I have a fever, and the only prescription is more Dimir decks.

July has been a very weird month, schedule-wise, but I will leave the narration of the weirdness for another time. This weirdness, however, caused me to miss one Friday Night Commander, and also took me away from my decks for about a week. But the moment I returned, I had a plan to acquire and try a new deck, the Doom Prevails one. What I hadn’t planned was to acquire and try an additional deck. But it is really hard to resist the The Hosts of Mordor precon at MSRP. Yes, my LGS is that awesome. But let me share my experience with them so far.

Sauron and Dr. Doom, BFFs

Doom Prevails is a really fun deck. I mostly watched Nicole play this deck, since I was trying the Sauron one. The conive mechanic is perfect for the villain theme. It is also great for helping you find the cards you need. There is also a tribal subtheme with villains that you can easily double down on during a game if you draw some specific cards. Cards like Doctor Doom, King of Latveria, Iron Monger, Sadistic Tycoon, The Squadron Sinister, and Ultron, Unlimited are prime examples of how easily you can buff your creatures and swing for lethal. My issue with the deck is that it doesn’t have as much interaction as I’d like. My second issue is that it feels like it has more filler cards than usual. But I need to see more of the deck in action to figure it out.

Moving on to Mr Sauron. The main 2 mechanics the deck focuses on are Amass and reanimate effects. And the commander, Sauron, Lord of the Rings, does both just by entering the battlefield. It is also a 9/9 with trample. And I think this justifies the 8 mana cost. Anger is so cool to have in this deck. One time I used Goblin Cratermaker just to put Anger in my graveyard, so that my dragon from Wake the Dragon would go for a hit the moment it appeared on the battlefield. And you know what? That was a good choice. This dragon got me a bunch of artifacts, including a Panharmonicon. I even dedicated a corner of my playmat just for the artifacts I had acquired from other players. I need to play more with these decks to get a better idea of how they work and which synergies work better, but I am happy with both so far. Should Mishra be concerned about losing his place in the list? We shall see…

Commander Archenemy is Insane

Last Friday, we played a couple of our games under Archenemy rules, since there was an event promoted by WotC featuring Loki. Basically, it is a 3v1 event, with the 2 teams starting with 60 life and the Archenemy resolving an effect at the beginning of their upkeep. These effects make it really hard to lose as the Archenemy. One of them allows you to draw 3 cards and put the lands drawn this way on the battlefield. Even though I only drew one, on turn 2 I chose the effect to reduce the cost of my spells by 1 that turn. So I ended up with an Icetill Explorer on turn 2, with my World Shaper deck, with Fabled Passage on the battlefield. Needless to say, I won. But this got me thinking.

The less-used decks

I’ve been doing the 32 Deck Commander Challenge for a year and a half now. I now have more decks than I care to admit. I have more decks than I can try each week on Friday Night Commander. This has made me neglect a bunch of them. There are a few decks I consider my favourites. I tend to play those more, and that’s understandable. But this hasn’t let me try others as much as I’d like. The main victims are the Strixhaven ones. I got about one month more to try the Lorwyn Eclipsed decks than I got for the Strixhaven decks, before the next set was released. That, and the fact that I made a couple of decks myself, didn’t leave much space for me to enjoy those. I realised this last week, and this made me decide to retire a few decks to give some breathing room to others. Retiring doesn’t mean breaking them down. I will just keep them in my drawer and pick other decks to bring to Friday Commander. An additional reason is that we’ve gotten a few new players joining our Commander community, and I don’t want to play decks that could make them hate the game because of the power difference.

So the ones I will be retiring are the following

• Dance of the Elements. This is my favourite deck of 2026 so far. I love playing it. Plus, it is very strong and can have so many cool synergies.
• Blight Curse. It can turn out very aggressive, very easily. Plus, I’ve played enough with it.
• World Shaper. This is my favourite deck of 2025. It is quite strong but has too many triggers so it can get exhausting for everyone.
• Ghyrson Starn Likes to Shoot Stuff. Unless the opponents know how the deck works and what to focus on, it can lock down the game pretty easily.
• My mono blue deck. There are much worse mono blue decks than this one, but it still is a mono blue deck.
• My mono black deck. Similarly with my mono blue deck, my mono black deck is a bit of a menace. Again, not the worst implementation of a mono black deck.

These are the ones that need a time out. Mind you, I haven’t been playing all of them a lot. As I said, I am retiring some of them until the new players get a better idea of the game. Learning to play Magic through commaner isn’t the easiest thing. I don’t have to make it worse by causing a bad experience. And, to be honest, putting restrictions on which decks I can play makes me look forward to trying some less used ones.

This gives me an interesting idea of tracking deck plays, which I may start doing from today on. Which means I must leave you now because I have to mess with an Excel file. The next time I’m back, I will most probably have something to say about the Hobbit set.

And until next time, have fun!