(Flubs, the Fool | Adam Rex)

Who Are You Calling a Fool?

Bloomburrow is filled with one thing above all else: cute little critters. There is possibly no card in the set that embodies this more than Flubs, the Fool. At first glance, I thought I knew all there was to know about our adorable Frog Scout friend. This could not be further from the truth. Flubs might be one of the most exciting and surprisingly strong commanders from the entire set. With over 1,500 decks in the database, Flubs is many things; a fool they are not. So what do you do when Flubs comes to you? Draw cards and play lands—two of the best things in all of Magic.

Land Ho!

Starting at the top of the card, Flubs gives us greatness in the form of colored pips: . Call it Temur, call it RUG, or even call it Ketria. For a land deck, I call it perfection. One of the many rules in Magic is that each player may play only one land a turn. I say FLUB that!

These three creatures and our froggy friend let us play more lands on every turn. We want to play every land possible on every turn, considering we have 40 in our deck. But creatures are not the only way we can take advantage of this.

Enchantments, sorceries, and even artifacts jump on the train to power this deck down the tracks. With thirteen individual effects that can either put an extra land from our hand onto the battlefield or give us another land drop on our turn, playing something like five lands a turn is a very common scenario for a pilot of this deck. But how are we playing all these extra lands? To take advantage of our froggy friend throwing cards in the trash.

Which Card Discard?

Whenever you play land or cast a spell Flubs, the Fool lets you do one of two things. If you're empty-handed, you can draw a card. If not, you must discard a card. For most other instances in the game, you would always want to maximize the ability to draw cards, especially if it comes from your commander. The more cards you have, the better chance you have to win the game, but more importantly, the more cool cards you get to show off to the table. But this is why we're playing The Fool. I want to throw all these cards away for value.

Glint-Horn Buccaneer is one of the best ways in a discard deck to chip away at the table and even steal a win in the late game. Surly Badgersaur allows us to pick and choose the type of value we want based on what we discard. Null Brooch is a strange card based on name and a hilarious way to stop a spell you don't want to resolve. Many players are familiar with the card Anger, but did you know it's part of a cycle? Well, I Wonder if you can guess what the blue creature might be. Don't worry about Flubs making you throw away lands. That's a key part of our strategy.

Reduce, Reuse...Recycle.

The most difficult part of playing a deck led by Flubs is having no cards in hand to draw a card. One of the best things that we can do is play cards that allow us to constantly draw cards and take advantage of always discarding something to his ability. The first card everyone added to this deck was Song of Creation. And while this song is topping the charts, a card from times long past might finally get a chance to shine.

This card is played in a minuscule number of decks, and for good reason: it makes you skip your draw step. So it must be bad, right? No, this might be one of the best cards in the deck. It functions as a backup for the commander once the table realizes what we're here to do.

Why Are We Doing All This?

So, we still have to find a way or two to win the game and not just spin our wheels. Between Scute Swarm, Field of the Dead, and Springheart Nantuko, we can go wide enough to get a win by going to combat. If we want to maximize our win percentage and "get sweaty," as the kids say, we can use the alternate win abilities on Thassa's Oracle and Jace, Wielder of Mysteries once we have no cards left in the deck. But my favorite way to win is by using a combination of these cards:

Anyone who has played a land-based deck or played against one should be familiar with the brutal effectiveness that the above cards can knock out your opponents.

Deck List

And dear reader, there lies the problem. Selfishly, I hoped that Bria, Riptide Rogue would be the most popular card from the set when crafting my list for Flubs. Then suddenly, a storm rolled in and shocked me out of my lamenting state. Specifically a Lightning Storm.

Memory Lane

The more I thought about Flubs, the Fool, the more something dug its way out of the far reaches of my mind. A day of the Modern format long passed by, and the alternate win condition used in Ad Nauseam decks. I have died to the card Lightning Storm (by the person who taught me how to play this fantastic game) more times than I can count. While we cannot run the namesake card that made the Modern deck and makes many a deck in other formats function, we can see if we can maximize the storm.

Two in the Hand

So, how do we get the crucial lands into our hand to pitch to the storm when our Frog is throwing everything into the graveyard? Surprisingly, there are a fair number of ways.

Trade Routes and Creeping Renaissance are the most effective ways to return lands to our hand, whether in the yard or on the battlefield. Nostalgic Dreams, Wildest Dreams, and Pair o' Dice Lost are a bit more restrictive but will still get the job done. Finally, a card only the most deeply ingrained players have heard of, Barrel Down Sokenzan, actually makes use of one of the single worst mechanics of all time, Sweep.

More Mana, Less Problems

This deck is hungry - mana hungry. We need a lot of mana to cast large -cost spells and spells with large mana requirements, like Praetor's Counsel. I attacked this problem in two ways. First, the classic card Mana Geyser. There's not often a card that every player forgets about with an inverse relationship to the amount of people playing it. I have never seen this card net less than seven red mana when cast. The second is basic lands. With a whopping 43 lands, I squeezed 15 basic lands into this three-color deck. And some builds could fit in even more. But why run so many basic lands?

Virtue of Strength turns our mana production into overdrive, and Rites of Spring lets us discard cards for value and stack our deck for a consistent string of land drops.

Something Old and Something New

These decks are similar in the core group of cards and strategy. But some key cards bring a certain charm to my bonus deck. Seismic Assault is another way to maximize having land in our hand. Firestorm can be another way to finish a game. Ignorant Bliss can stash some cards when we want to draw, but also like everything we hold. Mind Over Matter is a powerful card often used in high-powered mono-blue decks, and Storm Cauldron might, unfortunately, make people leave the table before the game is over, so cast with caution.

Deck List

One Last Thing

The final thing about Flubs, the Fool is that Gustha's Scepter, a card in both decks, is a powerhouse and should be the first or second card added to Flubs decks after Song of Creation. What started as me making a simple lands deck in colors led me to brainstorm two complete decks, collaborate with other EDHREC and Commander's Herald writers, and hopefully bring you something that makes you stop and say "that is so cool."

If so, please check out my series, Myth Realized, for more of my thoughts on Magic cards or anything else I have written and found on EDHREC.