Redless Snow

Card types get a lot of attention in Magic. People are always looking to maximize their synergies and get the most out of their spells. What we don't do a good job of is maximizing our Supertypes. What a super idea, right?

There aren't a lot of Supertypes in the game, 5 to be exact. They are Basic, World, Legendary, Snow, and Ongoing. A basic land focused deck would be an interesting avenue, but it's not the focus of this deck. I had never encountered Ongoing before. It's apparently an Archenemy thing, so those are out. You're only allowed 1 world enchantment on the field at a time, which may make for an interesting swap out style deck, but that's a future problem. We're very familiar with Legendary as each deck needs one to be their commander. There are even cool commanders like Kethis, the Hidden Hand that supercharge a Legendary strategy. I'm not talking about any of these, I'm talking about Snow.

Every couple of years Snow gets a little love. The effects trickle out, and the mechanic seems very parasitic. You run more Snow so you can maximize your payoffs, but there aren't benefits for playing non-Snow cards. They don't push the strategy, and you're left out of including powerful non-snow effects to maximize your snow cards' potential. Snow does have one thing going for it, like most supertypes, there isn't enough hate out there to punish you for playing the strategy. Reidane, God of the Worthy from Kaldheim made Snow permanents enter tapped. It has some good additional effects, but 1 hate piece does not inhibit a strategy. Have you ever seen her played? I haven't.

So I'm going all in on Snow. Lands, check. Creatures, check. Artifacts and Enchantments, double check. Even my Instants and Sorceries benefit from Snow. The strategy was wide open in all colors, but not necessarily evenly. Red was really lacking compared to the other colors out there. I get some access to direct damage and a couple of ramp pieces like Svella, Ice Shaper. Thermopod is a great mana generator and sac outlet, and Rimescale Dragon is a favorite stax/control piece. Overall, there aren't enough draws to include the color here, not even Skred could convince me. So I'm comfortably in 4 color Snow.

There are some generally good cards available to me that I would include no matter what. Search for Glory is a great example of this. It's a great tutor and can give me some incidental life gain at no extra cost. I've seen people play this in mono white just to tutor up a Snow land if they're in a pinch. You're not ramping if you're not hitting your land drops too. Ohran Frostfang is a killer creature, literally. Deathtouch is a powerful effect for attackers. People don't want to block a killer 1/1 token. That's what makes the ceiling for drawing cards off the second effect so attractive. Anything that says Marit Lage on it is a no brainer. All of those generically good cards don't make a strategy. I needed more, and it was hiding in plain sight.

If you've followed me for any length of time, you know I enjoy Blood on the Snow. I have added Snow lands to decks before just to get the most out of this card. It's a fine board wipe with some extra flexibility. The fact that I can recur a creature for no additional cost is the kind of added effect I look for in EDH. I started pulling this thread, Snow powered removal and reanimator.

The removal piece was rather easy. Dead of Winter is an even better board wipe here. My creatures are saved, and I can easily wipe out my opponents' boards. With Snow Lands alone, I regularly wipe out opponents' fields, leaving nothing behind. On Thin Ice is great targeted removal in the same vein as Chained to the Rocks. I always save these for a Commander since people always elect to send the creature back to the command zone and I don't have to worry about it coming back if the enchantment happens to get removed later. Priest of the Haunted Edge is another piece of removal that can handle any creature on the field. Sacrificing it is a downer, but it's something I can get around and repeat the effect. Blizzard Brawl is a fight spell that play more like a sucker punch. My creature is getting Indestructible.

I've shown there are great ways to put cards in the graveyard. Now I have to get them out of there. The Three Seasons is great for this. I can get my 2 best snow permanents back to my hand and shuffle 3 more into my library. They're easy to find again with Search for Glory. With Adarkar Valkyrie, I can save a creature from death. Vigilance and the tap effect are a great combination and mean I can still be aggressive with the angel. In a similar vein, I play Draugr Necromancer. It doesn't let me recast my own creatures, but it does give me access to the ones my opponents have removed. They may not be snow permanents when I recast them, but they offer powerful options my deck might be lacking at the moment. The Necromancer also acts as great graveyard hate. I don't have to worry about opposing creatures being recurred since they just get exiled instead.

Kaldring, the Rimestaff and Jorn, God of Winter are a special case. Picking which side to cast is always tricky, but in a good way. Both sides are exceptionally powerful. Replaying cards from the graveyard is very powerful and doing it repeatedly is best in a slower, grindier game. The ability to untap my snow permanents is a great reason to be aggressive. That payoff is a great way to cast multiple powerful spells in a turn. I like the staff more, that's why I listed it first, but the margin isn't that much more. Once I have Rime Tender out though, I always play the Staff.

Snowy Reanimator was a good avenue for the deck. I would have been happy to build that deck and run with it. However, I noticed something about Snow, it ramps very well. Boreal Druid, Sculptor of Winter, and Rime Tender can all net me an extra mana in their own way. If I happen to have Glittering Frost on a Snow land I ramp out even faster with the Sculptor or Tender. Isu the Abominable is a commander in his own right. Here, I use him to make sure I hit my land drop and take a peek at the top card of my library. Into the North is just a snowy Rampant Growth. It may be even better since it grabs any snow land and not just a basic land. Then there's Replicating Ring. A 3 mana rock isn't setting the world on fire, but it could. Once it gets those 8 counters I can trade them for 8 more Replicating Rings. Very powerful indeed.

All of this ramp is very important in a surprising way. A lot of creatures are very mana intensive. This actually gave me the last direction for the deck: buffing my attackers. I can already remove blockers and get back my creatures from the graveyard. Now, I can rush in on unsuspecting opponents and swing for massive damage on any given turn.

There are a plethora of creatures that let you pay some amount of mana for a limited effect, usually a buff to power and toughness. Hailstorm Valkyrie is a great example of this. For 2 snow mana, color is irrelevant; she gets a +2/+2 bump. Hailstorm Valkyrie is already evasive, so the power bump just means I'm getting in for more damage. Icehide Troll works similarly but with the added benefit of indestructibility. Spirit of the Aldergard doesn't pump itself up, but it does scale it's power very well. Ascendant Spirit doesn't start out as much and it really doesn't need to. I'm willing to invest the extra mana to get the Spirit to be evasive and allow me to pump up its own power.

With all this attacking, I wanted a couple of finishers at my disposal. The best single creature for this avenue is Conifer Wurm. 4 mana doubles the creature's power. Any turn I activate this effect 2 or 3 times is a turn I knock out an opponent. The last one is Diamond Faerie. A lot of creatures can pump up their own power. The Faerie lets me pump up the whole team all at once. It's great pivoting from a go tall strategy to suddenly going wide and making all of my creatures a threat.

I've also had good luck with a couple of Auras in the deck. Rime Transfusion adds a minimal amount of power to a creature, but the practical unblockable ability is really where the deck shines. Glacial Plating is the real deal. Yeah, it costs me an increasing amount of mana to get the bump, but +3/+3 is huge. Doubling and tripling that effect is really the stuff that would make an opponent stand up and take notice.

The deck is very focused around pumping my creatures and recurring key pieces of the strategy. The deck has some other tools to keep it playing smoothly while all that happens. Glacial Revelation is a great draw spell. Any time I cast it, I essentially walk away with 4 cards. Ice-Fang Coatl grabs me a card and acts as an emergency blocker when needed. Frost Augur is a simple creature with a great ability for its cost. Even Arcum's Astrolabe gets me a card when it first enters the battlefield. Filtering my mana is cool for casting creatures. One of the benefits of this Snow strategy is not having to worry about fixing colors. Most of the pump abilities I'm working toward only care about Snow mana, they're color agnostic. Scrying Sheets is a great land to get into play. For a little extra mana, I take a chance on the top card of my library. With so many Snow options, it's not much of a gamble.

The real challenge for building the deck and playing it came from the commander situation. There aren't a lot of 4 color options on their own, and there are none that care about or are even snow. I had to look past that. In reality, I was stuck with either an Atraxa or partners. “It's not that deck” is never a defense, so I avoided Atraxa, Preator's Voice. Instead, I borrowed a copy of Atraxa, Grand Unifier to start. She was good late game card advantage, especially after a board wipe. There was something poetic about a card that cared so much about card types when my deck revolved around a super type. I was toying around with making a change in the Command Zone when I had to surrender my borrowed copy of Atraxa. So, I was on to Partners.

There are some real bogeymen on the original C16 Partners. I knew I wanted to avoid a pairing or even a single card that had a bad reputation in cEDH. I'm looking at you, Thrasios, Triton Hero. There were some options that wouldn't move the strategy forward, like Silas Renn, Seeker Adept. There aren't enough artifacts to make him useful in the deck. The option that really fits with the strategy is Ravos, Soultender. He's evasive, so he works with those Auras I mentioned before. He's also an anthem, so he pumps up my creatures, which is what I'm paying to do anyway. Most importantly, he's a recursion engine, returning my best creatures from death to my hand. I paired him with Kydele, Chosen of Kruphix. The deck is mana hungry at times, so her ability is a benefit. Her mana is often used to cast spells, so I can use my Snow Mana to pay for pump abilities.

Come in from the cold and check out the deck list.

Ravos, Soutender Kydele, Chosen of Kruphix

Abominable Treefolk	Arcum's Astrolabe	Break the Ice
Adarkar Valkyrie	Blessing of Frost	Dead of Winter
Ascendant Spirit	Blizzard Brawl	Glacial Revelation
Berg Strider	Blood on the Snow	Heidar, Rimewind Master
Boreal Centaur	Coldsteel Heart	Into the North
Boreal Druid	Glacial Plating	The Three Seasons
Boreal Omenreader	Glittering Frost	Sculptor of Winter
Chillerpillar	Graven Lore	Spirit of the Aldergard
Chilling Shade	Marit Lage's Slumber	Rampant Growth
Conifer Wurm	On Thin Ice	Requisition Raid
Diamond Faerie	Replicating Ring	Fog
Draugr Necromancer	Rime Transfusion	Farseek
Frost Augur	Search for Glory	Austere Command
Frostpeak Yeti	Pilfering Hawk	Blue Sun's Zenith
Grim Draugr	Priest of the Haunted Edge	Winds of Abandon
Hailstorm Valkyrie	Rime Tender	Meathook Massacre II
Icebreaker Kraken	Rimefeather Owl	Deep Analysis
Ice-Fang Coatl	Isu the Abominable	Winds of Qal Sisma
Icehide Golem	Jorn, God of Winter	You Find the Villain's Lair
Icehide Troll	Moriette of the Frost	Phyrexian Snowcrusher
Ohran Frostfang	Narfi, Betrayer King	Ohran Viper
Shimmerdrift Vale	Snowfield Sinkhole	Sulfurous Mire
Glacial Floodplain	Mouth of Ronom	Ice Tunnel
Scrying Sheets	Frost Marsh	Arctic Treeline
Frostwalk Bastion	Arctic Flats	Rimewood Falls
Boreal Shelf	Faceless Haven	Dark Depths
Snow Covered Plains x6	Snow Covered Swamp x5	Snow Covered Island x5
Snow Covered Forest x6

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the deck. A lot of the 4 color options felt lacking at some point. That's in part because of the lack of an identity or strategy for that many colors all at once. Focusing on a Supertype like Snow helped alleviate that.

I hope Snow gets the energy treatment soon, with a couple of commander sets that make the mechanic central to the deck. Even something simple like Snow basics in a 1 or 2 color deck and Extraplanar Lens would enable some new Snow cards in a regular deck.

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