Deck Tech: Magda Brings Home the Treasure in cEDH

It's not all casual fun in the Commander world anymore. The format known as "competitive EDH" is on the rise as well, and its fans are playing for keeps. At a recent event in the UK, Nikita Balynskij walked away with the first prize of a full set of ten Revised dual lands worth about €4,000!

magda - winner

The Tournament

The people at Living Realms have been running TCG events in the UK for a while, although this marked their first foray into Magic. It was part of their two-year anniversary celebration in Leeds, and they went above and beyond to hand out prizes appropriate to the occasion. Top 16 finishers received sets of Warhammer 40,000 Commander decks, upgraded to Collector's Edition for the Top 4. Meanwhile, the tournament's champion earned one copy each of: , , , , , , , , , and .

It may not be 40,000 in Warhammer, but based on card conditions that's about 4,000 in euros. Winner Nikita Balynskij was quite happy with his haul. "It's pretty amazing, honestly," he commented. "It was my first cEDH tournament so winning such a huge prize against such competitive people—it feels fantastic."

The Format

The format takes its EDH label from the Highlander variant that often championed in the nineties, nowadays more commonly called Commander. It follows most of the same basic premises, like using singletons and a commander, but makes one crucial difference: Whereas regular Commander sees a good time as the ultimate goal and encourages everyone to maximize fun for everyone, the c in cEDH stands for competitive. You're supposed to try your hardest to win.

Table politics may still play a role, but cEDH incentivizes people to bring the most powerful strategies, the most broken decks they can find. So naturally you'll find one of the best starting things off with the dreaded turn one play of … uh, ?

The Deck

Some of the Dwarves, like , have relevant abilities, but most are really just here to support the commander, . The goal is to create Treasure en masse, and the eight Dwarf one-drops enable Magda to start the process as early as turn two, simply by attacking. A couple of Vehicles, lands like , , or allow for Treasure mining outside of combat too.

dockside extortionist cloudstone curio

One-mana creatures bring an additional, incidental benefit to bear: They form a combo with and that generates infinite Treasure even if the latter only extorts four such tokens upon each entry.

However, Magda's main game-winning combination is another. It merely requires the battlefield presence of the commander, five Treasure tokens, and one artifact Dwarf. That can be , , , , or even Magda under the influence of /.

magda, brazen outlaw clock of omens

Magda searches for . Clock and artifact Dwarf tap to activate the Clock, which creates one Treasure and untaps the artifact Dwarf. Treasure and artifact Dwarf then tap to activate the Clock again, leaving behind a new Treasure and the old Dwarf untapped again. Repeat for infinite tapped Treasure tokens.

Magda then searches for , followed by , which is now a Dragon card in the library thanks to Nexus. Create infinite Treasure tokens again, but this time half of them are untapped thanks to Xorn. All of this works at instant speed.

maskwood nexus xorn

With infinite mana and infinite Magda activations, able to bring each creature and artifact from library to battlefield, winning becomes largely academic. even makes it possible to play the whole deck.

Curio and Clock aren't the only two infinite loops in the deck. Balynskij chose to include and as well. His deck also just does unfair stuff with artifact mana and /, which are sure to leave some opponents out cold too.

While it was the first big win for Balynskij, it wasn't the first big win in cEDH for Magda. If you're looking for a deck with which to compete in the format, you too should consider the Brazen Outlaw. Compared to some designs, this one even is, or can be further modified to be, relatively cheap!

Magda by Nikita Balynskij, 1st at Livings Realms Two-Year Anniversary
  • 1
  •  
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  •  
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  •  
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  •  
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 10

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, not of Cardmarket.