Elvish Visionary | Art by D. Alexander Gregory

A Visionary Brew

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. Up this week, I'll be building around a motif that has proved itself time and time again across strategies, formats, and decades of play. It's Elvish Visionary, two mana for a creature and a card. This card always surprises me in how valuable it is and how many little mini-combos it opens up. It and its lineage have kept decks ticking since well before its first printing in Shards of Alara, because the very first Elvish Visionary was not Elvish Visionary: it was Wall of Blossoms. From that defensive body through the more aggressive (but tragically echoed) Multani's Acolyte, and again through the double-colored Coiling Oracle, it took more than ten years to print a single-color 1/1 that drew a card with no questions asked. But since that point, we've received many versions of this effect, each finding it way into formats from Draft to Legacy.

There are now twelve two-mana creatures that draw a card when they enter the battlefield. They fall into every color but red, distributed fairly evenly, so we might be playing a lot of colors today. Here's the list:

The most-played of these creatures by a long shot is Baleful Strix, in 118,550 decks. It's an incredible defensive card, it flies, and it's even an artifact, making it a perfect role-player in tons of strategies. After Baleful Strix comes Coiling Oracle, in 69,639 decks, which offers the chance to ramp if your top card is a land. New kid on the block Spirited Companion is in third place, hitting the intersection of the many Blink decks and enchantment decks in white. In last place is Multani's Acolyte, which hasn't quite kept pace with the power of current-day creatures. But even the worst of the bunch slots very well into Yedora, Grave Gardener or Mazirek, Kraul Death Priest. All of these cards have found a home in some strategy, because whatever other little thing they've got going on, they're cheap and they replace themselves.

But I don't want to use these creatures to help my engine run smoothly. I want them to be the engine. How can they turn into the star of the show?

A Grave Mistake

If Elvish Visionary and friends are going to win a game, they're not going to do so one at a time. From the first moment I began brewing this deck, I knew that I wanted all of these creatures to enter the battlefield at the same time, preferably over and over again. The first place I looked was to mass-blink effects such as Ghostway and Semester's End, which could hopefully re-trigger enough Elvish Visionarys to draw into another blink effect. The problem with this idea was that, when I wanted to cast the first Ghostway, I would often only have one or two of my cantripping creatures in play. I needed to dig deeper into my library.

There's a second set of cards that I've been trying to build around for quite some time now, inspired by an old Standard deck. Rally the Ancestors has always seemed so sweet to me, and the deck built around it played such cool utility creatures that I couldn't ever quite put it out of mind. And there are a handful of ways to reanimate a lot of cheap creatures, temporarily or forever. Here's a non-exhaustive list:

I admit that Living Death is a little bit of a stretch, but that card is mighty powerful, and it absolutely deserves a home in this deck. With any one of these cards, all we need is a huge graveyard to be able to get every enter-the-battlefield trigger. So all we need to do is put cards into our graveyard. Of course, cards like Stitcher's Supplier are premium, since they're creatures that both enable and make up the engine. But I seem to remember a mechanic that puts cards into the graveyard and that also interacts favorably with effects that draw cards, such as, I don't know, Elvish Visionary. And this mechanic was called...

Dredge

So we've stumbled into one of my favorite corners of Commander: Dredge decks. I love the way this strategy can churn through the entire deck and find any weird silver bullets we might include. It's like having forty cards in your hand, but they all do little fiddly things that you have to put together yourself to turn into actual game actions.

In sixty-card formats, almost all cards with Dredge have no relevant text except for their Dredge number. It's why Golgari Grave-Troll is banned in Modern despite almost never being cast. But in Commander, Golgari Grave-Troll is a powerful beater as well as a powerful enabler, and Stinkweed Imp plays incredible defense. The mechanic is strong, but it plays out as intended, as a way to mill while recurring cards to your hand. And so cards like Darkblast and Necroplasm, which are game-changing but narrow, can fit perfectly into the Dredge suite as secret tech to return if the right moment ever presents itself.

Besides cards that literally say Dredge, some other enablers stand out. Satyr Wayfinder and its wordy cousin Circle of the Land Druid both fit in right alongside our Elvish Visionarys as cheap creatures that replace themselves, and Blanchwood Prowler fills in the gap as an off-brand version. Hermit Druid is an incredibly powerful self-mill enabler, and in a four-color deck we just naturally won't be running many basics. Eternal Witness can act as redundant copies of any of our mass-reanimate cards, since it can pick them up from the graveyard.

And finally, for win conditions, we've got some self-mill classics. Spider Spawning works from the graveyard or from the hand, and can make an army that can run over anyone. Big creatures like Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis and The Ancient One can get the job done any day. And if all else fails and our library is running thin, Laboratory Maniac can give us the ultimate gold star for milling it all away.

Card Spotlights

Mirror-Mad Phantasm: Oh my goodness, this card is incredible. Not only does it act as a way to mill disgusting numbers of cards, but it also can protect itself from removal spells, and can block with impunity. If we ever get to untap with it, we can even start activating it multiple times in a turn, which is basically game over. How is this card in only 3,478 decks?

Bringer of the Last Gift: Living Death on a creature? Sign me up! We don't really want to draw this card, but if it ends up in our graveyard, it's a wonderful target for Dread Return or Unburial Rites.

Shigeki, Jukai Visionary: This card is so flexible for so little cost. It mills, it ramps, it can get back cards from the graveyard later. Definitely an underrated piece that ties so many strategies together.

The Decklist

I love graveyard decks, and I love utility creatures, so there was no way for this to go wrong. Mass reanimation as a way to draw more cards, Dredge more Dredge, and dig deeper, is so appealing and makes me want to keep playing. The Elvish Visionary plan definitely feels like the focus of the deck, but the nice thing about it is that these cards are still so useful on their own. They smooth draws, block to give us time, and then come back again later. The "combos" they open up aren't game-winning by themselves, but they do form a plan, and perform it well. It's interesting how the cards that perform well on their own are often harder to turn into an engine that produces ludicrous value. Elvish Visionary and friends are incredibly consistent, as opposed to other cards that are narrow but powerful.

Until Next Time

Cantrips? In green? This is an outrage. Green has long been able to use instants and sorceries to select for specific card types from the top of the library, but these cards point in many different directions. How can we unite these cards to build a green deck with the selection usually reserved for blue? Find out next time on Singleton Shmingleton!

Read more:

Collected Company - Lurrus

Recross the Paths - Arcades, the Strategist

Jesse Barker Plotkin

Jesse Barker Plotkin started playing Magic with Innistrad. He was disqualified from his first Commander game after he played his second copy of Goblins of the Flarg, and it's all been uphill from there. Outside of Magic, he enjoys writing and running.