Codie, Vociferous Codex - The Book of Dredge
Commander (1)
Ramp (11)
1 Sol Ring
Rummage/Mill (13)
For Casting (9)
For Freerolling (6)
Reanimation Targets (9)
Approximate Total Cost:
Codie, Vociferous Codex has caught my eye the most out of any of the freshly spoiled Strixhaven legends. Possibly because it's goofy, or five color, or screams "Johnny, come build a rube goldberg machine out of me!", or all of the above. Anywho, I got to brainstorming how to build with the book in mind, and found it surprisingly challenging. I came up with a couple of basic deck ideas:
1a) Load up on lands and nothing else besides instants and sorceries. No permanents allowed. Start slinging and have fun spinning the wheel.
1b) Go the opposite route and stuff every permanent that ramps into the list, get set up with a jillion mana and haste/protection, then cast Codie and an expensive instant/sorcery to effectively tutor up one of a very small number of non-permanents in the deck which have some game warping effect (turns, mass hand disruption, one sided board wipes, etc).
2) Find every untap effect in existence and try to activate Codie on each player's turn once you're set up - perhaps just spending the mana on activated abilities when there's nothing juicy to cast. Probably looking to combo out with some untap/mana generation shenanigan infinite.
3) Focus on super expensive spells that can have dramatically reduced costs - such as Blasphemous Act, cards with delve, affinity, etc. - and look to freeroll mid to high cmc spells for value.
4) Find an A + B synergy of spell effects with a good spread along one particular CMC for effect A, then a bunch of the complementary B effect on spells with CMC less than that. For instance, hard casting Conqueror's Pledge, Increasing Devotion, or Spider Spawning, then freerolling the Mystic Reflection or Second Harvest that Codie gets.
All of these ideas struck me as really cool and relatively wide open, but I hit plenty of roadblocks. The deckbuilding restrictions along both card types and CMC make for an interesting tension. Long story short, I wasn't overly satisfied with anything I was coming up with, so I kind of squished several of the ideas together into this. . . thing.
The short version of the deck's gameplan is this:
1) Fix, ramp, and start rummaging away fatties and stuff that's valuable in the GY (like Anger) until I hit a dredger.
2) Let that rummage + dredge engine hum for as long as I reasonably can. Get haste enabled.
3) Cast and activate Codie on the same turn. Cast a 7 cmc non-permanent, which will then let me freeroll one of several sweet 6 cmc reanimation spells.
4) Smash. Repeat.
I don't think it's going to be cutthroat or competitive by any stretch. I'll chalk this one up in the "more casual funstuff" column for now. I'm positive I missed some obvious stuff, so I'd love feedback. Oh, and the lands are placeholders if that wasn't already apparent.
Zacama
