Flourishing Fox | Art by Ilse Gort

The Circle of Life

Welcome back to Singleton Shmingleton, where I bend the singleton rules of Commander by building decks with as many functional reprints of a certain card as possible. This week is a little different: specifically, the cards we're grouping together as "functional reprints" actually don't function the same way almost at all. But the beauty of some engines is the ability to ignore almost all text on the cards they play, and some of these engines are among the most broken. Dredge decks in Vintage, for instance, couldn't care less what Golgari Grave-Troll does beyond the line Dredge 6. In Commander, some decks like Sram, Senior Edificer and Anje Falkenrath will run any zero mana Equipment or any Madness card, respectively, without ever planning on using those cards the way they were designed to be used. The most broken engines in Magic are broken because they do their best not to play Magic at all, and that's what we're trying to do today with Cycling.

Cycling decks have a long history of playing along a completely different axis from the rest of the format they occupy, from classic Astral Slide combo/control decks, to Zenith Flare combo decks in Ikoria draft, to Flourishing Fox Standard decks to Pauper Cycle Storm. All of these decks relied on a density of cards with Cycling that they rarely planned on casting. Constructing a deck out of functionally identical, low-powered cards in order to build an engine? That sounds like the essence of Singleton Shmingleton.

After returning to the mechanic repeatedly, there are now over 300 cards with Cycling, so we'll have to narrow that list down quite a bit. The cards that will make the best engine will be those with the cheapest cost to cycle, since we can churn through them and supercharge any payoffs. There are fifty cards that can cycle for one or zero mana. Here they are:

That's a massive variety of effects that will often come down to the same thing! The most played card on this list by a country mile is Ash Barrens, in 192,734 decks. This land is one of the pillars of budget mana bases, alongside Evolving Wilds and its friends, and it only gets more powerful alongside commanders that synergize with it, from Slogurk, the Overslime to Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar. After Ash Barrens come the five Barren Moor-style Cycling lands. These have such a low opportunity cost, and are staples of mono-colored decks. The least played is Secluded Steppe, gracing 67,332 decks and the most played, Forgotten Cave, finds its way into 98,271 decks. The least played of these cards, in only 324 decks, is Deadshot Minotaur. It fits into fewer decks as a two-color card, especially since red and green don't tend to synergize with Cycling as well as most other color pairs. And the card itself doesn't impress in Commander, despite offering a two-for-one. There are bigger things to be doing than this.

One restriction that has not applied to Cycling decks in other formats is Commander's color identity rule. Ikoria draft decks would often be playing ten off-color cards that they could never cast. But we will have to pay closer attention to what colors our cards can support. The most common color for our one-mana Cyclers is blue, followed by black. Then white and red are tied, and green brings up the rear. If we're looking for a density of these cards, we're going to need to build a deck that's at least blue and black, and probably also either red or white.

If these are our options, a few potential commanders stand out. Toluz, Clever Conductor lets us store any cards we Cycle in exile, and returns them to our hand when it dies. Nekusar, the Mindrazer plays well alongside any effects that reward us for drawing extra cards. But Queza, Augur of Agonies offers us both a way to remain alive and an ambitious win condition. Being in Esper also gives us access to two effects that have played incredibly well with Cycling in their constructed formats: Astral Slide and Living Death.

I Like to Ride my Bicycle

One of the things that is so exciting about Cycling is the sheer number of effects with which it synergizes. Anything that rewards us for drawing cards, discarding cards, having a lot of cards in our graveyard, and of course anything that specifically rewards Cycling, is a viable direction for our strategy. But some cards are must-includes. Fluctuator has intrigued players for decades now because it promises to make most Cycling costs free, opening up goofily long Cycling strings and turns that can generate a lot of value out of nowhere. It was rebooted in Amonkhet as New Perspectives, which offers the same dream. Going down the rabbit hole of explosive Cycling, Shadow of the Grave can refill our hand after dumping a ton of cards, and Songs of the Damned can do a good impression of its role in the Pauper deck, making tons of mana once we've discarded a handful of creatures.

Going alongside Queza, Augur of Agonies, there are a few cards that pay us off for drawing tons of cards by Cycling. Ominous Seas can churn out 8/8s surprisingly quickly, and we can rummage it away if it's not what we need. Teferi's Ageless Insight and Alhammarret's Archive both get out of hand quickly, breaking the parity of Cycling by doubling our draw whenever we discard a card. It's not hard to end up with fifteen or twenty cards in hand after untapping with one of these effects, and seeing that many cards makes it more likely to find our best payoffs.

Perpetual Motion

If Cycling is an engine, allowing us to turn our cards into new cards, then the ideal of this engine is to run entirely without friction. That is, without any reason for us to need to stop Cycling through our deck. In the case of Cycling, friction is the mana we have to pay to Cycle cards, and the eventuality that eventually we will draw into cards that do not have Cycling. But as we've already seen, there are ways to mitigate both of these forces of entropy. Cards like Fluctuator and New Perspectives can cancel the costs of Cycling, and other cards like Songs of the Damned can give us a mana rebate to keep the engine going. And in terms of running out of cards to Cycle, cards like Alhammarret's Archive can draw us extra cards to make fizzling less likely, and cards like Shadow of the Grave and Toluz, Clever Conductor can bring back everything we've discarded to try again. Just like in physics, perpetual motion is only a dream, but the goal of this deck is for the limiting factor to be the number of cards in our deck, rather than other bottlenecks. If we ever do manage to pull off a turn of digging through nearly our entire deck, winning should come easily, whether from Ominous Seas tokens or a big Living Death returning everything we've binned or even from Queza, Augur of Agonies triggers if our opponents have gotten low on life.

Along the same lines of Toluz, Clever Conductor, there are a couple of other cards that reward us for discarding cards. Bag of Holding operates very similarly to Toluz, Clever Conductor, letting us store discarded cards for later and return them to be discarded again. Bone Miser gives a little bit of everything, and the extra cards and mana can reduce friction and get us one step closer to perpetual motion.

Finally, there are now three versions of an old favorite, one of the best of the original payoffs for Cycling: Astral Slide. Astral Drift similarly lets us flicker opponents' creatures, functioning as a potent defensive tool. Escape Protocol gives a new spin to the old formula, and might end up being the most broken. It can only blink our own creatures, but whereas the other version wait for the end step to return the creature, Escape Protocol returns it right away. This opens up some combos that generate absurd amounts of mana, alongside Cloud of Faeries or Peregrine Drake. With Cloud of Faeries, each card we Cycle untaps two lands at the cost of one mana, which usually pays for its Cycling cost, and with Peregrine Drake we can net mana every time. Escape Protocol makes the dream of perpetual motion feel almost easy to achieve, and to make that dream more possible we're also running Muddle the Mixture and Shred Memory, which can both find either half of the engine.

The Decklist

This deck is capable of absurd things. If we ever manage to put together enough friction-reducing pieces to achieve perpetual motion, we can draw through almost every card in our deck. It takes a lot of setup, but the nice thing about it is that every successive piece we add to our Rube Goldberg machine makes it easier to find the next piece. One Teferi's Ageless Insight makes us so much more likely to find Escape Protocol plus Cloud of Faeries the next turn, and so many cards in the deck let us rummage deeper. And even if the draws don't work out perfectly, there's still a fun puzzle of how to turn Songs of the Damned plus Ominous Seas into a game-winning state, or how to ride Bone Miser as far as possible. But my favorite part of this deck is casting the cards we would usually Cycle away. Sure, Fade from Memory isn't a good card, but sometimes it's exactly what you need. Winged Shepherd is a terrible rate, but it sure can block Marit Lage. My favorite moments in Magic are when I have to think outside the box. This deck, full of cards that mostly read Cycling 1 but technically have another mode, provides its own box and plenty of very outside effects.

Until Next Time

Talking about Ash Barrens got me excited about budget mana bases, and following Standard the past few months got me excited about the Aftermath Analyst combo lands deck that has been doing ridiculous things. Evolving Wilds isn't just a cheap mana fixer: it also gives two Landfall triggers, it puts a land into the graveyard, it triggers Mayhem Devil. It simply ties the room together. What shenanigans can we get up to with one of the most reprinted lands of all time? Find out next week on Singleton Shmingleton!

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