Eluge, the Shoreless Sea | art by Antonio Jose Manzanedo

Eluge, the Shoreless Sea

Hello and welcome back to EDHighlights, the mini-series where I’ll be building decks for the year’s most popular commander for each color combination. As 2024’s set releases come to a close, I’d like to see which commanders from each color struck a chord with the Commander community.

We’ll be starting off with the monocolored commanders, and each deck in this series will have its own special twist to make it stand out just a little bit from the crowd. This series will go in order, and today we’re onto blue. This deck will be helmed by… Eluge, the Shoreless Sea!

As a self-identified nature nerd (and more relevantly, an ecological researcher), Bloomburrow is my favorite Magic set in recent memory.

Not only did I love the critter-themed cards, but I also loved drafting around kindred strategies. I was a big fan of the set Eluge released in, which makes me even more excited for this deck tech.

A flood of information on Eluge

Eluge is split between two themes, but we’ll be focusing much more heavily on one of them. First, this commander cares about the number of islands we have in play. It gets bigger for each Island we control, so we’ll look to ramp (as well as blue can) to make our commander a veritable threat.

Second, and more importantly, Eluge can reduce the colored AND colorless casting cost of our instant and sorcery spells for each land we control with a flood counter on it. This elemental fish also helps fuel that cost-reduction, by putting a flood counter on a land we control every turn.

While caring about our Islands is cool, my version of this deck will focus much more heavily on slinging spells for free.

But, I have a fundamental problem with spellslinger decks: they often lack a distinct win con. Sure, they’re able to draw a lot of cards and do a lot of impressive stuff on the stack, but it can be hard for these decks to have a consistent way to close out games. 

So, that brings us to this deck’s twist: we’ll include as many token creators as we reasonably can. This will not only provide more blockers to bolster our low creature count, but also hopefully provide a way for Eluge and co. to punch through to victory.

A token of my appreciation

There’s a good number of repeatable token creators in blue, and we’re using 10 of them. Starting with the most exciting ones, there’s Shark Typhoon, Metallurgic Summonings and Docent of Perfection. Shark Typhoon has the capacity to make huge, flying tokens and can even cycle itself in a pinch.

Metallurgic Summonings makes similarly large tokens, and can also recur all of our spells from the graveyard as the game goes on. Docent of Perfection makes smaller tokens, AND becomes a flying 6/5 in the blink of an eye.

Moving on to other exciting token creators, there’s the brand-new Stormchaser's Talent (which makes tokens with prowess and can recur our spells), Deekah, Fractal Theorist (who can make her big tokens unblockable), and Chrome Host Seedshark (which triggers on all noncreature spells).

Rounding out this section of the deck, we’ve got the ever-popular Poppet Stitcher, a great pauper card in Murmuring Mystic, and of course Talrand, Sky Summoner.

This list does also contain Whispering Wizard. This wizard only makes one token every turn, but that’s ok! Given that we’ll aim to be casting at least one spell per turn, this card should do a decent impression of Murmuring Mystic.

Ramping UP!

Eluge cares about the number of Islands we have on board, and that’s incentive enough to include a good amount of ramp in this deck.

But, in order to take full advantage of the fish’s ability, we’ll need to cast a spell every turn. To ensure that Eluge is threateningly large, and that we’re taking advantage of its abilities, we’ll be running a decent amount of ramp.

First, I’d like to talk about Displacer Kitten and Aven Courier. I can already hear you saying that “these aren’t ramp cards!” And you’d be right! In most decks, they aren’t. But, given that Eluge reduces the cost of our spells for each land we control with a flood counter on it, both of these spells do reduce the amount of mana we’ll have to spend on our spells.

Displacer Kitten can flicker Eluge after we attack, providing another enters-trigger and subsequent flood counter. Aven Courier, on the other hand, speeds up flood counter production by copying those counters.

There’s also more “traditional” ramp cards here, like Dreamscape Artist, Walking Atlas, and the new Archmage of Runes. Dreamscape Artist is a weird one, turning any card in our hand into a copy of Harrow. It’s definitely unique, and a must-include for any blue-based deck that cares about lands.

There’s also Walking Atlas, which ensures we can just keep putting lands on the field. This card is simple, yet effective. And one of my favorite cards from Foundations is here too: Archmage of Runes I was (and still am) a big fan of Archmage Emeritus, and this card is the same thing but with a big body and cost-reduction tacked on. This card also fits very well into our mana curve.

We can tap out for Eluge one turn, play the Archmage of Runes on the next turn, and have a cost reduction of 2-colored and 1-colorless on all of our future spells (while also drawing cards when we cast them)!

Shadow wizard money gang 

So, we have the backbone of the deck. There’s cards that make tokens when we cast spells and there’s cards that give us more mana to actually cast the spells, but what about the spells themselves? What are we actually casting?

Well, there are a few major categories here: cantrips, interaction, and card advantage.

I’ll start with cantrips, because it’s the most diverse category. This can be something as simple as an Opt an opponent’s turn after we already used Eluge’s cost reduction during our turn.

It can also be something a bit trickier, like a Slip Through Space to ensure our commander connects in combat. The deck contains a good quantity of each of these, because it’s really fun to cast a spell making the fish unblockable during our turn, then using the next turn’s cost reduction to draw more cards.

Next up is interaction, and the cost reduction our commander provides is super helpful here. Tapping out on our turn and then still being able to cast Cryptic Command is very strong.

There’s also expensive do-it-all spells, like Sublime Epiphany, and graveyard interaction, like Reenact the Crime, that become easier to cast with our commander on the field.

Finally, let’s talk about card advantage. Intrude on the Mind is an all-star: it makes a flying blocker/attacker and is pretty close to the classic Fact or Fiction. Sea Gate Restoration is great too, and this is probably the first deck I’ve built that actually has a chance of casting the spell-side of the card.

There’s also Archmage's Charm, which can act as interaction OR card advantage. I’m a sucker for modal spells, so this was one of the first cards I included.

Here’s the final decklist…

The sea may be endless, but this article is not

This deck has some other powerful things it can do, like JVP and High Tide or casting extra for free.

I spoke about this when I discussed Archmage of Runes but the deck feels great when you can drop a token creator the turn after playing Eluge, and rack up a huge amount of tokens by casting free spells over the next turn rotation. Given that there's a lot of four- or five-mana cost token producers, this list pulls that off with a good amount of frequency.

Did you enjoy Bloomburrow as much as I did? I think it’s one of the best sets in recent memory, and it was certainly my favorite draft environment. Let me know your thoughts on Bloomburrow, and on Eluge, in the comments!

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