For me, budget deckbuilding is a process. A process that takes a lot of time, fine-tuning, and thought. But sometimes you look at a commander, and you know exactly what it needs. So today, I want to take a quick look at some cheap, effective pickups for a few new Aetherdrift commanders. So, as the great Hazoret once said: It’s time to START. YOUR. ENGIIIIIIIINES.
Ketramose, the New Dawn
The first legend on the list is one I haven’t exactly been racing to build, but I know a lot of people have been interested in it, which has me hesitantly looking at it anyway. It’s not that I dislike Ketramose. I think his trigger condition is interesting, but I usually prefer building around commanders who do things other than just drawing cards. It’s not you, Ketramose. It’s me.
But what are some cheap pickups that you, my fellow budget brewer, might be interested in? We’ll start with Saltskitter, which is – unsurprisingly after you read its effect – a card from Future Sight. With it, any creatures you play will cause Saltskitter to exile itself, giving you a card off of Ketramose. And at just 21 cents, it’s a pretty easy include for most decks. If you’re willing to go higher, Lion Sash is a great find at $1.61, letting you exile cards for cheap while also beefing up your lifelink commander in the process. If you need something really cheap, Scrabbling Claws is just 8 cents and gets you a “free” card draw per turn. But the best budget pickup for Ketramose is almost certainly Withered Wretch. An 18 cent, 2-mana card that only does one thing: Exile a card from a graveyard for 1 mana. But, it just so happens, that does a lot in this deck. And it even has an advantage over Lion Sash since you can use any mana to activate it.
Nissa, Worldsoul Speaker
The next commander I want to take a look at is one I’m very excited for. The new Nissa gives you energy for playing lands, and lets you spend it to play permanents for free. Nissa is technically four mana, but let’s be real, she’s green, so most times you’ll be dropping her on turn 3 anyway. From there, you just need 4 lands to enter to play something for free. So what cards should we grab for her?
First, I think we need to look at lands. Namely, the cheap “fetchlands” that we get access to: Evolving Wilds, Terramorphic Expanse, Brokers Hideout, Cabaretti Courtyard, and Riveteers Overlook. The most expensive of these is just 50 cents, making them easy includes for doubling up on landfall triggers. If you get Nissa out on turn 3, play one of these on turn 4 and another on turn 5, then you get to free cast anything that turn. But those aren’t going to be enough, we need more ways to get bonus lands. Erinis, Gloom Stalker is a great, cheap option, and Fertilid and Burnished Hart can also help. But my favorite of these cards – and, unfortunately, the most expensive – is Undergrowth Recon, which can get back a land from your graveyard every single turn. This is especially great with the New Capenna fetches, which will instantly sacrifice themselves for another landfall trigger, unlike Evolving Wilds and Terramorphic Expanse.
As for things to cheat in, you can’t go wrong with Avenger of Zendikar, who is a bit expensive if you’re on a particularly tight budget, but is otherwise worth squeezing in if you can. Gonti’s Aether Heart is another somewhat-obvious choice, since it can help generate energy depending on your exact built, and of course, extra turns are always nice to have.
Daretti, Rocketeer Engineer
This is where things really start to heat up. Daretti isn’t doing anything new, but it is giving us access to that effect in the command zone in a pretty easy-to-reuse way. The first piece of the Daretti puzzle is a way to put artifacts in the graveyard.
You could mill yourself with something like Perpetual Timepiece, or stay more true to what red likes to do and discard them straight from your hand. Faithless Looting and Bitter Reunion are reliable here, but my personal favorite is Key to the City. Key discards an artifact, makes Daretti unblockable so you don’t lose him in the process of attacking, and then also will give you a new card next turn for a small price.
We also need things to sacrifice though. This generally means tokens, but can also be artifacts that like being sacrificed. Loyal Apprentice is a nice, cheap way to make an artifact token every turn, and Slagstone Refinery is pretty helpful for ramping us to hard-cast our big artifacts or just giving us extra fodder. Then there are also the “Schematic” type cards, that give us a benefit when they enter and when they’re sacrificed. Nimblewright Schematic, Servo Schematic, Prized Statue, and Ichor Wellspring all do great work.
Finally, the biggest, most important puzzle piece: The things we’re reanimating. We need a reason to jump through all these hoops, and thankfully, there are plenty of artifacts that make it worth our while. Wondrous Crucible is a bit pricy, but hard to beat in terms of value, making it harder for opponents to remove our stuff while also giving us a free spell every turn, and helping to fill our graveyard along the way. If that’s too expensive, don’t worry. There are plenty of cheaper options, including Threefold Thunderhulk, Phyrexian Triniform, and Combustible Gearhulk. You could even go for the cheaper artifacts that have abilities that trigger specifically when they enter from the graveyard, like Phyrexian Dragon Engine or Canoptek Tomb Sentinel.
Lastly, I want to call out my favorite card I found for this deck: Jaxis, the Troublemaker. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a sucker for these temporary-clone effects, and it just so happens that Jaxis is the best one for the job in this particular instance. The discard cost means you can put something into the graveyard for Daretti to bring back, and the cloning clause on this card has a pretty unique quirk: It doesn’t just let you target nonlegendary creatures. So you can activate Jaxis, discarding some huge artifact, then making a copy of Daretti. The Daretti clone will enter and trigger, letting you reanimate whatever you just discarded, and then the clone will instantly die to the legend rule, also drawing you a card.
Mendicant Core, Guidelight
Yes, this is artifact deck number 2 for this article, but you should be thankful: I originally was going to do 3 different BWx commanders, but decided that was too much of one thing. Another thing to be thankful for: Mendicant Core is quite a bit different from Daretti. Where Daretti wanted us to dig around in our graveyard, Mendicant Core asks us to do just one thing before paying us off: Go fast. And thankfully, in spite of the fact that we’re in White/Blue and those colors aren’t often thought of as fast, we actually have plenty of ways to make sure we hit max speed as early as turn 4.
To do this, we’re taking a page out of the Yuriko playbook: 1-mana unblockable creatures. Triton Shorestalker, Slither Blade, Mist-Cloaked Herald, and Gudul Lurker are all the ideal version of what we want. But you don’t always need perfect, and most times, you can also add one-mana fliers like Network Disruptor, Silver Raven, and Siren Stormtamer. Hitting one of these on turn 1 means we can play Mendicant Core turn 2 and jump straight to second gear, and then hit max speed on turn 4.
There are also some other ways to increase your speed without attacking. Eriette’s Tempting Apple is one option – although admittedly, I’d much rather wait to play it until I already had max speed so I could copy it. But it is technically an option. Psychosis Crawler can also help increase your speed, but generally you’ll want to be at or near max speed already by the time you play it. This makes the ideal non-creature speed-increaser Cryptolith Fragment, in my eyes, since it ramps us and helps increase our speed along the way.
Other than these, we have some general artifact goodstuff to try and get the most out of the max speed copy ability. Transplant Theorist is a fine option assuming you can get some kind of ramp on turn 3, since it will help get you value out of your subsequent artifacts. Sharding Sphinx is also great on later turns, since having two sphinxes (sphinges?) means you’ll get a boatload of tokens off of attacking. Thought Monitor is also great here, and even Kappa Cannoneer can probably be fit in under most budgets.
Hashaton, Scarab’s Fist
Last, but certainly not least, is Hashaton. This is one of the cards I’m most excited to build around, since it bears some similarity to one of my favorite commanders: Oskar, Rubbish Reclaimer. But obviously, with a bit of a twist. Hashaton asks us to fulfill a pretty small requirement for a unique reward.
First I want to talk about one potential way to build Hashaton, and the specific cards that go in that version: Hashaton Cycling. There are a lot of creatures with cycling that would love to be cloned this way, and oftentimes, the resulting creature token is more cost-effective than just playing the card would’ve been. And you cycled it so you got to draw a card along the way. Alabaster Host Intercessor is phenomenal removal for any version of this deck – dedicated to cycling or otherwise. Angel of the Ruins is also great, with Eagles of the North and Troll of Khazad-dum also being good pickups. And of course, Fluctuator is still pretty cheap too. Suffice it to say, there are a lot of cycling creatures you can run, and they’d make a pretty tight, focused deck.
But if you don’t want to build a dedicated cycling deck, you need some discard outlets to make it work, much like the Daretti deck above. I really like The Bath Song personally, with Skirge Familiar being another great option by giving you extra mana along the way. Chart a Course, Frantic Search, and Pull from Tomorrow are all decent as card draw options that have a discard built in, and cards like Forgotten Creation make it easy to discard a bunch of cards at once for no mana investment on that turn, so we can dump all of our mana into cloning the best things in our hand. This is another deck where Key to the City is welcome, and Malcolm, Alluring Scoundrel is a nice discard outlet that eventually can let us both copy something big and cast it for free from the graveyard.
But if we’re going this route, we obviously need things that are worth discarding to clone. Getting a 3-mana copy of Junji, the Midnight Sky is a decent incentive, and Syr Konrad also has a lot of obvious synergy here. Massacre Wurm can have a huge impact on a game, especially against token decks, and Sphinx of the Second Sun gives a lot of potential value. Noxious Gearhulk is also a reasonable pick, and Sister Hospitaller lets us do a bit of a silly trick: We can discard her, use Hashaton to make a copy, and then have that copy return the original to the battlefield. Then the original can return something else.
But there is one other facet of Hashaton that you could choose to pay attention to in your deckbuilding: Hashaton makes Zombie tokens. This means you can take advantage of token-specific synergy cards like Inspiring Leader, Intangible Virtue, and – my personal favorite of the bunch – Junk Winder. And if you use Hashaton to create a token Junk Winder, it gets to trigger its own ability. You can also lean in on Zombie-specific synergy cards like Gravespawn Sovereign and Undead Augur. Gempalm Polluter is very potent here, since you can cycle + clone it for less mana than its printed mana cost, you get an extra point of toughness, and you get to draw a card on top of its life-loss ability.
Crossing the Finish Line
If you want even more potential budget options for these commanders, I have a Moxfield list you can check out here. You can also comment on that list if you think there are cards that should be included, or if you have some budget picks for commanders in this set that you’re planning to build around! You can also find me on Bluesky if you want to follow me, suggest inclusions, or just talk about Magic!
