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There are lots of ways to play Commander in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Magic: The Gathering — Buffing powerful creatures for a knockout blow, setting off a Rube Goldberg-style combo that gives you battlefield dominance, or straight-up denying your opponent by not giving them a chance to lay their plans. If that last idea interests you, then let us introduce you to the wheel deck.
Wheel decks can be an interesting playstyle, but also a great way to familiarise yourself with mechanics like card advantage, trigger abilities, and resource managem𒀰ent. So here, we’re going to discuss what a wheels deck is, run through some notable builds, and get you started on one of your own.
What Is A Wheels Deck?
Named for the card Wheel of Fortune, the core mechanic of a wheels deck is to force each player to discard their hand and draw an entirely new one🌳. This lets you play your entire hand and then draw back up, and it scuppers any immediate plans your opponents had — placing their ambitions out of reach.
Forcing your opponent to discard and redraw will be most effective when they have lots of cards in hand. If you make them lose 🍌one card in hand to draw seven, they’ll more than likely just thank you for the trade.
However, ‘Wheeling’ on its own isn’t usually enough to win, so it’s often coupled with other permanents that cause damage, an excessive amount of draw, or give you additional benefits. What’s important is to have a few win conditions in mind since the state of a game varies massively over a game of Commander — you don’t want any plans of victory scuppered by one removal spelꦕl.
You’ll also be spending most of the early game setting up, meaning it’s important to have some way of dealing with early threats. This could be through black’s removal, red’s direct damage, or blue’s bounces and counterspells; an opponent that sneaks a big creature or combo piece through can be a real probl♏emꦑ two turns on. But you can’t nip everything in the bud, so choose your moments wisely.
Common Wheel Decks
Now we’ve covered the basics, let’s talk colours. Nearly all wheel spells are found in blue and red, with a few in black, and next to none in green and white. More than likely though, you’ll be ‘splashing’ into more than one colour — with common identities being Izzet (blue and red), Grixis (blue, black, and red), Azorius (white and blue), and Esper (white, blue, and black).
So looking at possible commanders, first up is Nekusar, the Mindrazer. As a Grixis legendary, blue and red give us access to our wheel spells, moreover, we can utilise black’s removal, blue’s control, and red’s aggro too. Nekusar damages opponents for every card drawn; we can increase this damage with cards like Liliana’s Caress or use something like Psychosis Crawler to deal damage whenever we draw as well.
Next up, Niv-Mizzet, Parun. This dragon deals damage to any target when you draw a card, and when anyone casts an instant or sorcery spell, you also draw a card — making blue and red perfect since they’re chock-full of them. Attaching an enchantment like Curiosity or Ophidian Eye to Niv-Mizzet ไthough will let you draw cards and deal damage as much as your library and hand size w💖ill allow.
Finally, we’ll cover The Locust God and Xyris, the Writhing Storm since they have similar abilities. Locust god creates 1/1 flying insects when you draw, with cards like Skullclamp essentially gi🧔ving you two cards and an extra insect for one mana.
Meanwhile, Xyris creates 1/1 snakes when an opponent draws, and with access to green, we can use Jaheira, Friend of the Forest to generate vast amoun🐬ts of mana for our wheel spells, creating even more snওakes in the process.
How To Build A Wheels Deck
With your commander selected, we can focus on what the cards in our deck will look like. As mentioned earlier, you’ll need to decide what your winning plays will be, likely something to do with your commander, but the more outs, the better.
The first route is to use abilities to knock out opponents, such as with Niv-Mizzet or Nekusar. This means including cards that activate the triggers more frequently and amplify the effects. Any wheels such as Jace's Archivist, Reforge the Soul, and Windfall are excellent at demanding opponents to draw, with permanents like Kederekt Parasite and Teferi's Ageless Insight stacking ex🐲tra damage on top of our commande♒r’s abilities.
We can also hit opponents by using creatures to attack. Big creatures tend to cost lots of mana, and given that we want to cycle out our cards, there’s a good chance they’ll end up in the graveyard. So we need low to medium-cost creatures with lots of bang for their buck. Chasm Skulker is nice because it grows with our card draw, and has lasting utility after death by creating 1/1 creatures, while Body of Knowledge comes in handy if we’ve got want to stic🐟k with a nice hand.
Another option is to force your opponents to discard their entire decks, though milling a 99-card library is a daunting task and requires more set-up than ‘card do damage’ or ‘creature go smack’. It’s very risky since you’re giving your opponents more resources, but combining Forced Fruition with Hive Mind and then casting a few cheap spells will hav🔯𝓰e libraries empty in no time.
Make sure your opponents don’t have unlimited hand sizes from cards like Reliquary Tower. This way, even if they draw masses of cards,🥀 they can only use so many, leaving them no c🗹hoice but to discard back down to seven.
Like all decks, there are upsides and downsides. For example, the wheel deck’s namesake – Wheel of Fortune – will set you back around $220 just for a ‘not tournament legal’ copy, and if you ever see a Timetwister in the wild, consider yourself blessed by Richard Garfield himself. That said, there are other, more affordable wheels, like Time Reversal in blue, Wheel of Fate in Red, and Dark Deal in black.
The other issue with forcing your opponents to redraw is that you have no idea what they'll draw into. They might get a better hand than before, or worse, you might have just given them the game-winning combo they were looking for. Remember, it only makes sense to wheel if you want to replace your hand or your opponent doesn’t.
An excellent time to strike is if your opponent has just searched for a card, such as with Enlightened Tutor, or they already have seven or more cards in hand.
Finally, since you won’t have many tough creatures, you’ll be exposed to attacks on the battlefield — especially in the early game. We already mentioned having plenty of removal, but eventually, something will hit the table, which is where prison effects come in. Permanents like Ghostly Prison in White, and Propaganda in blue place extr💮a costs on every creature to attack you. Making opponents choose between wasting resources, limiting their offensive, or attacking elsewhere.