CUT #26 - Jenny vs The Thirteenth Doctor vs The Master
Welcome to CUT, the article series where I give deck builders a series of ridiculous unique challenges to build a deck around and see what they come up with. Not only that, but then they put those decks head-to-head, and the readers (you!) get to vote on the ones you like best. Last time we finished off CUT #25 with Arnaud and Jordan, so let's see who came out on top...
Great job, Jordan, and congrats. Alela sure conquered up a storm and brought you victory. A big thank you to all of our deckbuilders from CUT #25, Arnaud, Jordan, and Adelaide the Proxy Queen! Don't forget to check out them out here:
Arnaud's EDHREC Articles
Jordan's EDHREC Articles/Youtube
Jordan gave me permission to share a link to his discord where Adelaide as a mod also hangs out! Here it is: JankCentre Discord
Now let's get to the timey wimey stuff.
This edition of CUT is themed around Doctor Who, and we have three Doctor Who enthusiasts here with their creations ready for your judgement. Before that, let's take a look at the challenges:
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Must use a Time Lord (solo; no companion) as your Commander
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Must play at least 20 nonbasic land cards from outside WHO
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Must play 10 different creature types
A big thank you to Christian (a big Doctor Who fan) for the help on creating these challenges and the ones for the next round, as I have never seen Doctor Who myself.
First up is a returning face to CUT, Jubilee! Let's see what they brought!
CUT Doctor Who Edition - Jenny Generated Anomaly
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The Doctor Who Commander decks have been an awesome experience. In contrast to The Lord of the Rings and Warhammer 40,000, the serialized nature of Doctor Who means every other card is a reference to a one-off character or episode. Rather than the decks telling a linear story, they take a snippet out of the universe and present it in a wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey fashion. A perfect example of this is Jenny, Generated Anomaly, based on the character from 2008's The Doctor's Daughter.
And oh boy, what a cool card she is! A double striker that explores when it deals combat damage? There's got to be some cool ways to play around with this! But when I started brewing this deck, I ran into a snag. See, in the best case scenario you would get a land off every explore trigger, giving you a fistful of lands. A green deck could dump these onto the battlefield, but we're not green. Even when we have this overwhelming deluge of lands, we don't have efficient ways of getting them onto the battlefield. But just before I threw out the deck altogether, I remembered one of my favorite jank Modern decks: Assault Loam.
Seismic Assault lets you discard a land and turn it into a Shock. This effect of turning land discard into burn has shown up a couple times since then. This is when things started to come together. Rather than treating the lands Jenny gives me as potential ramp, I turned them into burn spells waiting to happen. Now I had the goal of the deck: get as many lands into my hand as possible and throw them at my opponents' faces!
My final land count ended up at 43 lands, a number that would raise an eyebrow of even the most prolific Landfall players, but these lands aren't just for hitting land drops, as the high number of lands ensures we're hitting our explore triggers. To ensure they aren't dead draws, I've crammed as many utility lands as I can into the deck. Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty's Channel lands can act as pseudo-spells, while Slayers' Stronghold and Rogue's Passage help Jenny attack in! Boros Garrison, already a solid land in Commander, can bounce us back a land to be pitched to one of our Seismic Assault effects. Finally, I run cards like Lotus Field and Lotus Vale in a lot of base white decks. White ramp tends to care about the number of lands you control, so their sacrifice triggers can let you cheat those costs and reanimate those lands later! They're great in this deck and tons of other white decks!
Next, we're going to be attacking with Jenny every turn we can, so we better ensure that she can get in those explore triggers. We're a Boros deck, so the best way to do that is with Equipment. We run the basics, like Lightning Greaves and Sword of Fire and Ice, the latter of which gives us double triggers with double strike. Umezawa's Jitte gets counters every time its equipped creature dealS any combat damage, so it'll get counters on first strike damage, then we can activate it before normal damage is dealt. Finally, Rogue's Gloves and Mask of Memory ensure our hand stays full in preparation for the most vital part of this deck: abusing those lands.
Seismic Assault, Land's Edge, and Invasion of Kaldheim are our land-to-burn effects. While the Modern version of these decks tries to burn out the opponent with these, we're more of a control deck. The burn damage can clear the board so Jenny can take out our foes. Glint-Horn Buccaneer improves our attrition strategy. Pitch a land to kill a mana dork, then deal chip damage to everyone! We run plenty of other ways to exploit the deluge of lands we'll have in our hand. Storm Cauldron throws off our opponents' mana bases while letting us bounce our lands to pitch away, then you can reanimate them with Sevinne's Reclamation. While we still aren't running classic ramp, Ghirapur Orrery lets us play extra lands and draw a fresh hand after pitching ours away. Then there's the retrace cards. These let us throw away lands to keep casting spells. Throes of Chaos and Decaying Time Loop ensure we always have a chance of finding that one answer we need. Finally, Waves of Aggression is this deck's secret powerhouse. You draw some lands off Jenny, cast Waves of Aggression, draw more lands, cast it with Retrace, and repeat.
Universes Beyond has been an awesome way to see unique and fresh designs that could only exist in these releases. "Boros Explore Seismic Assault" is such a wild deck, and Doctor Who is what made it happen. With all of the cool cards in these Commander decks, I'm sure there are tons of ideas like this just waiting to be found. I'll be delving back into the cards to try and find them, and I hope you join me on that journey. There's a universe of cards to explore, so let's do it together!
Thanks, Jubilee! Glad to have you back on CUT, hope to see you in the Finals! Check out articles they have written here on Commander's Herald, or go and check them out on their socials: Twitter: @FinneyFlame, Instagram: @JWFinnegan.
Next up, we have a newcomer to the CUT family, everyone meet Martin! Martin is a writer over on EDHREC, so after you are done reading this article, go over and check his stuff out!
Thirteenth Doctor Self-Mill
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Hello! I'm Martin, and I write about Magic for EDHREC: you can see my articles here, and follow my twitter here.
As soon as I was given the challenge, I knew almost exactly what I wanted to build. The Second Doctor is by far my favourite Doctor, and his card also does almost everything I want to do in commander: not only is it in white, objectively the best colour in Magic, he also enables exactly the kind of durdle-y political strategies I find so fun in Commander.
But I was about halfway through building my list when I had a sudden change of heart. After all, why not take my first opportunity to be on the world-famous CUT series to do something different? Instead, then, I landed on a Doctor, a strategy, and a color pair I've spent far less time with and grown far less attached to.
On the surface, The Thirteenth Doctor seems to suffer more than almost any other Doctor from the restriction of not being able to have a companion. Her precon is almost entirely built around casting spells from exile, a strategy that almost necessitates playing red. But exile isn't the only place other than your hand you cast spells from, so instead, I decided to build a deck all around using your graveyard as an extra hand. One of the reasons I dislike Simic as a color combination so much is because of how one-note it is: play a few lands, draw a few cards, blah blah blah, we've all seen it a million times before. Graveyard, self-mill value however? That's something I've never really seen a Simic deck do before.
Most of our deck consists of two kinds of card: cards we can play from the graveyard, whether from flashback, aftermath, jumpstart or any of the many other near-identical mechanics, and cards to put those cards in the graveyard, mostly via self-mill.
Admittedly, the fact we need to cram our deck full of enough spells with inbuilt graveyard casting means we run a lot of suboptimal cards; who needs Rampant Growth when you've got Path to the Festival and Spring // Mind? But the fact that these cards are built-in two-for-ones, combined with the fact they make effects like Traumatize almost read 'draw half your library,' makes up for most of this power difference.
The other benefit of playing these cards is that almost all of them are dirt cheap, mostly because they're, well, not that great. That meant while I was building I almost added an additional challenge: keeping it under a strict budget (that's got to be worth a few extra votes, right?). Indeed, the whole list clocks in at not much more than 50 dollars, and that's without running any suboptimal effects to dodge the high prices either, really, but if you've got slightly deeper pockets, you'll definitely be wanting to throw in a few more dual lands.
I had now built a list that could out-durdle even the most durdle-y opponents: we've almost always got spells to play, ways to spend our mana, even if they may not be the most powerful. Playtesting, however, quickly showed our deck was much too durdle-y for its own good: having to rely on commander damage to finish opponents off wasn't much fun for either of us, believe me. So I added an additional package built around Jodie's second ability, focused on creatures with powerful tap effects.
Beguiler of Wills, especially, gets out of hand fast when you're stealing two creatures a turn, I've always thought it's criminally underrated in Commander in general, but it's especially good here, and all the more so since this deck admittedly lends itself to grindy games, with you nabbing the win once your opponents are mostly out of removal and cards in hand. The durdler in me, however, of course much prefers untapping Arcanis the Omnipotent with our commander.
The tappers also allowed us to easily have enough creature types, while the restriction around lands was, honestly, almost a non-feature: I almost always stuff my decks full of nonbasic color fixing and utility lands.
Our list, then, comes together like this. It isn't the most powerful deck, admittedly, and if you decide to make it, or a deck similar to it, you'll obviously want to throw in a Doctor's Companion, maybe Graham O'Brien if you want to stay Simic and perhaps throw in a Food package, or Clara Oswald and choose black, but if you're looking for a fun, budget-friendly list doing something you don't usually see in Simic, you'd be hard pressed to do better.
Great first appearance, Martin, let's hope we'll see you in the finals!
Last, but not least, we have Sinclair! He's back because he loves Doctor Who and if I didn't ask him to be a part of this, our friendship would've probably ended. So, here he is!
Four Knocks
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The goal of this deck is pretty simple: make as many temporary tokens as possible and make those tokens more then temporary. The Master, Multiplied is the engine that brings the whole deck together, so the faster you can make copies of him, the better. Generally, however, attacking with an army of 4/3s isn't how you're going to end up winning with this deck; that would be with triggers from other creatures. Mirkwood Bats, Impact Tremors, and Purphoros, God of the Forge will trigger after making a bunch of copies of creatures (bonus points if you make copies of them), enough to chip down your opponents so that your tokens that you generate are enough to swarm them out.
This deck is very susceptible to board wipes, so you want to keep that in mind when you start building. If you indeed decide to go all in, you need to win or be prepared to be out of the game for a number of turns while you rebuild. Helm of the Host goes infinite with Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and wins on the spot if you get a copy of Goblin Bombardment on the board with one of the above options (finally, a way to go infinite with Kiki-Jiki). While you want to keep one copy of The Master around at all times, every other creature with myriad can and should be attacking as often as possible because a 1/1 that blocks a 4/4 is one less creature to deal with in the future when you need to overwhelm a particular player. Keep in mind that myriad tokens of creatures also have myriad triggers if they survive combat. Even though winning with aggressive combat is not how this deck is supposed to win, sometimes continuing to put on pressure is enough.
Short and sweet Sinclair, I think that's your new nickname now. Let's see if your brief breakdown brings you to the next round!
That takes us to the part of the article where you vote for your favorite deck, or heck, even vote for your favourite Doctor Who character if one of them were used. Keep in mind that the top two vote-getters move on to the Finals and we'll see them one more time with more fun and interesting challenges! We'll see you in the next one, and remember, if you don't love it CUT it!
If you or a friend would like to participate in a future CUT article, feel free to email the.only.travis.stanley@gmail.com or reach out to me on Twitter/X @chipman007
