Lynde: A Curse on All Our Houses

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Hawk
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Post by Hawk » 2 years ago

I've waited a long time for a great Curses Commander. Innistrad: Midnight Hunt looked to remedy our three big gaps in Innistradian Commanders, by printing several new options for GW Humans, a great new Werewolf Commander in Tovolar, Dire Overlord // Tovolar, the Midnight Scourge to answer for Ulrich of the Krallenhorde // Ulrich, Uncontested Alpha's sins, and...Lynde, Cheerful Tormentor for curses.

I'm going to be real, I'm not convinced Lynde is what we want for Curses.dec, and I'm not convinced she's a better pilot at the helm than Ghen, Arcanum Weaver. Lynne faces several problems as a Commander for our Witchy Web:
1) Lynde's abilities require her to be on the battlefield; having her eat removal prior to your upkeep when you are loaded with Curses is a total disaster depriving you of draw while forcing you to suffer your own voodoo. Her deck is going to be need to be absolutely loaded to the gills with all manner of ways to protect her.

2) The "curses" strategy generally, and a few curses like Curse of Thirst and Curse of Surveillance explicitly, want you to pile all your curses on one unlucky opponent. That's awesome - until that opponent dies/scoops to your cruelty, at which point you get all the curses piled onto you if Lynne is on the table (and just lose all your curses forever is she's dead).

3) You can spread the love instead - but then, you face the dilemma of getting absolutely demolished the first time anyone casts a way to remove all your enchantments like Cleansing Nova, Austere Command, etc. (and it's even worse versus something like a Hour of Revelation since Lynde triggers to give you all your curses, and then goes to your Command Zone before she can shuffle any away).

4) Many curses reward rumbling in combat and favoring a more aggressive style - but despite her Deathtouch, Lynde doesn't really wanna go attacking directly. Hitting a critical mass of curses for Lynde and protection for Lynde and ramp for your deck means it'll be hard to run a ton of creatures to reap the rewards of stuff like Curse of Stalked Prey, Curse of the Restless Dead, Curse of Inertia and Curse of Disturbance.

5) A lot of curses and their support cards are fairly expensive, as is Lynde especially if she dies a few times. That can be rough in a non-green tricolor deck, and will make it a tough tension between developing our curse engine and holding up mana for interaction/protection. We can invest in cards to flash in our stuff (Vedalken Orrery, Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir, Leyline of Anticipation), but now we're paying even more mana and money to try to support this cursed lifestyle.

6) We haven't even discussed the fact that a lot of curses are...pretty bad. Stuff like Curse of Death's Hold, Curse of the Pierced Heart, Trespasser's Curse, and Cruel Reality don't scale really well for Commander compared to the limited/casual formats they were designed for. Curses like Fraying Sanity, Curse of the Bloody Tome, Curse of the Nightly Hunt, and Curse of Obsession, are situational and possibly even beneficial for opponents (as are a lot of the Commander Deck curses like Curse of Chaos and Curse of Shallow Graves). And some curses like Curse of Oblivion and Torment of Scarabs are just outright stone-cold unplayable jank.

7) While we're in the colors of the most curses, we're arguably in the colors missing the best curses (Overwhelming Splendor, Curse of Clinging Webs)

8) We also probably just fold to any deck with Witchbane Orb or any other way of granting a player hexproof/phasing which is more a "lol" and insult to the long above list of injuries.
So yeah, there's a lot of problems with Lynde. What are our saving graces? Well, she's definitely interesting with Constellation. A good sacrifice engine will allow us to recur enchantments every turn to milk a ton of value off of Doomwake Giant and Grim Guardian in particular. There's also at least two curses that are actively great on you (Curse of Obsession and Curse of Unbinding) especially with Lynde or a sacrifice outlet to skirt their drawbacks. We could also put curses that are "good for us and our assailant" like Curse of Opulence on ourselves easily, and then try to use rattlesnake cards like Aetherize or Dread to punish attackers. There's also some potentially exploitable angles there with creatures that leave the battlefield as curses but can come back as something else (Accursed Witch // Infectious Curse primarily, but also Clever Impersonator). To a lesser extent, also interesting to shuffle what and whom exactly Mirrormade or Estrid's Invocation are cursing. And of course, a nice bonus is that outside of white mages ruining our days enchantments are fairly resilient card types.

Sadly we're once again in the wrong colors to have a way to bin our own enchantments at will for 0 and we're off the best Constellation cards too, so I can't see any angle here where we might go infinite or even degenerate - merely serviceable. Here's my first draft - but I'm very eager to feedback!
Just a Bunch of Hocus Pocus
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There's a whole lot I'd like to run that missed the cut - this deck is a tricky balance. What do ya'll think?

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