Current state of mono white and Azorius

[duducrash]

Let us sac Plains (to keep our land count behind)

Yassssss! This is something I didnt know I needed and I'm not sure how design hasnt explored this yet!

[Serenade]

I'll give props to @ISBPathfinder for that notion. I've been thinking about it since this topic almost a year ago.

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[RowanKeltizar]

Let us sac Plains (to keep our land count behind)

Yassssss! This is something I didnt know I needed and I'm not sure how design hasnt explored this yet!

There are some ways to do that in mono white... kind of. Zuran Orb however, probably a bad card unless your commander actually cares about you having less lands.

There's also Balancing Act and Lotus Field.

Or you could just run more lands that sac themselves like Strip Mine or Buried Ruin. If you are in boros or orzhov you can run the horizon lands. Sunbaked Canyon and Silent Clearing

[RowanKeltizar]

I'm suprised nobody's mentioned Tameshi, Reality Architect. Probably a decent azorius control commander although I have to say I find her quite boring. She is decently powerful though offering both card draw and recursion at an efficient cost. She can also bounce lands to enable the deficit plains fetchers as we just discussed.

[Venedrex]

You know what I'd like? A generic Mono W Enchantments commander. I like Light-Paws quite a bit, and Sram is great, but there more aura or artifact commanders than just regular old enchantments. I'd like a Mono W commander that just rewards you for playing enchantments that aren't necessarily auras. Less two for ones and Voltron/aggro, more Mono W control enchantment fort, but one that turns them into value and threats. Maybe it could give you creatures or a card per turn, or recursion.

It could also reward you for casting big enchantments. Most enchantment commanders say CAST AS MANY CHEAP ENCHANTMENTS AS POSSIBLE MORE MORE MORE with a couple of exceptions. I'd like to see something akin to Zaffai, Thunder Conductor that encourages big mana value enchantments. Of course, this is mono-white so maybe big spells are too much of a hurdle. But maybe some cost reduction effect could help?

Just let Mono W have what all the other colors have for there favorite permanent types. Mono R has artifact commanders galore, and so does Mono U, and they're not just equipment matters, they care about all artifacts. Such as Daretti, who just says, play artifacts. He's not confined to just equipment or some other subtype.

[capitacommunist]

I think mono white suffers from two main problems (omitting the fundamental weakness of the color in card advantage and ramp):
1) efficient commanders that play into the colors main strengths and help provide card advantage and tempo. The color lacks a good enchantment general, but also lacks an equipment general that can compete well in fair metas. Sram requires high equipment counts, and leads you to playing a lot of individual weak equipment, or losing out on tempo . Something in the vein of Puresteel Paladin would be much better as it helps out on both tempo and card advantage. Light-Paws is a good example of this, providing card advantage and board presence. Mono white also misses a general for taxing strategies designed for EDH. Commanders like the Thalias are too weak, and do to little redress the weakness of the color.
2) sufficient (strong) payoffs for playing mono color, at the level of something like Blood Moon, as some have already mentioned. The best way to do this is through mana costs I think, which they've explored a bit in new Kamigawa, but then the cards also need to be powered up (which they weren't really).

Azorius is a very strong color combination, although it does suffer from lesser access to good win conditions. I think the issues for Azorius are a dearth of interesting, flexible commanders overall (e.g. Queen Marchesa), having a mix of boring, high cmc, set of partners in blue limiting the partner combinations, and a lack of generals to broadly support certain strategies (a lot of Azorius generals are very narrow). I would most like to see commanders that reward the small creatures strategy (a la Tymna), and that support the tapping aspect of the colors, added to the roster.

[Dunharrow]

I think there my issue is less to do with the commanders available and more to do with viable win conditions (that are not build around).
for UW, I just want some kind of Aetherling that scales better in commander.

For mono white, I think there are some decent options but they all basically get compared to Sram, Senior Edificer.
I don't personally like equipment or aura decks, so there is just a need for a different type of design space. There are go-wide commanders but mono-white aggro just does not interest me. Then the other options have very expensive commanders like Avacyn, Angel of Hope which are not the most fun.
I think the most interesting commander in a while is Heliod, Sun-Crowned. It is very fun in brawl. I just hate it for commander because it's too slow for killing 3 opponents without resorting to the combos, in which case just build a combo deck... and then that's not fun.

For a new commander, I think I would want some kind of anti-artifact and enchantment commander. Just not taxing.. Maybe something like Glissa Sunseeker.. repeatable disenchanting to generate life or clue tokens or something. Maybe it blows up enchantments to make shard tokens and blows up artifacts to make clues or treasures?

[RowanKeltizar]

Wanted to share some custom commanders I've been working on based on some feedback in the topic. Keep in mind my cards usually are overpowered to begin with, then get balanced.

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Another version of the white guy. (also added non-token clause to the second ability so you don't get hosed by things like Smothering Tithe)

[5colorsrainbow]

I really like Ranar the Ever-Watchful, haven't gotten to play him a lot but I personally wanna build into the exile space. WU is great for blinking/flickering and W has Oblivion Ring effects and exile wraths and of course he play well with foretell which I hope we see more of in the future.

In general I think most mono-color decks are just kinda bland. The ones I wanna build all kinda have a gimmick going on with them, Shadowborn Apostle demon fun for black and commander matters for red. I had wanted a mono-blue devotion deck based around Master of Waves but I don't cause Thassa's Oracle drama.

Devotion might be a fun thing to explore more in mono-white, they mostly gave it to G and B since those are the colors that tend to have the most colored mana symbols in costs. The flavor would be great and as white dose have support/love for basically all the permanent types that feed devotion.

[Jemolk]

This topic got me to take stock of my commander decks. I currently have 39 decks. Given the topic, it is perhaps remarkable that Azorius is the third-most-common color combination at three decks, following 5c and Grixis tied for first at eight each. I also have one mono-white deck.

My three Azorius decks are Kangee, Aerie Keeper bird tribal, Niambi, Faithful Healer Teferi/phasing tribal, and Ranar the Ever-Watchful Foretell/Suspend. My one mono-white deck is Darien, King of Kjeldor soldier tribal. All of them are a lot of fun, honestly.

Birds is my oldest of this grouping, and it's honestly just a ton of fun to completely blindside people with. I built it in a relatively controlly manner, with lots of bird-flavored draw and removal, rather than as aggro fliers, with the potential for an absurdly massive anthem out of the command zone to close out the game. It'll still beat you down in the air too, but it's more likely to do so with massive nonsense like Rimefeather Owl than with tokens, just because I find that far more interesting. It's got subthemes of snow, morph, and counters. Kangee himself loves proliferate, so why not have some other counter synergies to go with it, after all? And birds have some really interesting morph cards, as well as some excellent snow creatures. Lots of other directions you could take it in, though, and plenty of excellent cards I didn't have room for. I'd say birds is a rather underappreciated tribe.

Niambi, Faithful Healer was built as a Teferi tribal deck as an excuse to have a flavorful, multicolored phasing deck. I don't pull it out very often; it's grindy, slow, and control-heavy, and its wincons generally involve heavy pillowfort, because it's pretty hard to win with Azor's Elocutors or Darksteel Reactor otherwise. I wanted a way to use time as a wincon without it being extra turns, though. It's definitely a weird deck, and not something you'd want to play against super regularly, but for the occasional game every few months, it can be pretty amusing. Worth enough entertainment that it's worth keeping together, at the very least.

Ranar is the most recent of my Azorius decks. There's not really a whole lot to say there. Usually it seems to go toward foretell/blink, or just blink, but I found foretell/suspend to be more interesting to me by a good margin. Again, fairly controlly, but with a somewhat unusual theme that makes it more interesting to play and play against.

My most recent deck full stop, as of me writing this, is Darien. Darien is such an oddball. Such an incredibly unique effect. That's what makes him compelling. Same reason I built a Phage deck, really. It's not all-in on Darien's ability, mind. Just heavily utilizes it to create soldier tokens, which synergize with the rest of the deck largely by being soldier tokens. It does have a decent number of specific synergy pieces for Darien, though. It's strong enough overall, but very different from what my other decks tend to look like. Definitely plays to mono-white's strengths, especially in that it gets to run both lifegain payoffs and go-wide payoffs to great effect. The fact that you wind up running Tarnished Citadel in a mono-colored deck for the advantage of being able to bolt yourself on demand only adds to the amusement I get from the deck.