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 are plenty of cards in Magic: the Gathering that reference dance by name, flavor text, and/or art, so many, in fact, that we don't need to lean far into adjacent card flavor for songs and music to get a deck cooking. Some cards invoke dancing directly, showing off the dancers themselves--Ivy Dancer, Gallia of the Endless Dance, and Wind Dancer are all doing busting their respective moves--or indirectly, a la nearly every Prismari card from Strixhaven. Dancing and performance was kind of that school's whole thing.

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 and the Commander Collection: Green printing of Worldly Tutor featuring Yisan, the Wanderer Bard himself.

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 and Tymna the Weaver down in the command zone. Plus, I feel like using partners just to grab more colors, while fine in normal gameplay, is not a well we want to go to too often when we're building flavor-forward.

The OG Atraxa is a lightning rod, but the new Atraxa, Atraxa, Grand Unifier, does her thing upon entering the battlefield, which means if she's killed we just get to do its whole samba again. It also is a card clearly wanting to be blinked, and her art makes her look like a performer surrounded by a crowd of adoring fans. Flavor-wise, she's good enough, and mechanically, she's an absolute house (get it? Like house music? That one was a stretch, I know). 

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 wants to connect with our opponents, and it's got its pick of waltz partners to get there: both Ivy Dancer and Wind Dancer make for a great pairing. Especially the former, if our Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth is out.

Meanwhile, Skola Grovedancer lets us fill the graveyard, pad our life total, and provide another enchantment hit for both our commander and the deck's secret powerhouse, which you'll meet soon.

We also have Dance of Many, a flavorfully fitting way to copy a creature for two mana. Wait, that can't be right, let me try saying that again. Two mana. Really, two? Why is this card being played in fewer than 3,000 decks according to the EDHREC tally, about 0.2% of the 1.3 million decks in the database that could run the card. I know the upkeep cost and the extra fragility of the copy are downsides, but if you're in a deck that just wants to rebuy an ETB (and there are quite a few of those out there) and then maybe sacrifice the body, this is the cheapest clone effect I know of. I mean, we have one of the strongest ETB effects ever printed right in our command zone!

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 and Cemetery Tampering, which will fill our graveyard with so many creatures ready to do the Floss and the Orange Justice that you'll feel like you're at a Fortnite convention (do the kids still do those Fortnite dances? I don't know, I'm old, and the last time I ironically did the Floss I shot my hip clear across the room and knocked out a table lamp).

We'll also borrow a page from a popular Pioneer strategy in Greasefang, Okiba Boss/Parhelion II decks. Grisly Salvage and Satyr Wayfinder are the key self-mill cards in those decks, and I see no reason they wouldn't be effective here. They'll help us stomp stock the 'yard while keeping the land drops flowing.

Reanimate and Regrowth Plan

As mentioned, a number of dancing cards, like Dance of the Dead and Death's Duet, care about bringing creatures back from the dead, either right back onto the battlefield or into our hands. We've got those cards covered and also will add a few more like Reanimate and Animate Dead, because what is dancing if not animation perfected?

We can also buy back creatures and other cards to hand and save them for the right moment with Regrowth, Ravos, Soultender, and Treasured Find. But the unexpected star here, and the secret weapon I teased above, is Dance of the Manse.

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 just to have things to target with Dance. It works, and it's my favorite type of card: one that could turn the tide of the game when you topdeck it late.

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, Conjurer's Closet, and the Closet's creature-enchantment parallel, Thassa, Deep-Dwelling (whose double-typing makes it a flexible hit for Atraxa's effect and, yes, a Dance of the Manse target if you've milled it over) can repeatedly get our line-dancers moving in the right direction with just one spell.

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 and Reclamation Sage to accrue value and keep our opponents stymied as well as some juicy blink targets in Sheoldred and Archon of Cruelty. We can also blink our Yorion, Sky Nomad to set off a chain reaction of value that should help us close out the game.

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 Sheoldreds (though not the one from Dominaria United that is currently the boogeyman [boogeypraetor?] of at least two formats). Terastodon should clear out any last permanents holding us back from winning, and from there it's just about what huge thing we feel like ending the game with. Insert your preferred battlecruiser card here, but personally I enjoy Triplicate Titan, Pathrazer of Ulamog, and Liege of the Tangle, the last one especially if you want to go a bit farther out there budget-wise and include Avacyn, Angel of Hope to keep your animated lands safe.

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 and The Eternal Wanderer, and the cloud ballet queen herself, Mu Yanling, Sky Dancer.

Honestly, Atraxa, Grand Unifier might take out an opponent or two on her own. There are very few creatures that can tango with her in the air, she kills in three swoops, and opponents are likely reticent to send a removal spell her way because she will just come back and restock our hand.

And hey, if these don't work, we always have Eerie Ultimatum. Think of that as the crowd-pleasing Thriller that everyone including your aunts and uncles will get up to dance to at the reception.

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 its cycle, please? My vote is for party lands). Those and Triomes, while cheaper than the full four-color fetch-and-shock package, aren't really "budget", and while this isn't a finance-focused column, my recommendation is that investing in a land base won't ever steer you wrong. You'll get use for years out of the top lands, and they'll fit in any deck that runs their colors. If you want to build a strong, long-term collection, lands are maybe the best place to start.

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!