Commander Budget Builds: Six + Sagas
Those rumors, from the mouths of other planeswalkers, held that the finest trees grew in the Kessig forest, and after her time with Six, she was inclined to agree.
-Tangles, Seanan McGuire
Sagas have held a special place in my heart since their initial release in Dominaria in 2018. For years, I’ve been chasing the perfect Sagas commander. I briefly considered Go-Shintai of Life’s Origin when Neon Dynasty released, and sure, there are plenty of generic enchantress-style commanders that would fit well, but none of those options felt like they were the right fit for me. Lord of the Rings brought us Tom Bombadil, who had the exact opposite problem for my taste: He was too tailor-made, too on-the-nose. There was no puzzle, no intrigue, just a 5-color good-stuff card that screamed “Play the Sagas here!”
And don’t even get me started on Satsuki.
So when Modern Horizons 2 spoiled Six, and everyone else was chattering about the card’s prospects across various competitive formats, I had just one thought: Is this the Sagas commander I’ve been waiting for?
The answer, dear reader, is emphatically yes. Six is everything I could’ve dreamed of. It’s uniquely tailored to Sagas, but not in a direct way. It isn’t just a “value for free” commander, since it asks you to solve a small puzzle: How to put lands in your hand. And, perhaps most importantly: It’s really, really good. Even on a $50 budget ($49.74 to be exact, according to Moxfield at time of writing).
The Core
The deck has a few different things it needs to balance. Obviously, like all decks, we need ramp, card draw, and removal. This deck in particular also needs ways to fill our graveyard, and ways to put lands into our hand to synergize with the commander. Since Sagas need time to accrue value, it’s important to ramp as quickly as possible to get them ticking. Thankfully, we’re in green, so we have a variety of 1-mana dorks, as well as everyone’s favorite artifact: Sol Ring. There’s also a lot of potent 2-mana ramp here, with Sanctum Weaver and Herald of the Pantheon squeezing their way into the deck.
We also need card draw of course. Even though Six technically does “draw” us cards when he attacks, we can’t exactly rely on a 2/4 to be able to attack safely every turn. Thankfully, being green once again has its perks, since we have access to three enchantress effects, plus some other, more minor card draw effects like The First Iroan Games. For removal, we have Beast Within as an obvious include, but the rest I tried to keep synergistic in one way or another: Smell Fear proliferates our Sagas, Seal of Primordium sacrifices itself so we can reuse it, and Cankerbloom does both! There is also the matter of board wipes, and this is where being green hurts more than it helps. I ended up only running a single board wipe, and it’s really more of a finisher, but I’ll talk about that later.
Now with the goodstuff out of the way, let’s take a look at the synergy pieces. This deck is very mana hungry in two different ways, since you need to both play your lands and hold some in hand for paying retrace costs. For that reason, this list is running a staggering 43 lands, but we still can’t rely on just our normal card draw to keep us fueled up for retracing, which is why there are a number of cards in here specifically to put more lands into your hand.
Yavimaya Elder and Sprouting Vines are both solid options, with the floor on Vines giving you two lands, but I would consider three to be almost as easy to achieve. Nessian Wanderer stands out here, making it so almost every one of your Sagas puts a land into your hand, and making it trivial to retrace multiple sagas without running out of lands to burn.
The other component we need for maximum synergy is self-mill, or more generally just “a way to get things into our graveyard.” Frankly, the deck is very light on these elements, and for good reason. Six fills our graveyard early game while he can attack safely. Sagas put themselves in the graveyard, as do a handful of our creatures. Other than that, we have The Binding of the Titans — which has the courtesy of refunding its own retrace cost on the third chapter — and Teachings of the Kirin, which is certainly not the strongest Saga, but it is at least quite flexible. The best self-mill card in here is actually Perpetual Timepiece, which mills us for two cards per turn while giving us the very important option of reshuffling parts of our graveyard back into the deck if the game goes long.
But that’s all just the setup. Obviously, like any good Commander deck, there’s going to be a period of setup and grinding value. But what do we do when it’s time to actually close the game out?
Winning
Winning can be tricky on a budget. Some commanders have a win condition built in, like Talrand, but unfortunately Six doesn’t give us such a straightforward path to victory. Thankfully, Six’s successor can help. Wrenn and Seven is a very strong lategame card, keeping our graveyard stocked and our hand filled with lands, ramping us if needed, and of course, creating huge tokens with its -3.
Formless Genesis is also a great way to end games, making even more massive tokens for just three mana, and it’s repeatable, making it very hard for our opponents to deal with. Chameleon Colossus gives us a great way to spend all the mana we end up with, and gets even better with some +1/+1 counters on it. Sagas also tend to give us a handful of tokens, making it possible to win with an army and Song of Freyalise’s last chapter.
Finally, there’s The Mending of Dominaria. Does this card technically win you the game? No. But it does generate a lot of mana all at once, and all that mana makes it easy to win with almost anything.
But this is Commander, so I wasn’t just focused on winning when I built this deck. There needs to be some spice to keep things interesting, and I wanted to call out some of my favorites.
The Spice
The first and most important card to call out here is one I already mentioned: Chameleon Colossus. Sure, it has the potential to be a potent win condition, but it’s definitely not winning any awards. The real reason it’s here, along with Masked Vandal, is because it’s a Doctor! Fugitive of the Judoon allows us to tutor a Doctor card to the battlefield with its last chapter, and I thought two targets was a reasonable amount to make sure you could always get at least one use out of it.
Then we have a card that’s been sitting in my bulk box collecting dust since Shadows over Innistrad released: Groundskeeper! This may very well be one of the only decks in existence that can make use of it, since it lets us put lands back into our hand for just two mana and guarantees that we always have fuel for retrace. Ghost Town is in here for a similar reason, letting us play it early and return it to our hand to discard late in case we think we need an emergency retrace. Honestly, it would probably be one of the first cuts if you wanted to make the deck a bit stronger for your money, but I couldn’t resist including it.
There’s also Split the Spoils, which is another card this deck is uniquely positioned to take advantage of. Just make one pile of lands, and a second pile of nonland permanents, and suddenly the actual contents of the piles don’t matter since your whole graveyard has retrace.
So far nothing has been too expensive, which begs the question: How are we filling out the budget? I generally like to spread the power out in my budget decks, with a handful of two-to-three dollar cards to make sure you always get at least one of them. But with this deck, I consolidated the power a bit more.
Crown Jewels
First of all, I can’t talk about the expensive cards in this deck without talking about the Commander. Six himself is $4, already taking a decent bite out of our budget. Then we get Jugan Defends the Temple and Evolution Sage, which both come in around $1.50. Sanctum Weaver is just a few cents more, but you really won’t find a better two-mana dork. Virtue of Strength has crept up to just over $3, and although it doesn’t do a lot in the early game, it lets us go wild later on by tripling the mana from our 36 basic forests.
Our most expensive card comes in at right under $8, but it really is too good to pass up. I was already singing the praises of Groundskeeper, but Life from the Loam is so much better. It lets us return three lands at a time, it gets back nonbasics, and it mills us along the way. It basically lets us pay two mana per turn to draw three cards.
And finally, we have the card I promised I was going to talk about back when I mentioned board wipes: Vorinclex. Frankly, I’m surprised Vorinclex is as cheap as it is, but maybe that’s because it’s another card that overperforms in this specific deck. For $6, Vorinclex is an over-statted five-mana creature, that also puts lands into our hand, that also flips into a Saga for eight more mana, that also mills us for ten cards, that also significantly buffs our board, that also acts as a board wipe. Did you run out of breath reading that? Good, beause I almost ran out of breath writing it. Seriously, I put the card into the deck expecting it to be good, but it just takes over the game every time you get to flip it.
But hey, this is my version of the deck, and maybe you want to do something different. So I want to briefly look at some cards I considered, but ultimately ended up cutting from the deck...
What’s Not Here?
I tried not to cut any Sagas, but Long List of the Ents and Weatherseed Treaty were just a bit too bad for me to run them, with Treaty in particular needing multiple basic land types for the last chapter to be impactful. Similarly, Urza’s Saga and Welcome To… (Jurassic Park) were cut since they’re both way too expensive, and City of Death wasn’t really ruled out on either factor alone, but I decided it was too bad for how much it cost.
There’s also plenty of room for more Enchantress effects! Verduran Enchantress in particular is cheap enough to be squeezed in, but I felt there were enough Enchantresses already and I wanted to put that budget elsewhere. You could also try running Zuran Orb, which is a pet card of mine but could definitely see some use here, especially with The Mending of Dominaria’s last chapter. And speaking of Mending, I think it would be reasonable to run some other similar effects, like Aftermath Analyst, World Shaper, Splendid Reclamation, or Blossoming Tortoise. You can also check out the list on Moxfield to see the 66 cards in Considering that I cut.
Wrapping Up
This deck was a joy to build, and an even greater joy to play. I highly recommend trying this list out, or even building your own deck around Six! He generates so much value and punches well above his weight, and having spent time playing him, I can confidently say that all those planeswalkers were right: the finest trees do grow in Kessig.
You can find me on Twitter and Bluesky if you want to ask questions or talk about this deck, or even follow me there or on Moxfield to see what I brew up in the future! You can also leave a comment on the deck on Moxfield if you want to chat there.
