Sift Through Sands - Vaevictis and Amareth

Dragon Appeasement

| Illustrated by Paul Bonner

Topdeck Dragons

Hello and welcome! I'm Wes, and this is Sift Through Sands, an article series where we explore synergy across disparate decks, taking the lessons we learn from one commander and applying them to another. By exploring how certain cards play well together, we can understand their application in multiple decks, helping us build synergy and make unique building decisions. We'll look into the way each deck plays and highlight the stars before we look at the card package present in both that helps lead to their overall success.

Our Picks

Today we're going to be examining two Dragons: Vaevictis Asmadi, the Dire

Both of these Dragons are six-drop, evasive, heavy-hitting value engines with a lot of potential for variety. The potential value from manipulating the top card of our libraries makes both of them exciting. Both cards emphasize permanent-heavy decks, and each can easily be abused with a bit of creative building. Most importantly, we'll be talking about how utilizing utility creatures help these decks succeed and win. Let's look at our Vaevictis list.

Playing Vaevictis

Vaevictis is a great way to showcase permanents that have similar effects to instants and sorceries. Since his ability doesn't hit spells, building around him encourages us to look into cards that may fall by the wayside when compared to staples like Cultivate

The ideal game here is fairly straightforward. We want to get our ramp pieces and our mana rocks out quickly in order to cast Vaevictis as soon as we can. In the meantime, we want to get some of our token-generators and utility cards out, notably Awakening Zone

By the time Vaevictis hits, we want to have at least one or two sacrifice options and ideally some payoffs, like Gadrak, the Crown-Scourge

The core of the deck is based around creatures that imitate utility spells. Ravenous Chupacabra

The Collector

Our Amareth list leans into the Dragon's abilities even more than our Vaevictus list does. I put together a creatures-only list (which was a blast!) with a focus on +1/+1 counters and enters-the-battlefield triggers to help create a beefy army that keeps on coming. I'm not a math expert, but when Amareth is in play, she'll get us creatures when we play creatures an overwhelming majority of the time, so keeping our hand full of them lets this deck succeed. Since we're only running creatures, we can lean into plenty of creature-based strategies, particularly using blink effects to maximize ETB triggers and value.

Playing Amareth

The deck is even more straightforward than Vaevictus; we want to play creatures and begin snowballing as Amareth keeps them coming. We have to make sure that we not only have the draw, ramp, and removal every deck needs, but also some protection against board wipes and control strategies that can lock us down by exploiting the weaknesses of a creatures-only deck. We want to hit our mana dorks, like Avacyn's Pilgrim

Getting some blink effects on board, like Galepowder Mage

Yorion, Sky Nomad

Package Delivered

These decks, as mentioned, succeed with the help of creatures that aren't necessarily exciting, but still perform essential functions. Vaevictis needs permanents to sacrifice and cheat into play, while Amareth loves utility in the permanent type that her list sticks to. In both decks, our basic card package included Acidic Slime

The End-Raze

That's all for now! I hope that the article was enjoyable! Both of these decks were fun to brew and are fun to play, which is all I can ask from this game. Please let me know what some of your favorite utility creatures are, how you would build around these commanders, or what other cards you use that center around permanent based utility! Thanks for reading.