Commander Oracles: Klothys, God of Destiny

Hello internet, my name is Blue! Today I’ll be talking with you about the deck I played on our YouTube series: Commander Oracles. You can watch the game here if you haven’t already. During the previous week, we picked our commanders in the winning order. Since I slept through the recording, I got the last pick by default and got stuck with my least favorite of the new gods, Klothys, God of Destiny. Due to the fact that I got stuck with the one I didn’t want the most, I decided to make the game miserable for everyone else. Let’s get into how I did that, shall we?

Land Destruction

I wanted to make the table suffer and remember that they asked for this when they knowingly gave me Klothys, so I had to get a little evil. There’s one thing that most commander players hate above all else, and that’s mass land destruction. When I sat down to build the deck, I immediately started off with cards like Decree of Annihilation and Impending Disaster to get the lands off the battlefield. After that, I focused down on the ones that also destroy creatures like Devastation so I didn’t get killed on the backswing. Who knew this plan worked?

Some Additional Options

Mana

There’s one inherent problem with any MLD deck like this one, and it’s a simple one: How do I cast spells once all the lands are gone? This is done by overloading on an artifact-based ramp. Normally when I play green, I find myself playing somewhere between two and four mana rocks with four to six Rampant Growth effects, but this week, I switched it up. Since I’m constantly blowing up lands, it wouldn’t have been very smart of me to keep putting all my lands onto the battlefield, but I also needed to keep my mana high. I generally only play six to eight ramp spells, but this week, I had a whopping seventeen mana rocks, most of which produced either green, red, or both colors of mana.

Some examples that were present in the deck

Rebuilding

After all the lands are gone, I need to be able to rebuild. There are several ways to do this, including indestructible lands like Darksteel Citadel and lands that regrow themselves like Drownyard Temple. The absolute best way to do this though is global land regrow effects, like Crucible of Worlds. This allows me to continuously play a land from my graveyard every turn. This means I will almost always have a land to play, where my opponents might not.

Additional Options Present in the Deck

Additional Support Pieces

As with any deck in commander, you can’t play without support. I can blow up lands all I want but without something to back it up, I’m a fish out of water. To start, I went in on additional sweepers. I can’t always rely on Devastation to cleanly get the job done, so for board wipes, I added several cards like Blasphemous Act. Additionally, I needed to play some spot removal. For this, green has some good options like Beast Within and Song of the Dryad. After that, I wanted a little bit of card draw to fill my hand back up. For this, I used cards like Wheel of Fortune and Harmonize.

Additional Options all in the Deck

Winning the Game

Normally when you see a deck like this, it’s oftentimes with Keranos, God of Storms since he’s an incredibly efficient clock for ending the game after the lands are gone. Every turn, you either draw an extra card or get to Lightning Bolt something to slowly whittle down life totals. Klothys, God of Destiny has a similar effect depending on what we exile from a graveyard. If we eat land, we get additional mana to do something with. If we eat anything else, we get to Shock the table. The problem is, that’s not a very fast clock. To help speed things up, I started looking at planeswalkers since most of our MLD spells don’t touch Planeswalkers. I settled on six planeswalkers to help end the game, including Chandra, Torch of Defiance, and Ugin, the Spirit Dragon.

The Remaining Planeswalkers

Lands

Finally, let’s cover the lands. In this deck, it was pretty simple. Aside from the lands previously mentioned elsewhere, I played a handful of duals including Stomping Ground and Spire Garden, a bunch of basics, and a suite of utility lands. Most notably, Strip Mine and Wasteland. There were quite a few lands that destroy lands, and I think I have all of them in the deck. They combo well with Crucible of Worlds and other similar effects, so I felt it would be too good not to play.

Wrap-Up

Overall, I’m super happy with how this deck played out. It performed well in the video on YouTube, although I can’t say I’d ever want to play it again. I can tell it’s super annoying to play against and probably not the most entertaining to watch. Did you enjoy the games regardless? Was there anything I missed you would’ve liked to see me discuss? Are you going to try and build a version of this deck yourself? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter @TheRealBlueMTG or the site @MTGOracle to keep up with everything Magic! This is Blue, signing out!