Legends Legends - Livonya Silone

Welcome back to Legends Legends, our weekly delve into the Magic's past and its greatest set ever printed, Legends. This week, we're throwing together a Livonya Silone

General Thoughts

Livonya Silone

Nowadays, while the pool of legendary lands has increased, we can't always bet on our opponents running their own Mikokoro, Center of the Sea

Donors

Gruul isn't known for its ability to donate permanents. That's more of blue's wheel house. Instead, red relies on chaotic redistribution effects and a small handful of direct donations to pass out its permanents. 

Zedruu the Greathearted

In fact, keeping Bazaar Trader

There are three other odd ways I've found to redistribute the lands under our control. The first is a card I'd never heard of before I started this article: Gauntlets of Chaos

The second weird one is Thieves' Auction

The third option involves Turf War

Finally, we have a couple type-changers to create legendary lands on our opponents' battlefields. Song of the Dryads

What If Our Opponents Already Have Legendary Lands?

All the better for us! Now, we get to keep all of our lands and instead donate only our busted, detrimental effects. Aggressive Mining

Legendary Lands

Donating permanents, especially lands, to our opponents is dangerous work. We don't want to pull them too far ahead in mana, especially if they're running the same colors as us. That means we'll have to make conscious decisions about where to donate which lands, and focus on donating the lands with symmetrical benefits.

There are some donations that'll be better than others depending on the opponent. That mono-white deck isn't going to see any value off of our Baldur's Gate

Both of the NEO Channel lands in our colors can be donated in a pinch, since they can't use their channel effect from the field, making them effectively plain ol' Legendary Forest and Mountain.

If we absolutely must donate a land with an upside, we'll use the two with symmetrical effects. Mikokoro, Center of the Sea

Gallifrey Council Chamber and The Grey Havens both have triggered ETB effects that we'll get the value out of before donating to an opponent - just be sure you don't donate the Council Chamber to The Tenth Doctor deck, or the Havens to the Varolz, the Scar-Striped. 

Dual-Wielding Woman

There isn't a whole lot of lore about Livonya Silone. However, we do know that she's wielding two badass swords in her Richard Kane Ferguson artwork and blending her way through an army of...goblins? (that's what the wiki says, at least). How appropriate, then, that we should equip her with the strongest blades we can muster.

Our two best swords are, of course, the Swords of X and Y that we've included - in this case, Forge and Frontier and Feast and Famine. I shouldn't have to go long about why these cards are good- they're chock full of value and just get better on a creature with evasion like our commander.

Blackblade Reforged makes for a great power buff for Livonya, especially considering how hard we'll be ramping. Sigiled Sword of Valeron turns her into not only a great attacker, but a frightening blocker, too, with both vigilance and first strike. 

Champion's Helm and the two pairs of boots keep our expensive commander safe from targeted removal. Helm of the Host helps us hit multiple players per turn with our commander (note that damage from the tokens is not Commander Damage, but it's still an unblockable 4/4 coming at them every turn).

Mana Base

This Livonya Silone Commander deck has an interesting mana base; we're running 38 lands including our Bala Ged Recovery, but only nine basics (five Forests and four Mountains). We're mainly focused on tutoring up our nonbasic lands, anyways, but chances are with our Cultivate, Kodama's Reach, and other ramp we'll see almost every one of those basics on the field. Importantly, we'll use Sylvan Scrying, Titania's Command, Expedition Map, and even Ulvenwald Hydra to dig up our legendary lands and prep them for donation to our opponents.

Besides these, we've got the slew of typical ramp-rocks you've come to expect. Sol Ring, Arcane Signet, Gruul Signet; you know, the hits.

Strategy

A Commander deck built around Livonya Silone really only has one plan: get access to our Bazaar Trader, give any opponent without a legendary land a legendary land, and then beat face with Livonya.

Getting access to our measly little goblin is the easy part: we're running quite a few creature tutors in Worldly Tutor, Archdruid's Charm, Sylvan Tutor, and Finale of Devastation (which is a really funny card to use to tutor up our two-mana 1/1). 

Sticking the Trader to the field is the hard part. The Bazaar Trader has priority over Livonya as the recipient of any Lightning Greaves or Swiftfoot Boots we find, and even if its destroyed we'll want to use our recursion spells like Eternal Witness and Reclaim to get it back. Keep focusing on the Bazaar Trader until every opponent has at least one legendary land, then start donating our detrimental effects if you have the mana. 

Once everyone's got a legendary land, Livonya Silone can hit the field. It's usually safe to ditch the Bazaar Trader at this point, as not many people run ways to destroy their own lands. Start equipping Livonya with any of our powerful swords, and go to town on your foes. 

Should we become locked out of Livonya for whatever reason (maybe she's been the target of a Darksteel Mutation), our deck still runs a number of other powerful creatures we can use to end the game. Fetching up Argoth, Sanctum of Nature for Titania, Voice of Gaea and melding them creates a frighteningly huge monster to march across the battlefield, and Thunderfoot Baloth and Tyrant's Familiar both make for cheap (dollar-wise) threats for dealing big damage.

Livonya Silone Deck List

Budget Options

This deck will run you about $500 to build all in one go. Not super affordable to purchase all at once, but maybe a nice goal to work up to over time. While you build up some store credit at your LGS, let's take a look at some cheap alternatives for this deck.

There are a few $30+ cards required to make this Livonya Silone deck work. Sylvan Tutor works wonders for the consistency we miss by only running one Worldly Tutor, but at nearly $40, we can easily replace it with Tooth and Nail and just focus on ramping up to the seven mana we need. In addition, competitive staple Boseiju, Who Endures is an amazing pick for our deck because of its utility as both removal and a donatable legendary land, but it's also $30, and we could make do with just a Forest in its place.

Wrap Up

Surprisingly, Livonya Silone is more playable as a voltron commander than I expected. She's not about to win any cEDH events, but she can still function in EDH as the commander of a sufficiently built-around deck.

Livonya's not the only commander that can be built around landwalk abilities, either. I've seen a Sol'kanar the Swamp King deck built around entirely swampwalk creatures and cards like Evil Presence, and everyone is a bit familiar with the merfolks' synergies with flood counters (see Spreading Seas). How would you build a landwalk deck? Let me know in the comments!

Thanks for reading! Check back next week for more exciting Legends Legends!