Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be talking about Whtz, the Bibliophile!

Whtz is a three mana 1/3 that has a Rulebreaker ability making it so that your deck has no maximum deck size and for three mana and tap you draw a card and gain 1 life, with the ability being three mana less to activate if you had 200 or more cards in your starting deck.

Game Plan

Rulebreaker as a mechanic has plenty of interesting ways to play around with it, with the first go around being pretty safe all things considered. Whtz, on the other had, is one of the ones that does something so odd in comparison.

The goal of Whtz is that this is going to be a Commander legal way to play Battle of Wits, and we are very much going to consider cards that have that in mind. However, the one caveat is that if I were to build the deck, I would only have one tutor to find Battle of Wits because otherwise the deck is just “tutor for Battle of Wits, free protection spells, win the game.” and I don’t want to shuffle my deck very often.

I want to earn my win by being able to use the one tutor I am allowing myself to have, while looking for Battle of Wits the old fashioned way.

Support

That old fashioned way being of course, draw as many cards as humanly possible, which because we are in blue is incredibly easy and honestly trivial all things considered.

However, the struggle comes in making sure that we have a lot of cheap cantrips to draw us cards because we are operating with a deck that is over 200 cards, in my head 276 cards, so that means we need to ensure our land drops and draw spells.

So Opt, Consider, Cerulean Wisps, Brainstorm, Gitaxian Probe, Niveous Wisps, Honor, Peek, Obsessive Search, literally any one mana spell that let’s us draw at least one card will be something that we can pack the deck with in order to dig our way through the deck.

Speaking of digging through our deck, we can use Dig Through Time to look at the top seven cards of our library to put two of them into our hand and the rest in the bottom of our library in a random order or Treasure Cruise to draw us three cards with both of those spells letting us use Delve to exile cards from our graveyard to help cast them.

We can also use cards like Teferi’s Ageless Insight which lets us draw an additional card if we were to draw a card that isn’t the first card we draw on each of our draw steps, meaning we double the amount of cards we look through to find what we need.

Since we are trying to draw ourselves into as many cards, we also need to make sure that we can protect our card draw, Whtz, and Battle of Wits.

There are cards like Propoganda and Ghostly Prison which make it so that creatures need to pay two mana for each attacking creature that is coming towards us, Swords to Plowshares and Path to Exile as one mana removal for creatures, and of course counter spells like Dovin’s Veto and An Offer You Can’t Refuse, or Authority of the Consuls to make our opponents creatures enter tapped and whenever a creature enters under our opponents control we gain 1 life.

We can even play into our opponents searching or playing spells with something like Archivist of Oghma which gains us 1 life and draws us a card if an opponent searches their library or The Council of Four to let us draw a card if an opponent drew their second card during their turn and make a 2/2 Knight creature token if a player casts their second spell during their turn.

There are even cards we can use on the offensive like Chasm Skulker, which gets a +1/+1 counter whenever we draw a card and when it dies we make X 1/1 Squid creature tokens with islandwalk where X is the number of counters on it, or Ominous Seas which gets a foreshadow counter whenever we draw a card and we can remove eight foreshadow counters to make an 8/8 Kraken creature token.

Setbacks

This is deck is very much a gimmick if you happen to play it with the Battle of Wits game plan, and if you don’t then there really isn’t much else to do with having such a big deck.

If you have creatures that draw you card when they enter or some flicker shenanigans then you can justify playing Yorion, Sky Nomad as a Companion, which Whtz also makes possible, but otherwise there really isn’t much else to justify the gimmick.

You can definitely go weird with the deck because you now have a bevy of options to choose from, but if you are going to be playing a Battle of Wits deck, then everyone will know.

While you can protect yourself in some capacity, unless you are running a ton of tutors, odds are you won’t draw what you need until it is way to late, which is why ideally you pack the deck with as many draws, counters, and protection spells as you can so that you have at least something to do.

Consistency is the name of the game, which this deck will definitely struggle with because you need to hit your land drops, cast your spells, find ways to ramp efficiently, and a make sure Battle of Wits isn’t removed from your deck because then that limits the ways you win.

There is also a potential concern with managing the deck physically because if at minimum you are playing a 200 card deck, there is going to be some difficulties shuffling, or at the very least a lot of time that’s going to go with doing so. Ramping without needing you to find lands from your library is going to be a struggle, and if you do make use of white’s catch up ramp, get ready to shuffle a lot.

Bracket Rating: 1 to low 3

This was a weird one to try and place, purely because if you happen to have a good number of tutors, then this deck becomes much more consistent, but if you don’t run a lot of tutors then the deck loses a lot of potential and falls dramatically down the brackets.

Winning with a Battle of Wits in Commander is a fun idea, and would be a fun thing to do as a challenge in deck building, but as a consistent play every week sort of deck is where it gets a bit of a tough sell.

I am the sort of person who enjoys that sort of challenge, especially if it is using a limited number of tutors which is one of my many deck building personal goals, but it’s definitely not for everyone.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M.Casual