Merfolk aren’t great in Commander. I know that’s not an easy pill for some to swallow, but it’s how I feel. Merfolk have a lot of Lords, but the small mana costs that make them attractive in fast formats like Legacy, where you can deal 20 damage on turn four pretty easily, make them pretty underwhelming late-game draws in Commander. When you have one Silvergill Adept instead of three or four and you’re forced to jam merfolk that are just OK like Fallowsage and Cosi's Trickster, you start to worry that you can’t compete in combat unless you manage to stick quite a few Lords. I’ve seen some pretty dirty tricks with Surgespanner and Sigil Tracer and Wizards decks have made cards like Wanderwine Prophets and Sage of Fables relevant again; but, all in all, I’m not excited to sleeve up Merfolk in Commander.

Building a Simic goodstuff deck with Tishana at the helm is a real exercise in futility. You can get 75% of the way there (see what I did there? You’ll get it later) and then you get to ask yourself the question “How is this better than the deck would be if I built around Prime Speaker Zegana?” and the answer for me was always “It’s not” and I’d have to give up and start over. I wasn’t finding a goodstuff approach that wasn’t just better served by building with a different commander. I was getting really frustrated. My deadline looming, I switched gears and gave you an article last week that I’m really happy with and look forward to doing more of. I was starting to sweat a little because I said I’d talk about Tishana this week.

Druids generate a ton of mana. Not all of them, but a lot of the best mana generators in an elf build are also druids which means we get a lot of the benefits of elf decks but with access to additional very good druids such as Gilt-Leaf Archdruid. We can modify a traditional Seton, Krosan Protector deck to incorporate some Blue cards and do some of the things Seton decks were doing even better than Seton was. Cards like Temur Sabertooth and Cloudstone Curio are in there to make the most of Primordial Sage and Glimpse of Nature and we’re fine adding Tishana to that existing infrastructure considering all of the value we get out of Tishana. We even have access to Deadeye Navigator now, which isn’t great with the other nonsense but is great with Tishana. I don’t even hate playing Equilibrium, a card no one else seems that jazzed about.

There isn’t a ton of space to play around since the average Seton deck is pretty packed. How do we decide what to cut? For reference, my starting point was the average Seton deck, generated using EDHREC.

Average Seton, Krosan Protector ? Commander | EDHREC

• Creatures (38)
• 1 Arbor Elf
• 1 Argothian Elder
• 1 Boreal Druid
• 1 Chameleon Colossus
• 1 Citanul Woodreaders
• 1 Craterhoof Behemoth
• 1 Devoted Druid
• 1 Druid Lyrist
• 1 Elvish Archdruid
• 1 Elvish Harbinger
• 1 Elvish Mystic
• 1 Elvish Pioneer
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Farhaven Elf
• 1 Fierce Empath
• 1 Fyndhorn Elves
• 1 Gilt-Leaf Archdruid
• 1 Greenweaver Druid
• 1 Heart Warden
• 1 Heritage Druid
• 1 Joraga Treespeaker
• 1 Kamahl, Fist of Krosa
• 1 Karametra's Acolyte
• 1 Krosan Restorer
• 1 Krosan Wayfarer
• 1 Llanowar Druid
• 1 Llanowar Elves
• 1 Priest of Titania
• 1 Primordial Sage
• 1 Reclamation Sage
• 1 Regal Force
• 1 Somberwald Sage
• 1 Soul of the Harvest
• 1 Treefolk Harbinger
• 1 Voyaging Satyr
• 1 Werebear
• 1 Wirewood Channeler
• 1 Yavimaya Elder

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Freyalise, Llanowar's Fury

• Instants (5)
• 1 Beast Within
• 1 Chord of Calling
• 1 Kindred Summons
• 1 Krosan Grip
• 1 Vitalize

• Sorceries (9)
• 1 Collective Unconscious
• 1 Genesis Wave
• 1 Glimpse of Nature
• 1 Green Sun's Zenith
• 1 Harmonize
• 1 Harvest Season
• 1 Mobilize
• 1 Praetor's Counsel
• 1 Shamanic Revelation

• Enchantments (6)
• 1 Beastmaster Ascension
• 1 Concordant Crossroads
• 1 Recycle
• 1 Song of the Dryads
• 1 Sylvan Library
• 1 Zendikar Resurgent

• Artifacts (6)
• 1 Cloudstone Curio
• 1 Lifecrafter's Bestiary
• 1 Paradox Engine
• 1 Skullclamp
• 1 Slate of Ancestry
• 1 Throne of the God-Pharaoh

• Lands (34)
• 29 Forest
• 1 Dryad Arbor
• 1 Gaea's Cradle
• 1 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Wirewood Lodge

Buy This Deck

This isn’t exactly a playable deck as much as it is a representation of the median deck, but it’s actually not that terrible. The cuts are going to largely be from redundancy and cards that don’t serve our strategy of using Tishana to keep our hands fully stocked and beat them in the face with a big commander. We should have some redundancy to not having a max hand size in case we can’t re-buy Tishana right away so we don’t have to dump our entire mitt and we should steal some of their stuff if we can. My Tishana Druid deck would look a little something like this.

Tishana, Voice of Thunder ? Commander | Jason Alt

• Creatures (35)
• 1 Arbor Elf
• 1 Argothian Elder
• 1 Citanul Woodreaders
• 1 Coiling Oracle
• 1 Craterhoof Behemoth
• 1 Deadeye Navigator
• 1 Devoted Druid
• 1 Elvish Archdruid
• 1 Elvish Harbinger
• 1 Elvish Mystic
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Fyndhorn Elves
• 1 Gilt-Leaf Archdruid
• 1 Heritage Druid
• 1 Imperious Perfect
• 1 Joraga Treespeaker
• 1 Karametra's Acolyte
• 1 Krosan Restorer
• 1 Llanowar Druid
• 1 Llanowar Elves
• 1 Murkfiend Liege
• 1 Overbeing of Myth
• 1 Priest of Titania
• 1 Primordial Sage
• 1 Psychosis Crawler
• 1 Reclamation Sage
• 1 Rishkar, Peema Renegade
• 1 Somberwald Sage
• 1 Soul of the Harvest
• 1 Temur Sabertooth
• 1 Thrasios, Triton Hero
• 1 Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre
• 1 Voyaging Satyr
• 1 Wirewood Channeler
• 1 Yavimaya Elder

• Instants (4)
• 1 Cyclonic Rift
• 1 Desertion
• 1 Disallow
• 1 Krosan Grip

• Sorceries (4)
• 1 Genesis Wave
• 1 Glimpse of Nature
• 1 Rishkar's Expertise
• 1 Shamanic Revelation

• Enchantments (10)
• 1 Beastmaster Ascension
• 1 Cryptolith Rite
• 1 Equilibrium
• 1 Food Chain
• 1 From Beyond
• 1 Growing Rites of Itlimoc
• 1 Intruder Alarm
• 1 Kindred Discovery
• 1 Sylvan Library
• 1 Zendikar Resurgent

• Artifacts (7)
• 1 Ashnod's Altar
• 1 Bident of Thassa
• 1 Cloudstone Curio
• 1 Lifecrafter's Bestiary
• 1 Paradox Engine
• 1 Skullclamp
• 1 Whispersilk Cloak

• Lands (39)
• 12 Island
• 14 Forest
• 1 Breeding Pool
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Dryad Arbor
• 1 Gaea's Cradle
• 1 Hinterland Harbor
• 1 Misty Rainforest
• 1 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Rogue's Passage
• 1 Simic Growth Chamber
• 1 Temple of Mystery
• 1 Wirewood Lodge
• 1 Yavimaya Coast

Buy This Deck

To offset not having a ton of Blue pips, I think Nykthos is an all star in the deck. I have Gaea's Cradle, Growing Rites of Itlimoc, and Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx meaning druids that untap lands are more valuable than ones that tap for mana late in the game. I have both, which means I can cut cards like Cultivate (I think? I can do that, right?) in favor of mana druids which serve a lot of our different strategies.

I think the deck mostly speaks for itself — it has some Paradox Engine comboes, it has a lot of ways to use the mana it generates, and it can go big on top of going wide. Here are some things I might change depending on what you like to do.

Do you want more Druidy action? There are plenty of creatures in the original Seton list on top of cards like Staff of Domination and Thousand-Year Elixir. We can add Seedborn Muse, Nature's Will, and other cards to make sure we can get untap triggers all the time. This makes our mana elves and land untappers even more potent than they already are with Paradox Engine and Intruder Alarm. With tons of mana, we can play and replay Tishana, draw a ton of cards and find more creatures to play, hopefully drawing more cards until we find some way to kill them on the spot. This is a lot less resilient to interruption than my Kydele and Thrasios deck (which I hated) and instead of making it more consistent, I added more different ways to win. I think there are a lot of druids like Kamahl, Fist of Krosa and Baru, Fist of Krosa that have a spot in the deck.

Do you want more Blue? There are no obvious cuts to me, but I bet if you dialed back on the druid stuff and added some more countermagic or card draw you can play early in the game, you can do your typical Blue mage stuff that you like so much. Personally, I wanted this to feel more creature-driven, and that lends itself to being more Green than Blue.

What do we think? Did I miss something obvious? Include something terrible? Should I have built elves or rogues or some other tribe? Let me know in the comments section. Until next time!