Legends Legends - Sunastian Falconer
Welcome back! It's time for another Legends Legends! Each of these articles focuses on a different legendary creature from Magic: The Gathering's original cycle of 55 from the 1994 expansion set Legends. While these decks aren't always the most powerful (in fact, they rarely are), they're always a fun exercise in deckbuilding and an opportunity to play outside the box when it comes to Commander and EDH.
This week, we're gettin' back to basics with a Gruul deck built around ramping. Ramping up to big Fireballs, ramping into more lands, and, most importantly, ramping into our Commander, Sunastian Falconer. Let's dive in!
General Thoughts
Today's commander is Sunastian Falconer, a five-mana 4/4 creature with the ability to tap to add two generic mana to our mana pool. Five is rarely the price we want to pay for another mana dork, even if he gets us two mana for the price of one. I mean, even Hedron Archive runs at a better rate than Sunastian Falconer. To build around this overpriced mana dork, we've taken this deck's theme back to a classic archetype: Elfball.
Elfball decks look to ramp as hard as they can for several turns before dumping all of their available mana into a Fireball and blasting the opponent away in one fell swoop. While the decks don't necessarily need to run Elf mana dorks and Fireballs specifically, the original incarnation of the decks did and so the name has persisted. This Sunastian Falconer deck looks to do much the same thing, with our Commander Mana Dork sprinkled in for a little extra mana for good luck.
Elf-
The most important piece to any Elfball deck is, well, the Elves. They are mentioned first in the nickname, after all.
You'll recognize most of the Elf creatures in this deck. Classic one-drop mana dorks, like Llanowar Elves, Fyndhorn Elves, Elvish Mystic and Arbor Elf, are all staples of the format, even outside of Elf-specific decks.
Some of our more notable mana dorks include Argothian Elder (who we'll use to combo with Ashaya, Soul of the Wild; more on this later), as well as Elvish Aberration and Llanowar Tribe; we'll want to continue ramping well past six mana, so using the Aberration as a grande-sized mana dork will do nicely.
Llanowar Mentor doesn't get enough credit, in my opinion. One Llanowar Elves creature has never felt like enough for me, and with this Elf Spellshaper we'll turn any of those dead draws into more mana.
Despite its slower casting cost, Zhur-Taa Druid is important for getting in some damage early on our opponents.
Our real threatening mana dorks, however, are Circle of Dreams Druid, Priest of Titania, and Wirewood Channeler. These three each add mana roughly equal to the number of creatures we control (a little less for the two that count Elves specifically, but we've got enough of those running around in our decklist it shouldn't be too noticeable). Dropping any one of these three dorks is what takes our Fireballs from mildly threatening removal to player-obliterating conflagrations.
-Ball
The second piece to any self-respecting Elfball deck is, well, the balls. Besides the OG Fireball, we've got quite a selection of X-damage burn spells to choose from.
Crackle with Power and Jaya's Immolating Inferno are the two choice pieces for Commander-format Fireballs these days. Both of these sorceries can blast every opponent in the pod with massive damage, with Crackle with Power multiplying it exponentially as we dump more mana into its casting cost.
Earthquake and Squall Line are our two board wipe Fireballs. We'd almost always prefer to cast Squall Line, given that most of our mana dorks are stuck to the ground, but in a pinch we can opt to sacrifice them to the ensuing Earthquake if it means we can wipe the board of opponents as well.
Banefire's biggest advantage is its immunity to counterspells, something we'd have to save our Red Elemental Blast and Pyroblast for when casting any other Fireball spell.
Devil's Play's flashback cost means we can use it to finish off two players instead of just one-per-Fireball like Blaze.
While Worldsoul's Rage requires a little more mana than the average Fireball, it sets us up for a follow-up salvo by dropping a ton of lands out of our hand or returning those Llanowar Mentor-discarded lands to the field.
Electrodominance is another technically slower Fireball that can see big payoffs when we use it to cast Protean Hulk or Shared Summons for free to assemble our combo and finish the game.
Combustion Engine
With the pieces assembled, it's time to pump some fuel onto this blaze and see it roar up into a fiery inferno.
There are two infinite combos we can use to create infinitely huge fireballs to blast the board with. The first involves Argothian Elder and Ashaya, Soul of the Wild:
This first combo is a little expensive to assemble, but both pieces can be fetched from our library with Shared Summons.
The second combo involves creating infinite red mana with Birgi, God of Storytelling and Grinning Ignus:
This combo is cheaper and quicker, and Protean Hulk can fetch both pieces simultaneously and put them right onto the battlefield.
Besides those two combos, we have a few cards I like to think of as extra insurance. Beast Whisperer and Guardian Project give our green and red deck access to some efficient card draw as we build up our base of mana dorks, and City on Fire puts our Fireballs into lethal range way earlier than our opponents will expect.
If we run out of X-cost burn spells, we can use our Eternal Witness and Timeless Witness to grab them back out of our graveyard, and if we've already assembled our infinite combo, we can do this all in one turn!
Mana Base
Our deck is almost entirely ramp spells, mana rocks, and mana dorks. In addition, we're running 37 lands; we want to go big on mana, and we won't let anything stop us short of an Armageddon. My final count puts us at 19 mana dorks, six mana rocks, and seven other spells that fetch lands from our library. If we don't hit 20 mana by turn five, I'll eat this entire Google Doc.
Budget
This has got to be one of the cheapest Legends Legends entries yet. For just $125, you too can own this Sunastian Falconer Elfball deck! The only card that even breaks $10 is Birgi, God of Storytelling, and I can't bring myself to recommend you remove her, either. She's essential to one of our infinite mana combos. If you're really looking to save on this deck, you could cut the Three Visits and Ruby Medallion and replace them with any other slightly suboptimal ramp spells; maybe a Wood Elves and a Mind Stone, respectively?
Sunastian Falconer Deck List
Wrap Up
And so we come to the conclusion of another Legends Legend. This one has a special place in my heart as a bona fide Timmy player. Nothing quite says "Magic: The Gathering" like gathering a ton of magic and unleashing it fireball-style into my opponents' faces. Sunastian Falconer might not add a whole lot to this deck, but he does fit thematically alongside an army of mana dorks, and we'll always have a reason to tap him for mana once he's on the field.
How would you build a Sunastian Falconer Commander deck? Are there enough red and green birds to build a real Falconer's deck? Could we supplement it with Phoenixes? Would it even be playable? Let me know what you think in the comments!
Once again, thanks for reading!
