Commander Deck of the Week: Izzet Wyll, Blade of Frontiers

I built a deck around Wyll, Blade of Frontiers this summer after Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate came out. As a long-time fan of Dungeons & Dragons, I was excited about all the dice-rolling cards from Baldur’s Gate and last year’s Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, and wanted to find a home for a lot of the cards. Wyll seemed like a great commander for it, and it quickly became clear that I should pick a blue background to accommodate a bunch of other dice-rolling cards. I eventually settled on Shameless Charlatan.

The concept is: keep adding +1/+1 counters to Wyll, and once there’s a good creature on the battlefield that has a large body, evasion, and ideally some other sweet ability, cast Shameless Charlatan and have Wyll become a copy of that creature.  Only bigger, because of all the +1/+1 counters!  It’s important to note that Wyll won’t pick up any more +1/+1 counters while he’s a copy, though he’ll retain the ability to copy another creature if a better creature shows up later.  What I particularly like about this plan is that it scales nicely with what your opponents are doing; if they’re playing busted huge creatures, we can copy one of them, but if they’re playing medium-power creatures, we can copy the best of them.

Okay, let’s dive in!

Dice-Rolling Creatures

As a dice-rolling deck, I want to have a lot of dice-rolling effects, and a bunch of creatures do it for us. Delina, Wild Mage is one of the best, especially with cards that let you roll extra dice and pick the best for the result, potentially letting Delina copy a bunch of times on attack.  I was fortunate enough to open an Ancient Copper Dragon in a Set Booster, so I’ve got it and the blue Ancient Silver Dragon in the deck for the big d20 rolling effect.

The other creatures are definitely sub-par for Commander, but I think I need them to pad out the number of dice-rolling effects. But if I must make cuts to squeeze in some other cards, they can go on the chopping block.

Dice-Rolling Artifacts

I was pleased to see Unfinity brought a couple of solid new additions to the dice-rolling club!  I love that Clown Car lets you roll multiple dice at once and scales as the game goes on, hopefully netting you some 1/1 token creatures and a Vehicle of medium size.  Celebr-8000 is cool too, though with Wyll on the battlefield, you won’t often roll a 1 to add a +1/+1 counter to it.  Wyll could very easily tip the scales on Strength-Testing Hammer as the highest-power creature on the battlefield to net us an extra card.

Wand of Wonder’s chaos magic makes each activation a fun spin of randomness to see what nifty instant or sorcery we might find in each opponent’s library. And Wyll makes it pretty likely that your activation of Treasure Chest should net something awesome and not the dreaded trap!