Living Energy Precon Transformation | EDH to Canadian Highlander

Saheeli, Radiant Creator

| Illustrated by Ernanda Souza

Hey, nerds! My playgroup has recently gotten into Canadian Highlander. It scratches that competitive itch while still having a Commander-esque feel. Oh, and it costs $0 to get into!

If you haven't heard of the format before, it's 100-card singleton with no ban list, but instead a points system. Certain cards have a point value, and you can have a total of ten points in your deck. So cards like the original Mox are three points each, Ancestral Recall

The best part? Since it's a community format, proxies are 100% allowed! No need to drop hundreds of dollars on expensive staples to enjoy a competitive format. 

Okay, now that I've sold you on the format, how do you start playing? Picking a deck or trying to brew for a new format can be hard, especially with as deep of a card pool. Then you have to figure out which pointed cards you want to play also known as a point spread. And what theme do you want? But don't worry, that's where I come in.

I'm going to take this off-the-shelf Commander precon and turn it into a CanLander-ready deck for you and your friends to jam with. All we need to do is take 15 cards out and put 15 new cards in. 

The idea isn't to turn this deck into a competitive powerhouse. You need to make a lot more swaps than 15 to do that. This is just a starting point for you to explore the format and play causally with buds. But if you want to jump into the deep end, you can check out the Canadian Highlander website. 

Before we get into the swaps, there are some rules I'm following when making my swaps.

1. Price isn't a factor. As I've said, it's a proxy-friendly format, so just take a sharpie to a basic land. 
2. I'm not going to mention upgrading the mana base. Swapping out whatever bad duals are in the deck with OG duals, fetches, shocks, and surveil lands should be fine. 
3. I'm not going to change the color identity of the deck. While CanLander doesn't have a color identity rule like a commander. I want to keep with the idea that you just slide some paper in front of 15 cards and go, and adding another color means tweaking the mana base. Hybrid cards, like Deathrite Shaman
   , are the exception since you don't need to change the mana base to make them work. 

Okay, with all of the explanation out of the way, let's get into it! 

The Precon

Living Energy is a Temur midrange deck that uses energy cards to gain value from cards like Saheeli, Radiant Creator

The Point Spread

Let's start with the most exciting part, the point spread. The point spread is just the pointed cards in the deck. In this case, our points are Mox Sapphire

Urza's Saga

This bad boy lets us tutor Aetherworks Marvel

Need More Energy!

To round out our energy package, I included Galvanic Discharge

Blaster Hulk

Another One (Upgrade Option #2)

Before we get into the cuts, I wanted to share another 15 cards you might want to add instead. I won't always have two options, but I wanted to also build around Aetherworks Marvel

Because I wanted to build around Aetherwork Marvel, I added Emrakul, the Aeons Torn

The new Transit Mage

The Cut

We know what to add, but what about cuts? Let's start with the easy ones: anything that mentions a commander, so Command Tower

Explosive Vegetation

And there you have it! I would love to hear your thoughts on this series and if it helped convince you to try CanLander. If you already play CanLander, I'd love to hear how you think I could improve this deck and/or series. Alrighty, nerds, I'll see you in the next one!