Pauper Commander - Cormela, Glamour Thief
Last week, I discovered the unfortunate mashup of Azra Oddsmaker and the madness mechanic in Pauper. Azra Oddsmaker is a very cool card, but it found itself in front of the wrong archetype. Yes, it says "discard" on it, but it also says "draw" and "combat damage", two things that have nothing to do with madness, so last week we corrected the first of two wrongs and gave Azra Oddsmaker a proper deck built around it. Now, it's time for the second half of this plight to be resolved: we need to make a real Pauper madness deck.
First things first, we need a new commander. The reason I don't like Azra Oddsmaker as a general is its failure to provide consistent discard. You only have the chance to discard once at the beginning of combat, which is a huge shame with instant-speed madness cards, like Fiery Temper. You don't want to be casting that card on a restricted timing, and you certainly don't want to be casting that as your one madness card that turn.
My first thought for another commander was Flamecache Gecko. For two mana, you can loot at any time, as many times as you want. Absolutely a better commander than Azra Oddsmaker, but still, I think we can do better. Grixis Battlemage was my second consideration. Upsides: it can discard at any time, draws before the discard, and adds blue, which means you get access to four more madness cards. (The blue ones are also some of the best common madness cards!) Downsides: you can only trigger it once per turn cycle. I was pretty close to building this version of the deck, and I think it already would've been better than Azra Oddsmaker, even when committing a significant amount of deck space to untap effects. However, I discovered a commander with even greater potential: Cormela, Glamour Thief.
Yes, that sounds really strange, given that Cormela doesn't say anything about discarding, and she doesn't even provide an outlet for our madness cards, but hear me out: we don't actually need a way to discard in the command zone because we can do that with extreme ease in our 99. Firstly, there's a ton of permanents that will give us infinite discard whenever we want, more than Grixis Battlemage ever could. Skirge Familiar, Putrid Imp, and Hell Mongrel all answer any discard woes we'd ever have.
Then, there's a ton of red draw spells that are also discard spells, like Demand Answers, Thrill of Possibility, and Tormenting Voice. I probably would've run these even if our commander could discard. They're simply good spells, and we can cast most of them at instant speed for when we need to counter something with Circular Logic. There're big versions of this effect, in Unexpected Windfall and Big Score, and one-mana versions, like Faithless Looting and Careful Study. We have all the discard we'll ever need.
But still, why play a commander that cares about instants and sorceries in a madness deck? The answer comes when we look at the madness cards themselves. The creatures with the mechanic, to put it simply, are extremely bad. There's absolutely no world where Twins of Maurer Estate is a good card. Even for three mana, a vanilla 3/5 does nothing! I don't care if we're playing a madness deck: including a card like Skophos Reaver is just a terrible deckbuilding decision. As a result, we're cutting pretty much all the madness creatures, leaving us with 17 madness instants and sorceries, and what's going to be a much more cohesive deck.
To sum it up, here is why we're playing Cormela:
- Grixis colors give us access to the most, and the best, madness cards.
- Cormela gives us a lot more mana to work with, to cast our discard spells and the madness cards themselves.
- Cormela's ability to get cards from the graveyard back will help supplement our very small supply of insanity.
Now that we've got our commander and our madness cards, let's look at how this deck is going to play. The best madness deck in EDH is Anje Falkenrath due to her storm-like gameplay. The deck is capable of going off, casting ten or more madness cards in a single turn. We don't have any cards like Anje, but that doesn't stop us from storming off as well. By chaining together draw/discard effects and madness cards while using the extra mana supplied by our commander, we can cast quite a few spells ourselves, and because casting madness cards adds to our storm count, we can use the storm mechanic to great effect. Empty the Warrens is a natural inclusion, and Grapeshot, although it probably won't be game-ending, is still worth it as removal. Initially, Galvanic Relay seemed like a great inclusion for a storm deck, but keep in mind, you can't discard cards from exile, so it makes our madness cards null.
Now, how does the deck win? Storm cards are good and all, but they're not consistent. We need a lot of ways to take advantage of the avalanche of spells we plan to cast.
Because we narrowed our deck down to instants and sorceries, we have a convenient solution: run every possible copy of Firebrand Archer. Just a Guttersnipe on the board is enough to put a clock on our opponents, and we can run a ton of those. Unruly Catapult, Kessig Flamebreather, Thermo-Alchemist, Erebor Flamesmith, we've got them all. These cards are worth playing even in decks that only cast one or two instants or sorceries a turn, and let me tell you, we'll be casting a lot more than that.
Our needs for card draw are pretty much covered by our gameplan, but we still need some interaction. Being in Grixis gives us access to the absolute best of it, letting us run Feed the Swarm, Counterspell, and Terminate. I also chose to include some Not Dead After All cards to protect our pingers and allow us to trigger our commander a few extra times. They're instants and sorceries, too, so they synergize well with the rest of the deck.
I think this deck is absolutely an upgrade over the old Azra Oddsmaker deck. Despite running fewer madness cards overall, we have the potential to cast many more of them in a game, and though I haven't done a side-by-side comparison, I would be willing to bet this deck has a better win rate too. Storm is a tried-and-true strategy, and supplementing it with madness cards is actually an interesting improvement. We can get a ton of extra mileage out of our discard spells and a ton of extra triggers on our pingers. But what do you think? Is this a better madness deck, or did I stray too far from the theme?
