The problem with that is that all of that is instant and sorcery spam, and Jeskai is already flush with amazing Commanders for spellslingin'. Narset, Enlightened Master and Shu Yun, the Silent Tempest gave two different approaches and lots of versatility. Still, maybe Sevinne could have had a niche with tokens (using Cenn's Enlistment or Call the Skybreaker? He also was maybe good with casting spells out of a 'yard, specifically, since that wasn't an awesome niche for the two original Jeskai slinger commanders. But then Wizards said "nope". Mere weeks before Sevinne was released, they printed Kykar, Wind's Fury in Core Set 2020. Kykar is the best spellslinger Commander Jeskai could ever dream of, supporting a variety of archetypes and having an insanely high power level. He quickly shot up like a meteor as Jeskai's best commander. Want to spam tokens? Kykar is better. Want to go infinite? Kykar is better? Want to kill folks with your commander? Kykar. Want to protect an army of 'walkers? Kykar. Generally speaking Kykar proved to outclass Sevinne, coming down a turn sooner and effectively netting 2 spirits per flashback spell, which outclassed Sevinne's free Forks.
To add insult to injury, Sevinne found himself out-gunned in his own Precon, with Elsha of the Infinite living up to its name with infinite potential as a Spellslinger or Superfriends commander. Turns out, getting to use your entire library as an extra hand is better than using your whole graveyard as an extra hand, especially when your library gains Flash. The nail in the coffin was the printing of Gavi, Nest Warden - if you want to build a Jeskai deck that goes deep on a theme instead of just being a spellslinger or superfriends deck, it's hard to argue with Gavi's raw power and absolutely adorable Cat Dinosaur tokens. Brallin, Skyshark Rider and Shabraz, the Skyshark have even stolen his thunder for Jeskai looting and wheels!
One year later, things are grim for Sevinne. He's one of the only Commanders in MTG history who had two alternative commanders in his precon, both of which are more played on EDHRECs (apparently folks love themselves some Pramikon, Sky Rampart, although at least Jirina Kudro is on track to join him in this loser's bracket). It's not hard to see why; Sevinne is a very situational payoff to historically overcosted effects, on a very small body for a fairly high CMC, with a ton of competition. No one takes him seriously, he's under 500 decks played on EDHRECs which puts him in the bottom five worst face Commanders in Commander deck history alongside Ob Nixilis of the Black Oath, Kalemne, Disciple of Iroas, and Jirina Kudro.
And that's why I adore playing him.
Why On Earth Should I Play Sevinne?
I just spent a lot of words outlining why Sevinne is outclassed, so why play him at all?
- Sevinne will fly under the radar at most tables. He's extremely non-threatening because his deck strategy is so slow. Attacking into him is extremely unappealing due to his pseudo-indestructibility. These two things combine to buy you all the time in the world.
- You will get to play a lot of obscure old cards which allow you to win from a variety of angles. Sometimes you swing in with a horde of powered up tokens. Sometimes you play like Counter-burn, controlling the flow of the game and burning everyone to death. Sometimes you win with an instant combo. Now, you can also do that with better Commanders, but the next few points are what makes Sevinne really special.
- A well-built Flashback deck is inexhaustible. The combination of Runic Repetition and (ideally auto-Forked) Mystic Retrieval and the existence of (ideally forked) Oona's Grace and Glimpse of Freedom means you will never, ever, ever run out of fuel.
- Sevinne is hand's down the best home for the Ral, Storm Conduit infinite engine. Ral is just generally good in our deck as free chip damage, more forks, and some deck manipulation, but you are also so incentivized to run Increasing Vengeance and Refuse // Cooperate that it allows you to "go off" pretty reliably.
- You get to see, and have access to, a lot of cards. This deck draws like mad and treats its graveyard like a second hand for most of the game, and your Forking spells give you a ton of flexibility and advantage. Your victory paths frequently involve specific combinations of cards, but since you're going to see most of your deck most games you're totally fine.
What's the Gameplan?
The midgame: Use your removal sparingly and judiciously to protect yourself and keep the board manageable. Chip in damage from tokens and triggers where you can. Play politically, avoiding angering too many players and staying "out of and above" the fray unless you must intervene to not lose. Your various engines should mean you never lack for cards or options. Deep Analysis and Chemister's Insight reload your whole hand assuming you have at least one of Sevinne, Secrets, Kelpie, and Resonator on the table and it goes up from there, nevermind what happens if you can cast Ignite the Future with Sevinne live. You can get back whatever you need, over and over and over, with Runic Repetition + Mystic Retrieval. You can also just durdle away, drawing an extra 2-3 cards a turn with Oona's Grace or Glimpse of Freedom which crucially don't exile themselves. Pariah and Prismatic Strands are clutch at buying you whole turns to keep assembling and grinding your engine. Keep hitting landdrops - you need to assemble a strong mana advantage. Sevinne's Reclamation and Sun Titan are nice ways to "rescue" a dead value engine (most often Geistcaller or Guttersnipe), but I most often use them to ramp by targeting fetchlands and looted lands.
The Endgame:
This deck ends the game in one of three ways.
The most common way is Ral, Storm Conduit. The way this combo works, for the unfamiliar, will be to have any spell go on the stack (not from your yard!) with Sevinne, the Chronoclasm and Ral in play and Increasing Vengeance or Refuse // Cooperate in your 'yard. You then cast these from your 'yard, Sevinne copies it, and you can have the copy target the Vengeance or Cooperate on the stack to basically copy it ad nauesum until everyone is dead. This also works with no Sevinne and no graveyard-based need, if you have Vengeance AND Cooperate. While this feels narrow, it's more common than you think - you dig through your deck quickly, you can rebuy Increasing Vengeance with Runic Repetition if you had to burn it earlier, and once you resolve Ral it is extremely hard for an opponent to disrupt the combo, as you can just respond to any interaction with the combo. As a result, you basically never want to play Ral for value early if you can t all help it- you want to hold him until you can infinite with him.
The next most common way I've won is just burn. It's not uncommon since your threat profile is so low to be in a 1v1 shoot-out as one of the last players standing, at which point a Devil's Play for X=10, copied, is endgame. If the first blast doesn't do it, again, you can rebuy Play with Repetition until they die. You can also do a lot of burn damage with the Refuse side of Refuse // Cooperate (I've definitely killed someone by casting this on their 7 mana spell and then casting Increasing Vengeance on the Refuse), or by rebuying and spamming Blasphemous Act, Starstorm, or Star of Extinction while you control Stuffy Doll.
I've also won once or twice by managing to amass a horde of tokens and then cast Rally the Peasants + flashback Rally with Sevinne for a sudden +6/+0 to swing for 30+.
Those seem shaky, but the key thing is that with all your chip damage from Guttersnipe and Electrostatic Field and Burning Vengeance and Stuffy Doll and Mischievous Chimera, opponents are often in the 20s in the endgame.
The maybeboard: Cards I own, and mean to test soonish:
- Careful Study, Frantic Search, Fact or Fiction: Looting is SO GOOD for us, I'm tempted to run these despite the lack of flashback. The tricky balance is running enough cards that trigger Sevinne while still running power plays.
- Cyclonic Rift, Arcane Denial, Supreme Verdict, Chaos Warp, Wear // Tear: Same as above but for interaction. Wear//Tear is the most likely inclusion - Ray of Distortion has lost me a lot of games with its ridiculous cost, and it may just be the line at which the value isn't worth it.
- Quiet Speculation: I own this as well, and it is on the testing list. The reason I haven't done so yet it that it feels really unnecessary. None of the combo we're trying to execute involves our flashback spells; we're flashing back for value. We're also not looking to win quick, so using this as it was used in Standard to go fish for Roar of the Wurms isn't where we are at. It is a great way to bypass the awkward first casting of Deep Analysis and that's a real consideration, but on balance I'm just not convinced that this isn't superfluous with all our digging power. If it could hit any instant or sorcery (and thus dump Farm // Market and Oona's Grace into the 'yard as well) I'd be all about it.
- Cackling Counterpart, Quasiduplicate: We don't run enough hits for these to be meaningful in our deck I think. I am tempted to test that theory - it is sick to get 4 Guttersnipes - but I suspect on balance these are dead too often.
- Pariah's Shield: Pariah is great, so reusable Pariah should be amazing right? I'm not totally convinced - 8 mana is a lot. I do own one and will get around to testing it eventually though.
- Flash of Insight: This intrigues me, but seems like it is probaby bad. Demanding at least up front to draw even one makes it worse than Think Twice, Radical Idea, Glimpse of Freedom, or Desperate Ravings, and it doesn't seem worth the possibility of making this dig deep if I have a ton of spare mana. The flashback cost is also awkward, way more awkward than Glimpse, since it has to eat real live blue cards instead of eating lands. I do feel like it merits testing but suspect Scour All Possibilities (which I just haven't tracked down a copy of) or a non-flashing spell like Frantic Search is just better.
- Conflagrate: This is worse than Devil's Play at each point, but could also be spicy.
Good(?) and needs testing:
"Tier 1": I think these cards are auto-includes if you own them...I just don't. Yet. And in terms of investment, all of these compete with buying better mana for this deck.
- Monastery Mentor - Down to $15 which isn't prohibitive but is a bit pricey for my blood. Obviously great if you can get it.
- Brash Taunter - is a Stuffy Doll that snipes X/1s and can attack under a Rally. Seems amazing, unsure if it replaces Doll or gets played alongside it but I do want one.
- Baral, Chief of Compliance - is an electromancer that also adds a loot to my counters. Nuts card, but hard to justify since the loot will be fairly infrequent. Again, not sure if this is just a strictly better replacement to Electromancer or if the deck wants both.
- Primal Amulet // Primal Wellspring - Seems like it is just strictly better than Jace's Sanctum, I just don't own one.
- Whirlwind of Thought - I despise the idea of running stuff that is "better in Kykar" but it's hard to deny how good this would be. I'm not sure if it replaces Jace's Sanctum, River Kelpie, or something else to get run alongside them but this is just obviously incredible in the deck, triggering on both sides of a Flashback spell cast and also triggering off mana rocks and other enabler pieces.
- Narset's Reversal, Expansion // Explosion - These are two good forks. We aren't truly a "spell copy" deck, really, but it's hard to deny how great these would be in this deck.
- Bonus Round, Doublecast: These would make it much easier to win with Ral and not Sevinne or stack trickery.
- Saheeli, Sublime Artificer: Incredible card, just need to track down a copy. The ability is actually sometimes relevant - buy us another Gilded Lotus for the turn? And it makes tokens on the cheap while being slightly more resilient than a creature.
- Shark Typhoon, Metallurgic Summonings, Docent of Perfection // Final Iteration, The Locust God: I am grouping all of these together as "spellslinger value" cards. The thing is, the deck is slow. REAL slow. And we usually want to cast Sevinne on 5 (or 7 or 8 with mana up for immediate value, more often). So, these can be pretty hard to weave in. The current deck runs only one "value engine" that is more than 4 CMC other than Sevinne himself, and River Kelpie isn't a "do nothing" since it blocks and eventually at least cantrips by triggering itself with Persist. As a result, I suspect this deck is least interested in Summoning which is a true do-nothing, but I'm ambivalent about all of it.
- Twinning Staff: On the face of it, this seems awesome but I'm a bit reluctant. I don't love the idea of a card that's only good with Sevinne AND a stocked 'yard, which is what this is going to be. Obviously that's plan A, we hope it all works out like that, but it isn't a guarantee. The activated ability is prohibitive and will almost never happen, so this is purely a "do nothing" while we wait to go off even harder for Sevinne. I want to test it, but I think there's a real chance it's a win-more card that is dead some amount of the time and doesn't "win more" fast enough to justify its spot. Still, I am currently running Strionic Resonator and 95% of that time that's just targeting a Sevinne trigger anyways...
- Double Vision, Swarm Intelligence, Thousand-Year Storm: A sort of hybrid of the two complaints above - these are extremely slow "do nothing "spellslinger engines and we aren't a dedicated copy deck. These are spicy when copying a Devil's Play for X=7 (especially one already copied), but pretty lackluster when copying Glimpse of Freedom for one more card. Yes I am aware usually our Commander is just copying Glimpse for one more card. But our Commander does MORE than that, and I'm not sure I want to play a duplicate of our Commander who can't attack or block or get Pariah'd.
- Pull from Eternity: I do own this too, just not sure on it. The idea is this is a cheaper Runic Repetition that puts it back in the 'yard for only one more casting, and/or this is a way to save a Runic Repetition that ate an exile effect. Those are both nice effects, I'm just not sold on it. But honestly, the more I think about it should probably be in the list.
- Call the Skybreaker: I was so embarrassed to find I had zero copies of it, and haven't bothered to track other copies down. But in truth, maybe that's a good thing? This is obviously huge value with Sevinne, but seven mana is a lot. I suspect this is something we want and I do want to test it, but it may just be too slow for an already slow deck.
- Backdraft Hellkite, Snapcaster Mage, Torrential Gearhulk, Recoup, Underworld Breach, Mission Briefing, Jace, Vryn's Prodigy // Jace, Telepath Unbound, Past in Flames- The deck came with Hellkite and I did play a few games with Snappy and Recoup in the list before cutting them all. I also remember the internet nerd rage when it was revealed the precon didn't come with Past in Flames, as everyone assumed that should be his gameplan. These are among the most played cards with Sevinne, and certainly a way to build Sevinne would be to try and use these effects to copy Time Warps and Fact or Fictions and Frantic Searches out of the yard for infinite cosmic value. The thing is, that isn't how we actually want this deck to play. If you want to slam and copy the best spells in the game, there are commanders who do that without all the extra steps. You are better off cutting out the middleman and just playing Melek, Izzet Paragon or Riku of Two Reflections for dedicated forking, or playing Narset, Enlightened Master to cheat out massive backbreaking spells one after the other. These cards don't lean into Sevinne's niche of inexhaustible value and inevitability, and clutter up our deck. They're dead draws without other spells, and Sevinne is dead without these AND other spells. If you continue to run all your cards you can get your hands on that do combo with Sevinne, this is often superfluous as a way to maybe save a smidgen of mana on the flashback cost. It's just not where we want to be.
- Fervent Denial - I have kept Ray of Distortion and am ready to die on that hill, but this is too slow even for us and doubling a counter is rarely meaningful.
- Throes of Chaos - This is a popular add to Sevinne, but it does nothing with Sevinne (Cascade only works when the spell is cast, so a copy doesn't Cascade). Sure it does work with Vengeance/Secrets/Kelpie, but I want my flashback spells to work with Sevinne or not be in the list. The random cascading is also not really where we want to be.
- Shattered Perception, Commit // Memory, Echo of Eons, Dusk // Dawn: These are similar to Throes - duplicating them doesn't actually do anything, and the value from triggering Kelpie, Secrets, or Vengeance just isn't worth it.
- Battle Screech, Cenn's Enlistment: We have some token generation to play defense with or occasionally win out of nowhere with, but we aren't a dedicated token deck. Screech is surprisingly hard for us to flashback if the tokens don't live, and Enlistment is pretty weak. Enlistment was in for a long time and was frequently dead even with how great Retrace is as a mechanic for us.
- Kykar, Wind's Fury, Elsha of the Infinite: We don't run these on principle. They will overshadow Sevinne every time. Real talk, Elsha isn't what we want for all the reasons I've mentioned we don't probably want spell doublers or Mettalurgic Summosn or Future Sight, and Kykar is a marginal enough upgrade over Talrand and Geistcaller as to not be missed in this deck.
- Lightning Surge, Rolling Temblor, Volcanic Spray - I so wanted damage-based flashback removal to be good, but it just kept letting me down.