Zhalfirin VoidZhalfirin Void | Chase Stone

When playing Magic, there’s a certain separation of powers across the colors you can reasonably expect to see.

If you’re playing against a black deck, you can expect them to destroy your permanents. Some of your creatures may die, but that is a sacrifice they’re willing to make. Literally. They’ll sacrifice their own permanents all the same. Discarding. Direct damage. Graveyard retrieval. Hallmarks of a black deck and something you need to prepare for when facing one.

Except, of course, if you’re following this series and are looking to do something a little different. Then you might encounter a black deck who jealously protects its permanents while never so much as committing a crime.

What Is Playing “Out Of Type”?

While each color or combination of colors in Magic has its strengths, it’s rare for a mechanic to be completely devoid from a color. Certainly, lifegain in a mono-blue deck won’t be as common as white or green. But there are certainly optionsoptions.

At its core, playing Out Of Type or “Off-Color” is actively seeking the mechanics that barely have any support and scrounging them together. Like some sort of ramshackle scavenger, greedily scraping the barrel’s bottom for nonsense.

And sometimes, fools find gold.

A Quick Disclaimer

This isn't intended to be competitively viable. It’s for EDH, not cEDH after all. Further, the theory-crafting that goes into this follows the assumption you're avoiding leaning into any of the strengths of the color you’re playing.

That isn’t to say you shouldn’t attempt to win, just that you’re actively making it more difficult for yourself. Which to some players is anathema. However, perhaps you want to reexamine your relationship with a deck archetype. Perhaps you simply want to handicap yourself to level the playing field in your pod.

Or maybe you think that white’s lifelinking, indestructible, flying token swarm which exiles your permanents isn’t fun. This, of course, is the correct answer.

No matter what your rationale behind it, put aside whatever staples you have and focus on a theme. What can you cobble together into a deck that should have never been?

What White Does Well in Magic

Staying Safe

When it comes to gaining life, white is king. Lifelink. Gaining life on enter-the-battlefield effects. Instants and sorceries with the intended effect of gaining life.

Further, many of its cards scale or gain additional bonuses when you have more life. Most colors subscribe to the mantra of “the only life that matters is the last,” but white actually cares quite a bit about staying topped off. And so it has protections to boot.

Which, to be fair, is mostly the fault of its host of Angels. Whether gaining you life directly or gaining bonuses based off of how much life you have, white’s Angels really care about keeping your life total high.

No, really. I thought white had too much lifegain even without Angels, but they don’t mess around. Aside from their lifegain, they also fly and tend to scale off of one another.

From cards that give indestructibility to stat bonuses, white really takes offense when its creatures are destroyed. It even goes so far as to hide away from the game when pressured too far, which is comical in a vacuum, yet infuriating on the field.

Neutralizing Threats

White is one of the more directly aggressive colors in Magic, only beat out by red and green. That being said, it’s quite good at neutralizing its opponents’ permanents.

The most obvious and perhaps the least bemoaned is its use of PacifismPacifism. In short, white has many different cards with the primary effect of preventing a creature from attacking or blocking. This is quite frustrating in something like a Voltron deck, where the deck revolves around making one or two superpowered creatures.

But Pacifism isn’t the problem. It doesn’t prevent passive or active abilities and it can only affect creatures. The disrespect arrives when the White player upgrades.

Exiling

Then, of course, there’s white's propensity to simply remove things it finds undesirable. Blue returns permanents to your hand while black takes a more permanent solution. White, meanwhile, simply removes them from the game.

With a verified arsenal of enchantments designed entirely around exiling permanents, there are few things white can’t effectively deal with. Coupled with the protections mentioned earlier, white is a necessary color for any deck that wants to bolster its defenses.

But What If…

… You Play a White Deck With a Scorched Earth Policy?

Much like how the opposite of black’s fast-and-loose grasp of its permanents is to hold them close, white’s opposite is to do exactly that. Your life is a suggestion. Your hand is meaningless. Permanents are anything but.

It is time to invent Sui White.

Alabaster Host Time

I would be remiss if I didn’t immediately address that the white-aligned Phyrexian faction is perhaps the least similar to its traditional strengths. While it still involves quite a large amount of token generation and martial supremacy, the Alabaster Host focuses on toxic Mites and Incubator tokens*

Despite the fact that Mite or Incubator creation is somewhat aligned with white’s regular strategies, poison tokens are a far cry from “archetypal white.” Artifacts growing over time feels more like a Gruul (red-green) archetype than a white one.

Which, thematically, actually fits quite well for a compleated color.

Allow yourself to suffer the sin of token generation in order to assign those poison counters your opponents so desperately deserve.

Removal

While it’s quite established for a white deck to exile or remove threats it doesn’t want to deal with, properly executing them isn’t really in its wheelhouse. Therefore, this should be one of the first things we look into incorporating into an off-white deck.

Perhaps it’s because I dug too deep or because I misjudged how much removal white really has, but here’s quite the list!

While there are varying levels of permanency and flexibility, broadly speaking there’s a range of options available to you. You can focus on enchantment, artifact, or creature removal equally well, without relying on the “exile a permanent” enchantments white is so well-known for.

Though it should be noted that most of these options are more expensive or less flexible than other colors’ counterparts. Again, these aren’t ideal mechanics to build a white deck around, but that’s why it’s Commander Unoptimized!

Sacrifice

Unfortunately for us, self-sacrifice is an extremely “traditionally good” thing to do. That means that thematically, it doesn’t quite align without off-white ideals. However, white doesn’t mechanically engage in self-sacrifice often enough for this to be an issue.

Therefore, allow yourself to cache in on some good ol’ fashioned flagellation! Whether self-inflicted damage, discarding, or sacrificing permanents, all are fair game!

Scorched Earth

Single-target removal simply isn’t enough. Sometimes you need to remove everything, whether permanents or opponents. And that’s why white can share the pain, much in the same way it refuses to share lifegain.

Cards such as Ankh of MishraAnkh of Mishra spread pain and give you pinging direct damage. But anyone who has fought a white deck knows its propensity for board wipes.

This is where we run into an issue. If board wipes are so associated with white, is it not counterintuitive to include them?

I challenge this by drawing attention to our complete lack of protection. If you read the above cards, they don’t discriminate between friend and foe. And without white’s built-in safety net of indestructibility, these are legitimate threats that will affect you as well.

Exactly as off-white intended.

To Push It Further

In a similar vein, there are certain effects that have a nested synergy with white but deviate from the norm in key aspects. Are these off-limits?

Not always. Take Suture PriestSuture Priest. This gives you life which, gross, lifegain in a white deck! But it also damages opponents for playing creatures, which is exactly the sort of direct-damage taxing that is just odd enough to work.

In a situation like this, the fact it’s a “may” effect means you can set your own difficulty. It's entirely reasonable to take the healing from Suture PriestSuture Priest. Even if you’re avoiding lifegain overall, you’re including it for the damage, so you might as well benefit from it.

But if you really wanted to play off-color? Ignore those healing effects. Life is gross and you want nothing to do with it. The only life that matters is the last and anything else is fluff that needs to be trimmed.

And even then, who needs life? Phyrexian UnlifePhyrexian Unlife is much more on-theme.