Weekly Sale Commander: Deck the Halls - Part 2 of 6: Blue!

Posted on December 10, 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!

For the Deck the Halls sale over the next couple weeks, it's broken up into six total parts over the course of the sale. Each part ends in a couple days, so be sure to get your orders in before we move to the next color! Part 2: Blue ends on Thursday night at 11:59 PM before we get to Black!

Part 1 - White can be located here:

Weekly Sale Commander: Deck the Halls - Part 2 of 6: White!

Welcome to everyone's favorite color! Blue is historically known for being the most controlling color, and arguably the strongest color, although in Commander, that could depend on your playgroup, your bracket, etc. Today's Mono-Blue deck is designed to turn you into an Archenemy, meaning that you're gonna have to learn how to 1v3. This is because we're going to be playing our Commander early and doing as many things as possible with her while also maintaining strong control on the board!

Meet Lady Octopus, Inspired Inventor (I highly recommend going to read her official Gatherer ruling about your genius plans)! Doc Ock 2: Electric Boogaloo is well known for being Otto Octavius' protege, while also being quite cunning and ruthless herself. In Magic, she's about as efficient as you can get, since she's a one-mana 0/2, so we're playing her on turn one of every game! She has a neat ability that puts counters on her whenever you draw your first or second card each turn, which will count your draw for turn. With those counters, you can tap her to cast a free artifact from your hand with mana value less than or equal to the number of counters. She gives me Yisan, the Wanderer Bard vibes, but as a Blue artifact version, so we're going to take advantage of free spells in the best color to do so! Let's get into it!

It's an Artifact Deck!

As expected, we're running a good number of artifacts in this list. Lady Octopus, Inspired Inventor really benefits from coming down quick and having artifacts to cast right away. Early game artifacts will propel us into the mid-late game much faster than our opponents, ideally! Etherium Sculptor is a no-brainer here, one of the best artifact cost-reducers you can play in Blue. Spellskite and Lightning Greaves function as some solid protection for Lady Octopus, and Sapphire Medallion and The Reality Chip give us some efficient utility. We play Tribute Mage here as well, as we'd like to be able to find Spellskite/Lightning Greaves as fast as possible to keep Lady Octopus in play at all times.

Going up the mana ladder, we play cards like Sai, Master Thopterist and Phyrexian Metamorph, both of which are just strong utility artifacts in any good Blue artifact deck. Midnight Clock gives us a smidge more ramp, Repurposing Bay is our deck's Birthing Pod, and Simulacrum Synthesizer helps build our board up with big ol' Karn-structs! Master Transmuter and Padeem, Consul of Innovation give us tons of advantage in a Blue artifact deck, and The Water Crystal + Crystal Skull, Isu Spyglass are some higher-end ramp cards that also give us some other utility.

On the top end, we're hoping to kill our opponents or just massively control the board. Cybermen Squadron (a card I have yet to cast but I so desperately want to!) gives our nonlegendary artifact creatures myriad! Myriad basically means if you attack one opponent, you actually attack them all with copies. This works so well with all of our top end creatures, like Auton Soldier, an artifact clone, also with myriad (yes, it stacks), or Cityscape Leveler, a card true to its name when we have 3 of them out all at once! Blightsteel Colossus, Magic's favorite one-shot wand, can outright win you the game if it has myriad, but it's up to our opponents to have blockers by then. If they don't, then they sealed their own fate. On the non-creature side, we have Portal to Phyrexia, a card that basically reads "your opponents lose most, if not all, of their creatures and you'll get one each turn, good luck, have fun". We also play my newest obsession courtesy of Avatar: the Last Airbender, Planetarium of Wan Shi Tong. This card works so well when you can get it down early, and it's rather easy for a Blue deck to surveil and scry (just copy your Simulacrum Synthesizer, you can't ever have too many!).

Wait, it's an.. Infect deck?

Well, no, actually, we're not. Blightsteel Colossus does have infect, but we're not primarily an infect deck. We are, however, a proliferating deck! Proliferate is a great mechanic with Lady Octopus because the more counters on her, the more we're able to cast free spells. Surge Conductor proliferates every time a nontoken artifact we control enters, which will happen a lot! Flux Channeler proliferates every time we cast a noncreature, and Tekuthal, Inquiry Dominus will proliferate twice instead of once whenever we're doing it! Deepglow Skate has a super double proliferate and Ichormoon Gauntlet will give our lone planeswalker, Tezzeret the Seeker, the ability to proliferate, while also just acting as another Flux Channeler, but only for permanents. Between possible poison counters from our opponents surviving Blightsteel Colossus attacks, Lady Octopus' Ingenuity counters, Tezzeret's loyalty counters, and even our Karn-structs +1/+1 counters, we've got plenty of options for proliferating, so that value is greatly appreciated here.

Oh, I see, it's just an awesome Bracket 3 deck!

As usual, in Bracket 3, I'm opting to play 3 game changers, as long as they're all useful. Fierce Guardianship is a great counterspell to play in decks with low-cost Commanders, and ours is almost as cheap as they can get (aside from you Rograkh players out there). Urza, Lord High Artificer creates a Karn-struct but also makes it so all of our artifacts become Mox Sapphires! That, along with the Mind's Desire on a stick, makes Urza totally worth playing here. Our final game changer took me a second, but I ultimately landed on Ancient Tomb. It was fighting with The One Ring for the slot, but the deck slots were tight, as is, because of the multi-themed thing we've got going on with Artifacts and Proliferating. I'd say run them both if you want to jump up to bracket 4 or 5, or just swap our Urza! Personal preference is the name of the game, and you're gonna crush everyone anyway.

If you wanna beef it up even more, there are a plethora of combos you can add that make this significantly stronger. Trinket Mage + Sensei's Divining Top gives you a level of card draw you didn't realize you needed until you're always getting the extra ingenuity counter from Lady Octopus. If you're adding Top, you might as well add Mystic Forge at that point, since you have Etherium Sculptor, and boom, you've got a draw-your-deck combo. That also works with The Reality Chip as well!

Here's the list, good luck being Archenemy in your group! See y'all on Friday for Black!