Weekly Sale Commander: Wizards!

Posted on November 7, 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! Keep in mind that the game changers in your deck aren't the only thing that moves you up and down a bracket. Your intent with your deck; inclusions of other interactions, engines, and combos, and overall playgroup should also be factors in your bracket! Remember that the weekly sale ends on Sunday night at 11:59 PM EST, so you have until then to get your cards ordered!

Hello again, folks! This week's sale continues to be the Wizards and Warriors sale, and now we're going to focus on the Wizards! Check out the Warriors list here if you wanna turn creatures sideways instead of casting lots of spells! As far as Wizards in Magic go, these silly little guys pack a huge punch if you give them the time to build up. We're led by the best little Wizard on this side of Gaia, Vivi Ornitier! While he may be getting the hammer in Standard soon (no, we're not playing Agatha's Soul Cauldron, get that 60-card soup nonsense away from me), that doesn't mean that we still can't jam him in Commander! Let's get into it!

Wizards Galore!

To honor Vivi and his people, you'll wanna put this on repeat during the whole reading of the article, along with any game you're playing. I promise you, it's a bop.

Vivi Ornitier, if you're not familiar, is a prototype Black Mage from FF9, who basically goes through the game learning about his existence and why he and his people were created (war, the answer is always war). He happens to be an excellent mage, quite adept at all forms of Fire, Thunder, and Blizzard. Basically, he's stronger than everyone and just wants to use his power to protect his friends and people. In Magic, he's known for generating mana equal to his power once a turn, and getting bigger (while pinging EACH opponent) every time you play a noncreature. He's low-costed and efficient, which make for a great Wizards-based Storm Commander!

To kick things off, we've got a plethora of great wizards, courtesy of our sale. Both Archmage Emeritus and Archmage of Runes give us great card advantage just for casting spells! Archmage of Runes also gives us discounts on our spells, as does Baral, Chief of Compliance, Goblin Electromancer, and Stormcatch Mentor. Deekah, Fractal Theorist and Tellah, Great Sage give us great payoffs for casting our spells, although not as good as one of our first storm payoffs, Stormsplitter! We'll get to the rest later, but Stormsplitter basically just doubles in number every time you cast an instant or sorcery. Finally, for some copying, we've got Dualcaster Mage and (sort-of) Demlich, which also happens to be one of the coolest cards printed for this archetype, so we're obligated to include it.

Crackling a Witty Storm's Conduit in a Monsoon

If you get that reference, then you'll notice that we also play Ral, Monsoon Mage in this list (along with a couple of his Planeswalker variants)! Ral is a great secondary Commander choice for this list, but I've catered the list more to Vivi, so you may have to make a few changes if you wanna try out Ral. These three planeswalkers are great for our second storm payoff, Radstorm! Courtesy of Fallout, Radstorm lets us proliferate for each spell cast before it in that turn, which is especially nice with Vivi's +1/+1 counters and his army of planeswalkers!

We also play a whole host of low cost spells and cantrips that help us get our storm count up. Rituals like Pyretic Ritual, Desperate Ritual, Rite of Flame, and Seething Song (come on, Wizards, give me Manamorphose here!), along with Brainstorm, Opt, Ponder, Preordain, and Consider give us plenty of low cost options. In the middle ground of costs, cards like Lock and Load, Jeska's Will, and Frantic Search give us tons of card advantage, and Mizzix's Mastery and Past in Flames let us reuse many of these options from the graveyard! We also play Epic Experiment, basically a Genesis Wave for storm decks, here because hitting a Mind's Desire off of an Epic Experiment is one of the best feelings you can have in a Storm Deck.

Our other storm payoffs are Grapeshot and Mind's Desire! Mind's Desire is probably the most fun card that has Storm in Magic, and lets you just flip off of the top of your deck for more spells. Grapeshot, while is usually used in 20-life formats to just hit your opponent, is actually more of a board clear here; it's great in the early game to pick off a mana dork for a tempo swing or great in the late game to sweep your opponent's boards. Most of our games, we're going to be winning with constant pings to our opponents with Vivi, along with Coruscation Mage, Fiery Inscription, the mage from Mage Siege (the spell part of Lindblum, Industrial Regency), and also from Vivi's Persistence (not in this list until the Holiday cards come out later this year!). Rite of the Dragoncaller joins Deekah and Tellah as great creature payoffs for our spells. Finally, to include a card with literal actual storm in the name, we've got Thousand-Year Storm, a card that basically gives all your instants and sorceries a watered-down, but still good, version of Storm.

Change the Game!

Now while this may be a Wizards deck, we can go ahead and address the elephant in the room of missing Wizards. We're not playing a single dragon named Niv-Mizzet, and that's because I'd rather play Curiosity and Ophidian Eye. In bracket 3, you can totally have a 2-card combo, I just prefer not to in my lists, so I'll leave it up to you if you want to include them or not. We do, however, play 3 full game changers here! Jeska's Will is great at generating mana and cards, Mystical Tutor helps us find something we need to go off, and Force of Will is some much needed protection. Fierce Guardianship can be swapped for Force of Will, I just went with Force since I played Fierce Guardianship in the Warriors deck and wanted to mix it up.

If you want to beef this up to higher brackets, I'd recommend adding some fast mana, like Mox Amber/Chrome Mox/Mox Diamond, along with more free interaction like Deflecting Swat and Fierce Guardianship. Vivi is already a solid contender in cEDH these days, implementing cards like Hullbreaker Horror and Underworld Breach to give you competitive lines that are unmatched. You can also add cards like Molten Duplication and Heat Shimmer, which combo with Dualcaster Mage all on their own, so you've got tons of options.

Here's the list, check it out!