The leader of a small army

Hello and welcome to EDHighlights, a new mini-series where I’ll be building decks for the year’s most popular commander for each color combination. As 2024’s set releases come to a close, I’d like to see which commanders from each color struck a chord with the commander community. We’ll be starting off with the monocolored commanders, and each deck in this series will have its own special twist to make it stand out just a little bit from the crowd. This series will go in order, so today we’re starting with… Delney, Streetwise Lookout!

Despite the mixed reviews of Murders at Karlov Manor, Delney has been reasonably popular. As of the time of writing, they’re sitting as the 6th most popular commander from 2024, and as the 16th most popular mono-white commander ever, with just under 2000 decks on EDHREC. So, with the preamble out of the way, what does Delney do? How can we build a deck with them at the helm?

Who is Delney? What are they looking out for? What streets are they wise about?

Delney looks out for the little guy, meaning that they care about creatures with power 2 or less. Not only do they give our little guys evasion from our opponents’ undoubtedly bigger and scarier creatures, but they also double up all of our tiny team’s triggered abilities. Taking cues from Delney’s text, this deck’s twist is that every creature in it will have 2 or less power! “Why?” I hear you asking. “Why not!” I say. It’s more fun to brew with a restriction or two.

With that gameplan, let’s get brewing! Given white’s slice of the color pie, limiting ourselves to a deck themed around smaller creatures hopefully won’t prove to be much of a limitation at all. White’s got a ton of small creatures with big abilities, including format staples like Esper Sentinel.

Given Delney's doubling abilities, we’ll find ourselves able to double up on the three things every commander deck needs to have: ramp, removal, and card advantage. We’ll also be able to get two times the value from fun synergy pieces, but we’ll get to those later.

Eating our veggies

While white certainly isn’t the best color for ramp, its catch-up mechanics can serve a deck well. The classic Knight of the White Orchid does a pretty good 2-mana impression of Explosive Vegetation with our commander out, the also-classic Sad Robot punches well above its weight class in this deck, and mana dorks like Gold Myr look pretty good when they can’t be blocked.

We can also double up on our removal through Loran of the Third Path, Skyclave Apparition, and Witch Enchanter. Skyclave Apparition is a real standout here, as it’ll get rid of the best thing on the board and then do it again.

Of course, all of the Oblivion Ring variants that white has stapled to creatures become super efficient with our commander on the field. Sigrid, God-Favored’s first strike makes it a better blocker than most other creatures in our 99, Werefox Bodyguard’s ability to sacrifice itself could prove useful, and Palace Jailer’s ability to provide extra card advantage place it among the best Oblivion Ring effects that Delney can double.

But removal’s boring. Let’s talk about something more fun: drawing cards! All of the cantrip creatures, like Spirited Companion, Wall of Omens, and Inspiring Overseer now replace themselves in our hand AND draw us another card. Just like all the other creatures in our deck, our commander will make them unblockable too.

So, we know that one-time bursts of card advantage likely won’t be a problem. But our draw engines get supercharged too. The aforementioned Esper Sentinel will be one of the deck’s all-stars, alongside Archivist of Oghma and Mangara, the Diplomat. Between creatures that draw 2 cards when they enter and consistent streams of cards from a few key pieces, this deck should have no problem keeping a full grip of cards.

Other fun things to double up…

Other fun things to double up…

That’s the necessary parts of the deck dealt with, but we do actually need a way to push through a win. Luckily, we’ve got quite a few options. We can chain enter-the-battlefield effects with one of the many Flicker effects in the deck, like Felidar Guardian. It’s also possible to make use of some clever timing with Mirror Entity’s ability, activating it for a big number after no blocks have been declared against our small army. We can even put the game out of our opponent’s reach with lifegain from a Soul.

And, failing all of those options, there’s always the classic mono-white gameplan of making a (now doubled) ton of tokens with Reverent Hoplite, Evangel of Heliod and/or Saradoc, Master of Buckland. Combined with the deck’s blink spells, these creatures have the potential to absolutely flood the battlefield.

In fact, this deck has quite a few ways to clog the board with unblockable tokens, like Ocelot Pride (which also provides some nice lifegain), Rabble Rousing (this hideaway trigger can hit all but 5 nonland cards in our 99), and Elspeth, Sun's Champion (who also serves as a mostly one-sided board wipe).

We round out the deck with some recursion from Samwise the Stouthearted, some protection for our board with Flare of Fortitude, and (because we’re in mono-white) even more lifegain with Daxos, Blessed by the Sun. 

With deckbuilding for the first commander in this series all wrapped up, let’s take a look at the list:

View this decklist on Archidekt

A tiny conclusion

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how this brew turned out. There was absolutely an opportunity to make the deck more oppressive, including cards like Michiko Konda, Truth Seeker to make our opponents basically unable to hit us. A large selection of 2-or-less-power hatebears, low power and low mana value creatures with stax-y effects, like Charismatic Conqueror and Drannith Magistrate would have fit well in the deck from a theoretical perspective, but I think that a lot of the fun in a game of Magic comes when your opponents can play the game too.

My favorite card in the deck is probably Oltec Matterweaver, a 3 mana card from The Big Score bonus sheet that’ll churn out either two little guys OR two copies of our best artifact token every time we cast one of the 45 creatures in the deck. I’m also a big fan of Wojek Investigator, a vigilant flier which could net us double-digit numbers of clue tokens over the course of a game if it hits the board early.

What cards did I miss out on by restricting the deck to only have creatures with power 2 or less? Did you enjoy brewing any other commanders from Murders at Markov… I mean Karlov Manor? Let me know in the comments below!

Read more:

From the Brim to the Trim - Confusing Opponents with Keywords and Narrow Budgets

Under the Radar - Apothecary White

Cooper Gottfried

Cooper is a student at Brandeis University, where he’s Editor in Chief of its community newspaper, The Brandeis Hoot. He’s played Magic for a few years, starting in earnest when he was gifted a precon during the summer of 2022. His favorite Magic card is Denry Klin, Editor in Chief, and he bets you can't guess why.