One Theme Three Techs: Spellslinger

Ciel Collins • January 12, 2025

Lightning Bolt | art by Christopher Moeller

One Theme, Three Techs: Spellslinger

Magic has had 30 years to not only come up with a whole host of different and interesting themes to build a deck around but also develop them into something you can play with in all five colors. The problem is that too many five-color decks make them all feel less special. In this series, I want to break apart the five-color decks.

I'll discuss the theme, what value each color adds to it, the core colors of the theme, and then suggest a pair of commanders which each use at least one of the core colors but bring other spices to the table.

Core colors, for the record, will be determined by total number of decks in a given color with that theme under EDHREC. There will be some consideration given to the mono-color, two-color, and three-color categories.

This entry? Spellslinger.

Why Play Spellslinger?

If you play a game called Magic, you might enjoy casting spells. 

But seriously, spellslinger can be incredibly rewarding. You set up a small board that can maximize or otherwise get better by casting an instant or sorcery and take off. There are decisions to make, luck to plead with; it's a rush.

It's an archetype you have to actively think about while piloting it, but there can be a sense of inevitability to it. So long as you don't forget to include a wincon.

It's an archetype so core to the game that it's draftable in almost half of all the sets that have come out since 2012 (and I have the stats to prove it here). There's an appeal. 

What's the appeal to playing all five colors? Having access to the coolest or best instants and sorceries of each color. The obvious problem is that they'll crowd each other out if you try to put all the options in one deck.

The secondary problem is that spellslinger has a few different strategies that you can go down which want different overall builds. As much as it pains me, I'll discourage you from making a Codie, Vociferous Codex deck this article.

So, with that prelude over, let's move on to the individual colors.

Core Colors of Spellslinger?

No one is surprised to hear that the core colors of instants and sorceries are blue and red. They overlap a lot as to what they offer, which is good for our purposes. Both can copy instants/sorceries and have a high density of permanents with some kind of Magecraft ability (i.e., giving you value whenever you cast or copy an instant or sorcery).

They're not perfectly 1:1, though, which is important to keep in mind when considering how to split them.

For instance, red's utility spells are its cheap looting effects, direct damage, and mana rituals. 

Blue's utility spells are going to be cantrips, counterspells, and removal.

Both colors have ways to specifically interact with the spells being slung, such as making tokens, dealing damage, or drawing cards. 

And of course, both colors are proficient in copying and otherwise re-casting spells.

Listen, there's a reason that over 45,000 of the 100,000 Spellslinger decks on EDHREC are Izzet. There are 25 commanders in the theme with that exact color identity, though many of them encourage you to build in a specific way.

The "core" Spellslinger experience is pretty subjective, but for my money, you'd want Mizzix of the Izmagnus. I'd also slot most of these cards in: 

Blue-Red

1. Goblin Electromancer
2. Third Path Iconoclast
3. Galvanic Iteration

Mono-Blue

1. Talrand, Sky Summoner
2. Murmuring Mystic
3. Mnemonic Deluge
4. Swarm Intelligence
5.Twincast

Mono-Red

1. Birgi, God of Storytelling
2. Guttersnipe
3. Arcane Bombardment
4. Mizzix's Mastery
5. Return the Favor

What Does Each Color Offer?

The most straightforward answer is that each color offers a unique sweet of instants and sorceries in both the "core utility" and "big, flashy, game-ending" categories. Izzet spellslingers won't get to use Swords to Plowshares, Cultivate, or Victimize in their decks, obviously, but there are other advantages the different colors offer.

Thanks to our past visit to Strixhaven, all five colors have some interaction with instants and sorceries, and some colors get occasional access to the noncreature batch.

White has some interaction with instants and sorceries thanks to prowess and noncreature synergies. It also offers a high density of removal and protection, as well as a handful of spells that can buff a team of creatures.

Blue and red are both able to make tokens whenever you cast spells, so white would fit in with either color in helping to create a spellslinger token strategy.

Black is the color that has historically had the fewest affinities for card types. It has had a few interesting hits, like Blood Funnel, which are worth heavy consideration. Beyond those, black offers a lot of incidental self-mill that can be utilized in flashback builds. Failing that, most of black's best tutors are the card types in question.

Lastly, green. Green is interesting here. It has even less interaction with instants and sorceries than black, being essentially dead last, but it has a very unique category of spells to sling: ramp.

By using a mix of other green goodies like spot protection or fog effects in a spellslinger shell, we can hold off any losses until our tower of mana is ready to win us the game.

Alright, there are six combinations of arcs and pairs that will include all five colors with red on one side and blue on the other. I'll note them here along with what I would pick for that set-up if I were committing to it, before revealing which way I choose and why.

Azorius: Zethi, Arcane Blademaster & Jund: Vial Smasher the Fierce + Gilanra, Caller of Wirewood

Dimir: Lord of the Nazgûl & Naya: Annie Flash, the Veteran

Rakdos: Magar of the Magic Strings & Bant: Katilda and Lier

Gruul: Wort, the Raidmother & Esper: Saruman of Many Colors

Boros: Velomachus Lorehold & Sultai: Glarb, Calamity's Augur

Simic: Gale, Waterdeep Prodigy + Raised by Giants & Mardu: Extus, Oriq Overlord

Spellslinger is a category that has gotten a decent number of commanders, but mostly focused in Izzet and Izzet-plus colors. There's a decent reasoning for it, but it does make this particular journey harder in some respects. There are definitely a few tri-color combinations that feel like a "square peg in a round hole" situation. 

For my pick, there are two caveats I've settled on. First, blue has more overall support for instants and sorceries than red, so it needs less help (and thereby only needs one color). Meanwhile, red is one of the two colors genuinely good at making mana, so it doesn't need green. 

That leads us to my pick for the article!

These two should be suitably distinct while feeling like genuine spellslinger experiences.

Overview of Gale, Raised by Giants

Gale's core ability is incredibly interesting. Giving you the ability to cast an instant or sorcery from your graveyard whenever you cast the opposite from your hand does a couple of unique things you can build off of. Mill becomes a form of card advantage. You can cast instants on an opponent's turn and surprise with a follow-up sorcery. One card can become two spells for things that trigger off of that, as well as things that trigger when you cast a spell from somewhere other than your hand.

This baseline effect of Gale's is enough of an incentive to do Spellslinger, but his ability to choose a Background lets you pick his second color. Green's most-used instants and sorceries are ramp-based, which will help "feed" the fairly mana-hungry Gale, especially when you're getting to cast them all twice.

Simic Ramp puts up numbers for a reason, so I appreciate a deck like this, which wants to shy away from the usual top-end permanents in favor of crazy big instants and sorceries.

Now that's what green really kicks in for the deal, but there are several green Backgrounds. Why Raised by Giants? First, and most obviously, it turns Gale into a win condition. A small modification and he can two-shot anyone with commander damage. Secondly, there is a nice suite of green spells which scale with your creatures' power. Ten is a pretty big number, it turns out.

A quirk of Gale's is that normal counterspells are a little less useful than normal. It's absolutely great that a counterspell lets you cast a sorcery, but once in the graveyard, it's not going to be recast. We want modal counterspells. The other quirk is that Gale doubles the value of permanents that reduce the cost of instants and sorceries or any Magecraftiness. Absolute must pick there.

With all this in mind, our gameplan is simple. We're going to ramp in the early game. Once Gale is out, we can start recasting spells to grind out nutty value. In the endgame, we can cast the background to either turbocharge our power matters spells or use Gale as a beatstick to end the game.

Archidekt link here.

Onto our final build!

Overview of Extus, Oriq Overlord

Extus is a bit of an odd pick for a spellslinger. The piece is there, it's obvious, he's got a Magecraft ability. However, he doesn't actually care about instants or sorceries. He uses instants and sorceries to get creatures. Fortunately for us, there is a nice package of creatures which care about instants and sorceries, as we've already gone over! An especially prevalent version of this are red's damage dealers.

I wanted to shift the deck build away from full-on aristocrats to maximize the spellslinging side of things, but I still wanted there to be valuable, small creatures worth recurring. There are a lot of different ways to maximize the utility, but I built a little package leveraging the strengths we have in a build full of instants and sorceries that bring a free Disentomb effect with our commander out.

We still really need mana. This build leverages the large number of small creatures to run by using a few convoke spells, like City on Fire, but we also need just straight-up mana to power out some of the bigger spells in the build. Treasures are the best way to manage that in our colors, so Treasures it is! We've got a lot of the usual suspects, like Big Score and Deadly Dispute. There are also some clever ways to grant our spells convoke, which helps with some of the bigger spells in our arsenal.

To make sure we get to the endgame, we're going to need to protect ourselves and disrupt our opponents. To that end, we've got the usual removal suite (Path to Exile and friends) as well as a few cards that can help protect either just Extus or our entire board (Divine Resilience is a nice budget pick-up). The fact that they bring back a creature is definitely gravy. 

We've got our cards and mana sorted, so now we need to establish a genuine win condition. The previously mentioned City on Fire can turn our pingers and little creatures into serious pressure, but there are other ways to navigate to the end of the maze. Descent of the Dragons can turn all of our tiny creatures into sudden threats (and any nontoken creatures can be recurred later, if you don't win outright). We actually have two other dragon-y threats in Elemental Eruption and Rite of the Dragoncaller. Rounding out our six-mana red spells is Arcane Bombardment, which will get out of control fast.

So with that, we have a grindy control deck that seeks to eke out value with every spell cast in different ways until we can cast a big spell to hopefully end things!

Archidekt list here.

Close the Tome

Whew. With that, all five colors and their most interesting instants and sorceries can be used (across two decks). This one was a bit trickier thanks to just how much deeper blue and red have affinities for the card types than the others, so it relied more on leveraging the different weird strengths of the colors.

What did you all think? Does it still count? (Would you drop one of the colors from the Mardu deck to play Magar of the Magic Strings or Feather, the Redeemed?) 

Let me know your thoughts on the decks, and I'll see you next time!



Ciel got into Magic as a way to flirt with a girl in college and into Commander at their bachelor party. They’re a Vorthos and Timmy who is still waiting for an official Theros Beyond Death story release. In the meantime, Ciel obsesses over Commander precons, deck biomes, and deckbuilding practices. Naya forever.