Flavor of the Month: Dancing to the Beat(down)

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So You Think You Can Dandân

Welcome to Flavor of the Month, where we use cards' flavor as a recipe for building decks! Today-- you can tap your lands and your mana rocks, but can you tap dance?

That's right, we're doing the ol' soft-shoe, the flamenco, the boot-scootin' boogie. We're going to dig into some cards that invoke the pastime and rich history of dancing! A history so rich, in fact, that we need to start our story back at the cave paintings of 8000 BCE in what is modern-day India...

My editor just threw a ballet shoe at me, I'm assuming to signal that I should skip the history lesson and get to the cards and the deck. If you want to learn more about the evolution of dance, you should just do what we've all been doing since 2006 and look it up on YouTube.

I'll get on with it

There's also a third category of dance cards in MTG, one that borrows from the idiom of "dancing with death," meaning to do something risky. Magic's interpretation is a bit more literal, though:

So reanimation, then. I think we can fit all of these interpretations of dance into the deck, but how can we get it to function? Is it going to play like a Charleston or more of a Harlem Shake? As I see it, we need to get our cards moving.

Ingredients

In-game, we can achieve the flavor of dance by moving our cards in choreographed motions between game zones. We're going to self-mill from the library to the graveyard, bring things from the graveyard to the battlefield, and then do a little jitterbug between battlefield and exile once we're there, blinking our stuff to get a wealth of enters-the-battlefield effects. If you like a track, why listen just once? Set it on repeat.

We also have a number of flavor texts that invoke music and dance to fit into the deck, like Death's Duet

The deck will have four main components: the dancers themselves, along with self-mill, reanimate/regrowth, and blink packages. I like to work from the ground up for these decks, meaning figuring out the themes, mechanics, and colors before choosing who the commander will be. In this case, we need Simic for our mill, Golgari for reanimation and regrowthing, and Azorius for blink, which means we need four colors and thus a sans-red commander. Which means... oh no...

We have exactly two non-partner commander options for the WUBG color combination (or as your dad calls it, Witch-Maw); it might send the wrong signal to the playgroup if we take out our deck box and slap Thrasios, Triton Hero

The OG Atraxa

Preparation

Dance Cards

A lot of our "dance" cards are reanimation spells, and we'll get there momentarily, but there are also some interesting creatures that are "dancers" by name that can work with our gameplan of moving across the dancefloor board. Bone Dancer

Meanwhile, Skola Grovedancer

We also have Dance of Many

Mill Suite

While graveyards naturally start piling up over the course of a Commander game, it doesn't hurt to give our reanimation targets a little encouragement to foxtrot their way into the bin. Thus, we came prepared with Crawling Infestation

We'll also borrow a page from a popular Pioneer strategy in Greasefang, Okiba Boss

Reanimate and Regrowth Plan

As mentioned, a number of dancing cards, like Dance of the Dead

We can also buy back creatures and other cards to hand and save them for the right moment with Regrowth

We're certainly not using this spell to its utmost potential in the deck (most of our artifacts are mana rocks, and we can't get back two of our more impactful enchantments because they're Auras), but it's more of a powerhouse than you'd think. Over the course of the game, we'll be throwing all sorts of cards in our 'yard, and as a late-game mana sink, this can flood the board with 4/4s with bonus abilities. Note that you can target creatures in the graveyard too, so long as they're an enchantment or artifact as well. 

A swarm of 4/4s that also have the effects of other cards is not something our opponents are prepared for. Believe me, there was a time in Standard where people were playing utter crap like Golden Egg

Blink Tools

We have a lot of ground to cover in this deck, what with our milling, reanimating, and breakdancing, so when it comes to our blink package, we want to get the most exile-and-return effects possible for the least cardboard investment. Roon of the Hidden Realm

Of course, we need creatures to blink, and even though in many cases our commander will be the right target for that, she won't always be available. That's why we have Aether Channeler

Speaking of closing our the game, now that we've got our deck humming and going through its moves, we have to bring down the hammer. I'm talking showstopper, finale, that final scene from Step Up 2 where they have the dance battle in the rain and it's so incredible that no one ever even tries to dance again for fear of sullying its memory (until Step Up 3, I'm assuming). 

Well, maybe we stay just a bit shy of that last thing, but still, game's gotta end, and we have the tools to do it. 

We chose some big creatures to reanimate early or keep coming back, including two

The deck also has a healthy mix of card types spread throughout the 99 to get the most hits off of Atraxa and keep the party going. There are a few planeswalkers included that play well with the blink theme: Aminatou, the Fateshifter

Honestly, Atraxa, Grand Unifier

And hey, if these don't work, we always have Eerie Ultimatum

Yield

Worth noting if you're looking askance at the deck's pricetag is that you can make it a lot cheaper if you don't want to spring for some of the pricier parts of the mana bases. We're in four colors here, so we need to run all the three-color and two-color lands as we can, and in order to keep the latter from coming in tapped we run the party/crowd/Battlebond lands (can we all decide on one shorthand for Morphic Pool

And that's all for this week! Tell me in the comments below what you think: does this decklist make you want to get out and boogie? What cards would you add to make sure this deck doesn't do... whatever Elaine did when you bust it out at FNM? How many different types of dance did I reference in this article? Too many? Not enough? Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time!