How They Brew It - Mr. Foxglove Draws Inspiration

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Transformation Trouble

Good evening, everyone! I'm Counselor Michael Celani, and welcome to your first step on the road to healing. You're here at my Therapy for Wretched Animal Transformations, otherwise known as T.W.A.T, because you went to Bloomburrow hoping to become a cute, cuddly animal and now you're a blobfish, coelacanth, or, even worse, a chihuahua.

You might be distressed, confused, and angry, but healing is about accepting that what animal you transformed into has nothing to do with your inherent goodness as a person. As proof, my mother-in-law is a terrifying, venomous, and aggressively hideous snake, but when she got to Bloomburrow, she became a fuzzy little hamster. It's what's on the inside that counts.

Still don't believe me? Then let me tell you another story about how looks can be deceiving. Meet Mr. Foxglove, objectively the most handsome creature in all of Bloomburrow. Even the bat in the background is swooning! But as dashing as this vivacious vulpine looks on the outside, his looks are just a mask for a lying, cheating gremlin. Let me explain.

Getting Outfoxed

You see, like all animalfolk in Bloomburrow, Mr. Foxglove has to file forms with the local government declaring all his assets, and he's subject to very strict rules on what he can do based on what he's declared. Whenever he attacks, you either draw up to the number of cards held by the defending player, or, if you don't draw anything, you get to put a creature card from your hand onto the battlefield.

So, in order to legally coax out a giant beastie from your hand, you're forced to attack an opponent holding fewer cards than you, right? Wrong. Mr. Foxglove doesn't care whether or not you attacked an opponent with a larger hand than you; he just cares that you didn't actually draw any cards when you did that, and like shooting a sketch artist, it turns out it's pretty easy to turn drawing into not drawing.

Enchantments like Abundance replace the act of drawing a card with putting a card into your hand, something so distinct you'd have to be an absolute buffoon to confuse the two. If you've got a replacement effect on the field, despite the fact that your grip mysteriously gets bigger when you attack with Mr. Foxglove, you won't draw any cards... so you're allowed to put a creature onto the battlefield. It's not technically lying, it just has the spirit of it!

Empty Paws are the Devil's Plaything

Foxglove's fraud is more thorough than just hoping you have the right stuff in hand when it come time to cheat out a creature, though. To get to the good stuff in our deck, we want to see as many cards as possible, and that means we want to not-draw as many cards as possible when he attacks. The easiest way to do that is to empty our hand before every swing, because getting rid of our ill-gotten goods gives us more room for even more ill-gotten goods!

Cheap as Free

One of the easiest ways to get cards out of our hand is to put them onto the stack by paying their mana cost, at which point they may resolve into a permanent. In Commander, this technique is known as "cheating" and "ruining the game for others."

At five mana, casting Mr. Foxglove is an investment, but since he draws you a fresh grip of cards the moment he attacks, we can easily sink a lot of cards into early game ramp. Spells like Noble Hierarch and Birds of Paradise are obvious inclusions here, but because Mr. Foxglove nullifies their downsides, even putrid trash like Manabond and Diamond Lion can be valuable for their unparalleled acceleration. Nothing's more satisfying than drawing an opening hand of six lands and a Manabond in this deck.

The Shape of Spells

The other way to get rid of cards is to throw them away, like your ex did when you moved out. Luckily, there's an entire class of creatures out there dedicated to that very principle: Spellshapers!

Spellshapers have activated abilities that mimic iconic instants and sorceries from across Magic. For instance, Llanowar Mentor lets you play any card as Llanowar Elves, while Devout Witness lets you play any card as Disenchant. We're running a variety of Spellshapers, from those that ramp us even further, to those that act as removal, to others still that bog the board down with token blockers.

In particular, Fauna Shaman is an honorary Spellshaper that searches your library for a creature card, which is extremely helpful when we're looking to play out a game-winning piece. It does require you to discard specifically a creature card, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem when a full third of the deck is creatures. Once your graveyard is nice and stocked, Six can help you pitch excess lands to cast everything you've thrown out.

Miscellania

Don't worry, it's not all terrible creatures from Mercadian Masques here. Saproling Cluster and Scuttletide fill much the same role as a Spellshaper, allowing you to pitch cards for cheap.¹ If you're concerned about others taking advantage of Saproling Cluster, don't be: pitching an entire card for a mere 1/1 is suicide in practically every other deck. You can also use Null Brooch to repeatedly counter spells at the cost of discarding your entire hand.

Replacement Parts

This has been a cautionary tale on how you should never trust anyone based on their looks, but I can see some of you aren't convinced. Some of you are thinking that you could change him, or that he's really not that bad once you get to know him. You're still getting tricked, and your father is going to disapprove! Let me teach you the true heart of the scam.

You'll need to find a way to replace your draws. Remember, all you need to do is avoid drawing cards when you attack with Mr. Foxglove. Putting cards into your hand instead of drawing them is the optimal play, but you can also opt to skip the draw entirely. Here's all the options available to you:

Even Better Than Drawing

The cards above not only replace your draw, they upgrade it into something better. Abundance lets you qualify what type of card you want to find next, whether it be land or nonland, and Tomorrow, Azami's Familiar lets you pick from the top three cards every time you would draw.

The only card that could conceivably have a downside here is Sages of the Anima, which puts all creature cards from among the top three into your hand and the rest on the bottom of your library. Reading between the lines, this means you can never draw noncreature cards from your deck as long as it's on the field, but you're also in a deck predicated on cheating out gigantic creatures, so don't sweat the small stuff.

Similarly risky is Parallel Thoughts. For five mana, you can tutor out a seven-card mini-deck that you can take from whenever you'd draw instead. Since it's effectively seven Demonic Tutors stapled together, your enemies will desperately want to destroy it before you can get everything you looked for. Be judicious in your choices: you don't want to lock all your win conditions away forever.

By the way, each of these replacement effects can chain together with draw-doublers, like Alhammarret's Archive and Teferi's Ageless Insight. Even without an Abundance or whatever on the battlefield, drawing twice as many cards from Mr. Foxglove is well worth the price of entry.

There's one very unique way to replace the draw in this deck, and it's with the power of plagiarism. You can cast Plagiarize to steal an enemy's gigantic value spell, and in reality it's probably still best doing that, but by some weird crux of fate, you can actually plagiarize yourself.

If you cast Plagiarize targeting yourself, the draws from Mr. Foxglove are skipped, and for each card you'd draw from him, you... draw a card. This launders the draws through a separate source, meaning you still technically didn't draw any cards from the Fantastic Mr. Fox. This is objectively a terrible use of resources, but damn if it isn't hilarious.

Hop, Skip, and a Jump

You can also outright skip your draw if you want to guarantee a free creature from your attack trigger. Words of Wilding turns each of your draws into a 2/2 Bear, and Words of Worship turns them all into five life each (which, incidentally, is not a small number if you can activate it two or three times).² Pursuit of Knowledge can skip an arbitrary number of draws and be sacrificed for a new hand later, which is great, though you should be aware that there's no time for you to sacrifice it between drawing and putting a creature from your hand onto the battlefield.

Cheating Cronies

Now, all of you that got morphed into an ugly squid, or hideous hyena, or that weird star-nosed mole that I definitely regret Googling when researching this article: you should all be relieved, because the existence of worse people in the world makes you feel better about yourselves by association. Yes, I'm a real counselor. And speaking of worse people, here's the type of folk you'll have to contend with if you meet Mr. Foxglove in a dark alleyway:

One of the major weaknesses this deck has to contend with is that Mr. Foxglove has to attack safely to get the most value out of him. Luckily, the creatures we cheat out shore this up. Serra's Emissary can name "creature" to give Mr. Foxglove protection from creatures before blockers are declared, rendering him unblockable. Storvald, Frost Giant Jarl can make Mr. Foxglove into a 7/7 with a significant amount of ward while nerfing your opponent's scariest blocker into the ground. Moonshaker Cavalry can also make Mr. Foxglove huge and give him flying to boot, making commander damage a very real way to knock out an opponent. Finally, Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite is Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite.

Astral Dragon creates two copies of the best noncreature permanent on the battlefield, which (depending on what your opponents are playing) can be enough to end the game on its own. I once copied a Portal to Phyrexia with this trick.

And if choosing is just too difficult for you, why not be a pig and take it all? Apologies to all of the... actual pigs in the room, it's just a figure of speech. Ghalta, Stampede Tyrant extends the cheating to every creature in your hand!

Animal Facts

Thank you all for attending this session, everyone! For those animalfolk among you with strange new secretions that you don't know how to deal with, that workshop is just down the hall. I'm saying this because I know some of you need it. Time to call in the hazmat team again...

If you liked this How They Brew It, come check out our Discord, where you can chat with like-minded brewers, suggest ideas for the column, and vote on which you want to see next! You can also check out my other projects on my website. Hope you enjoyed reading, and I'll see you next time!

View this decklist on Moxfield

1. A pricier variant of this deck would also spring for Mind Over Matter.
2. You might be wondering about the last in the cycle, Words of Wind. Unfortunately, it tends to hurt us more than help us, though you can slot it in if you're running a variant of this deck that cares about huge enters triggers.