Vivi Ornitier Commander Deck Tech

Vivi Ornitier | Art by Toni Infante

Hello new readers, and welcome to the newly-rehoused How They Brew It: the deck tech series that's equipped your opponents' creatures, dealt combat damage to players while blocking, and much, much more since 2020. My name is Michael Celani, and the list of mainline Final Fantasy titles in order of descending quality is IX, V, IV, VI, VII, I, X, XIII, XIV, III, II, XVI, XII, XI, XV, and VIII. Now that we've gotten that settled, let's talk about Vivi Ornitier, a character whose last name has perplexed me for 25 years.

This plucky little pyro has captured the hearts of many a Final Fantasy fan, and it's not too hard to see why. As a kid, I was awed by the dazzling effects accompanying his incredibly powerful spellcasting. As an adult, I now deeply understand and empathize with his three-disc-long conga line of existentialist trauma.

In his Magic debut, which is a strange thing to say considering his job, Vivi comes prepared to share that trauma with the rest of the class. He literally does it all: he makes massive amounts of mana, wears down your enemies with chip damage, and powers himself up over time to deliver decisive finishing blows.

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What's Our Focus for Vivi Ornitier?

Most players will look at Wizards' bonkers answer to the question "What would it take to make Firebrand Archer playable at three mana?" by throwing every cantripping instant and sorcery into Archidekt and calling it a day.

I can't blame them; it makes total sense. If you play a bunch of cheap spells that are effectively free and which replace themselves in your hand, then before you know it you've dealt twenty damage to the table without expending any actual resources. The problem with this strategy is that it's boring and predictable and rote and I don't like it.

Instead, let's take another look at that mana ability. Vivi adds an amount of mana equal to his power, but only once on each of your turns. Seems pretty straightforward; I mean, without that restriction, he'd immediately go infinite by himself, so it seems like we're stuck playing by Wizards' rules.

However, suppose Vivi were to leave the fight and come back. He'd return as a new object, meaning you can activate his mana ability again - and you could potentially do this multiple times in one turn.

The plan: Break Vivi's once-per-turn limit on his ramp by shuffling him on and off the battlefield. Then, probably use that mana to shoot someone, or something.

There's a few wrinkles with this plan, though. The biggest one is that Vivi immediately loses all his counters the instant he leaves the battlefield, and since his base power is 0, reactivating his mana ability after a blink wouldn't actually do anything.

And even if you ignore that, we have to recognize that Vivi isn't a white mage; he's a black mage an Izzet mage. Without access to white, the best blink spells in the game (like Ephemerate) are out of reach - and there aren't that many mono-blue blink spells we can reach for as a replacement. You'd be scraping the bottom of the barrel for crumbs like Siren's Ruse before long if you wanted to reach a critical mass. And once those blink spells are used up, they're fairly cumbersome to recur.

But I'm not about to let a complete contradiction between what I want to do and what Vivi is written to be able to do actually stop me from doing what I want to do. Both problems have a solution. Let's get started!

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Level Grinding With Vivi Ornitier

Since we can't rely on Vivi's turbo-prowess to stack counters, we'll have to find other, more permanent ways to boost this pipsqueak's power.

A Well-Formed Party

It turns out that Izzet has access to a ridiculous amount of anthems. Granted, most are raw artifacts which are pricier than the equivalent effect would be in white or green, but mana is not an issue when your commander is a machine that turns copies of Brute Force into Dark Rituals.

We're actually in a unique position compared to most decks that run anthems. Most (non-Selesnya) go-wide decks are limited by buffs that only target a specific color or creature type, and so you'll only those cards in incredibly focused decks. If Lord of Atlantis is in a list, you can predict, pretty confidently, that most creatures in the deck are Merfolk.

No, we're different because we care about buffing Vivi - and only Vivi, the rest of our deck be damned. That means we can include any anthem we want, even those that seem contradictory. For example, buffing only blue creatures doesn't make much sense in an Izzet deck, but since Paragon of Gathering Mists hits Vivi, we're including it.

There's tons of examples like that. In total, we're adding eighteen anthems to the deck, including some choice hits like Graaz, Unstoppable Juggernaut, Naru Meha, Master Wizard, and Door of Destinies (which you should keep in the back of your mind for later).

Optimizing Your Equipment

Of course, anthems aren't the only (or even most efficient) way of boosting a creature's power. Equipping Vivi will also buff him up, and if the amount of power gained is greater than the equip cost, it's mana positive.

Let's get the most useful category out of the way, first: Equipment which auto-equips to creatures that enter the battlefield. Spells like Sai of the Shinobi are golden, as once Vivi comes back from his extended rest at the inn, he gets all his gear back for free.

Of particular note is Diviner's Wand, which has a great mana sink that works alongside Vivi to replenish your hand.

The other set of Equipment we're including is anything with a heavily skewed ratio of equip cost to power granted. Something as simple as a Blackblade Reforged will handily catapult Vivi to at least four power, and that's on the low end for this category. Explore the full list below to discover which of your favorites made the cut, but I've got bad news for any fans of Colossus Hammer.

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There and Back Again

So we've solved the problem of how Vivi's going to maintain his strength while our constant shenanigans forces him to question the legitimacy of his own existence. Now, how are we gonna get that critical mass of blink spells?

That's the neat part: we don't. We're gonna be bouncing him instead.

Bouncing creatures to hand and recasting them is generally much more expensive than blinking them. Ephemerate costs one mana, but recycling Sun Titan through your hand costs at least six. This markup is often too insurmountable a downside to overcome for decks that want to reuse their permanents, but our commander is Vivi Ornitier, an extremely cheap creature that makes a frankly broken amount of mana the instant he comes down.

Since we can pay the toll, we can reap the massive advantage bouncing has over blinking: it's much more renewable. There are tons of permanents like Crystal Shard which return a creature to its owner's hand as an activated ability, and it often costs just a single . If Vivi can make more than four mana at entry - and he will be able to, by the time this engine is set up - each bounce you use is mana positive.

And that's just if you're greedy. If you want to play defensively, you can even leave up some of these bounces as protection when it's time to go to your opponent's turn. The guy to your left might be tempted to lob a Swords to Plowshares at Vivi if they see an opportunity, but if your Erratic Portal is up, it's like you're always showing them a Counterspell. They're not gonna waste the card, and will ultimately lob it at an opponent instead!

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Even More Synergies

But the payoffs don't stop there. Since we're bouncing instead of blinking, we're actually casting Vivi every time we want to reuse his ability. That means we can leverage the cast triggers of permanents like Flamekin Herald to add an additional cascade to each loop or Defiler of Dreams to draw cards. Remember Door of Destinies? That's growing with every cast, too.

So what are we doing with our tons of mana? Well, Banefire and Crackle with Power are obvious, game-ending threats, but we're also sinking that mana into draw spells like Blue Sun's Zenith, too.

And as long as we're constantly recasting our commander to keep getting more and more mana, why not turn that into a win condition? Warstorm Surge and its bretheren can force an opponent to take massive damage with every cast.

Failing all of that, you still have a giant, probably hasty commander you can give evasion to. Maybe you can just thwack an opponent with Vivi's staff and get home in time to collect the Excalibur II before it disappears into the ether in twelve hours.

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Vivi Ornitier Commander Deck List

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A Place to Call Home

With your opponents' fantasies rendered final, make sure to rub it in by telling them that a nine-year-old is canonically stronger than Atraxa, or whatever commander it was you soundly trounced. Just don't cry when they counter by telling you that that Final Fantasy IX animated series announced in 2021 was actually canceled just this year. Found that one out while researching this article. Woof.

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