One Theme Three Techs: Planeswalkers

One Theme, Three Techs: Planeswalkers

Welcome to 1 Theme, 3 Techs, the article series about fighting off five-Color Goodstuff and expensive mana bases. 

I look at popular themes which can be spread across four or five colors and seek to break them into three possible decks. Deck A is the "core colors", a deck with the colors that have the highest affinity/synergy with the theme. Deck B and C will each take at least one of the core colors and will be "complementary" color sets (meaning if Deck B was WU, Deck C would be BRG, so the two decks cover all five colors). 

If you want the "base experience", go for the core color deck. If you want something off-center, pick B or C, or both if you want the full experience without a five-color deck! 

These decks aren't looking to be surprising or highly challenging, just a good way to interact with various themes in the game. I won't lean into other themes unless necessary. 

For this article, I want to look at Superfriends.

Why Play Superfriends?

The Superfriends archetype is known for playing a large number of planeswalkers. This is the rarest of the card types, and it has a lot of unusual potential. Every turn grants you a series of choices, the most prominent being which loyalty abilities to use, but there are also decisions about how to protect your planeswalkers, which ones to cast early and which ones to hold back, that sort of thing.

There are a lot of ways to play which reduce that mode of play, but the coolest feeling to draw out of a superfriends deck is the feeling of leading a team. You're there to build up overwhelming advantages, be it in the incidental tokens they make or game-breaking ultimates. 

I'm not going to knock the people playing Five-Color Superfriends. For the longest time, the only way to actually have enough good planeswalkers and cards which supported them was to play all five colors. Let's be real; even now, the people playing Esika, God of the Tree

Some difficulties surrounding planeswalkers as a card type is that, due to their relative rarity, a lot of them were built around supporting a specific deck archetype. Most Tezzeret cards care about artifacts, Nahiri tends to work with Equipment, and Nissa is a lands/creatures supporter. Not all of them do this, but it does cut into the already small number you can play.

That aside, what colors best support it?

Core Colors of Planeswalkers

It's not enough to slam 25-30 planeswalkers in a deck: the rest of the cards need to care about your gameplan to bolster its efficiency. We can look up all the cards that mention planeswalker (minus those cards that are destroying or damaging them...), and that'll get us a handful of options, mostly in white. White cares about planeswalkers (being able to search for them or pull them from the graveyard). It's also friendly to legendary permanents (which all planeswalkers are). Okay, that's one color established.

Follow up strategy: all planeswalkers use counters. Counter synergies are almost unilaterally strongest in green. Doubling Season

A Selesnya Planeswalker deck would have access to several Ajani-adjacent cards, each of which offer a nice bolstering effect to your cards.

An important facet of planeswalker decks is finding ways to protect them. All three of your opponents can attack the squad, so raising a big army of tokens with Avenger of Zendikar

Here's a quick list of the greatest hits for a Selesnya Superfriends deck, headed by either Lae'zel, Vlaakith's Champion

Green-White

1. Ajani, the Greathearted

Mono-White

1. Ajani Unyielding

Mono-Green
1. Garruk, Primal Hunter

These offer a lot of fun possibilities, but part of the fun of Superfriends can be using a cluster of your favorite characters. Sticking to just green and white leaves out over 60% of the field. Making a complementary pair of decks doesn't guarantee 100% of the possible planeswalkers. The only way to manage that is to either make a five-color deck, which risks leading to you cutting some of your favorite "jankier" planeswalkers in favor of the most efficient options, or make four decks around the theme, which is... impractical!

What Does Each Color Offer?

I'll note that this quick glance-over is focusing on what each color has to offer on its own and not as part of a multicolor package. 

First off, the other three colors have their own high-impact planeswalkers (Jace, the Mind Sculptor. They also have a handful of cards which call out planeswalkers or otherwise support the card type. Those are fine and good options, but if we're to properly bolster the theme, we need broader options here.

Planeswalkers are part of two important batches in Magic: historic and noncreature. Historic counts legendaries, artifacts, and Sagas, while noncreature includes... everything but creatures. Looking at cards which use these keywords helps find a lot more options. Furthermore, any other use of proliferate can be a boon. With these parameters, let's take a look.

Blue offers countermagic, of course, but the secret sauce in a U/x planeswalker deck is its extra turn spells. Much like white's board wipes, you have to be very careful with these. A single turn with Superfriends is going to be longer than normal just because you have to decide how to use each planeswalker's effect. Play out a Time Stretch and you could end up just goldfishing with extra steps, especially with how difficult it is to tell if you're guaranteed to pull out a win with your planeswalkers. The more fun and explosive options are blue's proliferate, noncreature, and historic synergies.

Black mirrors white in offering a lot of creature disruption. Black also offers a decent amount of proliferate, largely thanks to Phyrexia: All Will Be One. In this way, black can be a substitute for both white and blue, although not as good as either of them in their respective areas. We'll come back to this point later. Black's recursion is mostly creature-focused, but has dipped its toes in planeswalkers every now and again. Black's synergy with counters, historic spells, and noncreature spells are present, but they are best as part of a multicolor card. 

Red has, admittedly, the least to offer as part of a superfriends package. It has gained the unique ability to copy planeswalker activations, but this is a fairly rare offering thus far. It has virtually no proliferation, very few counter synergies, and two mono-colored historic cards. However, it does offer some utility options like efficient removal and Treasures. It also has a sneaky way to help protect your squad: goad. Forcing your opponents to attack each other keeps them from attacking your planeswalkers.

What are the Options?

So one of the decks is G/x and the other is W/x. We have six possible combinations. I'm going to go ahead and note which ones I would likely pick if I were to go with that route. 

1. Golgari and Jeskai: Carth the Lion and Commodore Guff
2. Gruul and Esper: Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes and Aminatou, the Fateshifter
3. Simic and Mardu: Ezuri, Stalker of Spheres and Dihada, Binder of Wills
4. Orzhov and Temur: Tomik, Wielder of Law and The Sixth Doctor plus Clara Oswald
5. Azorius and Jund: Elminster and Lord Windgrace
6. Boros and Sultai: Cadric, Soul Kindler and Xavier Sal, Infested Captain.

When making a pair of complementary Commander decks, I want to make sure they don't play the same. This helps express the theme in multiple ways and ensures that picking which one to play feels like an actual choice. So, what kinds of Planeswalker decks are there? There's the most straightforward plan: protect your planeswalkers while they tick up turn after turn. The other one is more of a combo, where you use some counter shenanigans to accelerate loyalty totals until you can suddenly ultimate five planeswalkers in a single turn. 

Despite the fact that the first option's commanders (Carth and Guff) have the word "planeswalker" written on them multiple times, I don't think I would actually choose them (for the record, I would build Guff as the "control the board, slow tick-up" and Carth as the "counter shenanigans" deck). This is a personal opinion, but I really like what Cadric, Soul Kindler and Xavier Sal, Infested Captain have to offer. 

Let's talk about 'em.

Overview of Cadric, Soul Kindler

Cadric's ability to create a temporary, second copy of your planeswalkers gives you a very unique effect and allows you a lot of interesting decisions throughout the game. The red and white give you some sweepers, goad, and propaganda effects to keep people off of the planeswalkers you keep around. The most common use of the secondary planeswalker will be to use its second ability, as it won't stick around to tick up anyways. These three planeswalkers would be especially worth doing that with.

However, Cadric's ability creating tokens is relevant, and you can use certain effects to cheat around the sacrifice clause or maximize what's being made.

Being a two-color deck with red in it also means you can potentially maximize a more focused package of planeswalkers, leaning into Chandra or Gideon kindred. You don't have to, but it's an option.

There is at least one infinite combo worth looking into. Planebound Accomplice enables some fun shenanigans, primarily if you have Cloudstone Curio and Chandra, Torch of Defiance; even without the Curio, the Accomplice can power out some explosive turns.

I like the Cloudstone as an oops button, but not enough to warp my deck around finding it. The primary gameplan will remain "control the board, grind out value" while using some token synergies to get some occasionally obscene turns.

Overview of Xavier Sal, Infested Captain

Xavier Sal's proliferation requires us to sacrifice creatures, but there are enough tokens being made by the planeswalkers in blue, black, and green to fuel it. Blue and green can potentially untap him several times in a single turn, and all three colors offer enough proliferate and counter-doubling to potentially ultimate a planeswalker when you first summon it (and that's without a Doubling Season). 

From there, we want to build a proliferate package to turbo our planeswalkers into ultimate territory. Most of the regular planeswalkers have something potentially game-breaking on their bottom line. 

There are also spells we need for the deck which enhance our planeswalker spells. Some of them help the planeswalkers tick up faster while others help us outright win the game. 

Finally, you really want to make sure to protect your planeswalkers. There are a myriad of ways to try this. I recommend relying on green for creatures to act as a buffer, blue for phasing spells, and black for mass removal.

With these in place, you'll have a better chance of setting up your engine and racing off. 

Wrapping Up

So, what do you all think about the idea of Complementary Commander decks? Are you the type who struggles with building too many decks as it is, or do you like the idea of breaking a five-color deck into two? Would you prefer they both be three-color (and overlap one)? Are any of you interested in making these more of a Duel Deck situation where they are designed to combat each other? Let me know in the comments.