When someone asks you what you intend to do with 19 mana in your pool, I think the best response is always: “Cast Tooth and Nail with Entwine, copy it with Riku, put 4 creatures from my library into play and make a token copy of each one.” It feels like Christmas, your Birthday, and Martin Luther King Jr. day all rolled into one; but it’s not! You’re just playing Commander, and Riku of Two Reflections is your boss.
EDH to me, is all about making those big plays that you don’t get to see in other formats, it’s more about winning the game with style than through tight, technical play. No commander captures the true spirit of the format like Riku does. It’s fun, versatile, and makes huge plays that just get bigger as the game goes on. With that in mind, here is my take on this popular commander:
Boss: Riku of Two Reflections
- 1 Acidic Slime
- 1 Anger
- 1 Animar, Soul of Elements
- 1 Avenger of Zendikar
- 1 Bloom Tender
- 1 Body Double
- 1 Coiling Oracle
- 1 Conquering Manticore
- 1 Consecrated Sphinx
- 1 Eternal Witness
- 1 Fauna Shaman
- 1 Fierce Empath
- 1 Gilded Drake
- 1 Genesis
- 1 Glen Elendra Archmage
- 1 Godo, Bandit Warlord
- 1 Inferno Titan
- 1 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
- 1 Oracle of Mul Daya
- 1 Palinchron
- 1 Phantasmal Image
- 1 Phyrexian Metamorph
- 1 Primeval Titan
- 1 Sakura-Tribe Elder
- 1 Solemn Simulacrum
- 1 Sphinx of Uthuun
- 1 Squee, Goblin Nabob
- 1 Terastodon
- 1 Venser, Shaper Savant
- 1 Wood Elves
- 1 All Is Dust
- 1 Beast Within
- 1 Birthing Pod
- 1 Cauldron of Souls
- 1 Chaos Warp
- 1 Chord of Calling
- 1 Cultivate
- 1 Erratic Portal
- 1 Fact or Fiction
- 1 Gamble
- 1 Greater Good
- 1 Kodama’s Reach
- 1 Krosan Grip
- 1 Life from the Loam
- 1 Lightning Greaves
- 1 Mimic Vat
- 1 Mystic Remora
- 1 Nature’s Lore
- 1 Oblivion Stone
- 1 Opportunity
- 1 Primal Command
- 1 Rampant Growth
- 1 Regrowth
- 1 Savage Twister
- 1 Skullclamp
- 1 Skyshroud Claim
- 1 Sol Ring
- 1 Survival of the Fittest
- 1 Sword of Feast and Famine
- 1 Time Warp
- 1 Tooth and Nail
- 1 Command Tower
- 1 Evolving Wilds
- 12 Forest
- 1 Forgotten Cave
- 1 High Market
- 8 Island
- 1 Izzet Boilerworks
- 1 Kessig Wolf Run
- 1 Lonely Sandbar
- 5 Mountain
- 1 Oran-Rief, the Vastwood
- 1 Reliquary Tower
- 1 Strip Mine
- 1 Sulfur Falls
- 1 Tolaria West
- 1 Tranquil Thicket
Strategy Explanations in No Particular Order:
Survival of the fittest, Fauna Shaman, and Birthing Pod form the core engine of the deck. Get one of them online and you can put Genesis and Squee into your graveyard setting up repeatable, recurrable tutors every turn. The creature base is a gigantic toolbox of enters the battlefield (ETB) effects that will allow you to control the board better than a regular aggro deck.
The more times your creatures ETB the more card advantage you get, that’s why the deck is running Erratic portal, Mimic Vat, Cauldron of Souls, Venser and Kiki-Jiki. Being able to bounce one of your creatures like Fauna Shaman or Wood Elves, gives you the ability to replay and copy them scoring a lot of card advantage in a short amount of time. It becomes downright degenerate when you are casting and copying something like avenger of zendikar or sphinx of uthuun multiple times. Your opponents probably thought that once was bad enough – sucks to be them.
There are some key interactions with Cauldron of Souls and Oran-Rief, the vastwood, and high market. Cauldron of souls is there to punish your opponents for trying to wrath your board. Your creatures come back, trigger all of their ETB abilities then get a -1/-1 counter meaning you cannot persist them a second time – unless you activate oran-rief to give them a +1/+1 counter when they come back, the counters will negate themselves due to state-based effects and you can continue to use cauldron of souls every turn.
You can use Cauldron of Souls aggressively too if you have a sac-outlet like High Market, or Greater Good in play. My favorite is flash in Venser to bounce something, activate cauldron of souls to give him persist until end of turn, then sacrifice him to high market, when he comes back into play I use his ETB ability to bounce himself back to my hand. Kind of like capsize with buyback, except better.
The Life from the Loam engine makes an appearance in this deck as well. Being able to play all your spells out of the graveyard with genesis and eternal witness means that dredging 3 counts as drawing 3 cards. The loam engine works by abusing the cycling lands (forgotten cave, lonely sandbar, tranquil thicket) to continuously draw cards for cheap. Just cycle them all, and replace the last draw with LFTL’s dredge so you can cast it getting back your cycling lands again.
Primeval Titan will set this all up for you as well, when he ETBs or attacks you can put one of the cycling lands into play, as well as your Izzet Boilerworks, this will allow you to bounce the cycling land back to your hand with Izzet Boilerworks’s trigger.
The deck is filled with the best ramping cards green has to offer, additionally Animar, Soul of Elements functions as acceleration in this deck – don’t be afraid to play him early, if you get some mana reductions out of him, he has done his job – the fact that he becomes a huge threat that your opponents have to deal with fairly quickly is just a nice bonus. Most of the ramp fetches specifically forest cards, this is so you have the option to upgrade your manabase with dual and shock lands for incredible consistency.
Sometimes the game just has to end, which is why there are slots for a few cards that go infinite, namely: Palinchron. If you have Riku in play, Palinchron allows you to make infinite mana, and infinite palinchrons if you can produce 10 mana. Palinchron comes into play for 5UU then gets copied for UG, but you untap 14 lands when they ETB, thus the circle of life continues. **NOTE: This Does Make You a Douchebag** Timewarp, eternal witness follows the same vein, but games cant last forever right?
Sometimes shit gets out of control, thats why god invented Oblivion Stone, All is Dust, and Primal Command. All is Dust is usually good because it spares your artifacts, and with cauldron of souls your creatures just come back anyways. Oblivion Stone is solid and recurrable if you chose to use Academy Ruins in your deck. Primal Command gets you a needed creature and shuffles away someone’s troublesome graveyard at the same time. So good.
Notable cards that are absent from my list:
I chose not to include the praetor’s, that is a personal choice, I feel that they don’t contribute enough to the deck’s strategies to justify how much everyone hates playing against them. They don’t outright win you the game like palinchron either, so you are forcing people to play under them, which I’m just not a fan of.
I like the 2 and 3 drops in EDH, I feel like this deck could be made stronger by adding seemingly innocent things to it like Selkie Hedge-Mage and Sea Gate Oracle – the potential for abuse with Riku, and all of the other synergistic effects is very high.
The first major upgrade would, of course, be the manabase. I run a lot of basic lands purely because the dream manabase would increase the cost to build the deck by over $400. That being said, Taiga, Tropical Island, Breeding Pool, and Stomping Ground should be the first into the deck since they can be fetched out with all of the forest tutors. The rest of the duals and shocks and fetch lands will only make the deck stronger.
If you like Sensei’s Divining Top, you can cut Palinchron, Time Warp, or Opportunity to include it. Top has good synergy with fetch lands, and Oracle of Mul Daya.
If it’s more to your playstyle, Teferi and Seedborn muse make dominating Tooth and Nail targets, I chose not to use them since they didn’t do enough on their own. If seedborn muse isn’t a huge liability in your local meta I would recommend playing it over Anger.
Overall, I think this particular Riku design is more viable than others, as it is less reliant on being able to copy a spell to get value. With this strategy, Riku is just a nice bonus, because the creature base is providing incremental card advantage by itself. Graveyard hate is a typical answer for green recursion engines like the ones in this deck, so the deck has many roads to victory by necessity. Your graveyard will be exiled, you will lose your genesis, you will probably get tormod’s crypt’d in response to playing eternal witness – but the decks synergies will still pull through and allow you to adapt to the situations at hand. You don’t need a graveyard to run them down with 120 hasty avenger of zendikar tokens!
Riku is more fun than Christmas, Your Birthday and Martin Luther King Jr Day rolled into one.
Enjoy!
-AB
