The Wandering Rescuer "Templar Knight Twiddle" - Plot Twist #20

The Wandering Rescuer by Anna Pavleeva

Welcome back to Plot Twist, the series where we build a Commander deck that looks like it'll tell one kind of story only to throw out a twist for our opponents mid-game. If you're joining us for the first time, welcome! I'd encourage you to check out the previous articles in the series to get a sense of the types of stories we're looking to tell.

Last time, we built a legends-matter Voltron deck around Nashi, Searcher in the Dark from Duskmourn: House of Horror, and it was an absolute blast to play. This week, we're revisiting one of the first legendary creatures spoiled from Duskmourn: The Wandering Rescuer. This is a commander that's been kicking around in my head for awhile, but I've been struggling to figure out what the twist would be.

I thought about ways we could tap and untap creatures at instant speed with cards like Diversionary Tactics, Village Bell-Ringer, and Pili-Pala, but it just seemed a little too unfocused. Then, somewhere deep in the depths of Scryfall, Templar Knight popped up and immediately I knew what I wanted to do. Here was another card that could tap itself that felt very unexpected, even though it's only a few months old. 

How Does The Wandering Rescuer Work?

The Wandering Rescuer has four total abilities, three of them being keyword abilities, and she feels like one of the more complex commanders we've done recently on Plot Twist. Like The Wandering Emperor before her, The Wandering Rescuer has flash, so we can cast her at instant speed, and she also has double strike, which is evocative of The Eternal Wanderer's second ability. She also adds convoke to her suite of keyword abilities to help us cast her early and with the help of any other creatures we cast as we start to build out our board.

Lastly, she also grants hexproof to other tapped creatures we control, which gets particularly cheeky because we can cast her at instant speed using convoke to grant a creature we control hexproof in response to a Swords to Plowshares or Lightning Bolt. Combine it all together and The Wandering Rescuer makes for an interesting commander that both encourages us to go wide and helps us protect our creatures.

If we take a look at The Wandering Rescuer's EDHREC page, we can see there's a lot of people making "The Wanderer Theme" decks with The Wandering Emperor, The Wanderer, The Eternal Wanderer, and even Cut Short all showing up in more than 40% of the 222 decklists at the time of writing. Other brewers who are trying to maximize convoke with Wand of the Worldsoul and We Ride at Dawn to help them cast creatures for cheap and give them hexproof at the same time with our commander.

There also seems to be a strong tokens sub-theme in many decks, with cards like Adeline, Resplendent Cathar and Jacked Rabbit also showing up in the 'High Synergy' section of The Wandering Rescuer's page. Overall, we can see how there isn't a clear direction to take this commander in as the 'Top Cards' section is filled with staples like Pearl Medallion, Esper Sentinel, and Loran of the Third Path.

Doing the Twist

This week's decklist is certainly going to run some of these cards. After all, Pearl Medallion does work really well with Templar Knight, and what white deck doesn't want Swords to Plowshares. But by choosing to build a deck filled with Templar Knights, we're immediately given a clear vision for what the deck wants to do.

Firstly, about a third of our deck is going to be made up of Templar Knights themselves because we need five of them in play and attacking to activate their ability, and secondly because Templar Knight wants us to run legendary artifacts for it to tutor directly into play.

So we're leaning heavily into the toolboxy nature of Templar Knight and building a mono-white deck that will have a legendary artifact answer for everything, whether it's a way to win, like Akroma's Memorial or Graaz, Unstoppable Juggernaut, card draw in the form of Throne of Eldraine or Yes Man, Personal Securitron, and even catch-all interaction like Karn's Sylex and The Pandorica.

We're looking to quickly get a bunch of Templar Knights into play and then find a legendary artifact to answer whatever our opponents are up to.

How Many Templar Knights is Too Many Templar Knights?

Full disclosure: not only have we never done a deck built around a "A deck can have any number of cards named _____" card before, but I've personally never built one wither. I've certainly played against Relentless Rats and Slime Against Humanity before, but I've never felt the pull to actually build a deck around one of these cards myself. All that to say, I had to do a little bit of research and math to figure out how many Templar Knights I wanted to run, and I could still be way off. 

By using this handy-dandy hyper geometric calculator from the folks at AetherHub, we can quickly find out the odds of us having a certain number of Templar Knights in our opening hand or how many cards we would need to draw to reliably find our fifth copy. With 30 copies of Templar Knight in the 99 of our deck, we can see there is a 68.6% chance for us to have two or more copies in our opening hand and 80% chance for us to see five or more copies of Templar Knight in the first 20 cards we see.

While I would certainly love to get both of those numbers up higher, it gets really tricky to cut cards when we also need to account for more than a third of our deck being lands. So I decided to roll with 30 copies of Templar Knight for now, but if you've built a deck around it (or have a better understanding of the math involved) please let me know in the comments below what number you settled on and how it's been working out for you.

I've seen various brewers suggesting we should run between 25 and 33 copies of Templar Knight, but it seems like we'll need to play the deck for awhile to get a sense of what the right number is.

As a quick aside, I'm coming to really love using a hyper geometric calculator when building decks with strong themes like this. I used it while building out my Karador Cycling-Reanimator Deck to see just how low I could get the land count (I'm at 20 lands currently and it almost never misses a land drop if I have two lands in my opening hand). You can also use a calculator like this to see how many ramp spells you should run, the odds of you drawing a piece of enchantment removal, or just about any other probability question you might have while deckbuilding.

A Legendary Artifact for Everything

Since Templar Knight wants us to run legendary artifacts, we're going to lean into them heavily so that we have an answer we can tutor up with Templar Knight no matter what situation we find ourselves in. If we find ourselves in need of more mana, we can get Oketra's Monument, Realmbreaker, the Invasion Tree, The Mightstone and Weakstone, or Throne of Eldraine as needed. Plus the latter two can also draw us extra cards if we need to find more copies of Templar Knight.

Speaking of card draw, Eye of Vecna seems like a colorless Phyrexian Arena in this deck, and we shouldn't have any issue paying for its trigger since the deck's average mana value is under three. We're also running The One Ring because it's such a powerful effect, even if we won't get the protection from everything trigger if we tutor it directly into play with a Templar Knight activation. Thrumming Stone doesn't technically draw us cards, but is quite possibly the best card in the deck.

With 30 Templar Knights in the deck, we have a roughly 77% chance of hitting at least one more Templar Knight off of a single Thrumming Stone trigger, and we should be able to reliably get multiple Templar Knights if we ever untap with a Thrumming Stone in play. We're also running Yes Man, Personal Securitron as a way to draw cards and hopefully get us some 1/1s to help convoke out spells when it dies.

We can even find an answer for whatever our opponents happen to be doing to stop our army of 3/1s. If we need to remove a problematic nonland permanent, The Pandorica will phase it out for as long as we need it gone. If we need to protect our board, Gerrard's Hourglass Pendant (which we've tinkered with before in our Zinnia, Valley's Voice Deck) is here to save the day or stop our opponent's from taking an extra turn. 

So You've Got Thirty One 3/1s, What Now?

Surprisingly (or maybe not), there are a lot of legendary artifacts we can use to win the game with a board full of Templar Knights. Akroma's Memorial is an excellent choice because we can attack with five knights and tutor it into play before blocks to give our creatures a bunch of keywords and forms of evasion, or we can wait until blockers are declared to hopefully whittle down our opponent's creatures.

Graaz, Unstoppable Juggernaut is another excellent choice to mess with blockers because it turns our Templar Knights into 5/3s that can't be blocked by walls. We're also running Andúril, Narsil Reforged because it can buff our creatures turn after turn and it shouldn't be hard for us to get the city's blessing in a deck that goes wide like this one.

While we can't tutor up Virtue of Loyalty with a Templar Knight activation, it will buff our creatures AND untap them at our end step. We saw just how effective this card is at closing out games in our "Oops No Creatures" deck built around Duskana, the Rage Mother all the way back in Plot Twist #2. We've also got Knight Exemplar (another all-star from our "Knights of No Honor" Haytham Kenway deck) as a way to protect our Templar Knights and quickly close out the game.

If you're looking to spice things up further, we looked at adding Gonti's Aether Heart, Konda's Banner, Palantír of Orthanc, and Throne of the God-Pharaoh to the decklist, but they didn't quite make the final cut. Being able to tutor any of those cards up at instant speed and winning the game shortly thereafter will certainly make for a memorable game.

A Few Additional Twists for Good Measure

As always, this week's decklist has a few cards that really caught my attention and I wanted to highlight. Lithoform Engine is definitely an all-star in any deck that's looking to copy abilities, spells, or permanents, but the idea of copying a Templar Knight activation to get two legendary artifacts really opened my eyes to the potential of this card.

Imagine being able to attack with a board full of Templar Knights, activate them before blocks, and then put both Akroma's Memorial and Graaz, Unstoppable Juggernaut into play making all of our creatures into 5/3s with a suite of keywords that will make blocking them difficult if not impossible. That's exactly the sort of splashy play we love on Plot Twist.

While Dazzling Theater // Prop Room is brand new from Duskmourn: House of Horror, it does seem like it could be a white Seedborn Muse with potential upside and will be something we'll look to add into future brews. Masako the Humorless is showing up in a lot of The Wandering Rescuer decklists so far for good reason, and seems like a card that should see more play because it's like Vitalize in creature form.

Crackdown verges dangerously close to Stax territory, but in a deck like this that should be able to close out games relatively quickly, it seems like a good fit. Last, but not least I want to shout out Remembrance as a card that is normally abysmal in single card formats like Commander, but finds its perfect home in a Templar Knight deck by allowing our knights to replace themselves when they die.

Here's the full decklist for you to peruse:

Roll the Credits

I hope you enjoyed reading the latest edition of Plot Twist featuring The Wandering Rescuer. Next time you sit down for a game of Commander, see what sort of plot twists you can add to take the game's narrative in a new direction.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on today's deck and what cards could find a home in it in the comments below or on Archidekt. The Maybeboards of my decklists are always filled with cards I thought could work but didn't make the final decklist.

You can check out my other articles here or see what decks I'm currently playing here. I've been tinkering around with my Signature Ikra / Bruse Secret Commander Wild Pair Deck lately, and really enjoying looking back at the deck now that I've gotten quite a few games under my belt with it. I'm constantly toying with new ideas like this Colorless Combo deck and would love to hear your thoughts on them there.

Stay tuned to see what other twists and turns are headed your way in the next edition of Plot Twist.