Now that War of the Spark spoilers are said and done, it’s time to take a closer look at the cards that we can use in our EDH decks, along with new legendary creatures we can brew around. I tend to build at least one new legendary creature per set, but there are times when that varies. Some sets in recent years had better cards for the 99 of other decks, and in the case of this Ravnica block, there have been plenty of new commanders I’d love to build in EDH. As such, here’s a new brew from the latest set, featuring quite possibly my favorite card being printed:

Feather, the Redeemed is apparently a character that appeared in an older Ravnica set, but didn’t have its own card until now. As with most characters in the MTG world, they typically end up being a legendary creature at some point or another. Feather is a character I hadn’t heard of before, but I really like this card. Boros as a color pair has always been a bit on the weak side, and typical Boros commanders usually rely on combat and combat tricks to do their thing. White and Red are also the worst at card draw and land ramp, so the pair has been at the bottom of the barrel for a while. Recent additions in the past couple of years have made a difference — cards like Smothering Tithe can really help out this color pair. Anyway, back to Feather. She’s a 3/4 flyer for three CMC which is a pretty decent start. I enjoy low costed commanders because they come down early and have the ability to be recast several times in a long game. What makes Feather really interesting though, is her paragraph of text that says anytime I target one of my creatures with an instant or sorcery, it then goes to exile instead of my graveyard, and I get it back to hand at the end of that turn. This does mean you can also cast instants on other people’s turns and get them back at their end step, so there is some flexibility here. The only problem I saw initially was that these colors tend to have good removal but not as much utility outside of combat tricks, however there are a ton of good cantrips (a card that does something but also says “draw a card” on it) in these colors, and that’s how we can get some card advantage, not to mention the baked in advantage this ability brings. Let’s take a look at some spells we can try to exploit:

This is a smaller sampling of what’s included in my build, but it covers the major tricks we want to cover. Cantrips include Crimson Wisps, Defiant Strike, Expedite and Gods Willing. These cards will all replace themselves by instantly drawing you a card, but then will also come back into your hand for later use. You should be able to cast these spells over and over and get major value, and no one is going to waste a counter spell on these because normally they’re garbage cards that no self-respecting EDH player would use. Speaking of, this deck ends up being pretty budget because of this fact, with plenty of cards floating around a quarter or less. We have some other tricks though, where we can use cards like Expose Evil or Spawning Breath, both of which spawn tokens we can use to ramp/draw cards, and these cards can too be cast every turn. There are some go-wide burn spells included as well, though you’ll want to make sure to throw a point of damage at one of your creatures if you want to get the spell back to hand. I’ve also included a few ways to blink our own creatures, mainly so that we can avoid our opponent’s removal. There’s a white counterspell that might come in handy some day, and Seize the Day can get us an extra combat every turn if we do end up wanting to go sideways more often. As I said this isn’t all of the cards, but it gives you an idea of where I’m going with this. Next up, what creatures do we want in this spell heavy deck?

The main focus of the creatures in this deck is to compliment the spell heavy build. This means cards like Guttersnipe and Firebrand Archer that do damage to our opponents when we cast spells. This also means token generation for casting spells, ala Young Pyromancer and Monastery Mentor. This also means including some cool Heroic keyword cards that I’ve never really found a use for, and most of them too create more tokens or other shenanigans. Lastly, we have Mirrorwing Dragon and Zada, both of which will copy spells if you target them, meaning you can cantrip off of zada and then draw multiple cards at once, for like a single mana. Good stuff man. I don’t have a really clear cut win con here, it’s just a value engine and hopefully you drain people down low enough to swing with a bunch of tokens for the win. I really don’t have a bunch of other tricks up my sleeve either. You can check out the full deck list here.