The Red One (RWU)

Welcome to the third of our Preconstructed Commander Deck reviews. Let's get on to the RWU deck in the Red packaging, Political Puppets.

Strategy

This is your classic "wait and see" deck, you're likely not going to be the aggressor until you have complete control. What's in question is do you have the tactical nous to be that player? The deck is defensive, almost agonisingly so, and the card selection is certainly not for the aggresively minded: Ghostly Prison, Propaganda, Windborn Muse, Azorious Guildmage, Fog Bank (seriously) and friends leave you feeling that Ken Nagle had to have outside help in to design this one, it's just not the beatdown.


The Good & the Bad

Now, the deck was supposedly built around Zedruü, who has a funky ability but has no real means to benefit from it within the presented deck without constantly ceeding advantages (if you consider Fog Bank an advantage) despite the tactics insert recommending you to be "agressive" wth his donate ability (and seriously Wizards, where's the actual Donate? SMH!), I can see Zedruü being a really fun general to build around but here there's seriously only 1 or 2 cards that I'd happily donate to an opponent to profit from his drawing and life-gain ability and no, surprisingly enough, neither one is Fog Bank. Red, White, Blue and Artifacts have enough global abilities that don't necessarily benefit just the controller and there's almost none in the deck, Howling Mine being the sole exception. Ok, I wasn't expecting Rule of Law or Arcane Lab but I feel that this avenue wasn't sufficiently worked during development and the deck is the poorer for it as it has no real connection with the listed general. That said, to start getting a pretty serious life- and card-advantage engine going, you really only need to hand over 3 or 4 permanents in total as the defensive nature of the deck should allow you to retain that advantage once you start benefitting.

Now, don't let this suggest that the contents of the deck are in any way inferior. You just can't have enough Insurrections or Reins of Power in any Commander metagame. This deck also increases the number of False Prophets in circulation [Was that a groan I heard in the back there? Ed.] Like I said, the deck does defensive very, very well and a 2/2 that will exile the board is often just what the doctor ordered.


The Legends

Zedruü, who the deck is apparently built around, would benefit from having a deck actually built around him. Start with Illusions of Grandeur, Delusions of Mediocrity and Puca's Mischief and work from there. There's a lot of creative space here for anyone who wants to put the deck-building work in. I'll be doing a deck tech with Zedruü very soon and it will blow your socks off with its selection of "Zero to Hero" cards. Two thumbs up for the goat! Em, Minotaur... Seriously? She's at best an Elan or a Gazelle, but a Minotaur? Never!

Nin: There's possibly a deck for Nin, but probably unsurprisingly, this isn't really it. You are either ceeding resources to gain card advantage (as with Zedruü's ability) or donating card advantage to remove threats. On top of Zedruü's ability and Ruhan's incongruity, Nin is just a step too far for the deck; at some point you're going to want to keep your stuff and the number of tricks are limited given the cards selected. How many times are you going to get away with a sneaky 1-damage ping on your own stuff just to draw cards with a 1/1? Not very often. People don't like their opponents to have unfettered card drawing and will generally send at least one ping of an Electrolize Nin's way, just because. Elsewhere, with cards like Stuffy Doll, there are opportunities to be discovered.

Big, stupid beats will really only be relevant if you end up hitting the same person repeatedly and your statistical chances of that happening decrease the more players are in the game. This makes Ruhan less than appealing. In addition, he's completely out of place in this particular deck as he only wants to attack and the deck generally only wants to defend. Sure, you need something to close out the game when the dust has settled and you're 1 on 1 with your last opponent but you'd really prefer to have something with any kind of evasion when this situation arises. A figurehead in a chaos deck is a possibility as is his borderline playability heading up a 1v1 deck, but overall, he's underwhelming.

His only seeming advantage is to replace Doran in 1v1 beatdown for those players who prefer the RWU colour mix to the treefolk's BWG. I prefer neither in a beatdown deck so this leaves me cold.




....and The New
Spell Crush (& Oblation). Do you like Tuck? Maybe the fact that you tuck this tucker upon resolution will make this more palatible though I seriously doubt it. How important is it that your Hinder goes into the graveyard when you play it? In some sort of counter-beasts UG build that can flicker Eternal Witness repeatedly for infinite Hinders, I suppose it could be an issue but as I've just described the personal Hell of a vast majority of EDH players, I doubt that it's an issue so tucking your own Spell Crush under your deck is really just an excuse not to reprint Hinder. What's the point?

Champions Helm: A boost and troll shroud for your general is a nice set of abilities and it's not too expensive especially as the back-end cost is so low. Essentially, once it's in play, you're happy. A one-of in the product, it's a real pity it's not in the Riku deck but it's just as necessary here with the entire deck hanging on whether you can get Zedruü online and protected. This is essentially a Lightning Greaves #2 as the boost is not going to save your general from the bigger threats in the decks without additional help.

Chaos Warp gives red the ability to deal with any permanent with the chaotic possibility that you could reveal the very permanent you mixed into the library or something worse. Given that it can whiff on the reveal, I'd say this is pretty much an auto-include (sorry) in mono-red decks against problematic enchantments. If it reveals a non-permanent, you've effectively dealt with a tricky permanent with zero downside. Or you can hit an Angelic Arbiter on your first shot and a Consecrated Sphinx on your second and be reeeeeeaaaalllly conservative with it from there on out. Still, the chaos aspect is a blast but if you don't like rolling the dice, don't play at the craps table. That apart, um, wow!   

Sometimes.

Crescendo of War: R&D tried to give every other colour a "Force of Nature - every upkeep" type card in the set, this isn't it though you'd be forgiven for wishing it was. The actual White Force of Nature-Like guy gives 3 life....... Less said the better. Crescendo of War is a strange fish in this deck: an aggressive card in a defensive deck, even if you do benefit when blocking, is terribly out of place. Despite the personal bonus, you're more likely to lose defenders than keep them even if you do take out the opposing attackers.

Personally, if an opponent played this, I'd happily ignore it and switch to aggressive mode but with the Zedruü deck, that's kinda hard as beating down with defenders is a rare (though wonderful) occurance. This is a stellar card in aggressive, multiple attacker decks but a baffling choice here.

Flusterstorm: Ah, Eternal fodder here we go. One of the eternal strategies that works well is Storm specifically because you essentially need to resolve one of 2 cards currently in print to fight it (Trickbind & Stifle) The storm mechanic's own counterspell, Hindering Touch, is too expensive for the eternal formats at 4 mana. What development decided to do was to reprint Force Spike. With Storm. Now that Tendrils is 33% less likely to resolve and Eternal SBs have become even more competitive.

Outside of that it's occasionally a better Spell Pierce but the "Instant or Sorcery" clause really puts into a certain niche. Depending on how the eternal metagame develops it will be a part player or a core counter.

What? You want EDH applications? Em, occasionally you can Force Spike someone.

Head and shoulders above these is Martyr's Bonds: Grave Pact and Karmic Justice had a lovechild, costed it at 4WW and unleashed it on the Commander world and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Killing any non-land permanent the Martyr's Bonds player controls, even including shitty little plant tokens, now costs you your Titan or other huge beast.

Worse still, the trigger is not source sensitive so the Bonds player themselves can put together a litttle creature sacrifice loop and force you to sacrifice in turn.

Even worse still, if that loop contains a creature with multiple types, like "Artifact Creature" they can clear the table of artifacts and creatures. Removing the last loyalty counter from their Planeswalker will spell doom for any others opposite them and sacrificing a Seal of Anything will do the same for Enchantments. Luckily they put in the non-land clause, imagine this with any type of fetch land or strip effect?

Grave Pact cleared shops and cleaned clocks on many an EDH table in years past and this is, frankly, better in almost every single way: it hits more targets, it's easier to splash and you have two chicks with Zendikar-angel halos (but no wings) holding a sword to the throat of the rest of the table. I won't say that this goes into every W/x deck because, well, that much is pretty obvious already except.......

..........except it's seemingly not obvious to the makers of the Zedruü deck who overlooked that killing a non-land permanent  you control will allow them to destroy the non-land permanent you had painstakingly donated to them to benefit from Zedruü. Multiple turns of set-up undone in an instant. Essentially the presence of this card in the deck is a huge hint that you should only be donating lands if you really want to benefit from Zedruü's triggered ability and, let's face it, who wants to be constantly be giving lands away?


Summary:
The deck: Good if you like defensive stuff and political machinations. Now-where near the amount of visceral "OOOOMPH!:" of the Mimeoplasm or Kaalia decks. As for the new legends, there's definitely something there, just out of kilter with the deck WotC have provided us with. Zedruü looks like a great addition to the format. We'll see what the brewmasters can cook up for us. All in all, not my preferred style of deck but someone out there will love it and the new legends are interesting if not very well supported here. Martyr's Bonds and, in certain decks a couple of other cards,  is top drawer though.