• How to teleport
• Avoiding hazards (high places, dangerous places)
• Quickly teleporting to a known place (home) in an emergency
• Not ejecting your lunch on arrival

• Energy conservation
• Etiquette
• Planning ahead

• Teleporting to unknown places (research and exploration)
• Rapid-fire teleportation

Plagueis, the Shadow of Death

One of the first dragons of Runeterra, the dragon Vulfeynnax was a denizen of the Blessed Isles for centuries until the Ruined King came and unleashed the curse of undeath, changing the land into the Shadow Isles. Vulfeynnax was transformed by the catastrophe into a Dracolich, an undead dragon of untold power and with a hatred of all life. Now known as Plagueis, he bides his time on the Shadow Isles, waiting to scourge Runeterra of all life and turn it into a land of undeath, while disposing of anything, living, dead, or undead, that dares to enter his lair.

Plagueis is a battlemage with permanent immunity to crowd control effects (the only exception is Stasis), making him very hard to stop. However, in exchange for this immunity, he cannot be buffed or healed by allies (he can still heal at the fountain), and cannot use Summoner's Spells (except Recall). Instead of Summoner's Spells, he has two abilities that take their place that play into his kit.
In combat, along with his permanent immunity to crowd controls, Plagueis's basic abilities must be charged up to inflict stronger effects. Due to the slow nature of his kit, he can be easily pre-empted or outmaneuvered by faster-acting and highly-maneuverable opponents. Additionally, he cannot charge up more than one ability at a time, though his "Contempt" ability lets him periodically bypass the charge-up on his abilities. However, if his abilities are used with proper planning and deliberation, he can be devastating in team fights.

• Permanently immune to crowd controls (except Stasis)
• Very strong AOE capabilities
• Tough to kill
• Powerful initiation
• Excellent DoT capabilities
• Good self-sustain
• Manaless

• Cannot be healed or buffed by allies
• No access to Summoner's Spells
• Huge target, easily hit by skillshots
• Abilities are all slow and require charge-ups
• Weak against highly-mobile opponents
• Vulnerable to Grievous Wounds effects
• Lackluster burst capabilities

Abilities

Plagueis is permanently immune to crowd controls, but cannot be healed or buffed by allies. Additionally, instead of Summoner's Spells, Plagueis has two unique abilities in their place: Contempt and Spite.
All of Plagueis's basic abilities can be charged to increase their power and, when fully charged, add bonus effects. Plagueis can still move and perform other actions while charging, but reduces his own movement speed while doing so. Plagueis can only charge up one ability at a time.
Plagueis generates Hatred over time by dealing and taking damage to and from enemy Champions and epic Monsters. When at maximum Hatred, he can trigger Contempt. Hatred falls off when Plagueis is out of combat.
Plagueis's basic attacks deal significant bonus magic damage, but he attacks very slowly and his base AD is mediocre-at-best.

When Plagueis is at 100 Hatred, he can activate Contempt to consume all of his Hatred and make his next basic ability within 6 seconds trigger at full power without a charge-up. Contempt is available at level 1 and does not require skill points. Contempt has a 4-second static cooldown that starts after he triggers an empowered basic ability.

When activated, Plagueis generates Hatred over 12 seconds and his Hatred does not decay from being out of combat for the duration. This has a significant cooldown (i.e. 240 seconds). Spite becomes available at level 6 and does not require skill points.

Plagueis charges up a breath attack, increasing damage as he charges up. Upon release, Plagueis releases a dark breath attack in a wide cone, dealing magic damage to all enemies hit. Half of the damage is dealt immediately, while half is dealt over 3 seconds. If fully charged, 25% of the damage is converted to true damage. Plagueis is healed for X% of the damage dealt to Champions by Death's Breath.

Plagueis charges up a demoralizing roar, increasing the radius as he charges up. Upon release, Plagueis deals magic damage to all nearby enemies and inflicts Dismay on all enemies struck, causing them to deal X% reduced damage for a short time. If fully charged, Roar of Terror also stuns all enemies hit for 0.75 seconds.

Plagueis charges up a powerful dive, increasing range as he charges up. Upon release, Plagueis flies to the target location, damaging and knocking back all nearby enemies in his path. If fully charged, Barren Flight gives Plagueis bonus resistances for each enemy Champion struck.

Upon activation, Plagueis's next basic ability within 6 seconds can be cast at full power without a charge-up and will not consume Hatred. Three seconds after Reign of Death's activation, Plagueis releases a devastating death nova around himself. Enemies struck by the nova take heavy magic damage over 4 seconds. For each enemy Champion struck by Reign of Death, Plagueis is healed for a percentage of his missing health over 4 seconds.

Champion Match-ups

Leona - Leona would normally be unwilling to aid a Dracolich, but the two make a deadly combination. Leona's Solar Flare can give Plagueis a target to engage on, while Sunlight is easily triggered by the DoT on Death's Breath and Reign of Death. It helps that Leona will easily be able to follow Plagueis in on his dives.
Ornn - Ornn is one of the few Champions who can actually "buff" Plagueis by allowing the Dracolich to buy stronger items. Ornn's initiates and Brittle debuff can also benefit Plagueis somewhat. The only issue between the two will be picking who takes top lane.
Nocturne - Paranoia can be a huge strategic help for Plagueis, preventing the enemy from seeing him when he starts his charge-ups. Nocturne can also join Plagueis in a dive and wipe out a priority target while Plagueis deals with the others.
Sejuani - Sejuani's Permafrost will work with Plagueis, even if basic attacks are not his forte. Sejuani's ultimate can also serve as a good initiation tool, giving Plagueis the time he needs to prepare Reign of Death and Barren Flight as a follow up.

Fiora - One thing Plagueis will struggle against is high-mobility opponents. Fiora is both mobile and can shred Plagueis' maximum health with True damage. This lets her easily avoid his ponderously slow abilities and then cut him down with precision and grace.
Illaoi - The Kraken Priestess is an enemy of death, and this is particularly the case for Plagueis, who will generally have trouble bursting her down. This means that she will generally win duels with him, and take advantage of his slow speed with her tentacle attacks while sustaining through whatever damage he deals.
Vayne - While Vayne can't Condemn Plagueis into a wall, her Silver Bolts will tear Plagueis to shreds very quickly if she focuses her fire on him. Plagueis will also struggle to hit her due to Tumble, letting Vayne dodge his slow attacks.
Brand - Brand's trait allows him to shred Plagueis's maximum health and generally cause him a lot of pain. While Brand can't stun Plagueis, he won't necessarily need to if he can just nuke him down. Brand's item choices also tend to be strong against Plagueis.

Jarvan IV - Plagueis might be immune to crowd controls, but he's not immune to getting trapped by temporary terrain. Jarvan's Cataclysm can be used to hold Plagueis in place after he uses Barren Flight, as Plagueis can't Flash out of it.
Bard - Bard is the only Champion in the game capable of crowd-controlling Plagueis, as the Dracolich is not immune to Stasis effects. Tempered Fate can lock down Plagueis for a short time, allowing Bard's team to either set up an attack or escape from him.
Kindred - Kindred's ultimate will not affect Plagueis regardless of which team he's on, so in general he should not fight inside the AOE of Lamb's Embrace. Kindred can also be somewhat hard for Plagueis to chase down and finish off.
Master Yi - While Yi doesn't innately deal %-max HP true damage like Fiora or Vayne, his Wuju Style's true damage will still hurt a lot since Plagueis cannot reduce it with Roar of Terror. However, Master Yi may have a tougher time avoiding Plagueis's abilities when going on the offensive.

Rammus - Rammus's crowd controls are useless against Plagueis, and his high armor won't help against Plagueis's plethora of magic damage attacks. Rammus also won't deal enough damage to take Plagueis out by himself before Plagueis withers him down.
Fiddlesticks - Fiddlesticks relies on surprise and crowd controls to win fights, which don't work against Plagueis. Standing still to use Drain on the Dracolich will make Fiddlesticks a very easy target, and Plagueis can survive the damage long enough to take the scarecrow demon down.
Kennen - His reliance on stuns make him unable to deal with Plagueis's CC immunity. While Kennan can harass the dragon and run away if things get dicey, there's little that the Yordle ninja can do to slow Plagueis down. All he can really do is delay the inevitable while Plagueis pushes down his lane.
Urgot - The recast of Urgot's ultimate does not work on Plagueis, removing his main means of finishing off the dragon. While Urgot's shotgun legs can shred off portions of Plagueis's maximum health, he'll be forced to make himself an easy target if he wants to use them, which works in Plagueis's favor if the dracolich makes effective trades.

Life expectancy continues to decline in the U.S. as it rebounds in other countries.
Just before Christmas, federal health officials confirmed life expectancy in America had dropped for a nearly unprecedented second year in a row – down to 76 years. While countries all over the world saw life expectancy rebound during the second year of the pandemic after the arrival of vaccines, the U.S. did not.
Then, last week, more bad news: Maternal mortality in the U.S. reached a high in 2021. Also, a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association found rising mortality rates among U.S. children and adolescents.
"This is the first time in my career that I've ever seen [an increase in pediatric mortality] – it's always been declining in the United States for as long as I can remember," says the JAMA paper's lead author Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. "Now, it's increasing at a magnitude that has not occurred at least for half a century."
Across the lifespan, and across every demographic group, Americans die at younger ages than their counterparts in other wealthy nations.
How could this happen? In a country that prides itself on scientific excellence and innovation, and spends an incredible amount of money on health care, the population keeps dying at younger and younger ages.
An unheard alarm
One group of people are not surprised at all: Woolf and the other researchers involved in a landmark, 400-page study ten years ago with a name that says it all: "Shorter Lives, Poorer Health." The research by a panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences and funded by the National Institutes of Health compared U.S. health and death with other developed countries. The results showed – convincingly – that the U.S. was stalling on health advances in the population while other countries raced ahead.
The authors tried to sound an alarm, but found few in the public or government or private sectors were willing to listen. In the years since, the trends have worsened. American life expectancy is lower than that of Cuba, Lebanon, and Czechia.
Ten years later, here's a look back at what that eye-popping study found, and why the researchers involved believe it's not too late to turn the trends around.
Beyond bad habits
Americans are used to hearing about how their poor diets and sedentary lifestyles make their health bad. It can seem easy to brush that off as another scold about eating more vegetables and getting more exercise. But the picture painted in the "Shorter Lives" report could shock even those who feel like they know the story.
"American children are less likely to live to age 5 than children in other high-income countries," the authors write on the second page. It goes on: "Even Americans with healthy behaviors, for example, those who are not obese or do not smoke, appear to have higher disease rates than their peers in other countries."
The researchers catalog what they call the "U.S. health disadvantage" – the fact that living in America is worse for your health and makes you more likely to die younger than if you lived in another rich country like the U.K., Switzerland or Japan.
"We went into this with an open mind as to why it is that the U.S. had a shorter life expectancy than people in other countries," says Woolf, who chaired the committee that produced the report. After looking across different age and racial and economic and geographic groups, he says, "what we found was that this problem existed in almost every category we looked at."
That's why, says Eileen Crimmins, professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California who was also on the panel that produced the report, they made a deliberate choice to focus on the health of the U.S. population as a whole.
"That was a decision – not to emphasize the differences in our population, because there is data that actually shows that even the top proportion of the U.S. population does worse than the top proportion of other populations," she explains. "We were trying to just say – look, this is an American problem."
Digging into the 'why'
The researchers were charged with documenting how Americans have more diseases and die younger and to explore the reasons why.
"We were very systematic and thorough about how we thought about this," says Woolf. The panel looked at American life and death in terms of the public health and medical care system, individual behaviors like diet and tobacco use, social factors like poverty and inequality, the physical environment, and public policies and values. "In every one of those five buckets, we found problems that distinguish the United States from other countries."
Yes, Americans eat more calories and lack universal access to health care. But there's also higher child poverty, racial segregation, social isolation, and more. Even the way cities are designed makes access to good food more difficult.
"Everybody has a pet thing they worry about and say, 'it's oral health' or 'it's suicides' – everyone has something that they're legitimately interested in and want to see more attention to," says John Haaga, who was the director of the Division of Behavioral and Social Research at the National Institute on Aging at NIH, before he retired. "The great value of an exercise like this one was to step back and say, 'OK, all of these things are going on, but which of them best account for these long-term population level trends that we're seeing?' "
The answer is varied. A big part of the difference between life and death in the U.S. and its peer countries is people dying or being killed before age 50. The "Shorter Lives" report specifically points to factors like teen pregnancy, drug overdoses, HIV, fatal car crashes, injuries, and violence.
"Two years difference in life expectancy probably comes from the fact that firearms are so available in the United States," Crimmins says. "There's the opioid epidemic, which is clearly ours – that was our drug companies and other countries didn't have that because those drugs were more controlled. Some of the difference comes from the fact that we are more likely to drive more miles. We have more cars," and ultimately, more fatal crashes.
"When we were doing it, we were joking we should call it 'Live free and die,' based on the New Hampshire slogan, ['Live free or die']," Crimmins says. "The National Academy of Sciences said, 'That's outrageous, that's too provocative.' "
There are some things Americans get right, according to the "Shorter Lives" report: "The United States has higher survival after age 75 than do peer countries, and it has higher rates of cancer screening and survival, better control of blood pressure and cholesterol levels, lower stroke mortality, lower rates of current smoking, and higher average household income." But those achievements, it's clear, aren't enough to offset the other problems that befall many Americans at younger ages.
All of this costs the country tremendously. Not only do families lose loved ones too soon, but having a sicker population costs the country as much as $100 billion every year in extra health care costs.
"Behind the statistics detailed in this report are the faces of young people – infants, children, and adolescents – who are unwell and dying early because conditions in this country are not as favorable as those in other countries," the paper's authors wrote.
Little action, despite the stakes
"Shorter Lives" is filled with recommended next steps for the government, especially the NIH, which has a budget of more than $40 billion annually to conduct research to improve Americans' health.
The NIH should undertake a "thorough examination of the policies and approaches that countries with better health outcomes have found useful and that may have application, with adaptations, in the United States," the authors wrote.
In other words: let's figure out what they are doing that works in other places, and do it over here.
Dr. Ravi Sawhney, who helped conceive of and launch the "Shorter Lives" study at NIH before he left the agency, had high hopes that the report would make a mark. "I really thought that when the results came out, they would be so obvious that people would say: Let's finally do this," he says.
Ten years on, how much of the detailed action plan has been done?
"To be brief, very little of that happened," Woolf says. At the time, he says, NIH officials didn't seem very interested in raising awareness about the panel's findings or in following up on its proposed research agenda. "There was some media coverage at the time that the report rolled out, but NIH was not involved in trying to promote awareness about the report."
Crimmins agrees. "There was a little bit more research, but there wasn't any policy reaction," she says. "I thought there might be, because it's embarrassing, but it just tends to be ignored." Those who are interested in this issue, she notes, tend to be those invested in "marvelous things they think are going to delay aging," even though people older than 75 are the only age group in the country that already does comparatively well.
Haaga, the former NIH division director, also thinks the response at the agency was lacking. "Not nearly enough has been done, given the stakes and given what we could learn," he says.
In response to NPR's request for comment for this story, NIH pointed to a subsequent panel on midlife mortality, several initiatives the agency has undertaken on disparities between subgroups within the U.S., and a recent paper funded by NIH that looked again at international life expectancy.
Outgoing NIH Director Francis Collins told NPR in 2021 that it bothered him that there hadn't been more gains to American life expectancy during his tenure. In his view, the success of NIH in achieving scientific breakthroughs hadn't translated to more gains because of problems in society that the research agency had little power to change.
Woolf calls it a misconception to assume that America's great scientific minds and medical discoveries translate to progress for the health of the population. "We are actually very innovative in making these kinds of breakthroughs, but we do very poorly in providing them to our population," he says.
'We can't touch everything'
Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra answered NPR's question at a press conference earlier this month about work the agency was doing to address lagging life expectancy by mentioning COVID-19 and vaccine hesitancy, along with mental health issues and gun violence.
"There's so many things that we're doing," Becerra said. "We can't touch everything. We can't touch state laws that allow an individual to buy an assault weapon and then kill so many people. We can only come in afterwards."
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky responded by listing some of the agency's work on mental health and vaccines, and acting NIH director Larry Tabak pointed to research on health disparities.
HHS did not answer a follow up question about whether the agency has considered a national commission or similar effort to address American life expectancy and poor health.
Sawhney thinks the federal government should try harder to fix the problems documented in the "Shorter Lives" report. He doesn't think lack of public awareness is the problem. "I really think that most Americans know that Americans are more overweight and obese and that we have higher rates of disease and live shorter lives than other countries," he says, "It's just the NIH and the CDC that don't want to take the responsibility for that failure or to do anything about it."
Crimmins says, in her experience, lawmakers and federal health officials don't like talking about how the U.S. is lagging behind other countries.
"I convened a meeting in Washington with the National Center for Health Statistics [part of CDC] about increasing healthy life expectancy," she recalls. "It was a relatively small meeting, but we brought experts from Canada." An official at the time gave what she calls a "typical" response, saying: "Oh, we can't have anything but an American solution to these issues – we can't listen to other countries."
"International studies are not the flavor of the month – they never will be," says Haaga. "The problem with foreign countries is that they're not in someone's congressional district."
It's more than a missed opportunity, says Woolf. It's a tragedy.
"If you add up the excess deaths that have occurred in the United States because of this unfolding problem, it dwarfs what happened during COVID-19, as horrible as COVID-19 was," Woolf says. "We've lost many more Americans cumulatively because of this longer systemic issue. And if the systemic issue is unaddressed, it will continue to claim lives going forward."
Small victories are possible
Taking stock of the many ways in which Americans are sicker and die younger can be overwhelming, says Haaga. "It's such a long list, that might partly be why the issue doesn't grab people," he says. "They just go, 'Oh, my gosh, that's depressing, what's on the other channel?' But there's a lot of things that could be done, and small victories are victories."
According to the "Shorter Lives" report, "the important point about the U.S. health disadvantage is not that the United States is losing a competition with other countries, but that Americans are dying and suffering at rates that are demonstrably unnecessary."
Rather than feel overwhelmed at the immensity of the problems, Sawhney suggests, the focus should instead be on the fact that every other rich country has been able to figure out how to help people live longer, healthier lives. That means that Americans could do it too, he says.
He believes that the changes might not be as hard as some policymakers and health officials seem to think. "You look at these healthier countries, they're free countries – England, France, Italy – they're not banning delicious foods. They're not chaining people to treadmills," he says. "Americans love to travel to Europe, to Australia, to Canada to enjoy their foods and their lifestyles, and so the idea that we might say, 'Hey, maybe we could bring some of those lifestyles back' – I don't think people are going to go up in arms that we're taking away their freedoms."
Getting policy ideas from other countries is just an obvious move, Woolf adds. "If a martian came down to earth and saw this situation, it would be very intuitive that you [would] look at other countries that have been able to solve this problem and apply the lessons learned," he says.
In historical research he's been doing, "I found that there are dozens and dozens of countries on almost every continent of the world that have outperformed the United States for 50 years," he says. "It's worth taking a look at what they've done and Americanizing it – you don't have to take it right off the shelf."
Some of the policies he's identified as helpful include universal, better coordinated health care, strong health and safety protections, broad access to education, and more investments to help kids get off to a healthy start. These policies are "paying off for them," he says, and could for Americans, too.

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Aggressive Combat-Focused Decks

• Ezuri remains my favorite commander of all time. I like this deck because it forces you to play a lot of 2-or-less power creatures rather than the usual Simic goodstuff.
• Building experience throughout the game and then all of a sudden making a tiny dude huge and swinging for massive damage is incredibly satisfying as an aggro player.

• Satoru grants all of our creatures Ninjutsu, so playing a bunch of small, evasive and unblockable dudes who can exchange themselves for a massive, expensive threat in our hand makes for one of the scariest aggro decks of all time.
• I included a couple of effects that let me cast my opponents' spells so no game ever feels the same with this deck.
• It's my newest build and a ton of fun.

• Neyith usually gets outshined by Xenagos as the go-to GRUUL SMASH commander but I love how she rewards aggression with card draw and can force opponents to block our creatures.
• She also incentivizes us to play a good amount of fight spells, so we have more creature interaction than the typical Gruul deck.
• This deck just feels fun and fair. Neyith flies under the radar until it's too late, and our opponents are taking insane amounts of combat damage out of nowhere.

• Deathleaper kind of flew under the radar with all of the awesome stuff from Warhammer 40K, but this guy caring about creatures who just entered the battlefield is a fantastic build-around.
• Red has a lot of effects that create tokens who only last until end of turn but have Haste, and getting to use those for more than just combos was an awesome feeling with this deck.

• There's just something hilarious about playing a mish-mash of non-human creatures and how a deck like that can be utterly terrifying because each one can cheat another creature into play just by attacking.

• Don't be shy, everyone gets to participate in combat! Whether they like it or not.
• This deck is packed full of effects that make it a terrible idea to attack into us, but since our opponents HAVE to attack, they'll just keep hitting each other!
• When the dust settles, we'll be only ones standing (on all eight legs).

Reanimator Decks

• One of my favorite reanimator decks and probably my favorite Esper build so far.
• I know the dungeon mechanic is a sore spot for some of you but trust me, this deck is a reanimator deck first and foremost and the dungeon venturing just supplements the gameplan.
• It's all about efficiently dumping cards into the yard to trigger Sefris's effect and eventually reanimate a big threat upon completing a dungeon.
• Give her a try and you may find that you enjoy dungeons a lot more than you thought you would (that's exactly what happened with me).

• Much like Simic Ezuri, Shirei forces us to play a lot of little creatures that don't really get to shine in other mono-black decks.
• A reanimation effect that can trigger on anyone's turn leads to insane aristocrats value and this deck is easily one of my favorites.

• Another unique reanimator commander, one who runs on counters of any kind and can reanimate permanents with 3-CMC or less.
• Striking a balance between mill effects, counter generators and game-winning pieces was a fun and creative challenge.
• Took me a while to get this deck into a state I liked, I encourage you all to take a crack at Tayam!

• Oskar's unique wording allows us to dodge timing restrictions on the spells we cast once they are discarded.
• Leverage looting effects to draw new cards and cast the ones you've dumped. Nothing is lost with Oskar! I would consider him a reanimator commander.

• Another deck focused on looting, conniving and discarding, except this one is digging for powerful reanimation spells.
• If Sefris isn't your jam, you may just like Raffine. While she doesn't have built-in reanimation, she does provide the sheer speed of digging through the deck to FIND the reanimation effects.
• You can play your preferred package of big reanimation targets since they hardly matter for the overall gameplan.

• I typically shy away from commanders that cost more than 5 mana but having Haste does make up for it, especially since Olivia can reanimate a creature when she attacks.

• Yeah I know it's not the most revolutionary commander out there but I'm just going to leave my Meren list here in case that one person hasn't built her yet and would like to get some ideas.

Control Decks

• Bounce stuff, draw cards, bounce more stuff, keep opponents away until you can assemble a combo win or (if you don't like combos) just win through sheer attrition.
• This is one of my most extensive primers simply due to the amount of combos and interactions you can do with Brago and his tuning fork lieutenant, Strionic Resonator

• Araumi provides insane value in a 4-player commander game. That feeling when you get 3 ETB and/or death triggers from your encored tokens is matched by few others. Imagine encoring Gary and draining opponents for 21 life EACH (minimum).
• This is a deck in which you want to mill yourself as much as possible so you have several juicy targets for Araumi to create copies of.

• This deck leverages stax effects to force opponents to play at our pace.
• The rest of the deck is packed with several ways to gain life so Karlov can grow absolutely massive.
• We can use his effect to control the board or just threaten to KO opponents with commander damage.

Spellslinger Decks

• Back when I was a noob, I hated the idea of anything that didn't smash and didn't have a powetoughness.
• I forced myself to build this only because Dragon's Approach can tutor Dragons, my favorite creature type.
• Oh my god this deck is hilariously fun (albiet my list is on the lower power end of the spectrum). You certainly do not need that many copies of Dragon's Approach but it's more fun not whiffing on Thrumming Stone.

• If you're a Timmy player like me struggling to venture into spellslinging, this is a nice middle ground.
• You get to play a lot of spells but also win by cheating big, Timmy creatures into play!
• If you'd like to add more colors, I also have a Kykar version of this deck

Landfall Decks

• Probably the most fun I've had with Landfall in a long time.
• Designed to loop deserts out of the graveyard for value and overwhelm opponents with Sand Warriors!
• Having a Crucible of Worlds in the command zone is much stronger than you might think.

• Again, not revolutionary but people build Omnath for a reason. He's a lot of fun but for me this deck in paper is just so nice to look at.
• I love the vibrant artwork and it's one of my favorites aesthetically.

Tribal Decks

• Hands down my favorite tribal deck in my current collection.
• It can win by going wide with tokens, going tall with Lathril or just making massive amounts of mana like a traditional elfball deck.
• I love how cohesive, explosive and consistent it feels right out of the gate.

• A deck packed full of 40+ Red/White spells. What do they do? Who cares, they make 4/4 Golem tokens, what more do you want??
• Jokes aside, this is a super easy to pilot and very budget friendly deck if you're looking to build Boros but aren't interested in Equipment or Winota.

• I love commanders that make weird cards important. Cue the Shrine tribal commander that helps amplify the effects of weird and whacky enchantments.
• Being 5-color also gives you access to a whole suite of upgrades if you'd like to build this deck at a higher power.

• Katilda is cheap to cast and turns all of our humans into mana dorks, leading to some insane ramp out of nowhere.
• This list also runs several ways to grant haste and effects that allow us to cast creatures off the top of our library, so we can sort of storm off and chain human into human into human until we've flooded the board.

• I built Rivaz as a throwaway commander for all the red and black dragons that didn't make the cut for my Ur-Dragon deck but man I severely underrated him.
• This deck can ramp harder than a lot of Rakdos decks and pump out dragons at an alarming rate.
• Seriously, give Rivaz a try if you have any dragons lying around not doing anything in your collection.

• Magus Lucea Kane helms this deck built around a mix of X-spells-matter and big, dumb tyranids!
• Nothing too revolutionary here, I just love this faction of Warhammer and wanted to build a deck around them.

Token Decks

• Rith creates dragon tokens whenever one of our creatures deals excess damage to another, so we've loaded up on big, mean dragons and a whole lot of bite/fight effects.
• Surprisingly fun take on dragon tribal with a reward for playing lots of creature interaction.

• One could consider this a voltron deck since its sole purpose is to get Koma on the field and keep him there by any means necessary, all while he creates serpent tokens that we can use for any number of purposes:
• Polymorph them into a scarier creature lurking in our deck, sac them to protect Koma or just buff them up and swing for big damage.
• It's also packed full of effects to increase the number of tokens Koma can make each turn.

• Nothing too crazy here, just wanted to build WBRG and packed it full of every tokens-matter card I could find in those colors.

• Mentioned this one earlier but this is as much a tokens-matter deck as it is a deserts-matter deck!

Voltron Decks

• Killian makes spells that target cost 2 less, so all Auras benefit from the cost reduction, meaning it's super easy to suit him up and make him a huge threat in just a few turns.
• This deck has caught several people off-guard, don't underestimate Killian!

• My equipment-based voltron deck. I honestly just wanted to build WUBR that wasn't Breya and ended up having a lot of fun with this deck.
• I do enjoy being able to play my collection of Swords in a deck and am excited for the last one we're waiting on to finish the cycle.

Jank/Meme Decks

• It's Kykar but he runs Kaladesh Customs.
• This deck wants to play vehicles that trigger Kykar and create spirit tokens, which can then be sacrificed for mana OR can be tapped to crew the vehicles.
• Jeskai colors also give us access to the best artifacts-matter effects.

• Yep, 99 permanents and a Primal Surge.
• Windmill slamming your entire deck onto the table face-up is a bucket list item. Do it, make it happen.

• I'll be honest, there are probably more effective commanders for Human Tribal. But I present to you a counter-argument: big monke smash
• On a more serious note, we can do some fun shenanigans with Kogla's ability to return humans to our hand, both offensively and defensively.

Decks That Don't Rely On Their Commander Whatsoever

• Yarok doubles our ETB triggers, but what changes if he isn't on the field? Literally nothing.
• This deck executes the exact same gameplan whether or not Yarok is around. He amplifies it, sure, but it doesn't depend on him at all.
• Let opponents point removal at him, it matters not when you're already on your way to valuetown.

• Yep, there's an unwritten rule in commander that says "thou shalt not allow Atraxa to remain on the field"
• So I built this deck with efficient ways of giving opponents poison counters and then proliferating all without Atraxa's assistance.
• If we can get her to stick for a turn, great! A nice little proliferate trigger at the end of turn, but no hard feelings if she dies immediately because we don't need her to carry out our gameplan.

• I mentioned Neyith earlier but this deck is another that doesn't rely on its commander all that much.
• I found that sometimes I'll just curve out so well and have so much card draw from other sources that I never really get a chance to cast her, and my creatures get big enough on their own to take over the game.

What Are Your Low-Power Picks?

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