Nighthawks by Edward Hopper (1942). Daring Saboteur by Victor Adame Minguez. Rampaging Ferocidon by Jonathan Kuo, Rowdy Crew by Steve Prescott. Jace, Vryn's Prodigy by Jamie Jones.
Today's article is going to be devoted to exploring what might just be the best of the 7 legendary creatures in Ixalan. At first glance, it might not seem like Tishana is all that special. She has a power and toughness equal to the number of cards in your hand. She gives you no maximum hand size, and when she enters the battlefield you draw a card for each creature you control.
There was a time when I'd look at a card like Tishana and not get that excited about it. There are no fancy keywords. Tishana has no built-in removal, evasion or combat tricks. She has nothing odd or interesting in her abilities that might have made my inner Timmy squeal with delight. She just draws you cards and rewards you for drawing cards by getting bigger. Tishana is somewhat like Prime Speaker Zegana, but where Zegana rewards you for having a huge creature, Tishana rewards you for having a wide board.
Tishana isn't going to be a Tier 1 Commander. At a cost of 5GU, that pretty much rules out any place in cEDH, but with the right build I think she could be pretty strong. Let's explore what we can do her and see if we can figure out how high her "ceiling" is in terms of competitiveness as a commander.
Ramp
The first thing to note is that while Tishana is expensive, she is in the best color for ramp - green. It's also worth noting that we probably don't want to cast Tishana until we've got enough of a battlefield to allow us to draw lots of cards. This is not necessarily a commander we want out as early as possible. We want her out when we've already gone a little wide.
Because Tishana's card draw is directly based upon the number of creatures you control, you're going to want to run mana dorks instead of mana rocks. Familiar faces like Birds of Paradise, Sylvan Caryatid and other low-drop mana producers will help us early game and late game they will always be welcome as a way to widen our board for a little more card draw. Any ways to make token creatures that produce mana are welcome, so Freyalise, Llanowar's Fury will fit right in. Brood Monitor produces Eldrazi Scion, which can to be sacrificed to produce mana. While that's not ideal, his ETB ability will make him a great target for flicker effects. While mana rocks aren't ideal, a card like Simic Keyrune will work to make mana and in a pinch can become an extra creature to help maximize Tishana's abiltiy. Chronatog Totem and Weatherseed Totem are worth a look as well if you like the idea of running artifact mana producers that can turn into creatures.
Early creature drops can sometimes discourage early damage by presenting blockers. While ramping with creatures makes you vulnerable to boardwipes, we happen to be in blue. We should be able to play enough counterspells to sometimes be able to control when wipes happen and our focus on draw should help make sure we have a counter in hand. We also probably won't have a board that's so scary we'll be inspiring many boardwipes on our own.
Token Generators
If we're trying to generate a lot of card draw by having a wide board, we'll want to run plenty of ways to make creatures. Fortunately, in simic colors we should have lots of ways to do just that.
Squirrel Nest is an old favorite, though it only creates one token per turn and essentially sets you back on your mana by enchanting a land. While there are ways to go infinite with it, we'd only want to draw infinite cards if we had Laboratory Maniac on the field. Ant Queen will let you pour as much mana as you can generate into creating 1/1 insects. Fable of Wolf and Owl is just amazing at churning out creatures and has won me a few games with my Ezuri, Claw of Progress deck. Talrand, Sky Summoner makes drakes, but is better if we're playing lots of instants and sorceries so he'll be a close call. Meloku, the Clouded Mirror is a card I had never seen until researching for this piece. If Meloku is on the field and you're going to miss a land drop, you can pay 1, return that tapped land to your hand, get a 1/1 flying token creature and then play the land you just picked up for your land drop that turn.
Because our commander likes to enter the battlefield, we're going to load up on cards that create creatures when they ETB. As we're going to be focusing on abusing Tishana's ETBs in this deck, the more of these creature we add in, the more synergy our deck should have.
The first three cards shown above - Whirler Rogue, Experimental Aviator and Cultivator of Blades - all create two tokens when they join the party. Hooded Hydra, much like Hangarback Walker, has the potential to create a huge number of creatures, but it has to die to do so. That's not ideal but it's still worth mentioning because Hooded Hydra's potential upside is tremendous and will provide us with a way to rebound after a boardwipe. Thopter Assembly should turn into five thopters and then return to your hand so if there's a boardwipe you're ready to rebuild more quickly.
A healthy slot of token-producers will go a long way towards setting us up for some really good Tishana triggers. It should go without saying that the goal is not to get a board of 80 creatures, drop Laboratory Maniac, cast Tishana and win. In reality getting through our library is going to happen in lots of bite-sized chunk - hopefully between 8-12 cards each but that will depend on how well we develop our board.
Flicker Effects
If we get to draw cards for each creature we control when Tishana enters the battlefield, that's something we're going to want to make happen a lot. We're going to want lots of flicker effects to get extra triggers for Tishana and the many other creatures we run with ETB triggers.
Deadeye Navigator is the O.G. of all flicker enablers so he's an auto-include. We might do well to run Palinchron in our deck as well if we want to have the occasional infinite mana / infinite trigger blowout. Nephalia Smuggler is the card Wizards would have made if they weren't smoking crack when they designed Deadeye - it's fairly costed and taps so you can't easily do it multiple times per turn. While the comparison might make it seem like Smuggler isn't worth it, he's a 1-drop and if we're poised to get a Lab Man win with one more Tishana ETB, or if we're drawing so many creatures with each ETB that one more Tishana draw could be a game changer we'll be happy to have him available.
Outside of creature-based flicker effects, we've got lots of other options. Ghostly Flicker can hit two creatures so we'll use it on Tishana and on something else that can help to advance our boardstate. Displace and Illusionist's Stratagem will probably go in to give us a some redundancy. Instants and sorceries aren't easily repeatable, so we'll want a few artifacts to throw into the mix. Blade of Selves on Tishana is going to result in extra copies if Tishana being created and then dying because of the legend rule. That's OK because we'll still get our card draw, which will make Tishana bigger - maybe even lethal. Conjurer's Closet will give us an extra ETB every turn.
Additional Draw
Our main goal is going to be to draw into a win with Tishana's ETB trigger, but to have enough options to "get there" we still need to include additional card draw effects. They might as well be ETBs so we can use our flicker effects on them.
Mulldrifter should be familiar to anyone who plays Commander. We'll want to avoid casting it for its Evoke cost, as we really care about having creatures on the battlefield and it's a flying blocker. Elvish Visionary and Wistful Selkie will both be reporting for duty and will be happy to get hit with a flicker spell or get paired up with Deadeye Navigator. Coiling Oracle does us the added favor of putting lands onto the battlefield so he's a must- have for Tishana. Prime Speaker Zegana may not seem as good because so many of our creatures are small. Remember that if Tishana is on the field already, we're probably going to be drawing cards equal to her power, and Tishana should be pretty big. Having a moderately sized army and hitting Tishana and Zegana with Ghostly Flicker is going to feel pretty good.
Protection
If we're trying to get to a turn where we can blow up, and if we're going to try to establish a pretty healthy boardstate so we can draw cards from Tishana's ETB, that means we'd do well to plan to have to deal with opponents wanting to attack us.
Propaganda is nice way to keep from getting rolled by any opponent with a wide board who sees we're about to go off and wants to swing at us. Glacial Chasm will even help against voltron decks but isn't a long term solution. Chasm keeps us from attacking but that's fine because we can build our board until we're ready to swing in for the win as long as we have enough life to pay the upkeep and not get dangerously low. Elephant Grass is somewhat situational and has a cumulative upkeep, but is another way to hang in there for a few extra turns if we're close to winning and our opponents are hoping to stop us through combat damage. Spore Frog is a wonderful way to prevent damage. Normally I prefer Spore Frog to Haze Frog, but in this deck I'd seriously consider running both. Having flicker effects as a focus in the deck makes Haze Frog much more viable, even at its relatively high casting cost.
Counterspells
The number of counterspells we want to run will vary based upon our meta. The quality of the counterspells we run will vary based upon the cards we have available to us and how much money we want to spend on this deck. Whether we're running Force of Will, Counterspell, Cancel, Plasm Capture or all of the above and then some - we're going to want to protect our shenanigans and keep our fragile board of mana dorks, servos, drakes, dorks and thopters around until we can cast Tishana.
Our interest in favoring creatures over non-creatures means a card like Stratus Dancer will fit in nicely. Kheru Spellsnatcher and Spellskite are also worth a look. Creatures mean card draw and card draw is the focus of this deck but we'd do well to run both counter-dorks and regular counterspells.
Our best case scenario will be that we can control when boardwipes occur and can politic our way to a turn where we can draw a ton of cards, protect our wincon and either swing or draw into a win.
The worst case scenario is that we overextend, create a wide board of mana dorks and other creatures, but see it all wiped away before we are able to cast Tishana. At that point, even if we can cast our commander we'll only be drawing a card or two and we'll have a much harder road to victory.
The inclusion of a strong suite of counterspells is probably one of the most important things to the success of this deck. They should mostly be counters that are universal. We don't want to be stuck with a counter for creatures when a boardwipe hits, or a counter for non-creatures when our opponent is trying to drop a Craterhoof Behemoth. Counters that require your opponent to pay mana aren't good either, as late game boards usually give our opponents more than enough mana to pay the cost.
Tishana Extras
It would be shortsighted to not include a few more extra cards that are either focused around Tishana's ability or slated to work as backup plans to avoid having to discard if for some reason Tishana is sent back to the command zone. Discarding dozens of cards is never fun. Let's make sure that doesn't happen.
Punishing our opponents with each card we draw is going to work out nicely for Tishana. Psychosis Crawler will do that for us and it will increase in size with the number of cards we have in hand. To avoid discard we could run the 0 casting cost Spellbook, but Venser's Journal and Kruphix, God of Horizons give us life gain and help with our mana, respectively. Panharmonicon will double our ETBs, which for Tishana could mean some serious draw, and it will help with our other ETB creatures too. Omniscience will let us no longer worry about casting costs, which if we're drawing tons of cards is pretty sweet.
Simic Goodstuff
Any simic deck that wants to compete against top decks is going to want a little "goodstuff". That means cards that will either win us the game or help keep us from losing when our back is against the wall and we're about to lose.
Cyclonic Rift and Triumph of the Hordes being here should come as no surprise. Momir Vig and Rashmi will give us more draw and the extra tutoring and free casting should come in handy. Murkfiend Liege, and if we can scrounge one up, Seedborn Muse, will give us the ability to have all of our mana available on everyone else's turns for counterspells or for abusing Deadeye Navigator if we've got him out.
The Game Plan
This deck isn't going to have a way to win the game early, but if we play our cards right we should be able to win our share of games. I'm seeing two basic plans - to draw into a LabMan win or to win via combat damage with our wide board of unassuming mana dorks, servos and thopters.
The early game is simple. We play mana dorks until we can play a token generator or two. That means by the time we get into our mid-game we are hoping to have something along the lines of 6 creatures. Let's say we have Birds of Paradise, Elvish Mystic, Experimental Aviator, two thopters and a Wistful Selkie on board. We can cast Tishana and draw 7 cards. As soon as we can cast a Ghostly Flicker we'll pick Aviator and Tishana, get another 2 thopters and draw 9 cards. Now we're looking at a decent hand and a nice little boardstate.
If we can get to the point where we're drawing 8-10 cards per turn we should be well on our way to being able to compete for a win. We might have nothing at all useful in our hand, but hopefully we'll be in a position to continue expanding our board, flickering Tishana and countering anyone that wants to stop us. We might even have a Cyclonic Rift and enough cards in hand to be able to attack for 21 commander damage. If we have a Triumph of the Hordes in hand and a wide enough board we should be able to eliminate one or two opponents that way. If we've added other spicy cards like Craterhoof Behemoth or Beastmaster Ascension, that could also be enough to get a kill or two.
If the game goes long enough, or if we can set up an inifnite ETB scenario, we can always just drop everyone's favorite blue wincon. I've mentioned him plenty of times already but it seems fitting to end this post with him. Yes - it's Laboratory Maniac. Everyone hates losing to infinite self-mill and Lab Man. I include him not because I enjoy winning with, or losing to Lab Man. I include him because he's legal, he's viable, and however salt-inducing he might sometimes be, he does win games.
"His mind whirled with grand plans, never thinking of what might happen if he were to succeed."
Final Thoughts
As is my habit, I am not leaving you with a decklist today. I enjoy deckbuilding immensely, but I want to encourage you to look through the cards I've put forward here and figure out for yourself what sort of Tishana deck you're going to build. You might eschew the Lab Man approach, and instead add in cards like Aqueous Form and Invisibility so you can win with commander damage. Whatever approach you take, i hope I gave you something to think about this week. I'm intrigued enough that I'm seriously considering taking my "Simic Dreams" deck and building Tishana if I'm lucky enough to open one up in a booster pack.
I like to update you on my games and I'm happy to say that my Marath Enraged deck won its first game last week. It went 0-2 in EDH league games yesterday but I've got some changes to make and I'm still optimistic I'll be able to win a game or two this month. It's fun, but it's turned into a combo deck with the occasional enraged dinosaur shenanigan. I'm OK with that. I think it's a strong deck and now I just need to learn how to pilot it effectively.
In other news, I devoted this year to writing every week and at this point I'm entering into the "home stretch". I've had plenty of ups and downs this year but I'm finally going to begin looking at possible venues where I can write professionally. That probably means going through all my work and figuring out word counts so I can tell potential sites how much content I've been producing. It feels like a lot, but on the other hand, they say brevity is the soul of wit and I'm well aware I can go on and on. I think I've got a decent shot and I'm genuinely excited to see what lies in store for the future of my EDH writing. I'll certainly keep you updated on how things progress and for those of you rooting for me - thank you!
Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!