Building a Vehicle Deck with The Belligerent

The Belligerent | Art by Bruce Brenneise

In case you haven't heard, all legendary Vehicles are about to be eligible to lead Commander decks starting August 1st. This opens up deckbuilding possibilities for players, letting unique cards like Esika's Chariot, Parhelion II, and Grond, the Gatebreaker be at the helm of your next EDH deck.

There aren't a ton of new cards that this change applies to (just about 20), but there are some interesting new options. Notably, I'd like to bring your attention to... The Belligerent!

Here, I'll be doing a deck tech for this daring pirate ship. Although it was once helmed by Vraska, it'll now be helmed by me! I'd say that's an upgrade, but I'll leave that up to your discretion.

What Does The Belligerent Do?

For , The Belligerent is a 5/5 Vehicle with crew 3. When it attacks, we make a Treasure token and can play cards from the top of our library for the rest of the turn. So essentially, after jumping through a few hoops, we get a copy of Future Sight in our command zone. Neat!

I'm of course reminded of Melek, Izzet Paragon, another Izzet () commander that lets us cast spells from the top of our library, although Melek gives us a benefit for doing so (even if he places a restriction on what sort of spells we can cast).

This commander is also reminiscent of Captain Lannery Storm, and not just because she's a Pirate: she makes a Treasure on attack, too, and even has a slot in the 99 of this deck!

Being in Izzet gives us access to a lot of cards that synergize with both halves of our commander's attack trigger. We've got cards that care about artifacts and cards that care about casting spells from places other than our hand.

There's a lot of cool cards from recent set releases that I'm super excited to talk about, so let's get brewing!

Key Cards for The Belligerent

First, let's talk about the artifact synergies in this deck. Our commander is an artifact, itself, and makes Treasures for us every turn, so we'll have no shortage of them.

No surprise, but Magda, Brazen Outlaw fits perfectly here. She wants to be tapped to crew our commander, and she can even let us use excess Treasures to fetch up some goodies from our library. Another Dwarf makes the list too, with Glóin, Dwarf Emissary. This curves perfectly into our four-drop commander: we play Glóin on turn three, cast our commander and make a Treasure token on turn four, then Glóin has just enough power to crew our big boat for the rest of the game!

There's also the newest version of Chandra: Chandra, Spark Hunter! This planeswalker can automatically crew a Vehicle, provide us with some card selection and even extra Vehicles if we need them. Plus, her ultimate can provide some game-ending damage

There's also some sweet payoffs for casting things from the top of our deck. Doctor Who brought some tech with The Twelfth Doctor and Osgood, Operation Double, both adding some value when we use our commander's ability to its fullest. Also, if The Doctor wasn't letting us copy our spells enough, we can use Mizzix, Replica Rider to get a sweet two-for-one discount on spells we cast from our library.

Finally, I love The Lost and the Damned in the 99 of this deck. It can hit the field before our commander and make us a 3/3 when we cast it, then it'll keep making us 3/3s as we progress our gameplan. I know that the Warhammer set had a lot to offer, but this card should be seeing a lot more play than it currently is.

Aside from our commander, there are a few other Vehicles that I really like here: Reaver Titan can be extremely challenging for our opponents to answer, Thunderhawk Gunship can help us break through board stalls, and Imposter Mech can be a super cheap clone of an opponent's best threat.

How Does This Deck Win?

There are a few other Vehicles and Vehicle synergies that can propel us to a win.

The ever-popular Unlicensed Hearse can become a big beater quickly while also keeping graveyard strategies in check. Mu Yanling, Wind Rider provides each of our Vehicles evasion, makes a Vehicle token when she enters, and gives us some card advantage. Honestly, I couldn't ask for more out of card for this list.

Finally, there's Invasion of Kaladesh and Brotherhood Vertibird. Combined with our 18 Vehicles (not counting Vehicle token-creators) and other artifacts, these cards have the chance to flip over into huge, evasive beaters.

Failing that, there's a few other ways we can win. We can ping our opponents' life totals down with Keeper of Secrets and Flaming Tyrannosaurus, we can reanimate some scary threats from opponents' graveyards with Nautiloid Ship, and we can even assemble a Hellkite Tyrant win if the game goes long enough.

The Belligerent Commander Decklist

Conclusion

This deck sits pretty firmly in Bracket 2. While it's a ton of fun to slam down a pirate ship and go to combat with it, our commander costs a little bit too much mana to be an effective card advantage or mana generation engine. Plus, as a 5/5 with no natural evasion, it'll occasionally be in danger during the combat step.

There are a few more cards that work well in the deck that I wanted to shout out.

First up, The Emperor of Palamecia can let us cast our commander on turn three and is immediately large enough to crew it. Between that cool pay pattern and the 33 other noncreature cards in the deck, we'll get a lot of mileage out of this Final Fantasy card.

I also wanted to shout out Bounce Off, a cool Unsummon variant that we can use offensively or defensively. We can, of course, bounce an opponent's creature if needed, but, once The Belligerent's attack trigger has resolved, we can return it to our hand if we're in danger of losing it during combat.

Finally, I wanted to draw some attention to Felhide Spiritbinder. While this may not be the greatest card in Magic, it can do some really unique things. For example, I'd love to use this thing to copy Xorn and make extra Treasures with our commander's ability. As a little bonus, this card's base power of three means it can be used to crew our commander all on its own.

Thanks very much for reading, and I'll see you all next week for another deck tech!