Legends Legends - Riven Turnbull
Greetings! Hail and well met! Welcome back to Legends Legends, the little corner of the internet I've been allotted to talk at you about the greatest single expansion set Magic: The Gathering has ever released, Legends! Surely, this original inception of Magic's legendary creatures will be chock-full of powerful creatures, deeply integral to the lore and fabric of the greater Magic multiverse! Just kidding!
Today we're talking about another seven-mana mana dork, Riven Turnbull, and his absolute lack of any lore or playability. Should be another wacky ride as we build a playable and thematic deck around this oversized Advisor!
General Thoughts
Riven Turnbull is a seven-mana 5/7 Human Advisor with an ability to tap to add one black mana to your mana pool. Reminiscent of Princess Lucrezia, Riven is not in the least bit exciting at first glance. He's got less than 40 decks logged on EDHREC, where the most popular themes are as a shell for Persistent Petitioners and as a nonthreatening Mill commander. We can do better and stay on-theme, though!
All we know about Riven comes from his flavor text, where he makes some exciting claims about how to handle persecution by a corrupt government. We'll be taking his words to heart and, in the spirit of building an on-theme deck, devising a politics Commander deck that thrives on the machinations of your devious mind. We'll use goading, Curse Auras, and the monarch effect to force our opponents to fight each other for us. By the time they realize what's happening, we'll have assembled one of our infinite mana combos and dumped it all into a huge X-spell for the win!
Dignitaries of the State
Riven Turnbull won't typically be the first creature we play. That honor goes to any number of his political dignitaries and hangers-on that surround our illustrious Advisor. In fact, we usually won't play any creatures in the early game besides Leaden Myr and Silver Myr (who we'll use later for one of our combos).
We should expect to cast one of our 24 enchantments each turn, so the brand new blue enchantress from Duskmourn: House of Horror Entity Tracker is a must-have.
Accursed Witch is a card your opponents will almost never kill for you; you'll have to do some light encouragement by swinging its 4/2 body around the table for a turn or two before they realize they might be better off with the Curse attached to them. Use this and other cards like it to influence your opponents' actions in the game: "If you block my Accursed Witch, I'll target the player in the lead with the Curse," etc.
Azure Fleet Admiral and Keeper of Keys are two of our best ways to get the monarch effect into the game and retake it by the end of each of our turns, with Archivist of Gondor doubling up on the card draw that the effect produces. Once again, since this effect is symmetrical, try to use the extra card draw to your advantage politically by offering to trade the monarch to someone else in exchange for a favor. Maybe you let them hit you and take the monarch to draw two cards, and in return they'll also swing at the opponent you've cursed with Curse of Verbosity?
Political Violence
If there's one thing this deck does well, it's create targets out of other players. With our wide selection of Curses and goad effects, we'll be controlling just exactly who attacks who and when and how.
We can turn our opponents into tasty-looking targets with Curse of Verbosity or Curse of Disturbance, or make that decision for our opponents with any of our goad cards. Bloodthirsty Blade has made an appearance in many of our recent Legends Legends decks, and that's because there's almost no better tool for spreading some goads around the table.
Maeve, Insidious Singer is a close second, and the added benefit of drawing a card can't be understated. Fealty to the Realm acts as a better Mind Control, bringing the monarch mechanic into play while stealing a creature from an opponent. Or, worse yet, passing a goaded creature around the board as control of the monarch changes.
If we really want to punish a player, we hit them with Curse of Misfortunes. This basically guarantees they'll have an uphill battle for the rest of the game as they try to contend with a Curse of Death's Hold, Curse of the Restless Dead, Cruel Reality, Torment of Scarabs, and everything else we can spit at them.
Other opponents may think they're safe once the Curse of Misfortunes hits one player; let them be lulled into a false sense of security before casting Copy Enchantment or Clever Impersonator on our other opponents and digging through our library to Curse them as well.
No Mercy further disincentivizes our foes from attacking us, while Propaganda can put a full stop to their attacks if they plan to use their mana in any other way this turn.
Acquire and Bribery are two cards whose results may vary depending on your play group. If you know your opponents' decks well, you can effectively use these to neuter them from their wincons or grab their most powerful cards. If we're lucky, they'll even have their own copy of the pieces we need for our combos, like Deadeye Navigator. Think of these as precognitive removal spells for you, deleting problem cards before they arrive.
Finally, our control elements all compensate our opponents for their trouble. We are playing politics, after all, and don't want to become the archenemy of the pod just yet. Spells like Pongify and Arcane Denial may remove problem cards in the moment, but our opponents can't get too mad at us when we've generously donated a 3/3 Ape in place of their Massacre Wurm.
Legitimate Answers
This Riven Turnbull Commander deck wins with one of a few combos, and one of them can even make use of Riven's mana ability!
Each of these combos makes use of either Deadeye Navigator, Shrieking Drake, Intruder Alarm, or Peregrine Drake. Each results in infinite mana, with two even using the mana from Riven Turnbull. I'll link the combos below to save space belaboring the points.
Assembling these combos is paramount to this deck's victory, which is why we're running five tutors that can fetch the pieces we need in Diabolic Tutor, Diabolic Revelation, Profane Tutor, Scheming Symmetry, and Vampiric Tutor. I'm not even sure that these will be enough, even with all of our card draw; I could see this deck taking a Demonic Tutor, as well.
Once we've assembled these combos, using Riven Turnbull and Silver Myr as our mana sources to blink something with Deadeye Navigator or cast and recast our Shrieking Drake, we can dump all that mana into an Exsanguinate, Torment of Hailfire, or Blue Sun's Zenith to obliterate our opponents in one fell swoop.
Mana Base
Riven Turnbull is a massive seven mana. To play him, we'll need to do some significant ramping in colors that aren't too great at it. In addition to our 36 lands, we're including four mana rocks and two more mana dorks in the form of our two Myr. Liliana of the Dark Realms fetches a Swamp for us every turn, as well, and god help anyone who lets us activate her third ability after tutoring Swamps for three turns.
Budget
The singles for this deck will run you anywhere from $300-400, depending on your preferred singles retailer. That's quite steep for a gimmicky deck like this, so let's take a look at some alternatives to bring down that budget.
We can save an easy $100 by cutting Vampiric Tutor, Rhystic Study, and Cyclonic Rift right out. Every tutor we lose hurts the overall consistency with which we can perform our combos, but there are no shortage of cheaper and less effective tutors out there: Beseech the Mirror, Beseech the Queen, even the transmute cards from Dissension could be used to fetch specific pieces.
Losing our Cyclonic Rift hurts, too, but an Aetherize can perform similarly in this deck, especially with all the goading we'll be doing.
Riven Turnbull Decklist
Wrap Up
What is Riven Turnbull's deal? What role could he possibly play in the history of Dominaria? Is he a brutal anarchist who shuns all nefarious political dealings, or does he work within the state to tear it down from the inside? The answers to these questions may remain forever unknown; you'll have to play it out in your pod to determine who Riven truly is.
Whatever his deal, this seven-mana Dimir mana dork is the antithesis of all other Dimir commanders, forcing you to think outside the box to find a use for an extra mana once you've already hit seven lands.
Let me know how you'd build Riven Turnbull in the comments! Would you run fewer Curses in favor of more goads, or maybe you're more partial to voting mechanics to control the table?
Thanks again for reading! Until next time!
