- Decklist
- Commander bracket
- The commander
- Ramp ramp ramp
- Draw draw draw
- Phlage the police officer
- Committing super-murder
- Epilogue
I play a rather unhealthy amount of a card game called Magic the Gathering.
My time playing Magic has been spent across a variety of formats, including Pioneer, Pauper, Draft & Sealed, Cube (shout out Vintage Cube!), and Brawl, but by far my most played format is Commander.
I’ve probably built over 15 commander decks by this point, but the one that I’ve spent the most time working on—and by far my favorite to play—is led by this chonker:
My Phlage, Titan of Fire’s Fury commander deck is my proudest creation within the world of Magic—my magnum opus, if you will. The decklist has been reworked many times, with both the overarching strategies and individual card choices being refined over the course of a year and a half.
I really enjoy the gameplay patterns that the Phlage deck produces. The deck is filled with interaction and card draw, allowing me to always stay in the game and have the tools to answer even the most greedy of decks. Endgames are often neck-and-neck damage races, rewarding threat assessment and skillfully timed interaction.
Decklist
You can view the decklist on Moxfield.
Visual Spoiler
Commander
Creatures - 34
Sorceries - 9
Instants - 11
Artifacts - 5
Enchantments - 5
Lands - 34 (+3 MDFC)
Text
1 Phlage, Titan of Fire's Fury1 Aerial Extortionist 1 Agent Bishop, Man in Black 1 Anticausal Vestige 1 Araña, Heart of the Spider 1 Archangel Avacyn // Avacyn, the Purifier 1 Arena of Glory 1 Arid Mesa 1 Aurelia, the Law Above 1 Aurelia, the Warleader 1 Battlefield Forge 1 Bitter Reunion 1 Bloodstained Mire 1 Cataclysmic Gearhulk 1 Clifftop Retreat 1 Command Tower 1 Demand Answers 1 Demolition Field 1 Djeru and Hazoret 1 Dragonhawk, Fate's Tempest 1 Elegant Parlor 1 Éowyn, Fearless Knight 1 Erode 1 Etali, Primal Storm 1 Fable of the Mirror-Breaker // Reflection of Kiki-Jiki 1 Fall of the First Civilization 1 Flagstones of Trokair 1 Flamekin Village 1 Flooded Strand 1 Generous Plunderer 1 Gwaihir, Greatest of the Eagles 1 Hanweir Battlements 1 Headliner Scarlett 1 Heartless Hidetsugu 1 Highway Robbery 1 Horn of the Mark 1 Humble Defector 1 Inspiring Vantage 1 Karlach, Fury of Avernus 1 Laelia, the Blade Reforged 1 Late to Dinner 1 Lion Sash 1 Loran of the Third Path 1 Lorehold, the Historian 1 Lotus Field 1 Lotus Vale 1 Loyal Retainers 1 Luminous Broodmoth 1 Marsh Flats 1 Moraug, Fury of Akoum 2 Mountain 1 Needleverge Pathway // Pillarverge Pathway 1 Neheb, Dreadhorde Champion 1 Ox Drover 1 Palace Jailer 1 Path to Exile 1 Peter Parker's Camera 3 Plains 1 Plateau 1 Prismatic Vista 1 Pumpkin Bombs 1 PuPu UFO 1 Pursue the Past 1 Pyrrhic Strike 1 Sacred Foundry 1 Scalding Tarn 1 Scholar of New Horizons 1 Sevinne's Reclamation 1 Slayers' Stronghold 1 Solphim, Mayhem Dominus 1 Soul Partition 1 Soul-Guide Lantern 1 Spectacular Tactics 1 Spectator Seating 1 Sunbillow Verge 1 Sundering Eruption // Volcanic Fissure 1 Sundown Pass 1 Swords to Plowshares 1 Teyo, Geometric Tactician 1 The Legend of Yangchen // Avatar Yangchen 1 The Regalia 1 Thespian's Stage 1 Thrilling Discovery 1 Tibalt's Trickery 1 Tragic Arrogance 1 Turbulent Steppe 1 Unwanted Remake 1 Valakut Awakening // Valakut Stoneforge 1 Vanquish the Horde 1 Velomachus Lorehold 1 Vision of Love 1 War of the Last Alliance 1 Weathered Wayfarer 1 What Must Be Done 1 Windswept Heath 1 Witch Enchanter // Witch-Blessed Meadow 1 Wooded Foothills
Commander bracket
This deck plays at a bracket 3 power level.
Bracket 3 is the most common commander bracket I encounter at local game stores in the wild, and is my favorite bracket to play. In my opinion, bracket 3 has the best balance of power and creative expression. Bracket 3 is slow enough that obscure/off-meta/idiosyncratic cards and decks are playable, while still having a strong focus on synergy, interaction, and playing for the win.
This deck does not play any game changers because game changers are cringe and unfun.
It also does not play Sol Ring.
The commander
Phlage, Titan of Fire’s Fury is a 3 mana 6/6 Elder Giant that gives you a free Lightning Helix every time it enters or attacks.
To balance out this otherwise absurd statline, Phlage promptly commits seppuku after being cast. It hangs out in the graveyard, waiting to escape. You can pay 4 mana and exile 5 other cards from the graveyard to cast Phlage for its escape cost, after which it permanently sticks around to terrorize the village.
This deck doesn’t really depend on having the commander around for its main game plan—in fact, I’ve played a number of games where Phlage was never cast at all! Instead, Phlage acts as a useful removal tool you have access to every game, as well as a powerful finisher late into the game.
This style of deckbuilding—where the main game plan of a deck does not directly synergize with its commander—is often described as a counterweight commander, a term coined by content creator Salubrious Snail. I generally enjoy this style of deckbuilding as your deck is able to function independently of your commander, making it so that your game is not easily disrupted by removal.
Ramp ramp ramp
Most of the early game of the Phlage commander deck is spent drawing cards and ramping.
Ramp is one of the four pillars of commander deckbuilding, the other three being card draw, interaction, and finishers. Most successful commander decks need to dedicate some portion of their deck to getting ahead on mana.
The ramp strategy for this deck was heavily inspired by 5 Levels of Mana Fraud in White by Commander Baumi, although many of the cards have deviated from the video’s suggestions. This video single-handedly expanded my horizons and showed me how creative commander-viable strategies really can be—I would highly recommend giving it a watch!
This deck does not play any mana rocks or other artifact ramp. In fact, almost all of the deck’s ramp is land-based!
This was partially a stylistic decision—“no mana rocks” was a unique deckbuilding restriction I wanted to try out—but it also ended up having some real gameplay advantages. By avoiding artifacts, our ramp is naturally more resilient to interaction, as mass artifact removal is commonplace among bracket 3 commander.
Land ramp
The vast majority of the ramp cards in the deck do so by placing additional lands into play.
Scholar of New Horizons is capable of ramping an additional land into play, the only caveat being that we need to control fewer lands than our opponent. This is easily done on curve—after playing Scholar on turn 2, we should be able to activate its ability on turn 3 before playing our normal land for turn (an opponent in turn order ahead of us likely has their third land in play). Note that this unfortunately does not work if you are the first seat at the table.
On top of the ramp it provides, Scholar is able to search additional lands into our hand every turn to ensure that we hit all our land drops—activating this ability requires paying the cost of removing a counter from a permanent we control. This works very nicely with sagas, since we can remove a lore counter from the saga every single turn to both get additional lands and repeatedly trigger a chapter ability.
PuPu UFO and The Regaila are both cards that are capable of ramping multiple lands into play turn over turn.
PuPu UFO requires some support since we need to constantly draw enough cards to ensure that we have extra lands to put into play—our high density of rummage spells helps us find land cards. If we are able to do this, PuPu UFO lets us ramp very quickly, giving us double land drops every turn as early as turn 3.
The Regalia is a personal favorite of Commander Baumi—he’s even posted a whole 13 minute video raving about this vehicle (can you tell that I’m a fan of his channel?). On top of being an excellent way to ramp additional lands into play every single turn, The Regalia is a 4/4 beater with haste which gets to participate in the arduous task of reducing our opponents’ life totals.
This deck plays Peter Parker’s Camera primarily to ramp additional lands into play.
The deck plays all 7 fetch lands in the red/white colors, plus Prismatic Vista. These lands all have an activated ability to fetch a land into play from our library—we can copy this ability using the Camera to get an additional land into play for only 2 mana. Thus, Peter Parker’s Camera is like a repeatable Rampant Growth, provided we also draw our fetch lands.
Another set of cards you may find surprising to be considered as ramp are the removal spells Path to Exile and Erode—if you shoot your own creature with one of these spells, you get to put a basic land into play tapped.
On top of being incredibly based, I think using these spells as ramp is legitimately strong in more situations than you may think. An interaction in particular I’d like to point out is with Humble Defector—by shooting Humble Defector with Path or Erode in response to activating its ability, you’re able to draw two cards and ramp once, all while preventing your opponents from gaining control of the creature!
Lotus field and friends
Lotus Field and its cousin Lotus Vale (collectively I’ll refer to as the “lotus lands”) are two very unique lands. They both tap for 3 mana of any color, but require you to sacrifice 2 other lands when they enter, thus they don’t actually increase the amount of mana you have access to. On their own, they don’t do much, but in this deck they play a part in a number of unique synergies.
One thing that the lotus lands do is place two other lands into your graveyard. For one, this is fuel that lets us cast Phlage for its escape cost. In addition to this, having the lands in the graveyard also allows them to be recurred with other effects.
Sevinnes Reclamation is a 3 mana spell that lets you return a permanent with mana value 3 or less to the battlefield—this of course includes lands! Thus, Sevinnes Reclamation can function as a ramp spell, provided you have a land in your graveyard. It even has a 5 mana flashback cost, providing potentially additional ramp on a following turn.
Since we also play a full set of fetch lands, Sevinnes Reclamation never has trouble finding lands to reanimate.
Flagstones of Trokair is a land that, when it is put into a graveyard from the battlefield, lets you search for a plains and put it into play tapped. This land works nicely with the lotus lands since they let you sacrifice it when they enter. Thus, playing Flagstones followed by a lotus land allows you to ramp one land into play.
Thespian’s Stage is a unique land that lets you copy another target land for 2 mana. This is excellent for copying lotus lands, allowing us to obtain a second land that taps for 3 mana without having to sacrifice anything (copying another land does not trigger its enter-the-battlefield effects). Fun fact: this combo is a core part of a popular Pioneer deck based around shenanigans with Lotus Field.
Weathered Wayfarer is a 1 mana white creature with a powerful effect—provided we’ve got fewer lands than our opponent, we can spend 1 white mana to search for any land from our deck to our hand. This is incredibly cracked, as we essentially have a one card combo to assemble all of the Lotus Field technology we’ve just described.
Provided we have Weathered Wayfarer and any untapped white land in our opening hand, we get to play the sequence:
- Turn 1: play an untapped white land, play Weathered Wayfarer.
- Turn 2: tap Wayfarer to find Flagstones of Trokair, play it for turn.
- Turn 3: tap Wayfarer to find Lotus Field, play it for turn, sacrificing the other two lands. Search for an additional plains (Elegant Parlor is a good target) onto our battlefield tapped.
- Turn 4: tap Lotus Field for 3 white mana, spend one with Wayfarer to search for Thespian’s Stage, play it for turn. Spend the remaining 2 mana to activate Stage to copy Lotus Field.
We end turn 4 with two Lotus Fields and a plains in play. Assuming that we hit our land drop on turn 5, we will now have access to eight mana! Remember, this is all possible with just Weathered Wayfarer in our opening hand. This level of ramping is enough to make even green players jealous.
Unfortunately, this sequence doesn’t quite work if we’re in the first seat of the pod, since none of our opponents will have more lands in play than us when we go to activate Wayfarer (if we’re in a later seat, the first seat player usually will have more lands than us). If you are ever in this situation while playing the deck, feel free to cry.
Treasure generators
Besides land-based ramp cards, this deck also plays two cards that can repeatedly produce treasure tokens—this kind of effect is arguably stronger than normal ramp as you can stockpile treasures over multiple turns for a big burst of mana, and efficiently hold up instant-speed interaction without needing to leave any lands untapped.
Generous Plunderer lets us create a treasure token every single upkeep, provided we find a friend to also receive a treasure. 2 mana for a permanent that produces a treasure token every turn is well above the normal rate.
Generous Plunderer also has a trigger on attack that deals damage to the defending player equal to the number of artifacts they control. This is specifically strong against artifact strategies, which are commonplace in bracket 3 commander—it’s not unusual to dome an opponent for 10+ damage using this ability.
Fable of the Mirror-Breaker is an absolute unit of a card that should be familiar to anyone that plays any competitive 1v1 Magic. Among the five other reasons this card is strong, the 2/2 Goblin Shaman creature token created by the first chapter ability will create a treasure token whenever it attacks, allowing you to ramp.
Draw draw draw
In commander, arguably the most important effect a deck should have is card draw.
Ramp helps you cast bigger & more spells earlier, interaction keeps you alive, and finishers help you kill your opponents, but without card draw, these other gameplans will run out of steam very quickly. There’s nothing more frustrating in a game of commander than having an empty hand, every turn praying to the Magic gods that the top card of your deck is not a land.
A well-built commander deck will almost always keep the player’s hand at a full grip of 7 cards—this deck is no exception.
Rummaging effects
At the backbone of the Phlage deck is a suite of rummaging spells.
In Magic parlance, a “rummaging” effect is one where you discard then draw some number of cards, ending up with about the same number of cards in hand. Rummaging exists in contrast to “looting” effects where you draw the cards before discarding. This is on average stronger than rummaging, since you get to see all the cards before choosing what to discard. Unfortunately, looting effects are typically only available to blue.
The Phlage deck plays an assortment of 2 mana rummage effects, most of which are instants or sorceries. Having a critical mass of these cards is important—we’re often able to chain these spells off each other, as casting one rummaging spell often has a high probability of drawing into another soon after, allowing us to effectively churn through our entire deck.
Among these cards, Highway Robbery is an interesting one—rummaging effects are typically stronger the more cards you have in hand, since you have more options for discarding. By plotting the card, you’re able to cast the card for free the following turn, or even a turn far into the future, where you can now discard one of the additional cards you’ve drawn up to that point.
Demand Answers and Vision of Love can be pure card draw if you have an artifact incidentally lying around, which is not uncommon—you can use treasures produced by one of our treasure generators for this purpose, for example.
There are also a handful of other cards that rummage as part of their effects.
Neheb, Dreadhorde Champion is a particularly powerful one, generating red mana for each card discarded. The fact that you are incentivized to discard as many cards as possible to maximize the amount of mana produced leads to a really fun “push your luck” style of gameplay.
These rummaging effects don’t go card positive—i.e. you don’t actually end up with more cards than you started with. However, they let us be selective of cards in our hand, smoothing out variance and improving the overall quality of our hand.
The most obvious utility of this is for hitting our land drops. If we have too many or too few lands in hand, a rummaging spell lets us discard excess land/nonland cards, ensuring that we can hit every land drop while still having cards to cast on curve.
In addition to this, rummaging cards fill our graveyard so that we always have enough fuel to escape Phlage. This also plays into our other graveyard synergies, such as our reanimation effects.
“True” card advantage
Rummaging spells are great for smoothing our hand, but they don’t actually increase the number of cards we have access to—if we only had rummaging for card draw, we’d still quickly run out of cards in hand as the game progressed.
To keep our hand full, we must play cards that provide “true” card advantage, i.e. effects that actually go card positive. Most of the cards in this category are able to effectively draw at least one card per turn. Note that card positive refers to anything that gives us access to more cards than we started with, which can include methods other than drawing cards.
This deck plays the following creatures which are able to “impulse” draw, i.e. the effect to exile the top card of our library and allow us to play it during the turn. Although this is inherently more risky than a normal draw—we aren’t always able to play the exiled card—this is still a very powerful effect that accumulates a lot of value over time. The best type of card to exile are typically lands, since it’s a card we can and want to play every turn.
Weathered Wayfarer and Scholar of New Horizons can both be considered card draw if you squint hard enough. They both provide card advantage by potentially giving you a land card from your library every turn. This is already great if you need to hit your land drops, and can be rummaged away if you need other cards to play. Scholar of New Horizons of course requires a source of counters to remove, which, on top of sagas as discussed in the previous section, can also be provided by Laelia or Araña.
Sharing the love
An interesting aspect of the Phlage deck is that a lot of the card draw in the deck forces you to share the card draw with your opponents. Some of this comes in the form of handing control of your card draw permanent over to an opponent.
Others come in the form of simultaneously letting you and another opponent draw a number of cards (see chapter 1 of Fall of the First Civilization and chapter 2 of The Legend of Yangchen).
Palace Jailer introduces the monarch into the game, which is sort of a shareable form of card draw you can give to your opponents. I really love the monarch as a mechanic; it’s a lot of fun and is a great way to introduce political leverage into the game, since you can always offer an opponent the ability to hit you for the monarch in exchange for a favor.
While some people may find sharing card draw with your opponents to be a downside, I actually think this is quite a good thing. There are many scenarios in which you can turn resources you give to your opponents into an advantage for yourself.
It is very common in commander games to have an “archenemy” who is threatening to take over the game—in these situations, giving cards to one of your other opponents doubles the resources you have to fight against Mr. Big Bad, letting you both search for interaction and other threats to fight against them. Thus, using shared card draw, you can force a sort of balancing effect upon the game, selectively giving resources to opponents who are behind. Of course, this will backfire upon yourself if you ever become the archenemy, thus it is imperative that you are never perceived as the main threat during the game, at least before you’ve accumulated enough resources to push for a win.
Phlage the police officer
I think the real strength of the Phlage deck lies in its suite of high quality interaction. My removal spells and board wipes give me leverage over the gameplans of my opponents, allowing me to take on a sort of “police officer” role.
Many commander decks I encounter in the wild are extremely greedy—they try to turbo out their gameplans, aiming to win by assembling a lethal threat faster than the rest of the table. This deck was created partially as a response to greedy decks: a single well-timed removal spell is often enough to stop an opponent from pushing through a win, or at least will slow them down enough so that the rest of the table can catch up.
I find threat evaluation to be by far the most fascinating part of commander. Properly understanding which cards must be removed, and perhaps more importantly, which cards are not actually threatening and can be left alone, is a deeply interesting strategic puzzle.
With the Phlage deck, it is very important never to become “the threat”. You should aim to appear as a solution to other problems at the table, and never become a problem yourself—that is, at least until you’re able to assemble a lethal threat yourself and push for a win.
Often you will want to sandbag your big creatures (intentionally not cast them) in order to avoid facing your opponent’s removal spells. Wait until someone else develops a threatening board and becomes the target, then your big creatures are much more likely to stick around as they look less threatening by comparison.
Removal spells
One of the defining traits of the Phlage deck is its assortment of cheap, instant-speed removal spells.
White has hands down the best removal spells in all of commander.
There are four white cards that are able to kill any creature, unconditionally at instant-speed, for just 1 mana. This deck plays all of them.
In addition, this deck plays a wide assortment of other interactive spells, including removal for a wider range of permanents, protection, and even just a straight-up counter spell with Tibalt’s Trickery. Having a set of varied, flexible removal spells increases the chances that any one of them will be relevant in a given game scenario.
You’ll notice that pretty much all of the instant removal spells are 1 or 2 mana—the deck doesn’t play more expensive commander staples like Chaos Warp or Generous Gift. My philosophy with instant removal spells is that mana efficiency matters a lot—I don’t want to have to choose between developing my own board and holding up interaction. It is much, much easier to hold up 1 or 2 mana than 3+ mana at the end of a turn.
The exception here of course is Pyrrhic Strike which costs 3 mana, but this spell more than makes up for its cost by being extremely flexible, and also being a 2-for-1 effect—it can nuke an artifact/enchantment and a creature with just a single piece of cardboard.
You may also notice that I prioritize being able to kill creatures over any other permanent type with my instant-speed interaction. Combat damage is the most common way for players to die in bracket 3. An attacking creature is often the best thing you can kill with an instant removal spell, since it can prevent an otherwise lethal swing, which can lead to a major blow-out. Artifacts and enchantments, many of which can be dangerous long-term engines, typically do not necessitate instant speed interaction. I prefer to deal with these permanents using board wipes and other removal effects.
Removal on a stick
This deck also plays a number of permanents that are able to remove things from your opponents.
Of these, I find The Legend of Yangchen to be particularly strong: depending on how you politic the table, you can convince your opponents to each choose a different thing to remove, allowing you to potentially remove up to 4 of your opponents’ permanents. More importantly, the effect doesn’t actually target, which means that it gets around things like hexproof, shroud, and protection.
You may recognize many of these cards from the earlier section, since they’re able to draw cards as well. This is very strong; having multiple useful effects stapled onto a single card makes the deck more compact, ensuring that we always have access to both the card draw and removal we need.
We also play two cards that can exile cards from our opponents’ graveyards. Graveyard-based synergies are super common in casual commander—every game that I’ve cast a Soul Guide Lantern, it’s been impactful at slowing down at least one player at the table.
The deck plays Witch Enchanter and Sundering Eruption, both are double-faced cards from Modern Horizons 3 with lands on the back. 95% of the time these will just be played as a normal land drop, but in a pinch they can be used to remove a problematic artifact/enchantment or land.
Notably, Phlage itself is a removal spell that can deal 3 damage to any creature. While 3 mana for this rate is a somewhat inefficient mana cost, the fact that Phlage is your commander means that you have access to this effect every game.
There are lots of creatures in commander with 3 or less toughness that can threaten to take over a game if not removed. By simply representing the ability to remove a creature in the command zone, opponents will have to think twice before being the first to deploy one of these game-spiraling creatures.
If Phlage triggers twice in the same turn, you can even kill creatures with up to 6 toughness. A common play pattern is to cast Phlage from the command zone on the turn you have 7 mana, since you can then recast it on the same turn, dealing a total of 6 damage to any target. This also works if you cast Phlage from the graveyard and give it haste with a utility land like Arena of Glory, since you will get a damage trigger both when it enters and then attacks.
Other ways to increase Phlage’s damage output are using Solphim, Mayhem Dominus, which doubles the damage dealt by Phlage, or using Luminous Broodmoth, which causes Phlage’s enter effect to trigger twice when initially cast (Phlage sacrifices on the first cast, which means it returns to the battlefield with a flying counter before sacrificing again).
Board wipes
Board wipes are crucial to this deck’s strategy, since they’re the main way we can answer multiple threatening opponents with a single spell.
The Phlage deck is designed to be good at deploying game-ending threats very quickly, thus we’re often in a highly favored position to win the game after a board wipe. For example, Phlage itself is often castable from the graveyard right after a board wipe for only 4 mana, meaning we often have additional mana left over to deploy additional threats.
Cataclysmic Gearhulk, Tragic Arrogance, and chapter 3 of Fall of the First Civilization are what I would call “soft” board wipes. These spells let every player keep a limited number of permanents, and cause the rest to be sacrificed/destroyed.
I really like the play patterns that these cards create. Greedy players who spent the game vomiting permanents onto the board are punished severely by these board wipes. On the other hand, these spells barely affect the players that are behind on board; they get to keep most or even all of their permanents. Thus, by nature of these cards’ design they give the disadvantaged player(s) a chance to catch up, overall balancing out the playing field (literally!).
Affecting noncreature permanents, like artifacts and enchantments, is a key advantage of these board wipes. Most players only play creature board wipes, which leaves players with piles of noncreature permanents (e.g. artifact tokens, mana rocks, value enchantments, you name it) far ahead.
Vanquish the Horde is a creature sweeper that is usually super cheap—almost always costing only 2 mana. It’s not the most exciting card, but it gets the job done at an exceptionally low cost.
What Must Be Done is a strong board wipe that destroys all creatures and artifacts. This is particularly devastating since it hits mana rocks (of which our deck plays none!), which can really set back the game for a lot of opponents.
Archangel Avacyn is a unique card that, among other things, can act as a board wipe that is strong against go-wide token strategies specifically. If a creature you control dies, Avacyn will flip on the next upkeep, dealing 3 damage to all other creatures and opponents.
In this deck, Avacyn is quite easy to flip since Phlage sacrifices itself when cast the first time, which triggers Avacyn.
Avacyn’s ability to give all your creatures indestructible is also quite useful for protecting your creatures against other board wipes. This synergizes particularly well with Vanquish the Horde—by casting Vanquish after Avacyn has resolved, you effectively cast a one-sided board wipe, heavily leaning the game in your favor.
Committing super-murder
Now that you’ve grinded out the early and mid-game, accumulated lots of cards in hand, maybe ramped out a few extra lands, and removed your opponents’ key threats, it is finally time to push for a win.
While the red/white colors are infamously bad in commander at ramping and drawing cards (although this has been changing with newer cards designed for commander), one thing that this color combination has always excelled at is BEATING THE EVER-LIVING SHIT OUT OF YOUR OPPONENTS.
In general, our late-game plan simply involves beating our opponents to death using big red/white creatures—what I will refer to as our deck’s “finishers”. Many of these creatures have flying, some have haste, most have a strong triggered ability on attack, and all have big bodies that threaten our opponents’ life total.
One card in particular that stands out is Dragonhawk, Fate’s Tempest. This creature is effectively able to deal X damage directly to each of your opponents, where X is 2 times the number of creatures with power 4 or greater you control. If you control Phlage and 2 other fatties on the battlefield, Dragonhawk entering will dome each opponent for 8 damage on end step. If you give it haste and attack with it, it will deal that damage again for an astounding 16 total damage to each opponent. On top of the combat damage you are dealing from attacking, this is often enough to close out a game in a single turn.
This deck plays a few creatures that give us additional combat phases. This type of effect effectively doubles the amount of damage we can deal in a single turn, and also synergizes nicely with the wide array of attack triggers present on our creatures. These creatures are crucial to our strategy—most of our successful win attempts with this deck involve one of these creatures multiplying our combat damage.
In the endgame, Phlage itself becomes a formidable finisher. On its own, this Elder Titan is able to swing for a total of 9 damage (6 power + 3 on the attack trigger), nearly a quarter of an opponent’s life total. This amount is compounded by any extra combats, allowing us to kill our opponents in just a few swings.
Some cards in the deck can temporarily give our creatures evasion—either by giving our creatures protection from the colors of our opponents’ creatures, or just straight up making our opponents’ creatures unable to block.
I find that many end-game scenarios end up being very tight damage races, where every small decision matters. For example: one game that I played was decided by a player choosing to fetch a shock land into play over a basic land, causing them to lose by a margin of 2 life!
A typical pattern for the deck is that I will cast a board wipe to clear all creatures on the battlefield, then follow that up with a few of our finisher creatures, often giving them haste. My opponents & I have to navigate our combat steps carefully, choosing the right times to attack, chump block, and use instant-speed interaction.
I like that this method of winning the game is profoundly fair. We win through combat damage instead of involving any kind of infinite or two card combo, and we don’t rely on an exponentially growing or otherwise spiralling amount of power & toughness being vomited onto the board. This gives our opponents an opportunity for counterplay, such that the game’s eventual outcome is decided by each player’s strategic finesse.
We do play one backdoor combo involving Heartless Hidetsugu and Solphim, Mayhem Dominus. By activating Hidetsugu with Solphim in play, we will either immediately kill each opponent, or set their life total to 1, depending on whether their life total started at an odd or even amount (Hidetsugu’s damage is rounded down). Having access to this combo gives us an out to an opponent that would otherwise be very hard to kill, for example a lifegain player who has gained an infinite amount of life.
While we do have access to this two card combo in our deck, it’s not common that we win with it, since we have to draw into both creatures and untap with both before either is removed. Both of these creatures are very strong in their own right in the late game, thus the opportunity cost of running this combo is very low.
A rather funny combo I’d like to point out is between Phlage, Luminous Broodmoth, and a card that prevents counters from being put on creatures, e.g. Solemnity. Since the flying counter cannot be placed on Phlage after it dies, Phlage will die and return to the battlefield in a loop, allowing us to deal infinite damage to kill our opponents.
You may notice that we don’t actually play Solemnity in our deck… This combo actually requires our opponent to play one of the combo pieces! I look forward to the day I get to play against a Vorinclex, Monstrous Raider commander deck.
Haste enablers
I truly believe that the strongest creature keyword in commander is haste.
Haste gives us the ability to sandbag heavily—we can hide our creatures in hand until the turn we want to attack with them, shielding them from board wipes and non instant-speed removal. It also gives us lots of tempo following a board wipe, allowing us to attack a turn ahead of each of our opponents.
Some of the big creatures that we play inherently come with haste, but for the rest of them, we play a wide array of haste-enablers. Most of these come in the form of lands that have the ability to give our creatures haste.
Bitter Reunion, one of our many rummage spells, also has the sneaky ability to give our creatures haste for the cost of 1 mana.
Reanimation
Since the deck plays a large number of ways to discard cards from our hand, it becomes quite useful to be able to bring back the creatures we’ve discarded earlier in the game. Our deck plays a handful of reanimation cards to return creatures from our graveyard to the battlefield. Note that two of these reanimation cards require the creature that we target to be legendary.
Legendary matters
One of the themes that I wanted to have for this deck was to include as many legendary creatures as possible. As you may have noticed by now, all of our finisher creatures are legendary!
Beyond just being a stylistic choice, having a high density of legendary creatures enables some of the cards in our deck, which have some kind of benefit for playing legendary creatures.
Epilogue
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading! This article is by far one of my longest ones, and also the one that took the most time to write. I hope that you were able to learn something new today, whether its something specific about this deck or ideas around commander deckbuilding in general; I certainly learned many things throughout the process of writing this article.
My Phlage commander deck is by no means perfect, and I certainly will continue to tweak the deck as new sets continue to be released. My goal is not to “complete” the deck (although I feel it is starting to near that point), rather my enjoyment comes from the process of continuously tweaking and learning more about the dynamics of Commander as a game. Magic the Gathering is an incredibly well designed game; the process of exploring the card pool and internalizing all of its quirky mechanics and interactions is an incredibly rewarding process.
Oh, and one more thing—one peculiarity of this deck in-person is that many of the cards in the Phlage deck have been signed and/or graffitied in sharpie, all from people who have played Commander with me, whether they’re a close friend or a stranger I met a the game store. Currently I’m up to about 45% of the deck’s cards being signed, and I aim to get the all signed one day.
That’s why I call this deck my “signature” deck.
