Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Neera, Wild Mage!

Neera is a six mana 2/7 with whenever you cast a spell, you may put it on the bottom of its owners library. If you do, reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal a nonland card, and you may cast that card without paying its mana cost. You then put the rest of the revealed cards on the bottom of your library in a random order, and you can only trigger this ability once each turn.

Game Plan

Neera plays well into the chaos archetype, in that you really don’t know what you’re going to cast. However the interesting thing about Neera is that you can choose when to activate her ability since it is a may ability. What’s more, you can cast any sort of spell from it.

A good chaos deck, despite wanting random outcomes, still wants some form of structure in order to get to those random outcomes. Ideally we have some cheap cards that we wouldn’t mind casting, but we want big weird spells to take on a majority of what we want. Luckily for us we can choose when to activate Neera’s ability, which we can use to our advantage.

Game Plan

Since we want to make sure that we want a big weird spell to cast, we need ways to manipulate the top cards of our deck, so something like Brainstorm is great for us because it let’s us draw three cards and put two back to the library.

Ponder can allow us to look at the top three cards of our library and then put them back in any order with the option to shuffle them away if we don’t like them, plus the additional card draw is also nice.

Soothsaying is a card that can actually do really well for us to arrange our library as we want it because we can pay five mana to completely shuffle our library or pay X mana to look at the top X cards and put them back in any order.

We should have a number of cheap cards that we can cast to trigger Neera, but wouldn’t mind hitting if we were to roll into it from a Neera trigger. As such, Wild Magic Surge is pretty flavorful and decently strong because we can destroy a permanent an opponent control and have it’s controller reveal cards until they reveal a permanent that shards a card type with that permanent and puts it onto the battlefield with the rest on the bottom in a random order.

Pongify and Rapid Hybridization also work really well because they let us destroy a creature and have them be replaced by a 3/3 creature, an Ape for Pongify and a Frog Lizard for Rapid Hybridization because there is usually a creature that we want to remove.

Cheap instants are our best bet to get to the big random cards we want, but cards like Serum Visions to draw us a card and scry 2 can also be very helpful in sculpting the top of our library to what we need for the moment.

As far as the big spells are concerned, we can go in a wide number of directions. One of my personal favorites would be to roll into an Arcane Bombardment, which has it so that whenever we cast our first instant or sorcery spell each turn, we exile an instant or sorcery at random from our graveyard and then we copy each card exiled by Arcane Bombardment and cast any number of the copies for free.

If we get a bunch of big spells like Hit the Mother Lode to Discover 10 with us making a number of tapped Treasure tokens equal to the difference if the spell was less than ten mana, Time Stretch to take two extra turns, or Call Forth the Tempest to double cascade to deal damage to each creature our opponents control equal to the total mana value of spells we’ve cast this turn.

Mnemonic Deluge can be a tricky card for us to use with Arcane Bombardment, but if we get it we can exile target instant or sorcery from a graveyard and copy that card three times and we can cast those copies for free.

We would normally need to exile Mnemonic Deluge after casting it, but if we get it to the graveyard without casting it, say like with a Faithless Looting, then we may have a way to get it onto the Arcane Bombardment.

Setbacks

We are a chaos deck, which means that no matter how much we plan and tune the deck, we are at the whims of randomness to dictate our game plan.

There is a chance we can sculpt the top of our library ideally in order to get the cards we want, but that will not always be the case. More often than not, we will not be getting the cards we want, instead getting some additional card draw and card selection.

Playing rituals is risky when you play a chaos deck because you can’t reliably say that you will have the ability to cast the spells you want to cast with the mana made by those rituals.

Speaking of, Neera is a six mana Commander so some amount of ramp will be necessary in order to get them onto the battlefield, which again isn’t bad to have some mana rocks, it’s just not often ideal to flip into when you need a removal spell.

There is also the debate on how many chaos cards do you include in your decks, whether you only have a couple for fun flavor reasons or they are versatile removal, or you play cards like Warp World and Scrambleverse because you have a play group that is cool with those cards.

Chaos can be a divisive archetype, and if you are not playing in a consistent play group, people may not be happy with some of the more infamous chaos cards. Hell, some people don’t like Chaos Warp despite it being a fairly tame chaos card by comparison.

Chaos is very much a play at your own risk, where if everyone is cool with the big chaos cards, then go crazy. If not, be sure to have some swap ins just in case.

Bracket Rating: High 1, Mid 2, Low 3

Neera is a unique Commander in that they can work decently well in bracket three, but they work best in lower brackets because those are much better suited for chaos decks to be weird.

The higher the brackets you go for a chaos deck, the less likely you are playing the random big mana spells you want, and you would rather play cards that help you win the game or generate some sort of value when you spin the wheel.

Chaos is fun, especially in lower brackets, and works best on a casual game night with friends and not against decks that can interact with it or with a group who wants to play something that is more high power.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual