(Thought ReflectionThought Reflection | Art by Chris Seaman)

Start Your Card Draw Engines!

Welcome back to The Monolith, the series in which I try to convince the world to put down their multicolored obsessions and pick just a single color to build around for their next deck.

What better way to do that than to entice you with FOMO as we check out one of the freshly spoiled commanders, Vnwxt, from Magic's next Standard legal set, Aetherdrift.

VnwxtVnwxt is brand new legendary hitting sleeves in Magic's latest set that'll cost you for a 0/4 Homunculus. From the get-go, Vnwxt provides the benefit of removing your maximum hand size for as long as it's on the battlefield.

But on top of that, this slick cyclopean boasts one of the brand new mechanics in the Aetherdrift repertoire. Start Your Engines! is a, for my part rather corny, new ability popping up on Aetherdrift cards that gives you another new thing to track in Commander games: your speed.

Speed starts at one whenever you play your first Start Your Engines! card and will increase only once on each of your turns whenever an opponent loses one or more life.

Doesn't matter how, you could hit them with a creature, you could burn them with a spell, they could tap one of their pain landspain lands for colored mana. As long as it happens on your turn.

Once you hit a speed of four, you've reached 'max speed' which will usually unlock a further ability on those cards. In the case of our spotlight commander today, we'll unlock the ability, 'whenever you would draw a card, draw two cards instead'. Wait... is this a Thought ReflectionThought Reflection in the command zone??

What If Vnwxt Drew Our Entire Deck?

Vnwxt seems like the perfect leader for a deck that plays into one of my favorite mono-blue deck archetypes, "What if I drew my entire deck?".

There is simply nothing funnier to me in a game of Commander than when you put your hand face down in a pile next to your deck and it's genuinely difficult for someone to tell which is which.

In mono-blue decks it's easy to lean into Control archetypes full of counter spells, bounces and cards that make your opponents groancards that make your opponents groan.

To mix things up, I recommend taking a page out of mono-green's strategy book and turning this big eyed pipsqueak and his gang of bookworms into a good old fashioned beat down deck.

Our main objective for each game is to slap down a creature or equipment whose power reflects the overwhelming amount of cards in our hand and then swinging in for big damage. We'll be able to take advantage of blue's natural evasion to get around blockers and maybe even take out our opponents in a single blow. All the while, we'll have half our deck at our disposal to answer our opponent's attempts to halt us.

Revving Up

But first, we need to get our hand full and the easiest way to kick that off is using our commander's max speed ability.

As I referenced earlier, Thought ReflectionThought Reflection is a very powerful card that allows you to double all your card draw. The downside of the card is that it costs a whopping seven mana for an enchantment that effectively does nothing when you play it.

By stapling that effect onto a two mana commander, we can do some serious shenanigans. But we have to jump through this 'max speed' hoop first. Luckily, we can get to our second gear right away on turn two by utilising some cheap flying creatures from our blue card pool.

Spectral SailorSpectral Sailor is a perfect example of a flying creature that we can flash in our opponent's end step and then force a loss of life after playing Vnwxt on turn two. But there's plenty of other options to perform a little chip damage.

Once we've hit max speed, that's it. It's effectively an emblem that can't be taken away from us, like the City's BlessingCity's Blessing. So don't worry about Vnwxt getting targeted, bringing him out for a second time will still see your double card draw active. Not to mention he's so lovely and cheap, too!

Filling Your Hand, and Keeping it Full

There is one thing you should be wary of when building this deck, and that's being too reliant on your commander's clause to break your maximum hand size.

Having an opponent destroy Vnwxt right as you transition to your end step could see you discarding an upsetting amount of cards. For that reason we should try and keep a good selection of cards in the deck that give us an alternative way to expand our hand size.

Our deck will need a big hand size to perform properly so anything that helps us keep it big without Vnwxt's help will give us security and stop any nasty surprises.

Reliquary TowerReliquary Tower provides a perfect way to do this as our mono-blue identity means we won't be struggling for color in our mana and it's safe from any board wipes that target creatures and artifacts.

Most importantly though, we need to draw a ton of cards to get this deck moving. Vnwxt's card draw doubling effect is super powerful when it's online but we can go even further by adding more replacement effects on top.

We already spoke about Thought ReflectionThought Reflection, and if you can afford to get one out then it combining with Vnwxt to turn every card you draw into four cards will absolutely do some work. You can get the same effect for a little cheaper by asking our good friend Teferi instead though. It just won't trigger on your draw step.

Much like with hand size breakers, it's good to have a few of these in the deck to either buff your commander's effect, or replace it when he's not around.

The Backup Plan

It's pretty obvious how to win with a deck like this. Once you've got a couple of huge creatures at your disposal, artificially inflated by your giant hand size, all you need to do is connect with an opponent to finish them off.

Pick on the player with no flyers to block yours, or make your commander unblockable with an Escape TunnelEscape Tunnel then equip the Hand of VecnaHand of Vecna and deal some lethal commander damage.

But if dealing damage the normal way is proving too tricky, for whatever reason, we might need a few backup options to close out our games.

Flood the Board

If tall doesn't work out for you, we can always go wide instead. Chasm SkulkerChasm Skulker will meet us in the middle by getting bigger every time we draw, but also exploding into a pile of potentially-unblockable squids if it ever gets destroyed.

Nadir KrakenNadir Kraken will give the same effect as the card draw occurs instead, but for a cost. And if you don't mind spreading your card draw across your opponent's turns you can utilize my favorite new stupid card from Foundations:

Ping 'Em Down

Who says mono-red has to have all the direct damage fun? Whilst you can expect it to act as a lightning rod for every removal spell in the 99 of your opponents' decks, Psychosis Crawler will massively punish their life totals for as long as it stays on the board.

Empty The Tank

If those pesky opponents continue to refuse you wins by damage alone then it's time to start bringing out some alternative win conditions instead. When you draw as many cards as we're planning to in this build, two very niche cards (and one very overused one) become seriously dangerous wincons for you.

It'd be foolish not have at least one of these options available to you in your 99, and you can probably get away with just one or two as you'll likely get your entire deck in hand anyway.

Just be warned that ThoracleThoracle is widely considered to be a very boring way to end a game of Commander, by myself included. Especially if your opponents are used to CEDH.

It just doesn't feel quite as earned when you already have a big mono blue board providing plenty of Devotion!

Whilst we're chatting about intentionally emptying our own library, it's worth pointing out that it's a very easy way to get milled to death. I'd recommend having a safety piece out to protect you in case your wincon gets cleared before the final card is drawn.

Some Useful Tools

So we have a strategy, and a few ways to still win the game if it doesn't go well. But there's still plenty of tricks we can hold up our sleeves to smooth the game in our favor.

If you're struggling to find key pieces to push you over the finish line, there's no better color to card select with than blue. Descendant of Soramaro allows you to rearrange the top X cards of your library where X is your hand size.

When your hand starts to get as big as (or bigger!) than your library, this effectively turns into an infinitely repeatable, instant speed, two mana tutor. Great to find a CounterspellCounterspell or Jace that's hiding at the bottom of your deck.

If you've had to abandon your combat damage strategy for whatever reason, maybe your opponent has a board as big as yours or they're able to prevent incoming damage, you can neutralize everyone else's creatures with this weird old tech.

This is definitely a nonbo in most situations though. Careful it doesn't eat up room in your hand. Use Oboro EnvoyOboro Envoy instead for a more targeted version.

If there's one constant in Commander, it's games that take way too long. How many matches have you been in that have outstayed their welcome? You can make your deck more survivable by adding a little life gain to your upkeep with Ivory Tower.

Go Forth and Draw!

What do you think, is having a hand so big you can barely hold it worth the effort? If nothing else it's a hell of a good time. I'm seriously tempted to swap this guy in as the new commander of my current mono-blue deck with the same strategy. Currently fronted by big Jin:

Let me know in the comments how you'd build around Vnwxt's crazy card draw. And most importantly, keep building those mono decks, and we'll see you next week for more of The Monolith.

Michael 'Wheels' Whelan

Wheels is a lover of all things cardboard from Brighton & Hove in the UK. As well as playing card games of all flavours multiple times a week he's also deeply invested in board games, wargames, and RPGs. In fact, he even designs his own tabletop games from self published TTRPGs like, The House Doesn't Always Win to published wargames like, FREAKZ! Mutant Murder Machines. Wheels is a big advocate for wacky deckbuilding and is an evangelist for more commander players building mono-coloured decks. He talks about all this and more on his YouTube and TikTok channel, Just For Fun!