What the heck?
Nissa is every color except green. Niv-Mizzet is black and white. Omnath is colorless.
And Jace is behind it all.
Reality Fracture’s Multiverse Reforged commander precon gives our beloved characters drastic new looks and a matching drastic play style.
“… second main, I cast Synthetic Destiny exiling my four spirit tokens. End of turn, I get Archon of Cruelty, Serra’s Emissary, Archfiend of Despair, and Avacyn. My turn?”
Oh Polymorph, look how much you’ve inspired
Our opponents better find some drastic responses, quick.
What’s Inside
For our commander, we choose between Jace, Multiverse Architect and Nissa, Leyline Tamer. Both enact a polymorph-inspired gameplan, with Jace limited to one polymorph before needing to slowly refill his loyalty and Nissa limited to once per turn, if we can get lands into play.
With only two fetch lands in the deck, the sizable mana value difference between commanders, and the fact that Jace’s face is on the box, we are going to go with Jace as our commander and find ways to “fix” the issue of only getting one polymorph per turn.
No doubt, Nissa will inspire many deck builders for years to come, but this build is not hers.
(Truth be told, the same can be said for many cards in the deck that don’t live up to their gameplay potential in this precon. More to come when we discuss cuts.)
Additions
Let’s start by putting an old spin on a new deck.
It’s combo time.
First things first, both Aminatou and Felidar Guardian are effectively “free” hits for our Jace.
We -3 Jace, hit Felidar Guardian, blink Jace to reset him, then -3 again to swap out another token. The same play pattern goes for Aminatou.
Both in play, Felidar Guardian and Aminatou blink one another infinitely.
To turn this into a win, we will add Oath of Teferi and Warleader’s Call.
Warleader’s Call is, admittedly, not budget, however this low mana value enchantment provides a extra strength for our wide token board while providing a much-needed combo win condition.
If we really wanted to stick to budget, we could swap in Slash, Reptile Rampager for Warleader’s Call, but the cost is worth it on this one, and I can’t in good conscience recommend Slash.
Oath of Teferi allows us to double trigger all of our planeswalkers, creating a second combo kill. With Aminatou, we can tap a land for mana, blink Felidar Guardian to untap the land, blink Felidar Guardian again to reset Aminatou, then repeat and repeat. And, we generate infinite mana.
Instead of lands, we can blink Sanctuary Warden to draw our deck, Venser, Fervent Forger to create a mercenary army, or Archon of Cruelty to defeat all of our opponents.
On a fairer note, our Oath of Teferi can blink Jace to reset our Jace’s loyalty allowing us to use the polymorph ability again the following turn. The additional +1 activations also mean more polymorph, albeit at a slow, slow pace.
As a small measure of combo support, Wizards provides us with a Cursed Mirror in the main deck. Alongside Felidar Guardian, we can have the Mirror enter as a copy of the Cat, blink the Cat which then blinks the Mirror, and so on beside our Warleader’s Call.
We are committed to bracket two, janky, easily disrupted, and hard-to-assemble combo piles.
To add a small measure of combo consistency, we will add a copy of Search for Glory to tutor up either Oath of Teferi or Aminatou. For the casual kitchen table, the combo cat menace of the deck will remain untutorable.
Search for Glory can also be used alongside Brainstorm and Brainsurge to effectively tutor a Nissa, Leyline Tamer to the top of the deck while allowing us to retain a land in hand to trigger landfall.
Reality Fracture introduces a red enchantment Polymorph, a new flavor that feels inspired by Sneak Attack and Through the Breach.
While it doesn’t grant haste, it is a repeatable source of Polymorph for us to more quickly turn our board of tokens into haymakers.
On flavor, Identity Echo is an auto-include. This is a Polymorph-inspired card about echoing identities in a deck and a set about Jace echoing identities as mechanically shown through polymorph.
Preordering for just one dollar?
Get it in.
Two more for flavor.
In the story, villainous Jace has reforged the Multiverse in his concept of a perfect likeness. Jace is acting as a god.
Deification makes the planeswalker type of your choice god-like. The little people in the art worship Jace for his transformation and, mechanically, we are rewarded with a Hexproof Jace that never dies through damage if one of his followers remains in play.
Naming Jace as a god and getting a cheap piece of continuous on-board protection is right where we are hoping to be with this deck.
But, as the dominos of betrayal fall, god-like or not, Jace was betrayed by none other than Vraska, the character who was once betrayed by Nicol Bolas.
(Could it have been Nicol Bolas all along working through Vraska to defeat Jace? No clue. Let’s leave this one to the lore historians.)
Knowing Vraska will betray, we will include Vraska, Betrayal’s Sting, a planeswalker that can disrupt our opponents’ creatures, proliferate Jace’s loyalty, and hit key story points all in one.
As big targets for Jace’s polymorph, we will add Sanctuary Warden and Angelic Aberration.
Not sure how crazy or bad this is, but Sanctuary Warden’s enter ability can remove the final loyalty counter from Jace, allowing us to move him back to the command zone to recast next turn. A little janky yea, but maybe easier than either proliferating three times or waiting three turns.
Angelic Aberration patches a hole in the deck’s game plan. Namely, that if our opponents destroy what we polymorph out, we’ll be stuck with little left. Angelic Aberration allows us to cash in our menagerie of spirits, goblins, myr, and mites for 4/4 flying angels.
For a final two additions, we have Karn’s Bastion and Swiftfoot Boots.
This list includes a Path of Ancestry that really does nothing. We could just replace Path with a basic land, but Karn’s Bastion can help us build up our planeswalkers, though we certainly hope to have better things to do with our mana.
Any deck full of big beaters needs Swiftfoot Boots. Especially when one of those beaters is The Ur-Sphinx.
Cuts
Multiverse Reforged is full of fun commander cards like The Ur-Sphinx that have relatively little business in this deck except for flavor and world-building reasons.
The Ur-Sphinx’s eminence ability is irrelevant. We don’t gain life for Niv-Mizzet, Ghost Council. Giving away bombs with Dack Fayden sounds fun until we’re one-on-one and losing to ourself.
As a result, many of the fun, build-around threats are out of this build.
Omnath, Locus of the Void
Dack Fayden, Helping Hand
Niv-Mizzet, Ghost Council
Akroma, Angel of Fury
Tamiyo, Upriser Crowned
Elspeth Sun’s Champion
Ginger, Queen of Sweets
Fact or Fiction
Shark Typhoon
Path of Ancestry
Plan for All Outcomes
Sol Ring
And there at the bottom of the cut list, Sol Ring.
The disproportionate level of power a deck gets with Sol Ring in the opener is ultimately not good for games of Commander. Let’s focus on doing the fun thing, and leave super powered artifacts out of it.
Or, if you want to keep Sol Ring, cut anything else. Sol Ring is significantly stronger than any other card. And that’s the problem.
Cleanup Step
Multiverse Reforged show us a new Jace-made world with traces of the world we know made radically new.
We have taken a new deck and put an old spin on it to balance the line between combo and value while staying true to Jace’s new story.
