Pauper Commander - Chakram Retriever & Slinger
Chakram Retriever and Chakram Slinger are a pair of commanders I've wanted to build for quite a while. Anyone who's read my articles knows about my love of untapping and tapping things over and over, which is exactly what Chakram Retriever does, so why has it taken me so long to build this deck?
There's a few reasons. Firstly, when you're untapping stuff, what you want to be untapping most are lands. With cards like Dawn's Reflection and Market Festival, you can generate a ton of mana and gain a huge advantage. Problem is, Chakram Retriever can only untap creatures, and even if you untap Vizier of Tumbling Sands, you're still missing all the green enchantments that make the land strategy so worthwhile.
The main things to be untapping in Izzet pauper are pingers, stuff like Thermo-Alchemist, Prodigal Sorcerer, Spear Spewer, and Nettle Drone. With Chakram Retriever triggering these guys every time you cast a spell, you can get a lot of damage in. However, this strategy is severely held back by the small number of pingers we have access to. We really can't afford to play support cards for this strategy when we can barely guarantee we'll draw one of them.
But all of this is irrelevant because Chakram Retriever has an archetype that it works very well with, and it's quite obvious: this Dog is clearly a combo card. On Commander Spellbook, only one combo shows up, but, trust me, there's more.
First, we have Chakram Retriever, Shrieking Drake, and a creature that can tap for . Easy enough. All we do is cast Shrieking Drake with the creature, untap said creature, then bounce Shrieking Drake to our hand. This doesn't give us anything, but it can be done infinitely, and it lets us win with Witty Roastmaster on the board.
This first combo is the easiest to pull off due to the abundance of creatures that will tap for a single and creatures that will win once we get the combo going. The only thing we have to put effort into finding is Shrieking Drake.
The second combo is a bit more complicated. There's these two cards, Banishing Knack and Retraction Helix, that essentially do the same thing: a creature that we choose gains the ability to tap and bounce a creature. It's a really strange card design, and I'm not sure why Wizards decided to print it twice, but it's a potent combo piece for us, so I'm not complaining. We can target our Chakram Retriever, then cast a mana-neutral creature spell; Cloud of Faeries or Peregrine Drake will do fine. Chakram Retriever will untap itself, use its ability to bounce the creature to our hand, and once again, we have infinite triggers for stuff like Sage's Row Denizen.
These are some decent combos; not incredible, but they do win the game. Now for the hard part: finding them. In the past, I've employed all manner of tricks to find my combo pieces. When I had to find Galvanic Alchemist, I used Step Through and Vedalken Aethermage to wizardcycle for it. To find Freed from the Real, I used Shrine Steward. In my Naya combo deck, I had Rocco, Cabaretti Caterer in the command zone to tutor for all kinds of creature combo pieces. And in all of my combo decks, I've used the transmute mechanic with great success.
It's the same here, with the transmute mechanic coming in clutch. Dizzy Spell can tutor for three of our combo pieces: Shrieking Drake, Banishing Knack, and Retraction Helix. Alternatively, Merchant Scroll can find Dizzy Spell, Muddle the Mixture can grab both Merchant Scroll and Cloud of Faeries, and if we really need it, Drift of Phantasms can go grab Molten Gatekeeper or Alloy Myr.
Those are the tutors we've got, and I think we can get quite a bit of reach with them, but just in case, I'm going to do the math:
In our deck, we have four cards we can draw that will get us to Shrieking Drake.
- Shrieking Drake itself.
- Dizzy Spell.
- Merchant Scroll (which finds Dizzy Spell.)
- Muddle the Mixture (which finds Merchant Scroll.)
This gives us the fraction 4/98, meaning that, for each card we draw, there's a 4.08% chance that it will get us to Shrieking Drake. This number changes as we draw cards, but it's the number we need to calculate odds. If we do this for the other piece in the combo (9/98 cards that will tap for blue mana), then we can multiply the fractions together to give us our odds of drawing the combo: 9/2401. 0.37%. That seems pretty low, but luckily that's not a real number. What it represents is our odds of drawing both pieces in a single card, which is impossible. But it will be useful for calculating our odds of drawing the combo.
Let's add another number. We're going to assume that, in the average game, we draw 40 cards out of our 98 card deck. We'll just multiply 40 by our previous odds, and get 14.99%. That's our odds of drawing the Shrieking Drake Combo.
Combine that with our odds of drawing the Cloud of Faeries combo (4/98 ways to get the creatures, 5/98 ways to get Banishing Knack or Retraction Helix, 0.2% chance of drawing the combo, and an 8.32% chance of drawing the combo in 40 cards) and we get a 23.31% chance of drawing either of our combos in a 40-card game. Huh.
Well, that's awkward. It turns out I would've had a much better likelihood of drawing pingers. 14 strong pingers out of 98 cards means I would have nearly a 100% of getting several in a 40-card game. I guess I was just wrong about the lack of pingers. Dang, it's a good thing I did the math before writing an entire article about this combo deck. Wait...
Uncommanders - Slingers
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So, this isn't exactly the best deck I've ever built, with a 1 in 5 chance of drawing the combos the deck is built around. It's possible that the deck draws more than 40 cards in a game, but still, the odds are terrible. At least I can say lesson learned. Tutoring for creature-based combos in blue and red is not easy at all.
What's a deck that you discovered wasn't viable after you built it?
