Wall of BlossomsWall of Blossoms | art by Heather Hudson

Who Else Loves Drawing a Card?

Well, hello, EDHREC! I’m Ciel. I love spreadsheet and spreadsheet accessories, and I like finding pleasing symmetries and histories in Magic: The Gathering. This is technically the ninth in my Dueling Deck Tech series (the first of which can be found here under the original name).

Magic has had 30 years to not only come up with a whole host of different and interesting themes to build a deck around but also develop them into something you can play with in all five colors.

The trouble with five color decks is that then you have too many other options to run, and the fun theme can get squeezed out. My solution: two decks!

I’ll discuss the theme, what value each color adds to it, the core colors of the theme, and then suggest a pair of commanders which each use at least one of the core colors but bring other spices to the table.

Core colors, for the record, will be determined by total number of decks in a given color with that theme under EDHREC. There will be some consideration given to the monocolor, two-color, and three-color categories.

This entry? Cantrips!

Why Play Cantrips?

Cantrips were an interesting solution to a problem Magic designers faced: some effects were worth mana, but not a card. How to fix this? Staple the line “draw a card” onto it. It wasn’t card advantage, as you didn’t actually go up in number. This has happened mostly with instants and sorceries, as creatures can innately be a wincon.

As time has gone on, however, there are certain ways to leverage cantrips. Magic has produced a few different ways to copy effects, care about drawing cards, or care about casting a lot of spells. These can turbocharge simple one- or two-mana spells, and you can go off pretty hard.

Cantrips are a fairly versatile archetype that can reward a player who is going deep. I want to distinguish it from the wheels archetype, card draw archetype, and Spellslinger archetypes although they have some synergies and overlaps.

Wheel decks, like cantrips, are about casting a specific category of card (but even more pigeonholed, as wheel cards almost exclusively exist in blue and red)— they use similar payoffs, but wheels are more like combo decks in how quickly and consistently they can pop off.

The card draw archetype and cantrip decks will use similar payoffs, but card draw can use a whole variety of other spells and abilities to get their engines going.

Finally, Spellslinger is well-established as needing a high density of instants and sorceries and being able to use the whole slew, not just the cantrips. Once again, just laying groundwork!

A fun bonus is that most cantrips are very cheap cards, so these get to be fairly budget-conscious.

What Colors Have the Most Cantrips?

Cantrips are another oddball case. This refers to a mechanic within Magic (a spell with the rules text “draw a card”), and not something that gets a recurring hook or draft archetype like spellslinger or graveyard.

The closest we get is the “whenever you draw your second card” archetype which started up in Modern Horizons 1. It has been a draft archetype four times, in fact.

Modern Horizons: red-blue

Throne of Eldraine: red-blue

Dominaria United: blue-black

The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth: White-Blue

…Overwhelmingly apparent that blue is the core color. Being the color of card draw, this is obvious. A lot of its cantrips feature something at a premium in these types of decks: card-smoothing in the form of surveil and scry. It has a lot of great payoffs for it.

Red is second in the “draw two” archetype, and a big source of its strength in that is Thrill of PossibilityThrill of Possibility. Being able to trigger all your Draw 2 permanents on an opponents’ turn is pretty sweet.

This category of card is solid in cantrip-style decks, though we’ll be focusing on red’s actual cantrips. These tend towards aggression, as expected.

For the pure cantrip experience in Izzet, look no further than Niv-Mizzet, ParunNiv-Mizzet, Parun. He turns most of your cantrips into card advantage and makes every card drawn into damage.

Going beyond that, however…

What Does Each Color Offer?

White has gotten the classic cantrips (spells worth a mana but not a card), but it also has a powerful version of the mechanic: cantrip creatures.

White lacks strong payoffs for the cantrip deck, but not enablers. There are also auras which cantrip. A focused white deck may turn those cantrip creatures into card advantage with a lot of flickering effects.

Weirdly, green is next in line for cantrips. I’m partially chalking this up to the need for combat tricks that are playable, but it works out the same for us.

Like white, it gets creature cantrips, although more are at higher mana values lately. Green does have a few small payoffs for cantripping, thanks to its presence in sets with investigate and other oddball ideas.

Black is the last in line for cantrips. I’m not going to seriously mark Sheoldred, the ApocalypseSheoldred, the Apocalypse as a cantrip payoff, but I’m not not doing that. In addition to the baseline cantrip effects, black also has cantrip creatures.

Black’s spell cantrips tend to fiddle with the graveyard, helping to synergize with its cantrip creatures. This is good, because black the fewest cantrips overall, and will need to rely on a few cards that aren’t strictly cantrips but look a lot like them.

Alright, we have the makings of a pair of decks here. Every color can offer at least a handful of solid cantrips, if not some payoffs for cantripping through the game. As usual, we’ll be keeping blue and red separate and seeing what shakes loose:

Azorius and Jund: The Council of FourThe Council of Four versus Henzie "Toolbox" TorreHenzie "Toolbox" Torre

Dimir and Naya: Lord of the NazgûlLord of the Nazgûl versus Rocco, Street ChefRocco, Street Chef

Rakdos and Bant: Tor Wauki the YoungerTor Wauki the Younger versus Ms. BumbleflowerMs. Bumbleflower

Gruul and Esper: The Howling AbominationThe Howling Abomination versus Queza, Augur of AgoniesQueza, Augur of Agonies

Boros and Sultai: Feather, the RedeemedFeather, the Redeemed versus Zimone and DinaZimone and Dina

Simic and Mardu: Ivy, Gleeful SpellthiefIvy, Gleeful Spellthief versus Queen MarchesaQueen Marchesa

Not all of these are created equal— some of them are the most serviceable for the archetype at time of writing, but most of them should be fun all the same.

We want to prioritize commanders who provide an output, as cantrips are found in every color aplenty. That strikes out most of these, actually. I ultimately settled up with…

Let’s see how these decks play out!

Overview of The Howling Abomination

So, The Howling AbominationThe Howling Abomination is a hasty 5/5 for 5 who has trample if you’ve cast three spells. It also gets bigger and shocks each opponent whenever it becomes the target of a spell.

A major feature of cantrips is that they are cheap and a lot of them target a creature, meaning we can use cantrips to enable that second ability to go off a lot in one turn. Our deck has fifteen cantrips, in fact.

If untap with our commander and manage to chain off five or six cantrips, someone is probably dead. We’re not living in magical Christmasland, however, so we need to make sure to consistently protect our commander.

Hilariously, if an opponent turns spot removal on our commander and we save it with one of these, we’ll also end up dealing 4 damage to the table.

This is a mana-hungry deck, so we’ll need ways to get our mana going. Per our previous cantrip deep dive and a 5-mana commander, we’re already running On the TrailOn the Trail and the usual 3-mana spells like CultivateCultivate.

Beyond that, though, we get some interesting ones… A few angles to look at is that our deck has 37 instants and sorceries and 32 red cards (24 with mana value two or more).

Cantrips aren’t actually card advantage, dear readers. Remember that. When our commander is on the battlefield, they’ll help us churn through our deck and activate our win condition, but they don’t actually put us up on cards.

We’ll need actual card draw spells or cards which can turn our cantrip spells into card advantage, like the aforementioned Zada, Hedron GrinderZada, Hedron Grinder.

Okay, these are all ways to really set up our main gameplan, now let’s lay down some payoffs. The Howling AbominationThe Howling Abomination does noncreature damage with every spell cast on it, and that’s red’s purview. If we can get other creatures down with a similar effect, that damage will build up quick.

Finally, these cantrips help make our deck function, but we have to respect what the commander itself is trying to do: pump up enormous and crash in. These last little trinkets will make sure that plan gets turbocharged.

This is obviously the aggressive version of cantrips, possibly the most aggressive that cantrips can even be.

Now let’s see how the other side lives…

Overview of Queza, Augur of Agonies

Queza, Augur of AgoniesQueza, Augur of Agonies has a much simpler textbox— any time you draw a card, she drains an opponent for one. There’s a lot of hooks here, actually. Cantrips are a consistent way to trigger the main ability.

Black has ways to magnify the life drain effect. Life gain rewards can be found in primarily white or black. Heck, Queza’s ability targets opponents, which means she commits crimes constantly.

I fit 19 cantrips in the deck, incidentally. To keep the deck feeling different from our red-green component, I chose to leverage creatures a bit more. There’s something entertaining about making Gruul the spellslinger and Esper the creature color as well. Mix it up!

Queza innately struggles compared to The Howling Abomination. Strictly speaking, the big beefy monster deals 6 times as much damage with each cantrip (2 damage to everyone instead of 1 targeted damage). We have to use some slots in the 99 to help shore this up where we can.

Along the way, we need to turn that card draw into genuine effects. A lot of this will mean tokens, which reinforces the light creature strategy at work here.

I repeat myself: cantrips are not card draw. We need card advantage, whether through actual spells or by effects which make our cantrips into advantage.

Alright, the game drags on. Queza is pinging steadily, but you’ve burned through ten of the cantrips. You’ve got a nice team going, maybe an Enduring TenacityEnduring Tenacity, but it’s not quite there yet. What’s going to juice up our hand?

What if we took our big graveyard full of juicy cantrips and slipped them back into our deck? Incidentally, there were two wheels that snuck into the deck on the basis of shuffling our graveyard back into the library for this purpose.

Now we’re at the endgame. There’s a fun quirk to Queza. Her ability says that when you draw a card, you gain 1 life. There are some cards that draw you a card when you gain life. If you have both on the battlefield, you will immediately enter a loop.

Be careful about how many cards are in your deck. Learn from the PastLearn from the Past being instant-speed will give you another blast through the deck, but either way you’re getting ready to shuffle up after dropping these:

Obviously, be wary of including these based on your playgroup. There are several solid “draw your second card” or even “commit a crime” rewards that would work in their place. Here’s the full list:

And that’s it! A much grindier, controlling list to go up against the aggressive predecessor.

So, what do we think? Cantrips are a staple of Magic set design, with a new one or three coming out every draft environment. They can be easy to gloss over due to this, but I love how Commander can even find a home for these types of spells.

Which one would you want to run? Do you have your own cantrip commander deck? Let me know! Until next time, may you enjoy Magic’s objective most fun action: drawing a card.