Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Momir Vig, Simic Visionary!

Momir Vig is a five mana 2/2 that whenever you cast a green creature spell you search your library for a creature spell, reveal it, and if you do then you shuffle your library and put that card on top of it and whenever you play a blue creature spell you reveal the top card of your library and if it’s a creature card, then you put that card into your hand.

Game Plan

The idea of Momir Vig is that you play creature spells that are both blue and green in order to get both effects so you can tutor for whatever creature you want and put it into your hand.

There are quite a few hoops to jump through, but this is an interesting way to play a creature toolbox deck, meaning that this deck is full of a lot of creatures that provide some sort of utility, whether that be resource accumulation or removal, and our goal as a deck is to have ways we can get them into play to gather the resources we need to win.

Support

Cheap creatures that are both blue and green that provide some utility are actually not that hard to come by.

Tam, Mindful First-Year is a solid way for us to keep Momir Vig protected because they give each other creature we control hexproof from each of its colors and can tap to give target creature we control all colors until end of turn, which can be a great way to blank a kill spell for a turn.

Maraleaf Pixie is a mana dork that can add green or blue mana and Gyre Engineer can add both blue and green mana, which can be really effective in not only triggering Momir Vig, but also helping us make sure we get our colors out in time because we do have some color pip heavy creatures.

Creatures like Frilled Mystic and Mystic Snake, flash creatures that also act as counter spells that happen to be color pip heavy, but since they can be cast on our opponents turns, this gives us the opportunity to tutor for a creature we need as soon as we can.

Speaking of, while our deck is mostly creatures, having ways to cast our creatures with flash can help give us the opportunity to further get what we need when we need it, so cards like Leyline of Anticipation or Radagast of Rhosgobel can be very useful.

We can also cheat our creatures in as we need with something like Rashmi, Eternities Crafter, which makes it so that whenever we cast our first spell each turn we reveal the top card of our library and we may cast it without paying its mana cost if it’s a spell with lesser mana value and of we can’t then we put it into our hand.

Again, this allows us to tune the deck as we need to give use the answers that we need, at the time that we need it.

Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath for life gain, card draw, and ramp, Malanthrope for graveyard removal, Trygon Predator for artifact and enchantment removal, and even Biovisionary and Clone creatures to give a cheeky win condition and so many more options.

Setbacks

There are plenty of things that do hold this deck back.

First, being the most apparent, is that Momir Vig is a five mana Commander that has very specific requirements to fulfill their effect and has not protection. It can be very slow to get the deck going at a reasonable rate, even with creatures that ramp us, especially since a Shock can kill Momir Vig if we don’t have a way to protect him.

The next thing is that, as I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of mana pip heavy utility creatures that we need a lot of mana sources to fuel the effects that we want. While not many green based decks play mana rocks because of their access to ramp spells and mana dorks, this deck may work effectively with mana rocks to guarantee you have the colors you need to cast what you need.

This brings up the concern with the ratio for how many creature spells are in the deck versus noncreature spells. While a lot of your answers are going to be creatures, you still need noncreature spells for some other effects or redundancy.

There is also the physical issue with this deck, in that you will likely be shuffling this deck fairly often and that can be time consuming and tiresome if you plan of using Momir Vig’s effect often, especially if you are playing very specific answers against certain cards.

One other major issue is that while this deck has a lot of answers, it doesn’t have a lot of proactive ways to win. I mentioned Biovisionary as a cheeky way to win, primarily because there are not many other ways this deck can win.

Simic Ascendency plays in a similar space, though if you want to use that deck you will need ways to get +1/+1 counters on your creatures to give growth counters to fulfill that win condition.

You can potentially win with a Craterhoof Behemoth, using Inga and Esika to make all of our creatures into mana dorks that can only use that mana to cast creatures along with Intruder Alarm to get even more creatures in since it untaps all creatures whenever a creature enters the battlefield.

Needless to say that these methods of winning are not very reliable and require a lot of setup to get working.

Bracket Rating: High 1 to Mid 2

Toolbox decks in general can be difficult to make work mostly because they tend to be decks that are primarily answers. You may be able to solve whatever problem you’re having, but at some point there needs to be some proactive actions to win.

Not to say that there aren’t creative ways to win with this type of deck, it’s just that Momir Vig is pretty slow to get this going and needs a lot of work to get working.

The lower the brackets the better because the goal of those brackets if to have your deck “do the thing” at a slower pace. While I was writing this I legitimately thought of doing a low bracket Momir Vig deck, so there is some potential for a casual deck to jam some games in while not expecting it to win consistently.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual