Codie's Big Pile of Tokens

Codie, Vociferous Codex

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Welcome back to another deck tech from this week's episode of The Sunday Stream Communal Brewing! Yes, you read that correctly. After using a generic working title of "The Sunday Stream" for the last year or so, we decided to finally give this series a name, and Communal Brewing was mentioned by multiple people in the chat.

After some brief deliberation, we felt like it was a perfect name for the show since we commonly take lots of suggestions from the chat throughout the deck-building process.

Another exciting part of this episode is a guest appearance from EDHRECast member Dana Roach, who stopped by to help us build around this challenging commander.

And hoo boy, is Codie ever a challenging commander to build around. Codie is a five color commander, which obviously gives us access to every card in Commander, and has an activated ability that essentially functions as cascade, which is neat.

However, the first line of text on Codie is what makes it such a challenge to build around.

You can't cast permanent spells.

Not being able to cast any permanent spells, even one you Codiescade into, is a massive obstacle to taking the most advantage of Codie, at least as it pertains to the typical flow of a commander deck.

So what exactly do we want to do with Codie?

If you watch the VOD posted above, you'll notice that we had a significant amount of trouble figuring this out ourselves. Codie's EDHREC page contains the usual suspects we see with commanders that allow us to cast stuff for free, like "Spellslinger" and "Big Mana." But the third-most popular archetype is....lands?

And the fifth-most popular archetype is sacrifice? Apparently lots of people are having trouble figuring out what to do with Codie.

Our first idea was to do some stuff with copying creatures. Then we pivoted to the idea of a burn theme, using Codie's ability to Codiescade into multiple mass burn spells in the same turn, then reflecting that damage with Boros Reckoner or Brash Taunter.

After a relative lack of enthusiasm from the group about this strategy, we eventually got an idea from chat to build this deck backwards.

Instead of limiting the number of permanents in the deck and trying to get Codie out as soon as possible to cast a wide variety of instants and sorceries, we could make Codie's activated ability as efficient as possible by playing a small number of instants and sorceries and making sure that we can hit the exact spells we want to hit exactly when we want to hit them.

So what's the best way to approach that?

Dana suggested the idea of using Codie to cast multiple Overrun effects in the same turn, and use those to transform a board full of tokens into a full-on alpha strike to win the game.

So what's the best way to create a wide board state as quickly as possible so we can set up our win?

We decided to take inspiration from our Ghired, Mirror of the Wilds deck that we built back in April, which is a powerful token creation deck. I personally own that exactly Ghired deck, and can attest to its effectiveness in building big board states quickly.

Finally, we have our strategy. Codie is going to masquerade as a Naya tokens deck until we can play our commander and Codiescade directly into our win condition.

I'm not going to through every piece of our Naya tokens package, but you can check out the deck we're pulling from right here.

Let's go over the cards that are unique to our Codie deck and are central to the win condition of the deck.

Haste Enablers

Since we're planning to wait to cast Codie until the very end of the game when we're ready to send our alpha strike, having a way to give Codie haste will make it much easier to pull off our strategy instead of having to wait entire turn where Codie will be vulnerable to removal.

Goro-Goro, Disciple of Ryusei is cheap to cast, and has a one-mana ability to give all creatures haste until end of turn, which is a very low price to pay.

Anger is a classic piece of any deck looking to gain haste. While we don't have a great way to manually send this to the graveyard via discard, we should still be able to play it and have it destroyed in combat fairly easily.

Fervor is another classic way to grant haste to your battlefield.

Rising of the Day is simply a strictly better Fervor. No need to reinvent the wheel.

Card Draw

Mentor of the Meek and Symmetry Matrix are both efficient card draw enchantments that will trigger regularly as we assemble our token army.

While it only triggers once per turn, Welcoming Vampire is another creature that will keep us drawing cards as we create tokens.

Jeskai Ascendancy is a very powerful draw engine. While it typically finds a home in spellslinger decks that can cast a handful of noncreature spells in a single turn and essentially draw a whole new grip of cards.

However, between our artifacts and enchantments, we have 23 possible triggers for Jeskai Ascendancy without counting our Overrun sorceries.

The Overruns

All four of these cards essentially amount to "Until end of turn, all of your creatures get +X/+X and trample until end of turn" with some other extra payoff bonus.

Ideally, we are going to be casting either Titanic Ultimatum, Tromp the Domains, or Conflux with our commander's activated ability, allowing us to automatically Codiescade into a second Overrun spell, producing a massive board state of gigantic tokens that you can swing to victory.

Closing Summary

Despite the deck's fairly simple and straightforward gameplan at the end, building this deck was no simple task. It's very easy to get distracted by interesting interactions and lose focus on what you want the deck to do, leading to a messy final product that doesn't work well.

Turning Codie into any sort of a high-power deck is a very tall task, but our streamlined focus on building a huge board with a Naya tokens strategy and finishing with stacked Overrun effects via Codie's ability should make this an effective deck that can hang at a medium power table with ease.

Levi Stevenson

Since first dipping his toes into Commander a a few years ago, Levi has consistently made a point to avoid making a whole bunch of the same kind of deck by brewing lots of different color combinations, only to discover that he just has token decks in almost every color combination. When not playing or talking about Magic, you can find him playing drums in a cover band, writing and talking about Iowa State athletics, or embarrassing his wife in public with outrageously dumb jokes.