Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Codie, Vociferous Codex!

Codie is a three mana 1/4 that prevents you from casting permanent spells and for four mana and tap you add a mana of every color and when you cast our next spell this turn you exile cards from the top of our library until you exile and instant or sorcery with lesser mana value and until the end of turn you may cast that card without paying its mana cost, and you put each other card exiled this way on the bottom of your library.

Spellslinger galore is Codie’s game plan, and with the extra restriction of not being able to cast permanent spells while Codie is in play is an extra challenge and wrinkle that many people have figured out.

But what if we go all in on not being able to play permanent spells, not even mana artifacts or advantage engine enchantments or creatures that provide discounts. Let’s go all in on no permanents at all, other than Codie and our lands, and see where this deck leads us.

The first thing we need is to have ways to get us mana, and since we are not having any sort of permanents in the deck, we need other ways we can ramp ourselves.

Baldur’s Gate is a path way for us to be able to get a lot of mana because it allows us to play with all the other Gates, 23 total Gates available with two of them being around ten dollars or higher and the rest being between five cents to two dollars. This also gives us the back up win condition of Maze’s End if we so choose.

We can also lean on temporary mana sources, and even though we aren’t playing permanents in the deck, we can still do things like make Treasure tokens with something like Strike It Rich, which also happens to have the benefit of having Flashback.

There are also rituals like Dark Ritual which adds three black mana, Manamorphose which adds two mana in any combination of colors while also drawing us a card, Planar Genesis to look at the top four cards of our library and puts a land from among them on the battlefield tapped or one in our hand and the rest on the bottom of our library in a random order or even Open the Gates to get a basic land or Gate into our hand.

If it’s late in the game, we even have options like Spell Swindle, which counters a spell and we make Treasure tokens equal to that spells mana value or Brass’s Bounty which makes a Treasure token for each land we control.

The next thing that we need are the spells that we are going to cast in order to get the pseudo-Cascade from Codie, which tends to mean high mana value spells.

Wake the Dragon is one such card that creates a 6/6 Dragon creature token with flying, menace and whenever it deals combat damage to a player we gain control of a target artifact that player controls, all the while having Flashback.

Treasure Cruise is a way to cast a massive draw three cards spell if we also happen to Delve away some cards in order to cast most spells in our library, like say a Time Wipe, which returns a creature we control to our hand and then destroys all creatures.

In order to make sure that we don’t fall too far behind, we can also use Blessed Respite as a way to not only shuffle the cards in our graveyard into our library, but to also prevent all combat damage that would be dealt this turn in order to survive any combats coming our way.

If we want more bodies on board, then we can also use Rise from the Tides, which makes a tapped 2/2 Zombie token for each instant and sorcery in our graveyard, Rebuild the City to create three copies of a land and then make them 3/3 creatures with vigilance and menace, and Commandeer which we can cast by exiling two blue cards rather than pay its mana cost in order to gain control of a noncreature spell that can choose new targets.

We can also take advantage of cheaper spells that can help us cast spells with low or zero mana value. We can use something like a Nature’s Claim to destroy an artifact or enchantment and turn it into us casting an Inevitable Betrayal so we can go through an opponents deck to put a creature under our control or turn a Swords to Plowshares into a Wheel of Fate to refuel our hand, or even a Cerulean Wisps to untap Codie to reuse their effect and draw a card to cast a Restore Balance to even the playing field in our favor.

The last thing we need are the big spells that will help us win the game, which can take a couple of routes.

Conflux is a way for us to tutor five cards, one representing each color, and putting all five of those cards into our hand, which is where the set up for us winning the game can get a little bit tricky since you need to find the five right cards to win the game.

For example, we do have the option for a Maze’s End win so we can get Reshape the Earth to get the Gates we need, Silence to prevent our opponents from stopping us, An Offer You Can’t Refuse just is case there is a way an opponent tries to counter us, a Dark Ritual and a Inner Fire to get the mana we need to make sure we can get the win we want.

There is a way for us to also potentially win via something like Approach of the Second Sun, which could be the white card, Waterlogged Teachings to look for it when it shuffles itself back, Act of Treason to steal an opponents massive mana value creature, Burnt Offering to sacrifice that creature to get any combination of black and/or red mana, and Autumn’s Veil to protect our spells and Codie from black or blue spells this turn.

If we want to try winning via an aggressive manner then we can do something like Insurrection to steal our opponents creatures and give them haste, Narset’s Reversal to protect ourselves from interaction, Stampede to give all creatures we control +1/+0 and trample, Dawn’s Truce to give the creatures hexproof and if we give a gift they become indestructible, and then Plunge into Darkness to sacrifice any number of creatures we control to gain to 3 life for each creature sacrificed this way.

All of these require a lot of mana to get going, but they are three lines we can take and we can use to build our deck around so we can make sure that we have access to one, two, all three, or other lines to win us the game in some convoluted way.

Codie is a way for us to cast a whole lot of spells because they can make us a bunch of mana all at once, and can let us have a way to get a Cascade type of effect through instants and/or sorceries to help us further get ahead to win the game.

The hardest part about Codie is that, at least in this particular version, we aren’t playing any permanent that will help us get to the mana that we need to start going absolutely bonkers. Since Codie is also necessary for us to get even more value from casting all of our instants and sorceries, if we don’t have ways to keep Codie in play, we are going to lose dramatically.

Codie can be a skill testing Commander in that we need to think to make sure that we have the correct lines of play in order to win us the game, all the while making sure that we don’t leave ourselves too open against our opponents that we lose the game before we have a chance to pop off.

However, if we do manage to get Codie going, then there will be little our opponents can do if we manage to sequence everything correctly while having ways to protect our spells.

Thank you for reading, see you tomorrow for the next Daily Commander!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual