Vorthos Vortex: The Most Dangerous Gamer

The Most Dangerous Gamer

by Aaron J. Riley

Hello, gamers!

For today's edition of Vorthos Vortex, I wanted to pay homage to gamers and gaming culture more broadly, and with the annual Global Game Jam having just wrapped up, there's no better time. For those of you who are game developers and those of you who just enjoy games and for whom games are an integral part of your life, this article is especially for you.

The commander for our deck today is The Most Dangerous Gamer

We will also be including a new card type in this deck: attractions. Attractions are a card type unique to Unfinity, and they are treated as artifacts. Along with attractions, Unfinity features a new stickers mechanic that will be important to our deck. More information on both of these mechanics can be found here: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/unfinity-release-notes-2022-10-07

On top of the gaming- and carnival-themed cards, I've also included a number of dice-rolling cards, as dice-rolling is one of the most foundational and iconic game mechanics.

As a quick reminder, this is a column that discusses Vorthos--flavorful and aesthetically minded--deckbuilding. The goal of decks designed in this column is to create decks where all, or most, of the cards in the deck fit within a particular aesthetic or theme. The theme could be anything from holidays to art styles to Magic: the Gathering lore. A Vorthos deck should leave some kind of aesthetic impression or tell some kind of story to other players. Competitive viability is also taken into consideration, though we build budget-friendly decks of more modest power levels (5 or 6 out of 10) for casual play environments. With that, let's jump back into today's deck!

Creatures

For sticker-related creatures, we have Blorbian Buddy

For attraction-related creatures, our decklist includes "Lifetime" Pass Holder

Because of the small pool of available attraction and sticker cards, it isn't really viable to build an entire deck around either of the mechanics. Instead, each mechanic is meant to augment the rest of the deck and to provide fun flavor to the deck.

Finally, we have dice-rolling creatures, which include Ancient Brass Dragon

Again, given not only the variability with the sticker and attraction mechanics but the uncertainty of dice rolls, this deck will be less reliable than a more finely tuned deck, but that's what makes it fun. You should be aware of that variability before you start building it. Where it lacks consistency, though, it makes up for in Vorthos and flavor. It's one of those decks that is incredibly fun to play even in games that you don't win.

Instants and Sorceries

We have a number of flavorful instant and sorcery cards in our deck list that will help us remove threats, draw cards, bring cards back from the graveyard, and visit attractions.

For removal, we have Saw in Half

Going into this deck build, I hadn't intended on making graveyard recursion a part of the strategy, but I found through the process of looking for Vorthos cards that there were several cards that synergized with the deck's flavor while also providing us with recursion effects, and given that there aren't a large number of sticker and attraction cards in the deck, it's important to find ways to make the most out of the sticker and attraction cards that we do have, and recursion provides us a means of retrieving those cards and allowing us to trigger their effects again while also just providing us a lot of value. For recursion, we have Pair o' Dice Lost

We also have two valuable cards that allow us to visit attractions in Coming Attraction

Artifacts and Enchantments

Today's deck build only has three enchantments, but each of them is valuable and flavorful. Done for the Day

Night Shift of the Living Dead

Finally, we have the iconic Phyrexian Arena

Most of the artifacts (outside of the attractions) are mana rocks, but there are several Vorthos artifacts that I want to highlight.

Clown Car

The Deck of Many Things

Vexing Puzzlebox

Attractions

For today's article, I'm covering attractions in a separate section, since they are a unique card type. As noted before, attractions are a unique type of artifact that have their own separate deck that is separate from the main deck. You draw a card from the attraction deck whenever the card ability, "open an Attraction" triggers. There are several cards in Unfinity with this ability, and I've included most of the relevant and legal attraction-related cards that I could in this deck (remember that not all Unfinity cards are legal in Commander), though not all of the attractions themselves, as our attraction deck only needs 10 attractions. Once you have played an attraction, each turn during your main phase you will roll a six-sided die, and if the die lands on one of the numbers highlighted on the left side of the card, the corresponding effect will trigger.

There aren't many attraction cards to choose from, so I put in the most flavorful and highest value attractions in this deck. You'll find a list of the included attractions as part of the larger deck list. Keep in mind that attractions don't count towards the total card count for the Commander deck, as they compose a separate deck. This means that the deck list will have 110 cards, even though Commander decks themselves are limited to 100 cards.

Final Thoughts

I think that you'll find The Most Dangerous Gamer

That's all for this edition of Vorthos Vortex. I'll be back soon with more Vorthos content for Commander in the coming weeks. I'll also be writing some articles about designing Commander cubes soon as well, so be on the lookout for those.

Happy gathering Commander players!