Ultimecia, Time SorceressUltimecia, Time Sorceress | Art by Mikio Masuda

Five-mana Dimir legend, surveils two when it enters and attacks, yeah yeah, whatever. It has a transform cost for eight mana that you can activate if you exile eight cards from your graveyard. Is there anything interesting that this card does? What's the backside? 7/7, menace, ok cool. TAKE AN EXTRA TURN?! What the heck is this? Never before has it been possible to take an extra turn in pEDH (or Pauper Commander), as there's never been a common or uncommon card with that effect. But with the arrival of Final Fantasy, we've got a commander that can stretch time out for us.

Is thirteen mana and eight cards from our graveyard a good price to pay for an extra turn? Absolutely not. But come on, it's an extra turn. We've got the opportunity to do something never done before. So let's not waste any time!

Ultimecia, Time SorceressUltimecia, Time Sorceress

Ok, so what exactly are we gonna do with Ultimecia? Well, we're gonna take as many extra turns as possible. What else would we do with her? Our goal here is just to trigger her ability over and over again. Once we do that, we'll just win with the insane advantage that extra turns give.

Conveniently, I instantly spotted an easy way to retrigger Ultimecia. Even though the card is designed to only do it's thing once, if we blink it while it's transformed, it'll go back to the front face, and then all we have to do to get that extra turn is retransform it. Simple enough, and there's no shortage of cards that'll do that for us. DisplaceDisplace, Ghostly FlickerGhostly Flicker, Teferi's Time TwistTeferi's Time Twist, Siren's RuseSiren's Ruse, and a few others will do nicely. In total, we have eight cards that can be used to blink our commander, that range from the efficiency of Essence FluxEssence Flux to Skyskipper DuoSkyskipper Duo.

Now eight isn't a whole lot, and I did consider adding cards like Not Dead After AllNot Dead After Allto the mix. This is part of a trick I've used many times, and it involves casting Not Dead After AllNot Dead After All, then sacrificing the targeted creature, essentially replicating a blink effect. It basically doubles the amount of blink spells you can have in a blue-black deck, and the only cost is having to play some sacrifice outlets. But here we have enough card advantage to find our blink spells. And if not, we're running a few transmute tutors like Muddle the MixtureMuddle the Mixture.

Still, the only thing we're doing is taking extra turns for an absurd cost, so it's not like we're losing a lot if we can't do that ten times.

Fueling the Ultimecia Extra Turns Engine

The next thing to figure out is how we're gonna get eight cards into our graveyard every time we want to activate Ultimecia. I thought it wouldn't be a difficult task, but consistent mill is surprisingly difficult to find in pEDH. Our commander surveils two cards every time it enters, so all we really need to do is find six more cards. Sage's Row DenizenSage's Row Denizen would add two every time we blink our commander, and Sinister StarfishSinister Starfish or Deranged AssistantDeranged Assistant could also do some work. But the only other thing we could really rely on would be Tome ScourTome Scour or Dream TwistDream Twist, and that's pretty inefficient.

So after coming to the conclusion that I didn't really want to run a card like Pelargir SurvivorPelargir Survivor, I jumped to a solution I knew would work, even if it came with some downsides. Persistent PetitionersPersistent Petitioners are absolutely incredible at milling. Get four of them on the board, and you can mill twelve cards every single turn. That's nuts! And as a little bonus, the numbers line up so that you'd only have to activate them twice to fuel our commander for three turns. Perfect!

But about that downside I mentioned. Because Persistent PetitionersPersistent Petitioners are so reliant on each other, you need to absolutely guarantee that you're gonna find four of them every single game. Twenty-eight copies is my personal minimum. Normally, that wouldn't be a problem at all, because milling would be your primary game plan, but here, we're only using it to supplement our primary strategy of blinking our commander for extra turns. That means we're taking up a lot of space with Persistent PetitionersPersistent Petitioners that we'd rather use on blink spells, or ramp.

The upsides of the Petitioners definitely outweigh the downsides, but it means we're gonna have to really make the most out of our other 43 cards, if we're running 31 lands. Sorry, 30 cards. We're using 13 slots for blink cards and tutors for blink. I think I want to use ten of those slots for ramp, and maybe five of them for card draw like Night's WhisperNight's Whisper. Oh and another five for removal and stuff. Can't forget the important things in a deck! But that only leaves us ten cards for figuring out how to win.

How Does Ultimecia, Time Sorceress Win?

Yeah, we still have to do that. Believe it or not, taking extra turns over and over again doesn't actually win, it just annoys the heck out of our opponents. Luckily, I have a plan.

After it's transformed, our commander has seven power, a number that spells doom for our opponents in just three hits. And keep in mind that because we're taking an extra turn, our commander will be able to attack without summoning sickness. Then, we can blink it again, reactivate it, and attack on our next extra turn as well. The only thing we need to make this work is evasion, and Pauper has no shortage of spells that make a creature unblockable. These will all do the trick:

• Slip Through SpaceSlip Through Space
• Distortion StrikeDistortion Strike
• Artful DodgeArtful Dodge
• You Come to a RiverYou Come to a River

Ultimecia, Time Sorceress Pauper Commander Deck List

And with that, I think we've got a great deck. Ok, maybe great is too strong of a word. We've got a wild deck, that's for sure. It's more than capable of taking multiple extra turns in a row, cause once you have around ten mana on board, you can really get rolling. But is ten mana, four Persistent PetitionersPersistent Petitioners on board, a few blink spells, and a few unblockable spells in hand too much to ask? Yeah, totally. But who really cares? We're taking extra turns in Pauper. It's something that's never been done! We're really pioneering here.

We may be making our way to an Artic wasteland, but progress is progress.