(Wyleth, Soul of Steel | Art by Tyler Jacobson)

Technically Playable - Wyleth, Soul of Steel

Welcome to Technically Playable, where our mission statement is "Every commander is Technically playable" (the best kind of playable).

The way this works is every article will have a commander generated using EDHREC's random button, I'll talk through the card and then write about how we can build around it!

This week's random commander is

I'm not a huge fan of Voltron decks because of their very linear playstyle, but I do understand the appeal of slamming a ton of cool weapons and armor onto your commander and then working to get it through your opponent's board and protecting it until you're the last one standing.

Wyleth works in a couple of ways and has the benefit of being card advantage in your command zone and in a color combination that can struggle to draw in bulk.

Suiting up

The first thing that comes to mind for me when I see Wyleth is a typical Equipment-focused Voltron deck. For me I prefer Equipment to Auras because they can be reequipped if anything bad happens, or you can re-use them on multiple different creatures.

The key with Wyleth is to balance powerful effects on your Equipment with cheap mana values and cheap equip costs to benefit from the card draw as much as possible when you attack. In terms of cheap Equipment, we have tons of options.

Shadowspear is a great option, keeping you alive with lifelink and allowing you to get through chump blockers with trample.

Additionally, it allows you to bypass indestructible and hexproof to ensure your removal gets through to key targets. You can also use Colossus Hammer to hugely buff your commander, making it a two-hit kill however the main issue with Colossus Hammer is the incredibly high equip cost, so if you can find an answer to that you're in a good situation.

Probably the best one-mana Equipment is Commander's Plate, giving you protection from a huge number of colors as well as the ability to get through the board states of some of the most popular colors (in the case of Wyleth, it allows you to dodge green creatures which is huge).

I've obviously just talked about one-mana cards (and there are 107 of just one-cost Equipment) but there are a ton of options and are obviously even more options as you look at more mana values.

We want to stack up on as much Equipment as possible to draw a bunch of cards but we also still need to get enough damage to reach that 21 commander damage threshold.

The best option would be Cranial Plating but with it being outside of our colors we will need to find some alternatives. The closest direct relative card is Nettlecyst which is practically identical but can't be equipped at instant speed.

This does mean that we only have one card with this kind of effect but with Sculpting Steel and Masterwork of Ingenuity we can try to stack as many of these as possible.

These are the best options since they count all of your artifacts and they don't need to be equipped but you can also run Golem-Skin Gauntlets as a functional alternative.

I've talked a couple of times about the drawbacks of some of the Equipment that I've recommended like Nettlecyst not being able to be equipped at instant speed or just the high equip cost of Colossus Hammer but there are some ways around these. When it comes to wanting to equip at instant speed we have a ton of options.

You can go down the route of Sigarda's Aid or Hammer of Nazahn which allow you to attach Equipment for free when you play them but I personally prefer the flexibility of being able to equip whenever I want.

The classic card for this is Brass Squire, an artifact for your artifact synergies and the ability to attach any of your Equipment to a creature for free and at instant speed to act as a combat trick. Sadly Brass Squire needs to survive a turn and is pretty easy to remove so we need some backups.

The best option, while only a single use, is probably Inventory Management since it has Split Second and allows you to move any Equipment and Auras in any way to want to get the best loadout onto your creatures

Threatening Aura

While it was the Equipment element of Wyleth that jumped out to me, the card does also care about Auras so I thought it was important to talk about both.

Just like with Equipment, the key to using Auras on Wyleth is to make sure you have cheap enough ones that also have good effects.

Some of the best Auras for Wyleth are Auras with totem armor, these allow you to remove an Aura when the equipped creature is destroyed meaning you can help to keep Wyleth alive for longer.

Hyena Umbra is the best if you just want the totem armor effect since it's just one mana but you can also run Umbra Mystic to give all of your Auras totem armor.

We're also fairly lucky that a lot of the cheap Auras have effects that care about the number of Auras and artifacts in play. The original was Ethereal Armor, giving the creature enchanted +1/+1 for each Aura, and giving first strike which means Wyleth will win most fights it gets into.

These kinds of effects have kept popping up since Ethereal Armor's inception too. Magic Origins gave us Helm of the Gods and Throne of Eldraine gave us the now Pauper-banned All That Glitters.

These are all amazing payoffs for very low mana costs that allow you to really stack up Wyleth's power to a point that will close out games in one or two turns.

If you're willing to pay a bit more mana though you can play Sage's Reverie, a similar effect that comes packaged with card draw, emulating Wyleth's attack trigger as a one-off.

If you decide to go down the Aura route there are a lot of utility creatures for that archetype. Some of the best are from more recent sets. Light-Paws, Emperor's Voice gives you pseudo-Cascade on all of your Auras and lets you really get the ball rolling in terms of stacking up those Ethereal Armor effects.

Similarly, Pearl-Ear, Imperial Advisor also gives you card advantage and reduces the cost of any enchantments that you cast based on the number of Auras that you have.

Lastly, from the Universes Beyond: Dungeons & Dragons Secret Lair, you can run Xenk, Paladin Unbroken as yet another functional Ethereal Armor.

Of course, Boros has had Aura and Equipment support for years so covering it all here would take too long, but I did want to talk about some options that would fit with both the Equipment and the Aura strategies.

For Wyleth in particular card draw is really important to the identity and the playstyle of the deck so being able to run some card draw benefiting win conditions can really help.

If you want to be able to win without actually hitting your opponent the best way to do this is probably with Psychosis Crawler, since you're drawing on attacks you can actually drain the entire table without ever hitting an opponent. Combine this with Strionic Resonator and you can really quickly end the game.

In a similar vein, but actually needing to hit your opponent, you can use Empyrial Armor and Empyrial Plate. Empyrial Plate was a mainstay in my old Kefnet the Mindful deck and while Wyleth might not draw as many cards consistently it will probably draw enough in bulk to gain a huge amount of state from both of these cards, giving you some easy one-shots in combat or even a cheeky Chandra's Ignition win.

I also feel like this deck benefits from something I'm not a huge fan of, extra combats and extra turns. I'm not a big fan of these since it reduces the amount of time that other people are playing the game and can sometimes make it feel a little single-player-esque which isn't fun for 75% of the table.

While extra turns are few and far between in Wyleth's colors there are plenty of ways to take extra combat steps, my personal favorite is Seize the Day since it has the downside of only being one creature, and the upside of being recastable a second time or even castable if it gives milled, discarded or countered.

Wyleth doesn't really care about it only being one creature though since you only need to attack again with Wyleth to either kill a player or to draw more cards.

If you want to stay on theme with Equipment you can also run Hexplate Wallbreaker which brings along a body in case Wyleth is too expensive to recast after being removed or if you need to go wide for whatever reason.

Lastly, and very on theme if you've read my articles, we need some ways to bring back our Auras and Equipments after a Vandalblast or any other board wipe puts us in the worst possible position.

If you're going down the route of both enchantments and artifacts the best are probably Brilliant Restoration and Triumphant Reckoning but they both have pretty prohibitive mana costs, if this is an issue for you Redress Fate from the Duskmourn Commander decks is a great alternative with only two white pips and a very low Miracle cost.

I'm also being brought around to One Last Job as an amazing flexible reanimation spell to get back key utility creatures and any really powerful artifacts and enchantments all while having the flexibility of a modal spell.

As with all Technically Playable articles, this was a very quick look at Wyleth, Soul of Steel as a commander, and a few of the cards that can really make a deck with Wyleth as the commander tick.

Let me know in the comments below if you play Wyleth, Soul of Steel, if you want to build a Wyleth, Soul of Steel deck, or even if you just enjoyed this article!

Read more:

Technically Playable - Lim-Dûl the Necromancer

Myth Realized - What if Any Planeswalker Could Be Your Commander? (Boros)

Paul Palmer

Hey there, I'm Paul. I've been writing about magic for a really long time. I love to write about obscure commanders (one of my really early articles back in 2015 was about Skeleton Ship) and how you can make decks around them work, no matter how unplayable they are. I love Gruul, I love Mountains and I love casting Lightning Bolt.