Maro | Art by Stuart Griffin

No Two See the Same Maro

Hello, and 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's card, despite being very simple, entirely upends the way its controller wants to play the game. Maro can be a huge beater, but only if we keep cards in our hand.

Normally, we want to use the cards in our hand, but Maro wants us to refrain. Draw spells somewhat circumvent this tension, but Maro still changes their purpose. Rather than playing card draw in order to be able to cast more spells later, Maro asks us to play card draw as pump spells.

As far as I know, no version of this card has ever seen competitive play, and that makes sense. Constructed games revolve around using every card efficiently, and a threat that relies on not using other cards just won't cut it. But in Commander, this little guy has a home.

In Commander, card draw is recognized as an end in itself, not only a means to casting spells. There are three other players' turns to sit through, and it's nice to have a full grip of cards to look at or shuffle around while your opponents do their thing.

I include plenty of cards in my decks just because I like looking at the art, and casting them is low on my priorities list. So Maro will do just fine here. It's a card that fuels imagination, and that's more important than the linear efficiency that competitive formats demand.

Because Maro makes players dream, several new versions of this creature have seen print in the quarter century since its first appearance, and we now have twenty creatures that are as big as your hand size. Here they are:

The most played of these cards, in 136,466 decks, is Psychosis Crawler. It's colorless, which means it can fit into any deck, and that ping ability says what every Commander player wants to hear: you just worry about drawing cards, I'll do the winning for you. The next most played card, in 35,988 decks, is Body of Knowledge. Not only does it do away with maximum hand size, it also discourages anyone attacking you, threatening to draw tons of cards, and it feels terrible to block it. The least played card, in only 274 decks, is Sylvan Yeti, and it's not terrible! Its toughness is always four, meaning it's capped, but it's also guaranteed to survive even if someone sticks a Sire of Insanity. Most of these cards are within green and blue, the only exceptions being Kiyomaro, First to Stand and Kagemaro, First to Suffer, which formed part of a cycle in Saviors of Kamigawa.

You Know What They Say About Big Hands...

So, what works well with creatures that get huge if we have a lot of cards? The first things that come to mind are the several spells that reward us for having huge creatures by drawing cards. Return of the Wildspeaker and Rishkar's Expertise are absolute green staples, but we also want to dip a little further into the well for Garruk, Primal Hunter and Soul's Majesty.

All of these cards will basically double the size of any of our Maroes while digging for more options. We even get a powerful option for a commander in Prime Speaker Zegana. Not only does Zegana draw us a bunch of cards when she enters, she can also add a bunch of power to the board herself, and threaten commander damage as well.

Along the same lines, Garruk's Uprising draws us a card every turn if we can stick a big creature, and Up the Beanstalk cantrips whenever we cast one of our many expensive spells. I also threw in Disciple of Freyalise, which does need to sacrifice the big creature to draw cards, but can also simply be a land drop in this incredibly mana-hungry deck.

The next step in building this deck is to make sure we never have to discard down to hand size. If our Maroes are capped at 7/7 at the end of our turn, there are plenty of other strategies that can simply go over the top of our creatures, and that's not where we want to be.

Reliquary Tower gets thrown into a lot of decks where it doesn't belong, but this is the place where it shines as an almost free way to keep our cards. Similarly, Thought Vessel gives us a mana rock that this deck already desperately needs with its high mana curve, with no maximum hand size tacked on.

We also get this effect stapled onto Body of Knowledge, and we can cast the spell half of Sea Gate Restoration if need be to load up on cards and never get rid of them again.

...Probably Need Big Gloves

There are several other fun cards that can put cards into our hand through means other than drawing them. Sprouting Vines is a cheap instant with Storm, which means we can benefit off of an opponent's big turn or even a Counterspell war to put four or five cards into our hand when no one's expecting.

Gush puts four cards into our hand if cast for free: the two cards we draw and the two Islands we return. It can act as a sneaky pump spell even when we're tapped out. And of course, our ramp package has to include Cultivate and Kodama's Reach.

They're even better in this deck than elsewhere, so much so that I also threw in Nissa's Pilgrimage, which normally I save for mono-green lists.

One other angle I want to play up is the interaction between our commander and our Maroes. Each time we can repeat her enters trigger, we draw twice as many cards as last time.

I've included both of the one mana spells that flicker creatures in blue, Essence Flux and Splash Portal, as one mana ways to double our hand and board when we have our commander out.

Phantasmal Image can also reiterate her enters trigger, on top of being one of the most efficient Clones of all time.

Dressed for Any Occasion

If the point of this deck is to have a hand full of cards, then we don't need all of our cards to be useful in all situations. Especially in a deck where a dozen of our cards do the same thing as each other, the best way to benefit from having fifteen or twenty options of cards to cast is if they each do something unique.

So I've included some situational cards with very high upside. Commandeer and Steal Enchantment don't always have a good target, but they can be game-swinging effects for very cheap in the right scenario.

Rebuild can stop entire strategies when it works. Mystic Reflection is a card unlike any other: we can cast it in response to an opponent's haymaker to make it enter as a mana dork, or we can cast it on our turn to make our creatures come in as the best thing on the board.

And there's more! In all honesty, I don't think Horizon Chimera is very good, but it was my favorite card when I was a kid and in this deck I can just look at it in my hand without ever having to cast it. Not of This World can be a free Counterspell and can protect one of our big creatures even when we're tapped out.

And finally, Reap plays into our strategy by filling our hand as long as anyone is playing black.

These high-impact situational cards reduce the tension that Maro presents of whether to hold or play our cards. We don't need for them all to be good every game; we just need one or two to be great while the others fuel our Maroes by doing nothing.

Winning the Game

This deck is a nice neat puzzle in that part of our advantage engine is also our win condition. Maro can draw us a ton of cards with Soul's Majesty or Prime Speaker Zegana, but it is also perfectly capable of dealing chunks of damage. Sturmgeist and Jolrael, Voice of Zhalfir especially can put on a fast clock if our opponents are low on flyers.

If our creatures can't get the job done, or if we fly too close to the sun and draw out by accident, we can also play a "fair" Thassa's Oracle and call it a day, but that's more of an insurance policy than a true plan B.

The Decklist

This deck feels like the epitome of green-blue in Commander. Our big creatures draw us cards, and our cards make our creatures big. Our response to anything an opponent does will either be to go over the top of it or to play some incredibly narrow trap card that blows them out.

We have enough resources that we can outlast almost anything, and just want the game to keep going. And for some reason, this deck more than almost any other one I've built is full of cards with beautiful artwork, which is a good thing since we have plenty of cards we're just going to look at in any given game.

Sturmgeist, Not of this World, even Maro itself, all look amazing. Definitely a deck to pull out when you want a good time.

Until Next Time

I've always loved Unearth, and now this effect has migrated into white. Over the past few years, we've gotten six new cheap spells that can return cheap creatures to play! But how do these efficient but tiny Reanimates stack up against the format of huge plays and wild effects? Find out next time on Singleton Shmingleton!

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