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 Commander deck, built around donating our Legendary lands to our opponents, making our commander unblockable! How do we go about ramping our opponents' mana bases without falling behind? Let's jump right in!
General Thoughts
Livonya Silone is a six-mana 4/4 with first strike. She is also one of the only instances of "legendary landwalk" in the entirety of Magic (besides Ayumi, the Last Visitor), making her incredibly unique to build around, albeit not very consistent. Maybe back in 1994, when Legends had just dropped, Livonya's built-in evasion was more useful for getting past all those players running The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale and Urborgs.
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. Folks still play a lot of legendary lands in Commander, but we need our own guarantees. To mitigate that, we're running the scant few red and green spells that allow us to donate or trade permanents with our opponents, giving them less-than-useful legendary lands to make Livonya Silone unblockable. Then, all we've got left to do is swing in for 21 commander damage, and that's a wrap.
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 fans will recognize Bazaar Trader and Harmless Offering as two of the best ways red can donate permanents. Bazaar Trader is so important to our game plan that it'll often become the target of our Swiftfoot Boots and Lightning Greaves once it's on the field, and we'll often use our Worldly Tutor and Shared Summons to fetch it from our library. It's just the best way to give our opponents legendary lands for the least amount of mana.
In fact, keeping Bazaar Trader around is so important we're running a ton of recursion for when this wimpy little 1/1 goblin inevitably dies. Timeless Witness, Eternal Witness, Bala Ged Recovery, and Reclaim are all primarily here to fetch our donation effects back out of the graveyard.
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. In a pinch, you can sink 10 total mana into this artifact and sacrifice it to trade a land with an opponent. While this is a heavy investment, we'll be ramping like mad to account for the lands we're losing, so 10 mana isn't actually that hard to reach.
The second weird one is Thieves' Auction. This seven-mana sorcery effectively lets the table draft permanents one at a time from the table. If we leave our legendary lands for last, there's no doubt someone must choose them eventually, putting them into play under their control and guaranteeing an unblockable Livonya Silone. (Make sure you don't cast this with Livonya on the field, as we'll probably just end up losing her to an opponent if we don't draft her first).
The third option involves Turf War, and is a bit convoluted. By putting a contested counter on one of our legendary lands, we'll be disincentivizing our opponents from attacking us, for fear of acquiring our legendary land and thereby making Livonya unblockable.
Finally, we have a couple type-changers to create legendary lands on our opponents' battlefields. Song of the Dryads works as effective removal for an opponent's commander, and, since the Aura doesn't cause the creature to lose any of its supertypes, it remains on the field as a Legendary Forest land with the commander's name. The other option is Awakening of Vitu-Ghazi, where we give someone a 9/9 legendary creature along with their land. This should be used as a last resort, or along with some smart politicking so that player doesn't immediately betray you.
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, Steel Golem, and Grid Monitor can make it nearly impossible for our opponents to play the game, and Rust Elemental is handy cleanup versus an artifact deck.
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, and chances are no one is running the land-sacrifice effects they need to remove Gods' Eye, Gate to the Reikai. Keldon Necropolis is nearly useless to any deck not running red, as is Kher Keep. Same goes for Shivan Gorge.
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 and Geier Reach Sanitarium generate advantage for the whole table, so it won't matter if your opponent chooses to use them as we'll still see the benefit.
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
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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!
