Commander with Nick Wolf: Olivia, Mobilized for War WRITTEN BY Nicholas Wolf

Hello there boys and girls, men and women, people and robots of the world. Welcome back to "Complaining about Plot Reveals that Totally Aren't About Emrakuls but Really Actually Are 100% Emrakul" with your host, everybody you'll talk to this week. Monday saw the announcement that shocked exactly no one with Wizards of the Coast revealing that yes, that Emrakul-shaped dread that's been looming over Innistrad is in fact actually Emrakul. And with that revelation came Emrakul's new card:







Having the distinction of being the scariest creature ever printed in Magic is a tough heritage to live up to, and obviously this new iteration of everyone's favorite upturned bowl of spaghetti is not as powerful as Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. That said, at least the new one isn't (and most likely will never be) banned in Commander, so we EDH obsessives will finally be able to cast or otherwise cheat in an Emrakul without our playgroups crying foul.

Emrakul isn't the only bombshell the powers that be decided to drop on us this week, and the world of Commander players gasped in unison with unfiltered joy at the new legendary werewolf creature, Ulrich of the Krallenhorde / Ulrich, Uncontested Alpha:





That "unfiltered joy" I mentioned earlier didn't last long, however, as the hordes of Commander players quickly took to social media to announce that THIS ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH™, and that Wizards should be ashamed at the travesty that is our first legendary werewolf. I personally don't think it's nearly as awful as people are shouting it is, though I can't say it's as good as I had hoped for. It's great with other werewolves obviously, as well as Arlinn Kord. In a deck with a fun "let's fight everybody mechanic" powered by Ulvenwald Tracker, Arena, and Gruul Ragebeast, among others, I'm tentatively excited to have one of these guys at the head of a list of 99. That, and he looks like he could be cousins with Ragnar, so that's awesome too.

Today's Commander

Last week, I asked readers to vote on Twitter which Commander we should discuss next, and I present to you our winner:







Olivia, Mobilized for War jumped out to an early lead and never really let go, though Damia, Sage of Stone made an admirable push towards the end there. And poor Vhati il-Dal, you died unceremoniously by being thrown off a flying boat, and you failed here too. Oh well, maybe next time.

So the people want Olivia, Mobilized for War, and 99% of the time we'd be talking about either vampire tribal or madness tribal, both of which can be covered in a paragraph. If it's a vampire, put it in. There. Vampire tribal is done. And for the other one, do you want to make discard and poof spells? Madness. Done.

But I said last week that no matter which Commander you all voted as the winner, the deck I would present to you would be something you weren't expecting. And hopefully, today's list is exactly that.

Olivia, Mobilized for War (Commander, by Nick Wolf)

Let's look at ol' Olivia for a minute. She's a 3/3 flyer for three mana, which is good but not "kill everyone with commander damage" good. It's her ability that makes us put on our thinky caps and brew, however. At the cost of discarding a card we can bestow on any creature coming into play under our control, haste and a +1/+1 counter. She also makes it a vampire, which is cool flavor-wise but completely irrelevant for our purposes. So if we have a commander that makes our creatures bigger and faster, how can we take advantage of that fact? By playing INFECT.

Here's the part where I was secretly hoping that Vhati or Damia won our little poll, since green offers a lot more options when it comes to infect. Oh, and I should mention that it was going to be infect all along. Sneaky, I know. But since you voted for Olivia, I had to really think about stuff, and I think that's not altogether a bad thing. B/R Infect isn't exactly common, so when you put this deck together you'll definitely get a few surprised faces when you cast Olivia on turn three into a hasty 4/3 zombie vampire Hand of the Praetors.

And speaking of infect creatures, we have to stretch our options a bit since you guys didn't give me green or blue to work with, but that's okay. While we're playing some less-than-excellent infect creatures like Razor Swine and Toxic Nim, we have ways to make them count. Our commander already takes mediocre creatures and gives them a little nudge in the right direction, but what else can we do to surprise our opponents into a heaping handful of poison counters?

Most people think of green when they think pump spells, but that's not the full story. Sure, green is the color of choice for infect in Legacy and Modern, but this isn't Legacy nor Modern. This is Commander. And we in Commanderland get to live a little, unlike those stuffy other formats. For every time someone casts a Might of Old Krosa targeting a Glistener Elf in some other format, we get to touch up a Fallen Ferromancer with a Howl from Beyond, or inflate a Flesh-Eater Imp with Enrage. The point is, while our creatures are going to be less good on their own than our opponents' creatures of comparable mana costs, our creatures have the one thing theirs don't: infect. And last I checked, it's still only 10 poison counters to make a person dead, even in Commander. While many groups around the world like to use 15 counters as the standard for defeat in Commander, the rules themselves never mention this, so 10 is still the goal. This means that while our opponents are trying to win the regular way by dealing 40 points of damage to each other like cavemen, we get to simplify things a bit.

Black and red offer us several ways to make our little infect creatures hit like a sack of plaguebricks. Many of the cards I put in this list have the welcome side effect of being hilarious to play and are not often seen on a Commander table. Cards like Furnace of Rath / Dictate of the Twin Gods see play once and awhile here and there, sure. But when's the last time you saw a Blazing Shoal or, better yet, Snake Cult Initiation? By the way, if you put Snake Cult Initiation on a creature with infect and connect to an opponent's face, the creature will deal 3 poison counters from the aura automatically in addition to whatever the creature's power is. It'll make people dead with a swiftness, I promise.

To go along with our damage enhancers and cult of wigglers, we also have a full suite of equipment that will make even the lowliest Septic Rats a threat to be reckoned with. I went all out on this list from a real life monies standpoint, and for that I do apologize. But I really wanted to make this deck both fun and good, and this entire sentence is me feeling guilty for telling you to go get an Umezawa's Jitte. But hey, for every 32 dollar fork I recommend, there's also a Fireshrieker and a Grafted Exoskeleton which combined are less than a ¼ of a cup of coffee.

Take some poison Jitte.

Speaking of Grafted Exoskeleton, you may be wondering why I put in an equipment that grants its wearer infect if our creatures already have that keyword. Well, not all our creatures do, that's why. To make this deck function (and to raise the creature count past the single digits) we need to include a few black/red all stars who don't have the added bonus of coming with built-in sickness. Partly for theme and partly for function I included both on-color praetors of Phyrexia, Sheoldred, Whispering One and Urabrask the Hidden. We don't have access to a ton of infect creatures, so Sheoldred pulls double duty here by clearing the board of enemy monsters as well as allowing us extra uses out of our own. Urabrask ensures that our opponents' blockers have to start on the back foot before they can get in the way. We also have Balefire Dragon, and this is in the deck for two reasons. First, imagine how hilarious it would be to give it a Grafted Exoskeleton and not only infect the opponent for eight poison counters but also incidentally kill their Avacyn, Angel of Hope. Second, we're playing Sarkhan's Triumph as a way to possibly tutor out Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon if needed, and if Skittles isn't in our deck when we draw Sarkhan's Triumph, it's nice to have a back up dragon to call on.

If we manage to get a poison counter or two onto an opponent but for some reason can't close it out the old fashioned way by punching them in the face, say because of a giant tax from Sphere of Safety or Propaganda, we have a few tricks to get them all the way sick sans combat damage. We have Contagion Clasp and Contagion Engine to proliferate at will, so anything that has counters will get more of those same counters. Obviously this is great for poison and -1/-1 counters, since that's pretty much the name of the game here. But if our pair of planeswalkers, Ob Nixilis Reignited and Liliana of the Dark Realms, need a boost, we can do that too. Don't forget that proliferate can add counters to anything that already has counters on it, so if you want to play the political game and put a counter on an opponent's Lux Cannon or just add a bunch of redundant bribery counters on something to make the Gwafa Hazid, Profiteer laugh, go for it. Beyond proliferate, we have Warstorm Surge which includes the handy few words "that creature deals damage." This means that whenever we play an infect creature with Warstorm Surge already on the battlefield we get to hit something with infect damage equal to the creature's power. It's a handy way to get around situations that prevent us from being able to attack. We can do all that with the proliferating and Warstorm Surging and what have you, or we can also just kill someone dead with Caress of Phyrexia. There's that too.

I hope you guys give this one a try if for no other reason than to get labeled by your playgroup as that dirty infect player. Hit me up on Twitter to tell me all about how you made everybody sick, both literally with poison counters and metaphorically by just being the jerk who actually cast Phyrexian Vatmother with a straight face. And speaking of Twitter, let's run this whole "voting for next week's commander" thing back again. Head over to @Nicholas_Etc and cast your vote. Next week's commander will be one of these three creatures, and I promise that no matter what you choose, the resulting decklist will almost definitely not have infect creatures in it, probably:

I hope you have your Chromatic Lanterns and Mana Confluences handy. See you then.

Comment on this article on Reddit at: https://www.reddit.com/r/PucaTrade/comments/4pary5/article_commander_with_nick_wolf_olivia_mobilized/

Nicholas Wolf is a writer who lives in Flint, Michigan. He's been playing Magic: The Gathering since Tempest and still doesn't consider Urza's Saga to be broken at all. He prefers building decks that have either have 40 cards (Limited), 100 cards (Commander), or 50 cards (Tiny Leaders).

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