Sometimes Wizards prints a card and my jaw drops to the floor, and that was indeed the case with Codie, Vociferous Codex. Naturally, Codie lends itself to being built as a spellslinger deck, even restricting your ability to play permanents once Codie is in play. The build potential with this little tome is tremendous: you could do a multicolored spell tribal deck, maximize on flexibility with charm tribal, or even go as deep as ultimatums. Of course you’ll still want to hit your functional requirements in terms of ramp, card draw, and removal; but you could work within some restrictions to explore old cards that don’t have a home like Exploding Borders. What really got me excited about building with this book was the activated ability. This essentially translates to: the next spell you cast will let you cast the next spell from your deck that has lower mana value for free. Casting things for free can be a good way to win, but what if we didn’t only win with Codie, but we also cast our entire deck for free?! Now that sounds like my kind of challenge. You can find the list here, but read on if you’re interested in some fun lines of play.
When I saw Codie previewed, the first card I thought of was Thousand Year Storm. This powerhouse will end games; and if we’re casting our entire deck, it could lead to some really wild stories. Thousand Year Storm definitely sits in the “win more” category, but it is a splashy way to close the game, so let’s work this into our strategy. One key piece we’ll need to be able to cast our whole deck is a reliable way to untap Codie. What better way than a card that lets us untap our creatures when we cast our spells? Jeskai Ascendancy is just the card to do so, with an added loot (draw then discard) as well as a buff to our team. Unless we’re casting one mana value spells, we’re going to need a way to continuously pay four to activate Codie. This is where we start to lose consistency and power, as we’ll be relying on creatures that generate mana (mana dorks). Unless we’re lucky and can stick a Faeburrow Elder, we may even need four additional creatures beyond Codie making our engine consist of at least six permanents. Even worse, we’ll need a way to give Codie haste or maybe with a bit of luck the table won’t have any interaction for a full turn cycle.
Luckily, mana dorks are unassuming on their own, so we can spend our first few turns playing them out and hoping no one else gets scary enough to warrant a board wipe. With fifteen in the deck we should consistently have at least one in our opening, but we also run some spell based ramp in Farseek, Harrow and Crop Rotation (an easy upgrade is to swap the Farseek for Three Visits). Now you may be wondering why Harrow and Crop Rotation over other staples like Cultivate or Rampant Growth? The real reason is if we can manage to resolve either of these with Thousand Year Storm in play, we only need to sacrifice one land for all of the copies (since the sacrifice is an additional cost to cast). Crop Rotation is better in this scenario since it will fetch out any land, but even if we only get two copies of either it can help us fuel our next spell cast. For good measure Escape to the Wilds and Urban Evolution can let us play additional lands if we happen to draw a lot in a turn, and they have the added benefit of having exactly five mana value, meaning they can be cast with Codie mana.
Speaking of drawing cards, this list features ten draw effects at four mana value and below so we can potentially free cast them. While not technically a draw spell, I’ve included Unexpected Results in this category since it may generate card advantage (and doesn’t draw in case there are any pesky Narset, Parter of Veils in play). Then we have some classics in Brainstorm and Harmonize, and I can’t resist including Read the Bones when it’s an option. Now with only ten draw spells we’re likely not going to find the pieces of our engine, so this deck leverages tutors. Since power level is closely tied to speed and consistency, the tutors included have higher mana value and are primarily meant to help us find one of our multiple permanents. There are some straight value tutors like Solve the Equation, but there are some other more unique ones in Bring to Light and Wargate (notably if we hit Wargate as a three mana value spell we can cast it to put a land into play). In total this deck features twelve tutors, which will up the consistency by a wide margin; but we likely won’t be playing them until turn four or five, so the table should have answers in hand. In terms of our own answers, we’re very light with only three removal spells and one wrath, meaning we’ll likely lose more games to our opponents getting out of control.
Our first focus should be to try and start the engine as quickly as we can, which is why we run four haste enablers; two of which are Lightning Greaves and Thousand-Year Elixir, which net us some protection and an extra Codie activation in a pinch. If we can manage to produce four mana with our dorks and have seven lands in play we can go off if we have Expedite and Jeskai Ascendancy in hand. Now we could go from this point and cast our way through the deck, but there is a line to get Thousand Year Storm into play after Codie has been cast. As you may have guessed we’re going to start with a tutor that can fetch another tutor! We’ll get to bank a free cast for later with Codie, but Final Parting is the page we’ll flip to next. Since we’ve cast a spell, this lets us start untapping with Jeskai Ascendancy and starting the cycle anew. With Final Parting we’ll tutor Thousand Year Storm into the graveyard and Obzedat’s Aid into hand (Revival Experiment or Eerie Ultimatum will also work if you have enough excess mana). From there we rip Obzedat’s Aid to cheat Thousand Year Storm into play. If we’ve got no cards in hand, hopefully we’ve hit one of our draw spells from the Codie triggers for our three spells we cast earlier. The cool thing about this tech is that Thousand Year Storm will count all of our prior casts, which means our next cast will be copied three times.
So how do we actually close out the game if we manage to get the engine in place? We’re still going to need to beat our opponents, and they’ve been building board states while we’ve been preoccupied. A 6x copy of Jeska’s Will should do it in terms of value, but if we want to crunch the numbers a 6x Chandra’s Ignition (hitting opponents for 42 each) or a 12x Essence Harvest (hitting each opponent for 48, which can be modified to life totals) should be sufficient. To get all these casts the plan is simple, draw cards until you can tutor for a high mana value spell and resolve that to hopefully keep the chain alive. Just be careful not to draw yourself out with copies. There are many other ways you could close it out like a simple Grapeshot or even Misery Charm if you really want to send a message.
There we have it, a whirlwind tour of a hundred page book. I hope you found this one interesting, and as always, you can find me on Twitter if you want to share your thoughts. But really what I think you want to do is see this deck in action at Chimera’s Commander night on Tuesdays. We organize games in the Chimera Discord and play over webcam with SpellTable. We love when our community grows and we’re seeing more people join every week. There are often players looking for a game and can usually get a game or two going on the weekends as well. Hope to see you at our next Commander night!
#Codie-Vociferous-Codex-mtg
#Exploding-Borders-mtg
#Conflux-mtg
#Azorious-Charm-mtg
#Ruinous-Ultimatum-mtg
#Thousand-Year-Storm-mtg
#Jeskai-Ascendancy-mtg
#Faeburrow-Elder-mtg
#Farseek-mtg
#Harrow-mtg
#Crop-Rotation-mtg
#Three-Visits-mtg
#Cultivate-mtg
#Rampant-Growth-mtg
#Escape-to-the-Wilds-mtg
#Unexpected-Results-mtg
#Narset-Parter-of-Veils-mtg
#Brainstorm-mtg
#Harmonize-mtg
#Read-the-Bones-mtg
#Solve-the-Equation-mtg
#Bring-to-Light-mtg
#Wargate-mtg
#Lightning-Greaves-mtg
#Thousand-Year-Elixir-mtg
#Expedite-mtg
#Obzedats-Aid-mtg
#Revival-Experiment-mtg
#Eerie-Ultimatum-mtg
#Jeskas-Will-mtg
#Chandras-Ignition-mtg
#Essence-Harvest-mtg
#Grapeshot-mtg
#Misery-Charm-mtg
