(Mirror March | Art by Johannes Voss)

Attack of the Clones

Hello all, and welcome to Pet Project. I’m Martin, and I’ve been playing MtG since the release of Magic 2014– Duels of the Planeswalkers. I started playing Commander around a year later, because I wanted a place to play with some of my favourite cards and synergies way below the power level of constructed formats – especially after I realised that building a deck around Azor's Elocutors in Standard was hardly going to book my ticket to the Pro Tour. In that vein, this series is going to see us forget all the wonderful legendary creatures Wizards of the Coast give us to use as our generals, and instead focus on using some of my pet cards as the hidden commander we build around.

This first article is going to be focused on one of my all-time favourite enchantments:

Mirror March is an absolutely ridiculous card. On the one hand, there’s a 50% chance it literally does nothing; on the other hand, we might win forty flips in a row and swing in for lethal – although this hasn’t happened to me yet. Mirror March can be utterly useless, or explosively overpowered – either way, it makes for some hilariously memorable gameplay.

The Gameplan

Going onto Mirror March’s EDHREC page and looking at the cards most commonly played with it, we can see how to get the most out of the card. One March on its own sees us average around 1 token per creature we play – but paired with some other spicy effects, we can bump that number up significantly.

Krark's Thumb is crucial to our game plan. With the Thumb in play, the 50% chance of whiffing gets cut in half, and the chances of us getting 2 or more creatures goes from 25% to 56.25%. Thumb is so essential to any deck built around coin flipping that it’s usually paired with a Tribute Mage to tutor it out. Today’s build is no different. Panharmonicon, meanwhile, is similarly busted; not only does it mean the Mirror March will trigger twice for each creature that enters, every single enter-the-battlefield (ETB) effect from the creature’s tokens will also be doubled.

Also frequently paired with Mirror March are ETB creatures, and we’ll want to play as many of these as we can.

Even an innocuous creature like a Mulldrifter can push you far enough ahead to win the game in this deck. Playing the Mulldrifter with a Mirror March and a Krark's Thumb on the board, we’ll be odds on to draw at least 6 cards; throw a Panharmonicon into the mix, and we can expect to draw at least twenty-four.

Picking the General

Now we know roughly what our deck wants to do, it’s the perfect time to pick a general as, unfortunately, Wizards of the Coast haven’t messed with the rules of Magic enough to enable us to put a non-legendary enchantment in our command zone. Most of the commanders commonly played alongside the March are mono-red, such as Delina, Wild Mage, or Norin the Wary – but to fit as many ETB synergies in as possible, ideally we’ll also have access to white, blue and green in our deck. Immediately, one legend stuck out:

Omnath doesn’t just include all the colours we want, it (elemental manifestations of mana have yet to develop gender reveal parties, leaving Omnath a genderless entity) comes along with a useful ETB trigger. Omnath’s Landfall ability is also powerful enough to be useful even when we’re not building around it - even just playing and promptly cracking a fetchland is enough to generate 4 mana.

Filling the Deck Out

We’re going to be wanting to share a lot of our deck, then, with typical flicker strategies. By far, the main benefit of creating temporary clones is rebuying ETB effects. Going onto EDHREC’s Blink theme page, we can see some of the best cards for this role. First are the value creatures, like the aforementioned Mulldrifter – bringing along effects like removal, card draw and ramp, these permanents are the bread and butter of our deck.

Easily the best one of these value creatures is Risen Reef. Since each Reef triggers on each other Reef entering, it scales obscenely well. In fact, when we really get going, sometimes the Reef can be a little too good - more than once, I've created so many tokens I've drawn my entire deck and milled myself out. Whoops.

Then come the big haymakers:

When paired along with a Mirror March and a few of our other synergies, these creatures don’t just tend to win the game, they tend to do so in a hilariously one-sided fashion. Get a couple of God-Eternal Rhonas tokens in play, for instance, and suddenly the power of your board has been quintupled.

Finally, of course, we need to ensure that we have the Mirror March in play as often as possible – both through tutoring for it, and protecting it once we’ve got it. To find some of these cards, I looked at the EDHREC page for enchantment decks:

By fitting in enough of these cards, we can guarantee that we get the Mirror March almost every game, and that it sticks around long enough for us to accrue such absurd value that it usually spirals into a win. Usually cramming your deck full of tutors makes the gameplay repetitive - but going off with the Mirror March is usually so hilariously chaotic, I've found it never gets boring.

Another set of cards looking at the enchantment page allowed me to discover was effects like Mirrormade and Copy Enchantment, because the only thing better than one Mirror March is, of course, two Mirror Marches.

Putting all these cards together, we get the following list:

Plan B

The inevitable problem with building around a hidden commander of sorts, however, is that while a normal general begins and ends up in our command zone, hidden commanders do not. Sometimes, we just won’t draw Mirror March or a tutor for it. Even worse, an opponent might just Revoke Existence it as soon as it comes out.

Our plan B, then, is to essentially function as a classic blink deck. Even without the Mirror March, we can still rely on effects like Soulherder and Panharmonicon to get absurd value off our Mulldrifters. We even play two pseudo-Mirror Marches – Flameshadow Conjuring does exactly what our deck wants to be doing, as does a very silly old card, Dual Nature. The fact Dual Nature sees play in barely a thousand decks in the EDHREC database is criminal. Yes, the fact it’s universal makes it extremely risky, but it’s easy enough to get far more value out of it than any of our opponents.

Indeed, one of the strengths of the deck is the resilience of this back-up plan; if Mirror March is out of the picture, the only truly dead card in the whole deck is Krark's Thumb.

Wrap-Up

After testing this list both online and in paper a bit, I can easily say it is one of the most fun commander decks I’ve ever played with. Drawing almost your entire deck then spitting out basically every permanent you play onto the battlefield is no rarity. The deck is also relatively powerful, at least at most casual EDH tables; the only time I really saw the deck do literally nothing was when an opponent had an Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines as their general. Awkward.

That’s all for this episode of Pet Project. Feel free to leave your thoughts, critiques and suggestions for next episode in the comments. Until next time.

Read more:

• Too-Specific Top 10 - We Are Legion
• Achievement Unlocked - Are Cards Banned in Other Formats Underrated in EDH?
• Architects and Tinkerers

Martin Conmy

Since around M14, Magic has been taking up far too much of Martin's time, to the detriment of his wallet and his social life. When he isn't arguing mono-white is superior to all other color combinations in EDH, or claiming MTG peaked during original Kamigawa, he lives a (relatively) normal life as a student.