Commander 2016 was just released, so why not celebrate by looking at a deck that is based around Legendary creatures?  The deck isn’t completely Commander themed I guess, because it’s not singleton or 100 cards or anything, but… uhh… well, I just wanted an excuse to do a legendary themed deck, ok?

So the only real reason to make it a legendary toolbox deck rather than a regular toolbox deck (built around searching your library to find whatever card you need) is because of one card - Thalia’s Lancers.

 

This, along with Eldritch Evolution, allows us to go and fetch whatever the best card for the current board is. Most of the time, it’s going to be one of the awesome legendary angels that we play, but there are a few other options too. Notice that Thalia’s Lancers doesn’t say the thing we find doesn’t need to be a creature, only a legendary card. This means that we can also search up legendary lands (of which there are 2 in standard) if we need lands, legendary enchantments (like the Oaths) or legendary artifacts like Aetherworks Marvel (not relevant here, but could be a fun deck!)

Thalia’s Lancers also works pretty well with ‘flicker’ effects (exiling a creature and then returning it to the battlefield) such as Eldrazi Displacer’s activated ability because it allows us to keep having it re-enter the battlefield and search our library for more legendary cards! Speaking of which, how about we take a look at the legends we’re running?

1x Odric, Lunarch Marshal
1x Archangel Avacyn
1x Bruna, the Fading Light
1x Gisela, the Broken Blade
1x Linvala, the Preserver
1x Sigarda, Heron's Grace

1x Skysovereign, Consul Flagship

1x Geier Reach Sanitarium

So, pretty much we’re playing a bunch of Angels and a few other things too.

Avacyn is there because she’s just generally a great card. She protects our creatures when she enters the battlefield, and she can be flickered with Eldrazi Displacer if we want to give our creatures indestructible again. If she flips, she will kill a few of our smaller creatures, but all of our Angels will survive.

Bruna is here mainly to meld with Gisela, but her cast trigger (put a human/angel from your graveyard onto the battlefield) is pretty useful too. 7 mana isn’t extremely difficult as we are playing some ‘mana dorks’ (creatures that make mana) so it’s not too much of a pain.

Gisela is just generally a fantastic aggressive creature, and if she gets into combat with a Smuggler’s Copter, she walks (flies?) away alive! The only issue is her 3 toughness, which means that she dies to Harnessed Lightning or Grasp of Darkness, but hey, you have like a bajillion more angels in the deck so it’s no biggie. You could also flicker her with Eldrazi Displacer in response to the removal to shake the target off of her!

Linvala re-balances the board if you’re losing, which is pretty crucial in the current standard meta with so many aggro decks running around. Since her abilities trigger when she enters the battlefield, Eldrazi Displacer can allow you to keep gaining life and keep making tokens, which is lots of fun.

Sigarda can give you a massive army of human tokens with her activated ability (2, exile a card from your graveyard: get a 1/1 human token) which could be used for chump blocking or large attacks, especially when you have Odric on board. She also gives them all hexproof, which is a nice bonus.

Odric is really funny when you have a few angels on board, especially with Gisela or Brisela.

Skysovereign acts as removal that we can find with Thalia’s Lancers. It’s also just a massive body, and if you flicker it with Eldrazi Displacer, you can use it’s ETB (enter the battlefield) ability again. Just note that you can only do this while it is a creature, and it will no longer be a creature when it enters again.

Geier Reach Sanitarium is there if we need land. The other legendary land in standard is Inventor’s Fair, which doesn’t really suit this deck very well seeing as it doesn’t have an artifact theme. Most of the time we won’t need Geier Reach Sanitarium’s activated ability, but it’s more relevant than that of Inventor’s Fair.

Adding in the non-legendary creatures gives us the mainboard:

1x Odric, Lunarch Marshal
1x Archangel Avacyn
1x Bruna, the Fading Light
1x Gisela, the Broken Blade
1x Linvala, the Preserver
1x Sigarda, Heron's Grace
4x Duskwatch Recruiter
4x Eldrazu Displacer
2x Lifespring Druid
4x Servant of the Conduit
4x Thalia's Lancers
3x Tireless Tracker

1x Skysovereign, Consul Flagship

4x Declaration in Stone
4x Eldritch Evolution

4x Canopy Vista
4x Fortified Village
3x Evolving Wilds
5x Forest
4x Plains
2x Westvale Abbey
1x Geier Reach Sanitarium
1x Wastes
 

So, we have Servant of the Conduit and Lifespring Druid to get us our army of Angels a li’l bit earlier. They can also be fodder for Eldritch Evolution to find a 4 or 5 mana creature. If we’re running low on energy for Servant of the Conduit, we can flicker it with Eldrazi Displacer.

Duskwatch Recruiter is a good ‘mana sink’ (a place to dump a bunch of unused mana but does not demand it) and helps us find Angels/Thalia’s Lancers/whatever. Tireless Tracker performs the same function, but limits the amount of mana we can pump into it with the advantage of becoming super buff.

Eldrazi Displacer is very useful, as you probably already know. I’ve pretty much covered it just by talking about other cards!

Declaration in Stone, along with Skysovereign, is our only mainboard removal. It doesn’t really do anything special with other cards (boring!) but it helps to stop our opponents from winning.

Eldritch Evolution is our secondary “toolbox” card and the main reason why we play so many 3 mana creatures. Most of our important things cost 5 mana and this gives us another way of accessing them.

The manabase is mostly pretty boring, but I chucked 2 copies of Westvale Abbey in there because we needed colourless sources for Eldrazi Displacer and who doesn’t like having a 9/7 Demon with flying, indestructible, haste AND lifelink? Other than that, it’s just a bunch of G/W lands with a few colourless sources. We play more green sources than white sources even though there are more white mana symbols in the deck because green is more important to our early game for mana dorks and such.


Sideboard:

2x Fragmentize
2x Fumigate
2x Grapple with the Past
2x Heron's Grace Champion
4x Thalia's Lieutenant
3x Thalia, Heretic Cathar

I have to admit, I made this sideboard (and this deck, but the sideboard especially) around what I thought was fun, not what was the best for the standard meta. What I’ve done here is made a sideboard plan where we transform the deck into a humans deck against aggro or just to surprise the opponent! We also have some ‘normal’ sideboard cards in Fragmentize for anything with powerful artifacts, Fumigate for decks with many creatures, and Grapple with the Past to find things from our library or get something that died back into our hand. If you want to make it a good sideboard rather than a fun one, you may want to experiment with delirium so that you can play Ishkanah and Traverse the Ulvenwald.

Just like last time’s deck (Jundelireanimator) this deck is easy to buy/trade into because all of the most expensive cards are 1-ofs. It’s a tonne of fun to play and can easily be tweaked in terms of colours because the staple cards don’t change as long as you’re still playing Green and White (which you should be doing!)

That’s all for this week, I hope you enjoyed this article, see you at FNM!