You love that you found them, and every once in a while you share them with just the right person. These cards aren't well known, so you don't risk looking like a noob by sharing them with folks who are clearly better at deckbuilding or way more experienced at EDH than you are. You share these cards with folks you think will "get" them, and appreciate them in the way you do. You share them with folks who love surprising opponents with weird old janky cards that are dynamite in the right situation.
Narset and The Dragon Cycle
I guessed before that I lost the competitive EDH audience last week by writing about Zedruu. Now it's time we lose the casual audience by writing about Narset.
Few commanders are as hated or as divisive as she is, and in the right build a Narset deck is not a lot of fun to play against.
I have a secret to share.
I am a Narset player.
I picked up a foil prerelease copy of Narset when I was just getting into EDH. I built her when I didn't really have a clue about building decks and she did pretty badly. I moved on to other decks, still building badly, but learning through my mistakes, and eventually I somehow got the impression that there were folks out there building super amazing Narset decks. I was such a bad deckbuilder, I wasn't even capable of building a winning Narset deck. It felt bad, and I knew at some point I was going to have to circle back to her and try again.
Eventually, after losing a lot of games with a lot of bad decks, I decided to take another crack at Narset.
I hadn't yet added in extra turns and combat steps, but I was starting to make better decisions and I was loading her up with unblockability and equipment that would help her get to 21 commander damage as quickly as possible within the fairly tight budget I was buliding under.
I was still finding it hard to rationalize spending over $5.00 on a card, and generally favored stuff that cost anywhere from a dime to a quarter. Needless to say, I lost a lot of games.
It was in that time that I made one of my first big discoveries in deckbuilding.
I discovered the Dragon Cycle.
Remember that Progenitus that was looming over that quiet little Italian seaport?
What if I told you I had five auras that, if they were in the graveyard, would attach themselves to Progenitus for FREE every time he entered the battlefield? As long as the creature has a CMC of 6 or more and the auras are in your graveyard, you can do this.
Well, you can't do it with Progenitus because "protection from everything" includes auras, but forget that for a moment.
If you could get all 5 of the auras into the yard, by whatever means, and you were to cast your giant legendary hydra commander, and you could somehow attach them despite the "protection from everything", Progenitus would get +3/+3, Vigilance, Flying, Fear, Haste, Fire-breathing, Fear & Trample. Good thing you can't do that, right?
The experienced EDH player might look at those and see a waste of card slots.
You can run Eldrazi Conscription and Daybreak Coronet and probably be way, way better off with three card slots to spare, especially if you have no easy way to get your dragon auras into the graveyard. Lacking experience, I saw three fantastic cards I could add to Narset that if she was somehow destroyed, would be waiting for me in the graveyard the next time I cast her.
Vigilance?
Yes please.
Flying to go over the inevitable player who has no reach or flyers?
Sign me up!
Haste?
If you don't think Narset likes swinging the turn she hits the table, you know nothing about our feisty little monk. She is all about haste.
I'm not writing this article to tell you about the Dragon Cycle - though I'm obviously happy to have done so. I'm writing to tell you about the feeling I get when I share secret tech.
When I was building up my Narset deck into the half-decent deck that it is now, I played a few games with a dude who also played Narset at one of our local game stores. Nearly everyone I met back then had much, much more experience at Magic and with EDH than I had, and nearly all of them had better, more expensive decks. Heck - I was still building with 2-color lands that enter the battlefield tapped. I was almost constantly impressed by the plays they were able to pull off, and the fantastic stuff they were running in their decks.
One day I got to chatting with this Narset player.
I was running Generator Servant in my Narset deck as a way to help get her to hit the table earlier and with haste, and he was thrilled to hear about another good haste enabler he could run, even if it was a creature. Many Narset decks run with no creatures at all, but he had never seen that little bit of tech. I was pretty thrilled to be able to show him a card he could use, but it was one I had read about online, not a discovery of my own. I was glad to share the info, but Generator Servant wasn't mine.
Then I showed him Dragon Breath and Dragon Wings.
His eyes got big.
Dragon Wings has cycling.
Those three magic words - "draw a card" are right there, and as soon as you've cycled it, your Narset will have flying every time she hits the battlefield. At least, she will until someone messes with your graveyard, but in point of fact it is an excellent addition to any Narset deck, it costs next to nothing, money-wise and it's a card many players haven't even heard of. Dragon Breath is good too, though without cycling it is obviously not quite as good as Dragon Wings.
I shared my "pet" cards with a player who was more experienced than me and he was impressed enough that he had to go find a copy. That just made my day. I knew I hadn't given him a way to double his win rate, but having my "pet cards" acknowledged as not just mildly interesting but genuinely good was really encouraging.
To me, that is an essential part of the EDH experience. It's about the games, and it's about the camaraderie, but it's also about collaboration. Teaching and helping each other get better is a huge part of building an EDH community.
The Dragon Cycle is only really viable if your commander costs 6 mana or more to cast, and it goes without saying that the cards in the cycle aren't all equal in power. They are going to be great for the right deck, with the right strategy, but will just be bad in many other decks.
Because I quite literally stumbled across them while looking through a box of Scourge cards, I find myself including them nearly any time I can do so, but those times are few and far between. A remarkable number of commanders that would love to use these auras happen to cost 5 mana to cast, so they just don't qualify. Zurgo and The Mimeoplasm come to mind, and there are lots more. As an example, I have included Dragon Fangs and Dragon Breath in my Atarka dragons deck, but Narset is the deck that has benefited the most from these "pet" cards of mine.
Battling Back Boardwipes
My Narset deck has gone through many revisions over the years, and while I play it infrequently I will always love when she blows up. On attacking she exiles the top four cards of your library and you can cast any non-creature spells for free. Lands and creatures go into exile. Cheating of mana costs is an age-old strategy in Magic, and when Narset gets a really good "flop", it can be utterly backbreaking for your opponents. Other commanders cheat mana costs as well, but something about her just sets some people's teeth on edge. Maybe it's her hexproof, or the fact that she can get four huge bombs for free with a little luck. I don't know, but she's hated like Prossh is hated - with incredible exuberance and an endless stream of expletives.
Her potential to blow up makes removing Narset a top priority for anyone stuck having to play her very often. Countering her when she is cast is obviously the best option but if you miss that chance you're going to have to get rid of her somehow. The big problem is of course that she has hexproof.
Opponents can't target a creature with hexproof, and they may well be of the mindset that Narset can win the game with one swing. With a good Narset deck and some good luck, they aren't wrong. In desperate times, players resort to desperate measures.
Once my Narset deck got better, my playgroup began to run more and more boardwipes.
It should go without saying that blowing up everyone's creatures - even your own - is a drastic measure to deal with one opponent's commander, but that's what started happening. I was faced with seemingly constant boardwipes and with only one creature usually available to me, the commander tax often made it very difficult to beat a steady stream of wraths.
As before when I stumbled across the Dragon cycle, I now managed to thumb my way through a set and discover some cards that would help me out.
I discovered Totem Armor.
Totem Armor is really neat stuff. It will give your creature a cool buff and if your creature would be destroyed, the aura falls off and the creature survives.
There are more umbras than just the 5 shown above but these are some of the better ones. They are way more than just wrath protection. It should be noted that they don't help with exile effects and -X/-X effects, only destruction.
Giving Narset a bunch of auras with Totem Armor went a long way to helping her deal with the new challenge she faced.
You can throw a totem armor on any creature no matter its mana cost, unlike the Dragon auras. In an earlier blog post about Mayael, I mentioned Hellkite Charger and Bear Umbra. That's an infinite combo that can win games on the spot, but it's also an example of totem armor. There's even a creature - Umbra Mystic - that will give every aura you have on the battlefield Totem Armor.
I think of my situation with Narset and board wipes as very specific to my playgroup, so I haven't gone too far out of my way to "spread the good word" about them. I have definitely suggested them to friends and I do try to consider adding them when building for commanders with high casting costs, as avoiding having to pay that tax can be a huge benefit. My Borborygmos Enraged deck recently got the axe because he starts at 8 mana to cast, and with enough removal and boardwipes he can get prohibitively expensive to cast even with some umbras thrown into the mix to help out.
I definitely think of these Umbras as cards that I "discovered" and as such I go out of my way to fit them into decks where appropriate. If I had found them on EDHREC or saw them in a decklist, I might not be as attached to them, but having "discovered" them for myself, they have definitely become "pet" cards of mine.
Drop it on the Top
One of the classic strategies with Narset is running the deck with no creatures, digging for Proteus Staff, and using it on her.
You wind up using Proteus Staff to put Narset on the bottom of your library. You then go through your library until you find a creature - Narset. You put her on the battlefield and then put the rest of the cards on the bottom of your library in any order. Since she was on the bottom, this equates to rearranging your library in whatever order you want. This means you put the cards in such an order that if you are able to swing with her you should be able to spin through extra turns and combat steps until you've won the game.
This deck re-ordering, and all these extra combat steps don't occur in a vacuum. Your opponent can respond.
What usually happens, however, is that their response is to stare daggers of hatred at you while you sit there with no appreciation of anyone else's "fun" but your own, and after the game go off to write rants on Facebook and Reddit about how broken Narset is, and how even if she didn't have hexproof she would still be the most busted commander ever. We call this the "Narset effect". Actually, no - we don't, but we probably should.
I'm a big softie. I bake cookies for the kids (and adults) in our EDH league every Saturday morning. I play because it's fun and because multiplayer games that are long and interesting, with lots of twists and turns, are fun for everyone - not just the winner.
I don't want to win like that.
There's another card that plays really well with Narset that I don't use.
Mana Severance is a old sorcery spell that will let you remove any number of lands from your library and put them into exile. While it's a fantastic way to make sure you only hit non-lands when you attack with Narset, if anything happens you can easily find yourself out of the game if you ever need to hit another land drop. If Narset finds her way back to the command zone you could very well be screwed.
I do like to win. My Narset deck is my guilty pleasure. I have tried to build her up to be my best deck and run stuff like Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, Eldrazi Conscription and a manabase that isn't just junk.
While I don't run Proteus Staff or Mana Severance, I'm not above a little topdeck manipulation.
Meet Penance.
You may never have heard of Penance. It's a fantastic little card that lets me put cards from my hand on top of my library at instant speed.
If you do, you can prevent all damage from a black or red source.
While that's occasionally relevant, the real reason is to cast a card in your hand for free when Narset attacks.
It's a janky old card of questionable use, but I have two decks that love to cast spells off the top of your deck for free - Narset and Mayael.
I'm not sure at this point if I found Penance by looking through old cards or searching iMTG for card text, but it was one that I found on my own. It's fantastic to be able to drop an Eldrazi Conscription or extra turn sorcery on the top of your library right before Narset swings, and while it is a way to abuse an already powerful ability, it doesn't waste my opponent's time and for the most part still preserves some of the randomness of playing the deck without Proteus Staff or Mana Severance.
I have recommended Penance to Narset and Mayael players, and have again gotten that great feeling of sharing my "secret tech" with a fellow player. Sometimes they're already playing a build of the deck much more degenerate than the one I'm playing, but every now and then it catches their attention and they go off to get themselves a copy. That always feels good.
Pets Gone Bad
I can't write an article about "pet" cards without including bad pets.
A bad pet card is a card you discover and develop an attachment for, but then wind up including in way more decks than it rightly belongs in.
When my Narset deck got good, one of things I would hear again and again is that she's broken because she has hexproof.
They are right. Hexproof, on top of Narset's ability, makes her a very potent commander.
Somewhere along the line I got the idea that I needed to start putting hexproof on every one of my commanders, and went out of my way to include it anytime I possibly could.
Thumbing through cards at one of my local game stores, I discovered Elegaud Shieldmate.
I had somehow gotten the idea that soulbond was a powerful ability, probably from hearing about Deadeye Navigator, and I snapped up a bunch of copies of the card and included it in multiple decks.
I figured having yet another way to give a creature hexproof would be really powerful.
Unfortunately, in actual play what happened was an opponent would use their targeted removal spell on the creature I wanted to protect before the soulbond trigger resolved. This didn't just happen once. It happened enough times that I eventually rethought the wisdom of including Elegaud Shieldmate in nearly every deck I had that ran blue.
If a "bad" pet card still gives you pleasure by making the deck more fun to play, by all means cling to it for as long as you still feel that way. In my experience eventually you'll want to drop it for something better as your playgroup's decks improve and you find yourself looking for more answers, more consistency and better cards to play.
Narset is Love. Narset is Life.
The other day I jokingly commented on a FB thread about Narset that "Narset is Love. Narset is Life."
While I was kidding, and intentionally needling all the many, many Narset haters on that thread, there is some truth in that statement.
Yesterday I had such a bad set of Narset games that I was thinking about pulling her apart. I was at a table with a Prossh - Food Chain deck and in our second round, both Prossh and a good Maelstrom Wanderer deck. Both games went poorly. I didn't get my colors out in the first game and in the second game my two attacks with Narset got me a grand total of 9 commander damage against the Prossh player and I hit 5 lands out of the 8 cards Narset hit. Not fun. Not fun at all.
The thing is, love and life also have their ups and downs. You have good days and bad days and it is a huge challenge to learn how to get through the bad days with grace and the good days with humility.
I'm not sure if I'm going to pull her apart. I love that deck but I also get tired of her lack of consistency. If I up the land count to get more reliable starts, I impact the number of lands I'm likely to hit when she attacks. It's not that there's no way to win - it's that there's no way to deal with the ebbs and flows of variance without resorting to the kinds of tactics I simply don't want to use.
So yes - Narset is Love. Narset is Life. Sometimes love kicks you in the ass and life goes badly. Playing Narset has been an adventure, and while the good games are magnificent, the bad ones are miserable.
Conclusions
For me, "pet" cards and sharing secret tech is an incredibly important part of the EDH experience. I can't imagine playing a format where the variety of decks was limited and the format would be "solved" within weeks of each new set being released.
Today's blog post didn't start out as an article about Narset, but it turns out that most of my "pet" cards wound up getting discovered as a part of building and tweaking her.
My way of deckbuilding and playing is not the only way. Everyone will have their own reasons to play EDH, and I don't begrudge them their "net deck", or their expensive pile of "goodstuff". I certainly can't really criticize anyone else - I own and play a Narset deck. Even if I don't run the most degenerate build possible, I'm not above enjoying the occasional Narset extra turns beatdown.
Before I sign off for today, I have one final thing to mention. I have a bucket-list item to win a game with Narset and Eldrazi Conscription. Somehow it hasn't happened yet, but I keep playing the deck and have faith that eventually I'll get there.
Imagine swinging with Narset with unblockability, double strike and Eldrazi Conscription and flopping into a pile of extra combat steps and extra turns. Someday I will live that dream, and it will feel amazing.
Normally the pics used for this blog are classic artwork with MTG creatures included in them.
I have a picture I might someday put on a playmat that is inspired by the art on Eldrazi Conscription. Since it doesn't include a piece of "classic art", it will never grace the top of a Commanderruminations post, but I wanted to share it with you, so I'm going to put it at the end of this blog post.
Thank you for reading!
Narset Equipment and Enchantments
