Pheldagriff Oath

Or, how a happy purple hippo can reveal horrors beyond human comprehension.

When I started playing EDH (back when it was still called EDH), it really was more of a wild west. While there were plenty of good, popular legends to build around, a lot more of people’s time was dedicated to trying to make things work with old, janky cards, rather than waiting for the latest obvious enabler or UB slop. It was this environment where you got crazy and stupid decks like Selenia Suicide Life Swap, Ashling & the 99 Mountains, Dosan Mono-Green-Not-Green. Things were a lot more open then, I guess. Even the popular legends people wouldn’t necessarily build the same way. A commander I saw all the time back then was Phelddagrif, the happy purple hippo from Legends. While most people built it as simple group hug or pillowfort, there were plenty of other ideas running around. I’ll never forget a game I played on Cockatrice against a Phelddagrif player whose whole deck was MLD and Stax. You don't see as much outside-the-box stuff like that today, which is a shame but also understandable.

So, for years the itch to build Phelddagrif has been festering in the back of my mind. There were plenty of obvious lines to take, but I wanted to make something more unique. Obviously, pillowfort sucks, and I’ve made too many stax decks to just do that again in different colors. I wanted to do something that was powerful, but ultimately still stupid. About a year ago, I somehow started watching a MTG vtuber who plays Vintage Oath (it’s shameful, I know). It was watching those videos when it hit me - Pheldagriff can give your opponent creatures, and that isn’t necessarily to their advantage. So I got to brewing.

Artifacts (5) 1 Arcane Signet 1 Proteus Staff 1 Scroll Rack 1 Sensei's Divining Top 1 Sol Ring Creatures (5) 1 Blightsteel Colossus 1 Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur 1 Serra's Emissary 1 Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre 1 Worldspine Wurm Enchantments (6) 1 Defense of the Heart 1 Exploration 1 Oath of Druids 1 Sterling Grove 1 Rhystic Study 1 Sylvan Library Instants (27) 1 Arcane Denial 1 Argivian Find 1 Beast Within 1 Brainstorm 1 Counterspell 1 Crib Swap 1 Cyclonic Rift 1 Dig Through Time 1 Dream Fracture 1 Enlightened Tutor 1 Fact or Fiction 1 Force of Negation 1 Hinder 1 Impulse 1 Mercy Killing 1 Misdirection 1 Muddle the Mixture 1 Mystical Tutor 1 Noxious Revival 1 Orim's Chant 1 Path to Exile 1 Pongify 1 Reins of Power 1 Remand 1 Swan Song 1 Swords to Plowshares 1 Voidslime Planeswalkers (4) 1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor 1 Narset, Parter of Veils 1 Oko, Thief of Crowns 1 Tamiyo, the Moon Sage

Sorcery (17) 1 Cataclysm 1 Curse of the Swine 1 Day of Judgment 1 Farewell 1 Gaea's Blessing 1 Idyllic Tutor 1 Polymorph 1 Ponder 1 Preordain 1 Regrowth 1 Show and Tell 1 Sleight of Hand 1 Supreme Verdict 1 Terminus 1 Wargate 1 Windfall 1 Wrath of God Lands (35) 1 Adarkar Wastes 1 Alchemist's Refuge 1 Arid Mesa 1 Breeding Pool 1 Brushland 1 City of Brass 1 Command Tower 1 Flooded Grove 1 Flooded Strand 1 Forbidden Orchard 1 Forest 1 Glacial Fortress 1 Hall of Heliod's Generosity 1 Hallowed Fountain 1 Hedge Maze 1 Hinterland Harbor 2 Island 1 Lush Portico 1 Mana Confluence 1 Marsh Flats 1 Meticulous Archive 1 Misty Rainforest 1 Mystic Gate 1 Mystic Sanctuary 1 Plains 1 Polluted Delta 1 Scalding Tarn 1 Sunpetal Grove 1 Temple Garden 1 Verdant Catacombs 1 Windswept Heath 1 Wooded Foothills 1 Wooded Bastion 1 Yavimaya Coast

Strategy

Basically, your goal with this deck is simple: stick Oath of Druids (or a congruent effect), get a fatty, and kill the table before they kill you. Really, though, most of the time we’re bant control. A big mistake with this deck is to try to turbo out Oath too early. You need to wait until you can get everybody else on the backfoot, then spring for your fatty. Otherwise, everyone will just gang up and kill you. Frankly, with the big scary creature, there’s a good chance they’re going to try to gang up and kill you anyway, which is why you need to be judicious. Most of the moves you make should be ensuring that you don’t die. Don’t use your wraths and counters willy-nilly; wait until there’s something that you absolutely have to stop. Try to play politically, if you can. Using Phelddagrif’s abilities, you can make deals with other players and hopefully get them to target other people while you’re waiting for the right time to strike.

A weakness of this deck is that you can burn through your life very quickly with fetches, shocks, City of Brass, and not to mention anything the rest of the players might do. When I built this deck, I was mostly playing in person with people who didn't like proxies, so I had to run some slightly-disadvantageous lands instead of duals. That’s probably the first thing I’d change today. As well, I could see reasonably adding in a few pillowfort-y elements to the deck to protect your life total while you’re getting ready, I just wouldn't want to lean super hard in that direction.

There are two big mistakes that many EDH Oath decks make. One is running utility creatures. We can’t afford a late game Oath just getting us Llanowar Elves, so unfortunately we have to forgo them. Another mistake is running too many fatties. Many lists online I see have 15+ creatures. Maybe they do this in the name of “chaos,” maybe they just don’t want to run out of hits, but to me having so many fatties in the mix only means that you have a higher chance of hitting a less-impactful one. So, I’ve opted for a pretty small selection. Maybe not all the choices are absolute top tier (Jin Gitaxis sticks out), but, well, it’s my list. Change it if you want. Unfortunately, being in Bant, we can’t run Atraxa, the Vintage Oath payoff, and being in a meme format, we can’t run Emrakul, the other Vintage Oath payoff. Still, we’ve got some big boppers. So long as you get them out at the right time, victory is pretty easy from there.

Really, the deck is pretty straightforward. The only “tech” things are cards like Mercy Killing, Oko, and Forbidden Orchard, which can force your opponent to have a creature to proc Oath even when they don’t want to, but those are pretty easy to understand. Maybe the most fun card that can win you the game is Reins of Power. You get all of an opponent’s creatures and they get nothing, or maybe one fatty for a turn. You can even do fun Mindslaver-esque plays with it, stealing all their creatures and then making the worst possible attacks in coordination with another player. Very fun.

Give the deck a try and let me know if there's any changes you think might be good.

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