This deck has been retired.
Decklist
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Introduction
I don't often underestimate or overestimate the ability of commanders. Like my ability to conceptualize the "ceiling" of commanders is usually pretty spot on.
But this seasons commanders have taken me a little bit by surprise, performing at way higher potentials than I first imagined.
SPOILER
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Greven, Predator Captain far exceeded my expectations, running over other decks like a champ.
Elsha of the Infinite although I expected it to be busted, still worked far better than I thought with manipulating the top of library to keep the cards flowing. Unanswered the game is usually over in a couple of turns of being in play.
K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth was about where I thought it was going to be at, but honestly a little linear.
Korvold, Fae-Cursed King right around where I'd thought he'd be at, very strong, but I did underestimate his Voltron ability to finish opponents.
Elsha of the Infinite although I expected it to be busted, still worked far better than I thought with manipulating the top of library to keep the cards flowing. Unanswered the game is usually over in a couple of turns of being in play.
K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth was about where I thought it was going to be at, but honestly a little linear.
Korvold, Fae-Cursed King right around where I'd thought he'd be at, very strong, but I did underestimate his Voltron ability to finish opponents.
I did read his ability "Whenever you cast a creature spell, draw a card, then you may put a land card from your hand onto the battlefield." and it did sound very good. As we all know land ramp in multiplayer commander is exactly where you want to be at to make sure you have good turns after good turns.
But in my mind I'm thinking that I'm going to get good value each turn. What transpired is that it's much more like a combo deck where you just string together turns that don't seem to end...and I wasn't even trying that hard to make the deck like that!?!
My initial take was creatures have a sort of Coiling Oracle ability embedded within each creature, and honestly this should have been enough for me to figure out the ceiling. But it's not until I got to experience it that your ability to just keep playing out more creatures and playing out more lands makes each turn round a very exponential affair. And honestly only like 3 or 4 turns worth of Chulane, Teller of Tales engine of draw and land ramp is enough to get through almost your entire library.
Too be honest in some ways I'm disappointed as I have decks that I've spent a lot of time coming up with tech ways and synergies to come up with similar results, but Chulane, Teller of Tales basically just presents this on a plate. Almost like a dumbing down for deck builders to accomplish results.
My first build I had more of a spread of creature converted-mana-costs. I had 13 more 3-4 mana cards than this final version I've ended up with.
What I figured out pretty quickly is that you want to lower your curve to as many 1-2 cmc creatures that still effect your ability to interact and win you the game.
Because at the end of the day, these creatures can end up being a Growth Spiral each and can easily mean that you double your mana base (or some good amount) after even maybe just a single turn if you get lucky enough.
So in the end I've ended up with 40 creatures between 1-2 cmc, with almost 60 creatures all up! This is probably the heaviest creature deck I've ever made, and for good reason.
Non-creatures
Not a Sol Ring or Mana Crypt to be found!
So you can clearly see that the advantages of the deck are mainly through creatures. Cleansing Nova, Fracturing Gust and Austere Command are for wiping the board of artifacts and enchantments, which you don't care about.
Cleansing Nova and Austere Command can be used for removing creatures as well in a pinch, although the deck is designed to match creatures versus creatures for more fun battles.
Earthcraft and Aluren are combo cards that can really just keep the flow of cards going for a very long stretch if not indefinitely.
Life from the Loam being a sort of tech card for the deck. Returning 3 lands to have fuel for putting them into play off Chulane, Teller of Tales gives you a consistency and the deck is not short on fetch-lands, so you'll almost always have the fuel in graveyard for it to be effective.
Right so now let's get to the heart of the deck and really that's it's creatures and what they can do to effect the game.
As I've pointed out you really want to have a low mana curve as a 1 cmc Growth Spiral is better than a 2 cmc Growth Spiral which is better than a 3 cmc Growth Spiral..you get the picture.
However you still need to be able to effect the game in meaningful ways and this is where I've gone deep into my knowledge tank and research to try and pull out the best creatures for mana cost that I think suits and wins the game.
There are a lot of obvious mana centered creatures to be played at this low range, so I'm just going to focus on explaining selections for protection, removal and disruption more for this 1-3 cmc range.
Hate-bear and Removal creatures
Gaddock Teeg is one of the best creatures to have in play when you want to avoid mass creature removal effects.
Because there are zero artifacts in the deck Kataki, War's Wage and Collector Ouphe have no penalty to you and Bane of Progress is just normally a blow-out for your opponents only.
There are not a lot of ways to deal with creatures in the deck, but Ulvenwald Tracker and Gilded Drake are cost efficient creatures for creature removal. Walking Ballista can also be used and Gaea's Cradle can be used to great effect if needing to get rid of pesky critters.
Linvala, Keeper of Silence is one of the higher costed creatures in the deck, but really shuts down a lot of strategies.
I used to have more removal and disruptive creatures like Reclamation Sage, Manglehorn, Trygon Predator, Mangara of Corondor, Ertai, Wizard Adept, Mystic Snake, Venser, Shaper Savant, Tradewind Rider.
However I just found that the converted-mana-costs are just too high to be really efficient.
Protection creatures
Protection creatures (targeted)
Protection creatures (mass-removal)
However due to the nature of drawing cards and putting more lands into play, even though you are set to lose wide boards from wrath effects, your ability to bounce back or carry on with a winning position is still very high.
So you're either drawing cards to fill up your hand for replacement effects, or putting lands into play so that you can cast out Chulane, Teller of Tales again easily to then start the value train going again. In this respect expect at least one board wipe during the early to mid part of the game to reset your board. Don't be afraid to play into it either by not committing creatures, because you are getting a replacement effects each time anyway, meaning you don't really lose resources by playing this way.
However there a lot of creature to mitigate removal.
From a spot removal (targeted) perceptive we have a bunch of creatures to help with that.
The more important creatures over-time though as you get more and more creatures into play are those that can protect your entire board.
Planar Guide, Selfless Spirit, Dauntless Escort can protect you from wrath effects, so look for these to be key cards to draw into during the game.
Planar Guide has been an all-star as far as getting around non-destroy spells like Toxic Deluge, Terminus, and even things like Decree of Pain cycled.
Shalai, Voice of Plenty is basically the trump card of the deck for being both protection and a way of making your creatures huge to finish off opponents with an alpha strike. Gaea's Cradle being a key card in the deck to make this easy.
There is also Voidmage Prodigy and Glen Elendra Archmage to prevent mass removal effects if need be. It's very possible to get more than 2 uses out of Glen Elendra Archmage during a game due to bounce effects or even distribution of +1/+1 counters.
Note that Gaddock Teeg is one of the best creatures you can have in play to stop wrath effects.
Card advantage and Toolbox creatures
I have to admit that my roots in commander had very much been in the good stuff green and blue department for many many years. But over the last couple of years I've really branched out into different color pies on purpose, simply because the formula worked and I got bored with it. Green always gave me mana ramp and card draw and blue gave me draw and disruption and protection..and well you didn't need anything else.
But I really invested into lower power colors, simply wanting to challenge myself, and examples are Boros with Firesong and Sunspeaker and then later on Feather, the Redeemed (busted, so busted, so maybe not the best example). Then my first time in mono-black with Yawgmoth, Thran Physician and then K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth.
Then my first time with Rakdos with Greven, Predator Captain. I'll point out that I've enjoyed every single game with these non-Simic commanders and decks as well, but a lot in part to being simply WotC also recognizing the need to spread out competitive commander colors more and giving me a reason to try them.
The point of my long intro here is that I've been thrust back into blue and green and it's hard to let old habits and formulas lie.
Thus I'm playing a set of creatures and synergies that I just know works, regardless of the Commander at the helm and I will explain a lot of these, even if they are obvious to a lot of you.
Card advantage creatures
Vizier of the Menagerie and Magus of the Future can really make sure that you have a continuous stream of spells at your disposal and with Chulane, Teller of Tales ability to draw, you can really dictate not getting lands stuck on-top of your library to allow continuous access to your library. With almost 60 creatures in the deck, Vizier of the Menagerie basically just casts everything.
Beast Whisperer has also turned into a real combo enabler. Once you are drawing two cards off each creature, your ability to draw into lands (to put into play) as well as further creatures to cast, really does end up stringing massive turns together.
Toolbox creatures
SPOILER
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I will point out that a popular strategy of mine with Seedborn Muse is to use Captain Sisay and Yisan, the Wanderer Bard to get a lot of value. However I was playing these and I found that they are just excess to what you are doing anyway, so cut them. I really cut back on anything that requires tapping for abilities as the game state changes a lot in between a full turn round with summoning sickness and I just found them too slow compared to what the rest of the deck is doing. Mana creatures are different.
Now there are not a lot of ETB effects in the deck, but you can still return creatures to get more triggers from Chulane, Teller of Tales. For example I often return Plaxmanta or Containment Priest or Aven Mindcensor that all have flash, to recast to get the draw and land drop during these Seedborn Muse turns. The thing is that because you are extending your land base during each of these opponents turns, it's has an exponential effect to how much more you can do on subsequent turns.
Eventual you can have enough mana to simply bounce a bunch of your creatures in the face of a big board removal spell, and easily play a portion (if not all) of them in the following turn, so this is another way to get around these spells. However often I'll have the answer already with previously mentioned protection spells.
I just really like Faerie Artisans, I've rated it as maybe the most underplayed card for level of power in commander..period.
Tutor creatures
Winning the Game
Without going into a full on stages, strategies, etc, hearkening back to where I pointed out just how efficient this commander is, actually often I find myself literally drawing through almost all 99 cards. Like I play a lot of decks that get through decks in busted ways, but this one is just really good at it.
The "downside" of being able to do this so efficiently is that that bulk of the deck is 1-2 cmc creatures, so therefore on individual levels don't have the same impact as higher converted cost bombs. However the sum of the parts is more than enough to win you the game when you simply get to play out your entire deck.
In fact what normally ends up happening is that when I get down to the last single digit amount of cards left in library, I often end up bouncing both Beast Whisperer and Chulane, Teller of Tales just to make sure I can play out the rest of my creatures in hand to prevent decking.
The other thing is that there really isn't any ways to return your graveyard on-mass. I have looked at what could help out with this, even thinking about Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre to get continuous shuffling back, but honestly I've never needed it, you just need to make sure that don't deck yourself by playing smart.
You will invariably get at least one massive turn where you draw so many cards that you'll end up discarding a bunch of cards at end of turn. At the time you get really worried about throwing away so many good cards and resources. A really great example of this is when you have Vizier of the Menagerie or Magus of the Future in play, and by virtue you've drawn a hand of like 20 cards but you are still playing off the top of your library for value.
The temptation at that stage is think it would be really nice to have a Reliquary Tower at your disposal. But the truth is that regardless of discarding 13 cards or more (which can easily happen), you've already won the game at that stage.
You don't even have mass reanimation cards to leverage this dump, but it doesn't matter.
There is Mistveil Plains and Eternal Witness to get key cards back in a pinch, but I've not actually needed them yet to exact a win.
Another thing I encountered in the "boo-hoo I've drawn my entire deck" is that you'll often run out of lands to search with fetch-lands. And again this really isn't a problem, we are talking about when you now have 20 lands in play type thing and really it doesn't effect your ability to win.
However there is a tech card in the deck with Realmwright to make sure you can still tap them for mana. I thought about Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth but you can give up too many advantages to black players wanting fixing or Cabal Coffers.
Shaman of Forgotten Ways is a common way I'll end the game quickly, reducing opponents life to easily dealt with totals even with small creature attacks.
Why not more "win conditions"? Maybe Kamahl, Fist of Krosa and Craterhoof Behemoth or even Laboratory Maniac? The answer simply lies in inevitability of drawing your deck and backing up your plays with protection and disruption, which the deck has in spades.
The mana efficiency of a low curve means that the deck ticks along with a certain consistency and once you start introducing high-mana curve cards it creates potential bottlenecks.
I did have God-Eternal Oketra in the deck and it was proficient at producing an army of Zombies, but after a few games I came to the conclusion that it was just a "win more" type of card.
I'm just as interested to hear what other people have come up with for their Chulane, Teller of Tales decks, and am I missing anything for my build or even strategies that I should be incorporating?
Zacama
