Nick Valentine, Private Eye "Rise and Shine, it's Millin' Time" - Plot Twist #5

Welcome back to Plot Twist, the series where we build a Commander deck that starts out telling one kind of story only to throw out a plot twist mid-game. If you're joining us for the first time, welcome! I'd encourage you to check out the previous articles in the series to get a sense for the types of stories we're looking to tell.

This week, we're celebrating the release of the Fallout Universes Beyond decks with a couple of firsts for Plot Twist: we're doing our first mono-colored deck, with Nick Valentine, Private Eye

How Does Nick Valentine Work?

After I finished writing about The Wise Mothman last time, I started looking through the other commanders from the Fallout decks, and Nick Valentine was one of a couple that stood out to me. Nick's first ability, which prevents him from being blocked by nonartifact creatures, seems like a situationally better version of intimidate. While I could see that being relevant in some sort of artifact creatures Voltron deck, it's not particularly important to what we're trying to do today.

Instead, Nick's second ability, "Whenever Nick Valentine or another artifact creature you control dies, investigate", is what immediately caught my attention. With Nick Valentine, Private Eye

Doing the Twist

In looking over Nick Valentine's EDHREC page, we can quickly see that... not a lot of people are drawn to building a deck with Nick just yet. He's only got 23 decklists registered as of the time I'm writing this, but then again, the Fallout decks have only just been released. Still, we can see that the 23 founding members of the Nick Valentine Fan Club™ are doing a few things we might expect: they're making lots of artifact tokens, with cards like Sai, Master Thopterist

And while those are certainly powerful ways to play mono-blue, and we're running a few of those cards ourselves, we're going to instead focus on effects like Cyberdrive Awakener

The Combo

Since this is our first foray into building a combo deck on Plot Twist, I wanted to do something a little different. While we could certainly build a mono-blue combo deck that won with Thassa's Oracle

We end up with a loop of infinite creatures entering the battlefield and dying, but that doesn't get us anywhere by itself, so how do we turn that into a win? With Selhoff Occultist

There's one problem: if we don't have a way to remove Nick Valentine, Private Eye

Luckily for us, the deck is running sacrifice effects, like Ashnod's Altar

Whew, that was a lot! Let's see what else the deck is doing.

Other Powerful Things to Do with Artifact Tokens

While we have the one combo in our back pocket (and a handful of ways to tutor up parts of it in Fabricate

We have other ways to turn our tokens into creatures in Cyberdrive Awakener

We also have some downright busted things that we can do with our artifact tokens without ever having to animate them. Arcbound Ravager

Making Ridiculous Amounts Quantities of Tokens

Now that we know the various avenues our deck has to win, how are we going to pump out ridiculous amounts of artifact tokens ? Academy Manufactor

We've also got Efficient Construction

Even some key pieces of our interaction package, like Access Denied, Canoptek Scarab Swarm, and Spell Swindle, leave behind a bunch of artifact tokens for us to use however we see fit.

Busted Artifact Stuff

We're running a few powerful cards, like Urza, Lord High Artificer, Karn, Scion of Urza, Mystic Forge, Tezzeret the Seeker, and Unwinding Clock, that are staples in artifact-centric decks like this one. They'll help us generate a lot of card advantage and close out the game if we need a little assistance to get across the finish line. 

We've also got some strong, synergistic cards, like Cybermen Squadron, Dollhouse of Horrors, Nyssa of Traken, and Retrofitter Foundry, that don't do too much by themselves but will really pop off when we get a critical mass of mana or artifacts in play. We'll likely want to hold off on these cards until we've started to build up a mass of tokens or other artifact creatures, though, because they can look pretty threatening on their own.

A Few Extra Twists for Good Measure

Since we're building both an artifact deck AND a combo deck this time, there were no shortage of strange cards I came across in my Scryfall searches. Encroaching Mycosynth is relatively new and has synergies with so many things our deck is looking to do (it'll also sometimes result in all of our nonland permanents getting destroyed by a Vandalblast, but what a story that will be!). I love it with Cyberman Patrol in particular because it'll make blocking really dangerous for our opponents.

Rootwater Diver is a niche Regrowth effect, but for only one mana in mono-blue we'd be hard-pressed to find a better option. Tamiyo's Journal is the sort of tutor that shouldn't annoy our opponents too much and that shines in a deck like this. It seems like Forensic Gadgeteer is a card advantage engine that cares about clues and reduces the cost of activated abilities, which is perfect for this deck but might end up being amazing in all blue artifact decks. Lastly, Vedalken Humiliator will sometimes be a Humility in this deck and is absolutely a card I need to slot into a few of my decks ASAP.

Here's the full decklist for you to peruse:

Roll the Credits

I hope you enjoyed reading the latest edition of Plot Twist featuring Nick Valentine, Private Eye. Next time you sit down for a game of Commander, see what sort of plot twists you can add to take the game's narrative in a new direction.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on today's deck and what cards could find a home in it in the comments below or on Archidekt. The Maybeboards of my decklists are always filled with cards I thought could work but didn't make the final decklist.

You can find me on Instagram at @girtenjeff, and you can check out my other articles here or see what decks I'm currently playing here. 

Stay tuned to see what other twists and turns are headed your way in the next edition of Plot Twist.