To celebrate the month of March I'm going to showcase a number of EDH decks (challenge based and otherwise) that i've played around with over the course of this month starting with a redux of my previous EDH 1 Letter Challenge. The core of the challenge was to build an EDH deck where every card's name started with the same letter of the alphabet. Previously I started with the letter S which turned out to be simpler and stronger than expected thanks to elements like the Snow-Covered basic lands and multiple EDH staples like Sol Ring, Sylvan Library and Swords to Plowshares being available. This time around in honor of March and in order to challenge myself I decided to use the letter M and to build a mono red deck around a new-ish commander from Kaldheim. So without further ado I present to you all -
Marvelous Mistress Magda's Madly Maroon Monstrosity
This is the core of the deck, Mine Layer is the only other actual dwarf starting with the letter M but Mutavault and Metallic Mimic (who gets bonus points for having M.M. as the initials) can do a dwarf-y impression. Mana Charged Dragon and Mordant Dragon were sadly the only M dragons that I had on hand (given the opportunity I would have also added in the other 3 options - Mirrorwing Dragon, Moltensteel Dragon and Moonveil Dragon in place of other more generic high cost creatures like Markov Warlord). The low number of dwarves and dragons was mitigated however by Maskwood Nexus, an amazing card that I'd highly recommend for any Magda deck you can search it out as your first tutor and then all your creatures count as dwarves for extra treasure token generation and all of your deck count as dragons for future tutoring (allowing you to search up powerful non-artifact non-dragon permanents putting them into play).
The deck I ended up running (broken into 2 parts 0-3 mana and 4+ mana). Apart from the Dragons I was unable to locate in time the only card that I wanted but was unable to include was Mox Diamond which while nice to have (especially in terms of a 1st turn Magda) isn't vital to the deck's overall strategy. Surprising the deck did very well for me on the night I played it, I wouldn't call it powerful but the meme level of the concept let it go under the radar and get wins that it shouldn't have pulled off on power level alone. A classic case of the underestimated deck going better than the power deck in a pod.
BONUS: Precon makeover
Kaldheim (like Commander Legends and Zendikar before it) came with 2 preconstructed commander decks. I've previously compared the other decks in a video so this time around I thought I would do a makeover (make some minor alterations/improvements and then test out the deck). Of the 2 Lathril as Golgari Elf tribal is simpler and arguably the stronger out of the box and the easier to makeover (just add in more good elves) so of course ... I chose the other option - Ranar an Azorius deck with a bit of a split personality, part Foretell deck, part flicker deck.
The deck box showing off Ranar and the changes I made to the deck. The easiest option for improving Ranar is to switch things around entirely scrapping most of the Foretell and leaning into the flicker engine by switching commanders to Brago (who is already in the maindeck of the precon). But that didn't interest me, there are plenty of good Azorius blink decks out the and Brago is a proven commander so instead I leant into the Foretell option. I chose to only use cards from Kaldheim and added in 7 more foretell spells (the best options available), Alrund who has foretell synergy and the UW pathway to slightly improve the mana base.
The deck was inconsistent, sometimes strong and sometimes mediocre and unfortunately the times when the deck was at it's best always related to the blink package with foretell never being consistent enough (in 1 game I only draw 2 foretell cards the entire time). There were 5 foretell cards that I didn't consider strong enough to add to the deck but even if I had that would still only be 23 foretell cards in total + Ethereal Valkyrie a solid creature unique to the precon that let's you foretell with non-foretell cards and that's less that 1 in 4 cards (just not enough to build an EDH deck around).
For reference these were the 5 foretell cards that didn't make the cut, Effigy is pure vanilla, Raven and Guardian are french vanilla (vanilla + 1 standard keyword), Shepherd is actually quite strong in the right situation but the deck has very few cmc 2 or less permanents to return and Kaya's Onslaught is a nice combat trick for an aggressive commander (especially one trying to win with commander damage) but this deck is a grindy midrange control deck.
Overall I don't think there's enough Foretell to make a 2 colour deck around it work and even though a 3 colour foretell deck might be possible there's no commander for it and the pay off probably isn't high enough. A better option might be to use Vega, the Watcher (an uncommon legend from Kaldheim also included in the precon) as the commander because they can gain advantage from foretell and also from many other alternative location casting - like Flashback and Suspend which could easily be enough to fill out most of an EDH deck without resorting to questionable options.
Thanks as always for reading, I hope you enjoyed the article and there should be a follow up with more deck ideas sometime in the next few days, please share any feedback or questions that you have here or on any of the TabletopLG social media.