We’re back once again with a renegade card to put in a deck and see if you can make it work. There’s a balance to be found between a card being bad and a card just being hard to use, but we think we’re nailing it. There’s possibly some bias there, but hey, at least we’re all having fun.
This week we’re leaning into yet more chaos. Rather than just discarding cards or anything though, we’re offering chance the opportunity to rule the game. It could go either way, and that’s kind of the point. But hey, that doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from Scrambleverse.
What is Scrambleverse?
Scrambleverse is an eight-mana red sorcery that is built around chaos. In fact, the flavor text reads, “Sometimes a little chaos is in order.” For the record, that’s some very good flavor text. The spell itself isn’t exactly simple, but it is a lot of fun as long as you can work out a good way of speeding the process up. “For each nonland permanent, choose a player at random. Then each player gains control of each permanent for which they were chosen. Untap those permanents.”
There are two ways we can go with this. Either we make sure that we benefit from other people having our permanents, or we simply don’t have any permanents. They’re both good choices, so we’ve gone ahead and chosen a Commander for each to get you started.
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Zedruu lottery
Zedruu, the Greathearted
Zedruu, the GreatheartedAt the beginning of your upkeep, you gain X life and draw X cards, where X is the number of permanents you own that your opponents control.
{U}{R}{W}: Target opponent gains control of target permanent you control. is a four-mana red, white, and blue 2/4 that allows you to pay three to give an opponent a permanent you control. Then, at the beginning of your upkeep, you draw cards and gain life equal to the number of permanents you own that someone else controls. This means you benefit when you cast Scrambleverse, though you will need to make sure Zedruu isn’t out when you do so.
From there, you can either play a group hug deck where you’re genuinely trying to help people out, or mess around with cards like Puca’s Mischief, Perplexing Chimera to constantly keep cards shifting around. If you’re feeling mean, you could also then include things like Nine Lives to give people loss conditions instead of helping.
Zedruu is an odd commander to play around with, but they allow for some very entertaining lines of play, so they’re worth checking out at least once.
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Narset doesn’t like permanents
The other option we like is Narset, Enlightened Master
Narset, Enlightened MasterFirst strike, hexproof
Whenever Narset attacks, exile the top four cards of your library. Until end of turn, you may cast noncreature spells from among those cards without paying their mana costs.. Narset is a six-mana blue, red, and white 3/2 with first strike and hexproof. They read, “Whenever Narset, Enlightened Master attacks, exile the top four cards of your library. Until end of turn, you may cast noncreature spells from among those cards without paying their mana costs.”
The aim with Narset is different to Zedruu, because we’re simply not going to be using permanents at all. You’ll basically be playing a control style deck or one that utilizes nonpermanents to constantly kill, bounce, or just board wipe everything into non-existence. Then, when everyone’s got a decent board state, you can just cast Scrambleverse and revel in the fact that you’ve inevitably made some kind of profit.
Good times, right?
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