Too-Specific Top 10 - cEDH Suspend?

October 20, 2023 by DougY

(Mox Tantalite | Art by Ryan Pancoast)

...What If It Had 11 Cards To Start With, Instead of 7?

Welcome to Too-Specific Top 10, where if there isn’t a category to rank our pet card at the top of, we’ll just make one up! (Did you know that Amy Pond is the only commander with two forms of Partner?)

I've off-handedly mentioned before in this series my cEDH deck that I designed on a dare, 5-Color 10-Card. The deck is built entirely around the question of whether or not having access to all five colors and three cards in the "command zone" is good enough to make a competitive cEDH deck. The reviews on that are pretty much in, and the answer is a resounding "Meh, it's okay".

So, with that roaring success to draw upon, why not try the whole thing again?

3-Color, 11-Card

Despite my meh feelings about Universes Beyond, I've still been fairly enraptured by the Doctor Who spoilers at large, as they play with some of my favorite mechanics. Imagine my delight, then, when I first saw Amy Pond, a Partner-capable Commander who plays with Suspend and goes to fetch yet another Partner out of your deck. Sure, Rory Williams doesn't do anything great at first glance, but he does provide a couple of cast triggers, a Clue, or can pitch for Force of Will or Solitude in a pinch. More importantly, at this point in Doctor Who spoilers, I'd already been messing around with Suspend in various forms for two straight weeks, and that had put a bug in my brain about whether it could be good enough for Competitive EDH. Amy was the perfect place to start.

Now, obviously if you wait the full three-to-four turns for these powerful effects, they aren't going to cut the mustard at a cEDH table. If you did have a presence like Amy in the command zone that could come down on turn one or two and play these the next turn, however, would that make them worth playing?

The only logical next question is which "Time Travelling cares-about-Suspend" Doctor I'd be pairing Amy and Rory up with to make my new "10-Card" cEDH deck out of. There were, after all, only two to choose from:

The Tenth Doctor is going to be the most popular of this bunch in casual, there's no question. The only problem is that five mana is a lot to work with in cEDH, and while you do get an "immediate" effect out of it with his attack trigger, it just puts cards out there to wait for three turns. Combine that with you only getting two colors and not being able to put Rory in your deck at all, and this was just not what I was looking for.

The Eleventh Doctor seemed much better. At three mana, he comes down early, and can make your various combat damage trigger minions like Professional Face-Breaker (and himself) get through. Where I started losing the plot on him is that he doesn't draw you cards like The Tenth Doctor does, he instead lets you cast cards from your hand for free if you're willing to wait for them to get unsuspended. In other words, I'm losing my ability to cast cheap spells at instant speed, and having to wait way too long for my haymakers to come down, even with the assistance of Amy Pond. There's no doubt that this was the "intended" Partner pairing, but I just don't think it's good enough.

So, on a whim, I took a look at what else was available in the Doctor lineup, and, wouldn't you know it, there's another commander you can play that "Partners" with a card in your deck?

He's perfect. He provides card advantage by fetching the TARDIS, which in turn allows you to Cascade into things, and can make Amy bigger to get through your Suspend targets in one bite.

So, as you naturally do whenever you have access to Cascade in the "command zone", I put together a combo deck that tries to Cascade into your various combo pieces:

Commander (2)

1 Amy Pond
1 The First Doctor

"Commander" (2)

1 Rory Williams
1 TARDIS

Creatures (23)

Instants (23)

Enchantments (5)

Artifacts (4)

Sorceries (8)

Planeswalkers (2)

Lands (31)

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View this decklist on Archidekt

Now make no mistake, this deck is no pushover. If you wanted to bring it to your average high-powered table, it's likely that you would be the archenemy in most pods, despite not having access to most fast mana or 90% of cEDH staples.

At a cEDH table, though? This thing just doesn't have a chance. Don't get me wrong, it's cool that you can Cascade into pieces of the Underworld Breach combo, and if you could guarantee that you would hit Underworld Breach every time, then you would really have a deck here. Unfortunately, you need Lion's Eye Diamond and either Brain Freeze or a Wheel of Fortune variant to get going on that, which means that it could take three Cascades over three turns to get going, which is an eternity in a cEDH pod.

Luckily, Cascade can also be used for just... good old fashioned card advantage, too! Not only that, but we have a commander that cares about Suspend, which means that you can easily Cascade into all of the free Cascade spells, as well.

Which begs the question, what exactly are those "free" Suspend spells that you can luck into?

Top 10 "Cheap" Suspend Spells

Now, in a cEDH deck that's going to be playing a ton of cheap interaction and fast mana, you do have a fairly good shot at having a one-mana spell to cast after your TARDIS trigger to go get a free spell, whether that be a no-cost Suspend spell or a random Moxen. With that said, there's also going to be a lot of times where you either don't have a one-mana spell available, or where you'll have Amy in play removing Time counters from existing Suspend cards, resulting in a situation where your first Cascade trigger is going to be something more expensive like a Rousing Refrain you're looping every turn.

The guaranteed cards we'll have if you put The First Doctor down first, though? That would be Amy Pond in the command zone, at three mana. Combine that with a significant amount of other cEDH nonsense in Jeskai that also costs three (Wheel of Fortune, Narset, Parter of Veils, Jeska's Will, Intuition, Frantic Search, etc), and it's a solid bet that you'll have the three mana slot available in some fashion or form that you don't mind casting during your own main phase. So, let's focus there when it comes to our Suspend spells.

Criteria: Cards within the Jeskai color identity with a mana value of two or less that either inherently have Suspend or can cause another card to gain it. As is tradition, all results are ordered by EDHREC score.

10. Sinister Concierge

(5,127 Inclusions, 0% of 1,305,141 Decks)

In a deck that was riddled with sacrifice effects and Suspend nonsense, Sinister Concierge would be a slam dunk. Repeatable removal is extremely strong. With that said, we're trying to build a cEDH deck here. The only way we're including sac outlets is if they directly synergize with our commander or our win condition, and it's just unlikely that this is going to do either.

Still, in your casual Suspend deck? This thing is gonna be great, absolutely windmill slam of an include.

9. Mox Tantalite

(13,655 Inclusions, 0% of 3,113,628 Decks)

When I started poking around asking if Suspend is good enough for cEDH, Mox Tantalite was the exact card I was thinking of. "Slow Mox" is usually too slow to even think about that kind of thing, but when you can routinely cut those three turns down to one? Well, that seems fast enough for me to at least try it, right?

8. Suspend

(15,351 Inclusions, 1% of 1,533,281 Decks)

Suspend is already seeing fringe play in cEDH, and for good reason. Two turns is an eternity, and it's a one mana removal spell. Combine that with the increased functionality for us where it could be used to "blink" Dockside Extortionist, a clone, or a key piece of our deck like the TARDIS, and there's plenty of reason to be excited about this.

7. Lotus Bloom

(19,256 Inclusions, 1% of 3,113,628 Decks)

Lotus Bloom isn't quite as exciting to me as Mox Tantalite, but that in no way means that a Lotus that can be free and fairly quick isn't worth playing. Playing this down on turn one to flip it on turn two or three is more than worth the price of admission, and will still make whatever turn it gets played on a possible "Storm for the win" turn.

6. Ancestral Vision

(19,633 Inclusions, 1% of 1,533,281 Decks)

Ancestral Recall it isn't. Heck, with Suspend 4, it might not even be Treasure Cruise. Still, if you have a slow turn where you're able to play this down and you can get Amy to remove a couple of counters, this will draw you half a hand when it resolves, even if it might be a turn slower than you'd like. No, where this thing is going to shine is when we do get Cascades for zero and we flip this, grabbing all the gas along the way to casting a lot of spells.

5. Inevitable Betrayal

(25,721 Inclusions, 2% of 1,533,281 Decks)

Before going on this Suspend binge, I was actually completely unaware of this card. Bribery used to be a staple of any blue deck in EDH, and while that time has passed, I'm not sure that it should have. Yeah, your opponent isn't going to be on your deck's plan, but getting their best creature into play is still going to be something that is likely to win you the game. Translate that to cEDH, and I think the likelihood only goes up:

Top 10 Creatures Over 3 Mana Value (Per cEDH-Analytics)

Suffice it to say, in cEDH, that if you have a good idea of what even half the decks at the table are trying to do to win, you can find a creature that is a threat to win the game on its own in someone's library (and then put it directly onto the battlefield). While five mana might be too much of an investment to take that chance, three isn't, even if you are waiting on a turn and hoping for Amy to get in on someone at the table.

4. Wheel of Fate

(27,000 Inclusions, 2% of 1,483,158 Decks)

Suspend 4 is still a long time, and two mana isn't nothing, but it's looking more and more like the deck we're building here is a Storm deck. With that being the case, this is worth at least giving a try, even if it's a little bit of a risk. The only real thing that we're worried about is the high chance that we'll Cascade into this, but that should be able to be mitigated somewhat by knowing that's a possibility and playing around it. After all, when we Cascade for zero, we're more or less looking for ramp or card draw, and this resolving will most likely give us both.

3. Sol Talisman

(32,352 Inclusions, 1% of 3,113,628 Decks)

I was a little shocked to see that Sol Talisman topped the list of the "free" Suspend mana rocks. One of Sol Ring's primary strengths is its ability to come down and immediately be mana positive, which you can't really do with a Suspend version. While it's still going to feel great if we get it off of a Cascade, in a cEDH environment paying the one to Suspend this is always going to feel bad. Not bad enough that we're not going to try it, but still, not great.

2. Resurgent Belief

(32,697 Inclusions, 2% of 1,412,108 Decks)

Whether or not we play Resurgent Belief, to me, boils down to whether or not we have a win-con that would benefit from it. I think I've already decided that, much like the attempted Cascade Combo deck, Underworld Breach is going to be the win-con of this Storm version as well. That leaves two questions that need to be answered in regard to Resurgent Belief:

Is this dependable enough to give us a second chance at an Underworld Breach turn if we missed the first?
Are there any other targets that would make this feel less bad to draw when we don't have an Underworld Breach yet?

The main way that most decks get a removed Underworld Dreams back is through Sevinne's Reclamation or one of the various Regrowths in green. Having a backup to Reclamation in our white deck may be worth pursuing, but there's no doubt that this is finicky, and like Sevinne's Reclamation, will need to have another use in the game.

With that in mind, what other value enchantments are we likely to be pursuing in a game of cEDH?

Top 10 Jeskai Enchantments (per cEDH-Analytics)

The list gets quite a bit worse after this, rapidly delving down into things that only Enchantress brews would bother playing. As for the list itself, as a Jeskai Storm deck, it's likely that we're only playing the top three. The various Rule of Laws are what Stax decks are trying to stop us with, Dress Down would be maybe one of the worst things to Cascade into possible, and the rest just isn't good enough for our particular brew.

In other words, there will undoubtedly be a Suspend deck that will revel in bringing back The Parting of the Ways and a bunch of Vanishing enchantments with this, but not in cEDH, and not in our deck.

1. Delay

(57,424 Inclusions, 4% of 1,533,281 Decks)

One of the things that's going to make this a unique cEDH deck is that we're going to have to plan around Cascade and counterspells. That more or less writes out Pact of Negation immediately, and makes even the one-mana counters like Swan Song and Mental Misstep a dicey proposition. While Delay is less likely to be hit at two mana, it's still a distinct possibility that will make for feel-bads, and the unlikely event of us having enough mana to counter our own spell to then Suspend it out is not worth how bad that's going to play when we do inevitably flip it.

Instead, we'll stick to the multi-modal counterspells like Pyroblast that will still likely affect the table when flipped into, along with the "free ones that are technically too expensive to get hit by most of our Cascades.

Honorable Mentions

If you're a cEDH player, and you managed to get this far without your eyes rolling out of your head, then thank you for keeping an open mind! If you're a casual player that has feigned enough interest to power through, then I thank you for the same. For the both of you, I reward you with a decklist:

Commander (2)

1 Amy Pond
1 The First Doctor

Sorceries (13)

Instants (20)

Enchantments (4)

Creatures (16)

Planeswalkers (1)

1 Narset, Parter of Veils

Artifacts (15)

Lands (29)

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View this decklist on Archidekt

In short, I've been liking this brew a lot, and cannot wait to get into some serious testing with it. If you'd like to try out some of the same, I encourage you to do so, and have included a Primer for the deck at the direct Archidekt link. To give a brief overview of why I feel so positive about it, simply put: It's fast and resilient. While it won't keep up with the Ad Nauseam decks that are trying to win on turns one and two, it has the resources to counteract their initial gambit and then hopefully be deck number two to try and go off in the pod. Getting down either commander on turn one happens routinely, and both can handily win the game with a little help from their respective friends.

As for the rest of the Suspend stuff, there's not too deep a well, even with the new WHO cards. That doesn't mean that there's not a few worth mentioning, however, some of which even made the final cut:

Rousing Refrain has been a controversial card, but I don't think that that controversy should remain when it comes to decks with Amy Pond in them. If you can find or make an open opponent, she will loop this ritual for most likely five or six mana every single turn, which is just going to win you games at any power level. As for Ecstatic Beauty, it's bad Ancestral Vision for the most part. I'm waiting for the set notes like everyone else to make sure that you can indeed hard-cast the Suspend cards you happen to flip off the top, but I would be surprised if you couldn't so it all just seems like gravy. In short, it's one mana for three cards, which is good no matter how you swing it.

Finally, astute readers will note that Glimpse of Tomorrow did not make the final cut in our cEDH brew. I did test it out, however, and I mention it because I think there might be another high-powered brew around it with these same commanders. Put simply, if you're playing more permanents than the average Spellslinger deck and you can set up Cascades for zero into this, then shuffling up a whole new untapped board of stuff is probably going to be game-winning in some fashion.

There's obviously still quite a lot of detail work to be figured out there, not least of which is what the win condition is, but I do think it's a fun deck that could be a bit of a monster. I'm not sure if it will rise to the level of cEDH, given that you need both commanders to make it work, but I leave that to the potential brewer to find out. What I do know it will be, is a crazy unique, probably high-powered casual Commander deck. And isn't that what just about everyone is looking for these days?

Nuts and Bolts

There always seems to be a bit of interest in how these lists are made (this seems like a good time to stress once again that they are based on EDHREC score, NOT my personal opinion…), and people are often surprised that I’m not using any special data or .json from EDHREC, but rather just muddling my way through with some Scryfall knowledge! For your enjoyment/research, here is this week’s Scryfall search.

What Do You Think?

And finally, what do you think of Amy Pond, The First Doctor, and other commanders that can search up other "commanders" out of the deck? Does the concept of having more cards in your "opening hand" to work with seem powerful enough that it could make a difference in competitive EDH, as it did with Companions in pretty much every other format? What do you think of the new Suspend stuff and how powerful it is?

Let us know in the comments, and we'll see you at the table that folds out into three other tables.

The Over/Under - Predicting the Popularity of Dr. Who Commanders

Too-Specific Top 10 - Timey-Wimey

DougY

Doug has been an avid Magic player since Fallen Empires, when his older brother traded him some epic blue Homarids for all of his Islands. As for Commander, he's been playing since 2010, when he started off by making a two-player oriented G/R Land Destruction deck. Nailed it. In his spare time when he's not playing Magic, writing about Magic or doing his day job, he runs a YouTube channel or two, keeps up a College Football Computer Poll, and is attempting to gif every scene of the Star Wars prequels.

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