MTG Salvation

Depala is arguably the most interesting RW commander, and unarguably the only one that gives you actual card advantage. In RW!

The difficulty is that she only works with 2 pretty dubious types - vehicles and dwarves. Dwarves are unapologetically horrible in commander, with only a few playable ones and no reasonable token producers, so going all-out dwarf tribal looks to be criminally underpowered. Vehicles are mostly vanilla beaters that don't look very exciting in commander. Even one of the most exciting, skysovereign, consul flagship seems to be a mediocre inferno titan variant.

But vehicles have one thing that few other creatures in magic have - the ability to last through board wipes, and even attack immediately afterwards if properly crewed. Because of this synergy, they represent the possibility for a control-aggro deck that simultaneously keeps the board clean with powerful wipes, and then immediately gets in for damage with high powered vehicles.

Will it work? Maybe. But if the thought of using blinkmoth nexus to crew sky skiff to crew smuggler's copter to crew renegade freighter to crew aradara express to crew consulate dreadnought to crew demolition stomper, and then untapping all of them with aggravated assault and going in for 46 doesn't make you laugh, then I'm not sure what to do for you.

Here's my initial list.



I'm leaning a bit heavy on vehicles and a bit lighter on board wipes for the initial list because I want to test out as many vehicles as seems reasonable. I've also intentionally cut a few cards like assemble the legion and luminarch ascension because they tend to overcentralize the way decks play, and I want this to primarily win through vehicles, not angels or soldiers. Also cut stuff like serra ascendant because it doesn't really contribute to the plan despite (maybe also because) it being stupid strong.

and depala doesn't work well with honor-worn shaku. Trust me, I thought about it pretty hard.

Seems like a great list and an interesting take on depala. Do let us know how it plays for you. I do have a few suggestions for you that I think would make for good inclusions.

Command tower: Probably just a simple oversight, but this is almost always an auto include in any edh deck.
Command beacon: Given that you'll be wiping the board multiple times a game, the commander tax on depala will certainly begin to rack up. This land helps with that allowing you to skip the tax once.
Boros signet: 36 lands and 2 rock seems like very little for a deck that is looking to use board wipes that can cost 6 mana. More mana rocks would certainly be good including a signet.
Boros keyrune: speaking of mana rocks, why not one that can also become a creature to pilot vehicles?
Solemn Simulacrum: a pseudo ramp card that can also crew a vehicle. You don't really mind losing this guy to your board wipes either as it'll net you back a card when it dies
Academy rector: Like solemn simulacrum, this is a creature you don't mind dying as it can get you one of your powerful enchantments.
Tajic, Blade of the legion: you may never get the battalion trigger, but a 4 mana creature that can survive the repeated board wipes to crew vehicle seems like a great inclusion.
Helios, God of the sun: not 100% sure about this one tbh as it can be difficult to fill the devotion requirements with enchantments and planes walkers. But it is another indestructible creature that can also generate tokens for you.
Start your engines; this card may work out pretty well in your deck since youre playing so many vehicles, providing massive burst damage without the need for creatures to crew them.

I'll also second both boros charm and artifact recursion cards mentioned before. Artifact hate is prominent in most decks so those cards will certainly help against those. I'm also not too sure about tragic arrogance in the deck. It's a great card but you'll almost certainly lose some of your own vehicles to it. Perhaps replace it for something like fumigate?

Tags fixed, thanks.

I considered boros charm, but I don't think it's all that great here. Depala's ability motivates you to tap out on your turn, so keeping up 2 mana to counter a pretty small subset of cards is fairly narrow. I'm a lot more likely to try karmic justice since I don't have to leave mana up on another turn, and it actually deters using those cards rather than just countering them and leaving you vulnerable to the next one. Also it's tutorable with enlightened tutor. Could also go with something like scrap mastery or open the vaults, we'll see how big of a problem it is.

I build with my physical cards. command tower was in another deck that I need to keep together for now (as were crypt/ring/fetches) so I had to go off memory and screwed up.
command beacon - avoid tax once? I dunno, doesn't seem that great. I'd rather just be judicious in using depala and using wipes.
boros signet - I think it's pretty rare to need to fire off a board wipe before turn 6. This deck feels like it wants to play on a curve anyway. And more artifact ramp makes me more vulnerable to mass artifact removal. So I remain unsold.
boros keyrune - overlapping with my commanders cost and only having 1 power to crew made me dismiss this card.
solemn simulacrum - I tend to prefer reusable engines over single-shot versions.
academy rector - well, it's only got 1 power, and I'd usually rather throw down my enchantments at strategic times to immediately kill someone, so idk if it really does much, if any, work as a driver. Plus my enchantments aren't that expensive, seems like a waste.
tajic - was considered. 2/2 for 4, even with indestructible, seems kind of meh. But I may change my tune, since most of my other reliable drivers activate with mana.
heliod - also considered, seems extremely unreliable to be a creature, and pretty slow to make tokens. Plus our commander is already a sink.
Start your Engines - May be worth it, I'm going to see how the deck performs and how realistic it is to have enough vehicles on-board to justify a card that basically only does face damage.

I tried to put a vehicles deck together when Kaladesh came out, with Avacyn, Angel of Hope and tons of wraths. Tried to pack in as many man lands as possible to drive them.

The truthful answer is that it was horrible. Vehicles are just such dead cards most of the time. Sure Smuggler's Copter is good and Skysovereign, Consul Flagship is OK, but you're not winning multiplayer games off the back of them.

If you're spending X on Depala, then you're not casting anything else that turn, which you'll only have that luxury if your opponents are doing nothing.

The only thing I can think of to do unfair things is to setup some big Roar of Reclamation, Scrap Mastery and Open the Vaults.

The reason is that artifacts are ordinarily light on being actual straight up win conditions. Artifact creatures that are finishers are far and few between, so an actual vehicle army might be a nice new angle to mass graveyard recursion. So you'll want your Daretti, Scrap Savant, Faithless Looting type cards.

Tested it out a bit tonight at my LGS.

The environment there is sort of annoying, quite a few people only have powerful value decks - the sort of meta where everyone is running consecrated sphinx, seedborn muse, DEN, palinchron, etc. It's fairly unwinnable for most decks trying to steer off the beaten path, so the deck lost pretty badly there - first game to a cataclysm, second game to stupid DEN crap.

After those two games we had a 3 player vs 2 precons (meren and atraxa...so at least GOOD precons), which I won fairly handily. So the deck is definitely above precon level.

Overall it's fairly fun to play, swinging in for a ton of damage right after a board wipe feels great. Playing against it was apparently less fun, because it's very hard to avoid just getting beaten down and there's not a ton you can do about it since the main wincon is fairly hard to interact with and the control is pretty strong (for vs lower-powered decks at least). Overall I think it's an amusing decks and one I'd at least consider playing again, probably a 3/5, but I'll probably do a little more testing in a lower-powered group since, as I said, it's mostly just out of place in a more powerful meta.

What about Hateflayer as a driver?

7 cmc to cast and 3 to activate is lots, but it just looks fun.

Cheers!

Hey just wanted to say hi and see if you're still playing this

I recently built Depala myself, with a few less wipes and a Sunforger package. Went for Hateflayer and Felhide Spiritbinder as well. The former I haven't drawn yet, but the latter has been pretty dang good, especially with Mobile Garrison. Any reason you didn't include them? Also, have you cut any of the vehicles after testing? Sky Skiff and Ovalchase Dragster seem cuttable...

Last, any thoughts on Oketra the True as a pilot?

Quote from aslidsiksoraksi »

Hey just wanted to say hi and see if you're still playing this

I recently built Depala myself, with a few less wipes and a Sunforger package. Went for Hateflayer and Felhide Spiritbinder as well. The former I haven't drawn yet, but the latter has been pretty dang good, especially with Mobile Garrison. Any reason you didn't include them? Also, have you cut any of the vehicles after testing? Sky Skiff and Ovalchase Dragster seem cuttable...

Last, any thoughts on Oketra the True as a pilot?

Unfortunately because of how I build decks, I only keep up one at a time (not counting Zirilan, he's my permanent deck) so I don't have to share cards. Lets me build every deck as powerful as possible while not buying duplicates of everything. So this deck got disassembled months ago.

I didn't include hateflayer or spiritbinder because they're dead to my boardwipes. I could see a wipe-light version running them, but imo the best reason to run vehicles is to take advantage of mass board wipes. Sunforger, although it's my favorite card of all time (actually), is a little weak here for similar reasons - it's hard to keep a creature around I want to attach it to that won't fall off eot.

Sky skiff is valuable because it's one of the few ways Depala can tap for x=4 on turn 4. dragster is just a beater, but the deck does want beaters and toughness rarely matters. I think they're both fine. Density of vehicles is also important to hit with Depala.

The gods are both pretty reasonable for a deck like this, as they're relatively cheap indestructible creatures. If I were to rebuild I'd probably consider them.