Weekly Sale Commander: Beat the Heat Sale!

Posted on August 25, 2025

Hi folks! Welcome to the Weekly Sale Column! This column will be aimed at showing you some cards on sale that could give you some new ideas for your lists. They will *usually* be Commander lists in Bracket 3 as well so you'll be able to play these in any Bracket 3 (or higher) pods. If you want to play in lower pods, just swap out the Game Changers for other choices and/or add more along with some other competitive combos if you want to compete with Bracket 4 and 5 pods! Remember that the weekly sale ends on Sunday night at 11:59 PM EST, so you have until then to get your cards ordered!

Anyone who knows me knows a few things about me. 1: I hate summer. 2: I love playing Control. This is the Beat the Heat Sale! We've got a plethora of cards that prevent damage, counter activated/triggered abilities, double activated/triggered abilities, and are also just big Blue beaters (for an endgame). This screamed Control to me, and we've chosen the best detective on Ravnica, Alquist Proft, Master Sleuth! Proft solved none other than the Murders at Karlov Manor, and we will be investigating left and right while also fighting this not-so-delightful season that we Floridians call summer. Let's get into it!

Investigating our way to Victory!

Alquist Proft, Master Sleuth has two distinct abilities relating to clues. The first is simple. It creates a Clue token! The second relates to what makes this a Control deck. For the cost of sacrificing a clue, Alquist Proft's activated ability is Sphinx's Revelation! We get to draw X cards and gain X life, all at instant speed. If you ever played back when Sphinx's Revelation was legal, you'd know that this was a powerhouse in Standard and defined many decks, including my personal favorite, Control! The shell back then was a Bant Control list that played Thragtusk and Nephalia Drownyard, but this version will just be the basics with Blue White! Just on principle, the first card I added in this list was Sphinx's Revelation, but now let's start with cards helping us do things with more clues so we can keep Sphinx Revving!

Erdwal Illuminator doubles our clues every time we investigate, while also curving well as a 2-drop into Proft as a 3-drop. Cards like Piper Wright, Publick Reporter, Merchant of Truth, and Tangletrove Kelp give our clues a way to help us actually deal damage outside of our win conditions. James, Wandering Dad, Lavinia, Foil to Conspiracy, and Sally Sparrow will give us lots of clues, and Academy Manufactor will help give us tons of mana as we investigate so that we can make our Sphinx's Revelations even bigger!

On the non-creature side, Trail of Evidence will give us consistent clues while we control our opponents, Mechanized Production doubles as a win condition and Disorder in the Court + Confirm Suspicions will give us lots of clues while helping us do other things! It's important that we don't play too many cards that just create clues; as a control deck, we're hoping to do other things while we create clues so that we can stabilize easier in the mid/endgame. Novice and Thraben inspector will help act as chump blockers for us early on as well, and the rest of our cards will be more classic control cards!

You don't get triggers, only me!

This sale includes lots of cards that counter triggered abilities and also double ours. Interacting with our opponent's cards is exactly what we want to be doing as a control deck, so those fit well in here, and doubling our abilities is great for our creatures that investigate, including Proft himself!

Disallow, Louisoix's Sacrifice, Stifle, Tale's End, and Trickbind are a great mix of useful counters that we'll want to interact with our opponents. Tishana's Tidebinder is great for pesky planeswalkers that you'll have to deal with. Sublime Epiphany is the biggest of them all, while also creating copies for us, drawing a card, and bouncing a permanent!

Virtue of Knowledge and Mirror Room // Fractured Realm are great trigger doublers for our deck because lots of our creatures have "when this enters, investigate". More clues means more Sphinx's Revelations! Gogo, Master of Mimicry can copy your own abilities as much as you have mana, so if you copy your Proft's Sphinx's Revelation ability that's high enough, you'll get extra cards and life for only two mana each!

Back to our roots!

Now let's get into our classic Control cards. These cards will give us our classic control shell while also advancing what we want to do! Desertion is a useful counterspell that steals what you counter, provided that it's an artifact or a creature. Memory Lapse and Remand are efficient counterspells for their cost. Ultimate Magic: Holy and Divine Deflection help to prevent damage so that we don't die to the damage our opponents are dealing.

Dispatch, Swords to Plowshares, and Supreme Verdict help to deal with pesky creatures. Finally, this sale also includes some classic win conditions, like Nezahal, Primal Tide and Sphinx of the Final Word. Big beaters are important because we can control the game until the late game, so then we just use the big creatures in the end!

For our game changers, we've included two cards from the sale, Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur and Force of Negation. Jin-Gitaxias is a fantastic end game win condition like Nezahal and Sphinx of the Final Word, and Force of Negation just screams control counterspell. Our last Game Changer is arguably the best one for this deck, Urza, Lord High Artificer. This one allows us to use our clues as mana rocks instead of as one-time card draws. Extra mana is huge in a control shell, and Urza's activated ability is a one-time Mind's Desire which is useful when we have extra mana! As a control shell, we don't plan on tapping out often, so at the end of our opponent's turn, we'll ideally have spare mana.

If you're looking to ramp this up, this sale also includes Hullbreaker Horror, a card that combos with any mana positive mana rock, Sol Ring in this case. With that mana, you can cast your deck with Urza or bounce your opponent's boards. If you wanna remove the game changers for a little less power, you could add more control cards, like Counterspell, Jace, the Mind Sculptor, or Farewell.

Here's the list, happy investigating!