Balmor, Battlemage Captain - Pauper Commander

Balmor, Battlemage Captain

by Nino Vecia

The Cooler Daniel

A few months ago, I built a deck around Adeliz, the Cinder Wind

They do the same thing, buffing your team every time you cast an instant or sorcery, but Adeliz only sizes up Wizards, where Balmor scales up every creature you control. Plus, Balmor costs one mana less! Sure, Adeliz has haste and grants a toughness point in addition to the power boost, but overall, Balmor is just a superior card, so let's revisit that deck and find out how much better it can be when we're not restricted to Wizard kindred. 

Optimizing Card Ratios

In addition to upgrading this deck, I want to upgrade my deckbuilding strategy. One of the main things that I see deckbuilders struggling with is dividing the deck into appropriate categories to maximize efficiency. And no wonder! It's hard! There are so many things to keep track of in Magic that it's often impossible to consider them all, so let's start by simplifying the problem. Balmor wants two things: instants and sorceries, to trigger his ability, and creatures, to receive the buff. That gives us two broad categories, which I'll now evaluate their aspects to decide the appropriate balance. 

Whenever we cast an instant or sorcery, we want to have a creature on the battlefield, and likewise, whenever we have a creature on the battlefield, we want to be casting spells. However, if we have more creatures on the battlefield, then a single instant or sorcery does more. That makes me lean towards having more creatures in the deck. That being said, we have to note that creatures are permanents; once we play them, they'll stick, hopefully for a significant part of the game.

That means we don't really want to have our hand flooded with creatures. Then, there's also the fact that you can make creatures with instants and sorceries, like

With all this in mind, I've decided to go with a rough 1:2 ratio of creatures to spells, with around 35 slots left for lands. There are 20 creature cards, 28 instants, and 17 sorceries. This is a balance I've found works well, usually guaranteeing one to two creatures and two to three other spells in your opening hand, exactly what this deck wants to get rolling. 

Creatures

With that all sorted out, let's decide exactly what cards we're playing. Since most of our spells are going to directly effect our creatures, let's start with the board presence first. What I'm seeing in most Balmor decks are a bunch of prowess creatures, like Jeskai Elder

Balmor basically gives the prowess ability to your whole team, so if your creatures already have it, the effect stacks. I do think these creatures deserve a slot in the deck, but I don't think they should make up the entire library, like they do in most of the decks I see. To put it simply, there are just way better cards to run in a spellslinger deck. 

Let me prove it by doing to the math. If you have a Sanguinary Mage

The first spell you cast gives you the same amount of addition power as a Nimble-Blade Khenra

Then, there are a few utility creatures that will simply oil the engine of the deck. Goblin Electromancer

Spells

Now, onto the spells! I mentioned before that the instants and sorceries are going to be affected by the creatures we play, and here's what I mean. We have a bunch of creatures whose only purpose is to get big. Even our commander is going to be attacking for big points. So why don't we play a bunch of spells that'll help them swing in for as much as possible?

The first category is evasion. Leap

Then, you've just got all the basic needs filled by other instants and sorceries. There's card draw, in the form of Frantic Search

Of course, the deck has removal with Unsummon

And that's everything, folks! I would say this is definitely an improvement from the Adeliz deck, if only because we're not playing Wizard kindred. What do you say? Do you think the prowess creatures are worth more than I gave them credit for? Is there some hidden synergy I missed with them? And how would you balance a deck like this? What's the optimal ratio?