Hey folks, and welcome to Weird Commander, where I build strange and unique brews that you’ve (hopefully) never seen before! The first installment is my Tamiyo 1-Drops deck, where every nonland card has a mana value of exactly 1!

So this list was the result of a recent Commander Clash episode: each of us had to build a deck that was either all 1-Drops, 2-Drops, 3-Drops, or 4-Drops, and I was last to snag a deck so I had to do 1-Drops, which in my opinion is by far the hardest of the bunch to do. I even doubted initially that I could make a decent deck with such a difficult deckbuilding restriction, but in the end I’m glad I got to try it out because the result is super sweet!

This was probably the longest I spent building a deck for Commander Clash, and it was indeed hard to get to a point where I was happy with a deck. My final brew with Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student // Tamiyo, Seasoned Scholar wasn’t my first deck, but rather my THIRD attempt at this challenge! Let me walk you through the process.

The Process

So when I first tried building 1-Drops, I immediately tried everyone’s favorite monkey, Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer. I tried building him Voltron, and while in theory Ragavan looked like a clear favorite to pull this off, in practice I noticed that I had precious few ways of giving him evasion which really hurts his viability and Mono Red gave precious few ways to ramp or draw without him. So his combat trigger is far from guaranteed, and if he got removed a couple times I was basically out of the game. This wasn’t going to work.

I then tried brew #2: Frodo, Sauron's Bane. This one also was Voltron, but came with some huge advantages over Ragavan: first, Frodo has the benefit of being two colors, meaning I have double the card pool to work with, very important with such a large brewing restriction! Second, I can dump mana into Frodo to turn him into a lethal 1-shotter, though I do need to be tempted by the ring four times beforehand. And the card pool was definitely stronger: I had strong protection options like Loran’s Escape, powerful tutors like Vampiric Tutor and Enlightened Tutor, and even a board wipe with Final Showdown!

But Frodo had some glaring flaws too. First off, the deck was incredibly weak on card draw: I had Esper Sentinel, Strength-Testing Hammer with some ways to tutor it, and … that’s basically it? And also while Frodo COULD 1-shot people, I actually had only 2 cards with ring tempts you, Gollum's Bite and Sam's Desperate Rescue, not great. So realistically I would have to dump an extra 5 mana into Frodo and then hit people 4 times before I could start 1-shotting folks, all while putting a massive target on myself as people overestimate my 1-shot capabilities. With the severe lack of card draw and my assumption that my opponents would hate me out of the game, I ditched Frodo on Mt. Doom and moved to my final option.

We finally arrive at brew #3, Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student // Tamiyo, Seasoned Scholar. Now initially I skipped over Tamiyo because I initially assumed the plan would be to flip Tamiyo asap with a Brainstorm or whatever, but planeswalkers kind of suck in Commander: it’s impossible to protect her against 3 opponents, and none of her abilities are particularly good in multiplayer. But then I realized, what if I DIDN’T flip her? What if I built her Voltron like the others? And then everything clicked: Tamiyo is basically what I wanted Ragavan to be, she comes with card advantage just like the monkey except she comes with much-needed evasion too. And just like Frodo she gives us two colors instead of one, but unlike Frodo the colors are much stronger, we’re Simic baby! I started brewing and IMMEDIATELY the results were far more promising!

So the game plan is the same as the first two brews: our Plan A is Voltron killing. We’ve got tons of powerful equipments to get Tamiyo scary, like Commander's Plate, Shadowspear, and Golem-Skin Gauntlets. My favorite is Tarrian's Soulcleaver because we can grow Tamiyo for each Clue we crack, and vigilance is amazing to protect ourselves from attacks. There’s also plenty of great auras to put on Tamiyo like One with Nature to ramp, Combat Research to draw, Curious Inquiry to investigate, and Predatory Hunger for smash. We don’t want to draw 3 cards in a turn because flipping Tamiyo is actually bad in our deck, but we still want to draw lots of cards, just staggered throughout the turn cycle.

The rest of our Voltron package is protection: lots of great options here from hexproof with Royal Treatment, indestructible Tamiyo's Safekeeping, counterspells with Three Steps Ahead, phasing with March of Swirling Mist, and Veil of Summer to make Crim salty. My favorite voltron card though is Confront the Unknown which can be a surprise lethal pump spell if we’re sitting on a bunch of clues!

Another weird thing about this brew is the land count: I’m running 38 lands in a deck whose average mana value is exactly 1! Sounds silly at first, but the deck is actually mana-hungry, since cracking clues is an extra 2 mana per turn and the deck has so many ways to draw extra cards each turn cycle, I still need to mana to deploy everything. I ran only 36 lands for the Commander Clash episode and it was too little! The high land count also lets me abuse two of the strongest cards in the format, Exploration and Burgeoning, letting me ramp way ahead of the rest of the table.

The high land count is also essential for my Plan B to win the game: the lands themselves! Yes, unlike my other brews, Tamiyo has a secondary win condition, and that’s either summoning Marit Lage with Dark Depths + Thespian's Stage, or assembling an army of karnstructs with Urza's Saga and then copying the Saga a bunch of times with stuff like Vesuva. I have multiple ways to tutor these lands up too like Urza's Cave, Crop Rotation, and Expedition Map. And even if I’m focusing on Plan A Voltron kill, my utility lands are still essential, like Boseiju, Who Endures and Otawara, Soaring City for interaction or Talon Gates of Madara and Tyrite Sanctum for protection. So you see, I need lots of lands and lots of mana for this 1-Drop deck!

I was extremely pleased with the result.

And there you have it! One of the hardest brews I’ve ever come up with, but one I’m exceedingly proud of. Some of you know that I have a 6-Drops deck that I’m also very happy with, and that one also took a lot of time to get right, so I guess maybe these types of restrictions are my jam. What’s the weirdest deckbuilding restriction you pulled off though? Let me know in the comments! Thanks for reading!

SPOILERS FOR THE COMMANDER CLASH EPISODE BELOW!

One big factor why I wrote this article is despite how much time I spent crafting this list and how happy I am with the result, it didn’t manage to go the distance on Commander Clash. I felt like the underdog going into this game as I knew that 2-Drops, 3-Drops, and 4-Drops had stronger card pools to work with, especially when 4-Drops was helmed by Omnath, Locus of Creation, which could easily start playing multiple 4-Drops by turn 5 and was at the right mana value to start casting board wipes regularly. So I was hoping to go under the radar a bit with my piddly 0/3 flyer and generate small value while the rest of the table freaks out over each other.

Unfortunately that was not the case: Seth and Richard are expert gaslighters at our table and managed to convince the group that my Tamiyo with a Shadowspear and Keen Sense, aka a ¼ flyer that draws a card, gains 1 life, and makes a clue each turn was an avengers-level threat, so I got swatted like a fly and Omnath predictably did Omnath things. I switched gears to Plan B with karnstructs, but an (ill-timed imo) Oblivion Stone shadowrealmed me and I could never recover after that. The game was very sweet and I especially loved Phil’s brew, but I honestly wish I could’ve shown off a bit more of what my deck was trying to do.

So typing out this deck as a full article and gushing about the brewing process and cool things I discovered is very cathartic for me. It’s legit one of my favorite Commander Clash decks, and while it didn’t do a ton that game, at least now I got to give it a proper sendoff! And heck, maybe it inspires some sweet brews as well. So thank you for reading!