When I sit down at a table and describe my deck as being ‘Land recursion & Aristocrats with a combo wincon,’ your mind may immediately jump to something like The Necrobloom, or The Gitrog Monster. Sacrifice and land synergies are classically in the wheelhouse of Green & Black, and combos utilizing both of those tools run rampant with the sheer breadth of recursion available. It is a curious thing, then, to realize you’re sitting across from Beza, the Bounding Spring, a Mono-White value piece that’s only really seen play in Standard. How could someone flex the capabilities of a single color, much less the one with the least synergies with sacrifice and ramp, to end up with a description resembling its furthest opposite?
In this brand-new series, I want to take a look at some of the strategies & Legendary Creatures that have made an impact on Magic’s 60-card formats, such as Standard & Pioneer, and how they can be translated to Commander. Coming from a Modern background, the shift in the game’s focus towards multiplayer has been pronounced, but that just makes pushing these 1v1 all-stars to their limits in a free-for-all even more fun! This time, we’re covering the control darling Beza, the last hero in the fight against aggro in Standard, and just how far White can go towards its enemy colors.
Not only are mono-color (or colorless) commanders the most innately restrictive in their card pool, but they also focus solely on what their color does best, lacking influence from other pieces of the color pie; the draw towards a two or three color identity is one of agency, that you as the player can access a wider cardpool and tap into synergies between your commander’s colors. It is for that reason that I believe everyone should have a widely underplayed Mono-Color deck in their arsenal as a means to flex not only one’s prowess at building decks, but a showcase of how restriction breeds creative solutions.
With that preamble out of the way, I want to pitch you a commander that often makes 20+ mana in a single turn, loops through your graveyard for the win, and does it all while being a competent value engine throughout. Oko might be gone, but this elk has plenty to say: Let’s talk about Beza, the Bounding Spring.
“If an Opponent Has More”
Beza is one of the wordiest cards when it comes to a single trigger, but to sum up its text, in every way you’re doing worse than at least one opponent, you receive a minor upside. A Treasure if you’re behind on lands, four life if you’ve been poked, one card if you’ve used up your hand, and crucially, two Fish if you have fewer creatures when the trigger resolves. While this is obviously fantastic if you’re behind due to bricking, being targeted, or otherwise lack the fuel to keep up, without your own input you’ll rarely receive all of these benefits. You’d need to purposefully get behind on lands, toss away cards in hand, pay out your life, and sacrifice your board—things White isn’t typically known for. “Victory at any price” is a Black ideal, with well-studied means of paying life, discarding, sacrificing, and so on. Or…is it?
White is shockingly good at tutoring equipment, and while this is most often used in the context of Voltron decks, there’s a swath of armaments that play into getting rid of your own cards or giving your opponent more. The obvious example is Skullclamp, one of the greatest cards of all time, which functionally pays {1} to sacrifice a 1 Toughness creature for a draw 2, but what about Mortarpod? It comes with a body, and given enough mana, can allow you to ping off things like mana dorks or utility creatures with relative ease. Dowsing Dagger plays multiple roles, not only giving an opponent more bodies, but flipping into a land that produces more than one mana—a subtheme we’ll employ even more later on. Finally, there’s Murderer’s Axe, currently in 414 decks total on EDHREC, being the only colorless, free, equipment discard outlet in Monowhite. This card seems terrible (and I’m under no illusions that it’s good), but it is a critical piece of Beza’s endgame, being a combo that loops the elk for lethal.
White is also the foremost color of a small niche called “catch-up ramp.” This takes the form of cards like Knight of the White Orchid or Archaeomancer’s Map—two cards I would never put in Beza, and which in general tend to be traps. The only catch-up ramp we’re playing only finds cards that keep us behind, the underrated Sand Scout. Of the two targets in the deck, Arid Archway is land-count neutral, and Lazotep Quarry can sacrifice our creatures, both things we want to be doing. One of the greatest flaws I find with other Beza lists is that they attempt to rectify the fact that you’ll be behind, instead of extracting maximum value from being so; why ramp up to the lands your opponent have, when you can take advantage of juicy tools that clown on high-advantage gamestates? Ward of Bones is my favorite example, locking up the gamestate so long as you’re behind, and Priest of the Blessed Graf is almost always making three 1/1s for you to sacrifice to Skullclamp or by other means. Speaking of, the obvious culprits are present: Ashnod’s Altar, Phyrexian Altar, and even Blasting Station.
A lot of Beza decks are going to be blink-centric, and when the elk’s gotten airtime on Commander shows, that was the choice made (with less than ideal results). While there certainly are some fantastic blink cards that exile & return Beza, they’re actually less efficient than one might believe, especially compared to the tools provided once Blue is added to the mix. In just White, you’ve pretty much just got Ephemerate, and Parting Gust with Touch the Spirit Realm both doubling as removal as added flexibility. The rest of White as a Monocolor strategy doesn’t have fantastic blink without it being cumbersome, telegraphed, or single-target (or multiple of the above), so I feel it’s worth looking to the graveyard when it comes to getting more triggers off of your permanents.
Twiddling Lands
Beza innately wants to be staying behind on lands, that much is clear. Unfortunately, most of the ways to ramp naturally involve either assembling a hoard of Treasure tokens (a reasonable ask, given the elk’s Enters trigger) or acquiring more lands; the clearest solution is taking a cue from the deck’s prolific usage of Equipment, and focusing on untapping the lands we do have, rather than finding more. The three caballeros responsible for this, being Lost Jitte, Pip-Boy 3000, and Sword of Feast and Famine, all accomplish this task differently in ways worth elaborating on. Jitte triggers on any combat damage, and allows you to ‘bank’ counters, waiting to pop off once you have a use for the mana, whereas Pip-Boy is an attack trigger, but untaps two lands in the process. Feast & Famine should already be a known villain to most players, however, requiring you get through to a player often beholden to the two most popular colors in Commander, Green & Black. Deserted Temple also comes out swinging in this list, being a land that untaps other lands, which can have cascading value with our multi-untappers, alongside Thespian’s Stage, which isn’t just copying Dark Depths for the umpteemth time. Instead, you’ll be using it to ignore unfavorable Enters conditions while reaping the benefits of untapping some very specific lands. In a normal strategy, these untaps usually net you a single mana, but here, it’s almost always going to be much, much more.
Now that you know Beza wants to be untapping lands and sacrificing its board to remain behind, it’s time to talk about the other two subthemes present: Faith’s Reward effects, and lands that tap for 2+ mana. Cards like Lotus Field both put you behind on lands but also have cascading mana advantage when untapped, similar to Lotus Vale and Scorched Ruins. Ancient Tomb, already a profoundly broken card, puts you behind on life so Beza accrues maximum value. Arid Archway, as mentioned, is reasonably tutorable, taps for 2, keeps you land-neutral, et cetera. That being said, if we’re constantly sacrificing lands to other lands that makes us fairly vulnerable to removal, or even just being a bit slow. Furthermore, given how scary the Altars are, we’re likely to draw ample removal once the engine’s online; unlike a lot of decks, Beza doesn’t counteract this with protection, but instead readily bounces back from interaction by way of Modern Eggs’ gameplan. Let’s segue into that.
We’re Back! A Beza Story
As a brief history lesson, Eggs’ modern conception began with the printing of Faith’s Reward in Magic 13, where it focused on looping a number of small artifacts that either drew cards or produced mana when sacrificed, finishing with a recursive loop of Pyrite Spellbomb or another damage outlet. In Commander, players will often focus more on protecting their board than being able to get it back following removal, which I feel is more behavioral than anything; it feels better to be able to shrug off interaction than it does to put things back the way they were, after getting blown up. Coming from a Modern background though, I knew these types of cards were the perfect fit in Beza, given how the rest of the deck already behaved. While there’s a lot of them, the ones we’re highlighting only help ourselves, being Faith’s Reward, Brought Back, Cosmic Intervention, and Gerrard’s Hourglass Pendant, with Samwise the Stouthearted as a miniature version. Not only can we use tools like Brought Back & Samwise to get back lands we’ve sacrificed to things like Lotus Field, each of them also doubles as help against removal, given we have sacrifice outlets if our Creatures are targeted by removal such as Swords to Plowshares.
Additionally, while these are fantastic in the midgame when fighting to establish our value engines, they also serve as a means of breaking parity into board wipes—Toxic Deluge feels a lot better knowing we can just snap our fingers and recur the board. This also means we can make superb use of less common board wipes, namely Balancing Act and Cataclysm. If we’ve been sacrificing lands, creatures, etc to remain behind, these can be absolutely devastating, given we’ll always have at least one land which has more value than an opponents’. Even if we aren’t returning the things we wipe, it’s rare to have less available mana production than an opponent following either of these, due to how the deck’s mana engine is structured.
Moreover, White is actually the second-best color when it comes to recurring cards from the graveyard directly to the battlefield, and in some cases, the absolute king. I would argue Sevinne’s Reclamation is the single-greatest White card in Commander, as its flexibility, scaling throughout the game, allows it to both help you bounce back or win outright, depending on the tools at your disposal. Sun Titan is also here, yet while many would think it a bit too slow, the fact we make so much mana, and even have some loopable win conditons with the card, ensures it still has a place in a 2025 brew. Yet, while Sevrec is good, and Sun Titan at least used to be a staple, I want to draw your attention to one of the most underplayed cards in White: Jailbreak. At face value, this is kind of a one-time use Sevrec with some riders, although looking a bit deeper, it’s much more fun; Jailbreak is a phenomenal political piece, able to return threatening components to the opponent’s board, or get back their removal, all while keeping your board stacked with the best tools available in your graveyard. At worst, given all the fetchlands we’re playing, this is kind of a white Nature’s Lore, so long as at least one opponent is also on fetchlands. In that sense, it even helps with Beza, as while we do ramp up, so does at least 1 opponent, keeping us behind.
The Secret of Nim
Now that we’ve delved into the various value synergies at play here, it’s worth asking how Beza actually intends to win. The most common way you’ll be winning is through a combination of Beza itself, Nim Deathmantle, and one of the Altars (With Ashnod’s being preferred). So long as an opponent controls 2 or more creatures, you can sacrifice Beza & its two Fish to Ashnod’s Altar for 6 colorless mana, use 4 of it to pay for Deathmantle, and net 2 colorless mana, plus sometimes a card or Treasure. In the case of Phyrexian Altar, you’d need to sacrifice Beza, the two Fish, and the Treasure, and only net the card; this is a problem unless you have your discard outlet in Murderer’s Axe, and for either loop, you can only draw up to the number of cards in an opponent’s hand, needing to either play or discard the cards you draw in order to free up space. While this sounds cumbersome & a bit weird, the line is actually fairly consistent, given everything in the deck wants to end up at the point where you’d be able to resolve a combo like this.
Your other option is of course pairing 2/3 of Sun Titan, Samwise, and Gift of Immortality/Angelic Renewal with any sacrifice outlet. These cards all return one another over and over, providing infinite sacrifice fodder in Monowhite, and each have fantastic use cases throughout the game. Gift in particular is an astounding value piece when attached to a creature with a solid Enters trigger, such as Beza, looping basically anything we want 4 times per turn cycle. The actual win comes either from Blasting Station or Mortarpod, both being mana sinks for damage, although the deck does have a few non-infinite paths to victory as well. Finally, there’s a relatively untutorable card in Eldrazi Displacer, which also obtains infinite Beza triggers by way of Ashnod’s Altar, although it of course also combos with any of our creatures that produce 2+ bodies and Ashnod’s as well.
While Urza’s Saga is well-known for being a means to fetch small Artifacts, a role it certainly plays here, given the amount of untapping & recursion we have, it also can create an alarming amount of massive Construct tokens. I’ve had games where I make 4-9 Constructs, each at 10+ power, swinging in as chunky distractions while you assemble your actual combo. Furthermore, most opponents will threaten a scoop if you resolve a board wipe + mass recursion spell, something we’re also primed to do with the deck. The crucial thing though, is that the vast majority of your gameplan exists independent of Beza itself; yes, it’s a solid value piece to nab some mana, bodies, and/or card advantage, and yes you have a combo with your Commander, but at the end of the day it’s just a perfectly reasonable card that doesn’t often strike players as immediately threatening. It has a lot of text, and incrementally gains a reasonable amount of value, but when compared to juggernauts like Korvold or Jodah, you’re often shrugged off (much to your benefit).
Seek and Destroy
As with most decks employing a relatively niche strategy reliant on a select few cards, Beza is well-acquainted with tutors. Within White as a color, in fact, looping your tutors is often going to be a greater degree of value than most dedicated draw engines, although those tools would not be out of place in a lower-power build. One fantastic example is Ranger-Captain of Eos—you already know this card is good, sure, but Beza is able to flex it uniquely due to its search pool & sacrifice ability. This card is most often finding Weathered Wayfarer if your lands aren’t yet set up, but can also grab our copy of Esper Sentinel, the rare great White value piece. Coupling Ranger-Captain with cards that recur it, such as Sevrec, Faith’s Reward, etc means we can not only protect ourselves from non-creature spells, but also deny them to our opponents, all while finding an extra small Creature. The card would be better here if you wanted to run things like Mother of Runes, but as discussed above, protection is usually worse for us than recursion, and Ranger-Captain itself is tutorable by nothing else in the deck, meaning we don’t want to hitch too big a cart to its horse. If it were, I might consider former Pauper darling Tireless Tribe as a 1-mana Creature that serves as a discard outlet, in place of Murderer’s Axe, a reasonable swap based on your gameplan.
All manner of ‘sacrifice to search’ cards are welcome here in much the same way, such as Moonsilver Key, Inventors’ Fair, and Expedition Map, but we can also couple Enters searches with our own sacrifice outlets to double up on value. With the density of tutors we have Samwise, Angelic Renewal, and more can all be tutors themselves with the right buddy. That’s not all though—not only do we have a number of tutors that sacrifice themselves, our removal does as well. Aura of Silence does double duty as a means to slow down our opponents, and a self-sacrifice piece, and Magus of the Balance is even more backbreaking when done twice over. Similarly, both Solitude and Witch Enchanter don’t mind being sacrificed and brought back, and Skyclave Apparition is also a stellar option, given we can sacrifice it to its trigger, denying our opponents an Illusion…or deliberately give them multiple, to ensure Beza’s Fish trigger goes off.
Example Decklist: Beza, Catch-Up and Mustard
I think the main point of umbrage I have with the deck, which is my most-played Commander at this point, is the necessary cost associated with many of its core cards. Those lands that tap for 2+ mana don’t come cheap, and as soon as you scrape away even one of them you’re losing a significant point of consistency that White as a color can’t make up for. Both Lotus Vale & Scorched Ruins are reserve list cards, meaning they have a price which won’t ever go down, and often creeps up with the passage of time. Worse still, the one major land untapper I haven’t yet mentioned, Candelabra of Tawnos, is a famously expensive Magic card with only a sparing few people having access to a copy. While you or I might own Vale & Ruins, each around ~$50, getting our hands on a real Candelabra is likely well beyond the pale at >$1000. There are a few paths forward with that in consideration, the first being less pragmatic. Not only has Beza benefitted greatly from the recent uptick in good White cards, a few of its best cards are less than a year or two old; the synergies at play here are relatively recent developments, with Lost Jitte & Pip-Boy 3000 as key examples. It is entirely possible a high enough density of effects not yet replicable without reserve list cards will at some point become available to the masses, a day I eagerly await. As for the more realistic option…so long as your power level is even with the rest of the players at your table, the price of cards should not be a deterrent to unique strategies being played. You can absolutely test this Beza list as a Bracket 4 deck using naught but sharpied-on Basic Lands as stand-ins, and reasonable folks will understand.
With that caveat out of the way, allow me to say that Beza is my favorite Commander Deck of all time. While I wouldn’t be shocked if eventually a better actual Commander comes along for the 99 it uses, the idea of utilizing White in this mock-Golgari fashion gets to the core of everything I love about Magic. This is a deck that nothing within its color comes close to replicating, and watching my opponents figure out the gameplan in real time is always a treat. As previously discussed in this series, I have a penchant for specifically 60-card playable Monocolor Commanders, and Beza is no different. Seeing this elk be cast at a Pro Tour in so many UWx shells warms my heart, and it’s always a fun challenge to try and see something from the more traditional formats translate into Commander.
The other point worth mentioning when talking about the deck holistically is the fact that it’s fun-first, which I know sounds rich coming from a list including Moxen, land wraths, and more. I’ve eschewed the traditional White stax pieces you’ll see most often in cEDH, such as Drannith Magistrate, because it can often be counterintuitive to put both a target on your back, and your opponents behind. If you manage to break parity or slow the game to a crawl, it can actually be harder to combo off or pull ahead, as there’s fewer ways to trigger Beza and others similar effects. We don’t want to lock our opponents from their Commanders, because Beza thrives in an environment where at least one player is doing better than you. It’s the eternal underdog, and that’s not by choice.
As a brief aside: One thing worth mentioning to the table while piloting the deck is the absurd fact that you can actually makes Tokens of every color, all in Monowhite. Between the White Spirit from Priest of the Blessed Graf, Blue Fishes from Beza, Black Germ from Mortarpod (and Zombie copy from Lazotep Quarry), Red Warrior from Voice of Victory, and Green Plants from Dowsing Dagger, each color is accounted for, and you could potentially swerve that into its own take on Beza. Case in point, this could be a Monowhite Happily Ever After deck, something which could perfectly slot into Bracket 1 or 2, with the necessary power level tuning.
Beza Does What Abzan’t
I’ve always had an affection for doing what colors plainly shouldn’t, all the way back to my first-ever optimized deck, a Barrin, Master Wizard Monoblue sacrifice strategy. There’s something delightful about showing players the potential Monocolor decks have to break the molds thrust upon them, and Beza is no different. If you get a kick out of Korvold, or wile away your days sacrificing Squirrels to Chatterfang, Beza might just be a great breath of fresh air that still has similar enough play patterns to suit your tastes. Being Monocolor, you have far greater reliance on, and ability to fit in, utility artifacts & lands; this is shown through the admittedly-greedy 6.5 Plains we play, on top of all the MDFCs and fetchlands. Yet still, this is without a doubt a White deck, not colorless masquerading as a color by way of its tutors, as can sometimes be the case. A lot of those colorless cards have costs you need to pay, such as exiling/discarding for your Moxen, sacrificing for lands, or otherwise paying/losing life, all of which White can assist in recouping.
While Beza only has 731 decks on EDHREC at time of writing, it’s not without its fans. Not only is it my favorite deck, but Beza’s been showcased by the wonderful Jimmy Wong of Game Knights as a personal deck of his, and Beza itself has a number of Standard tops within control shells. Just imagine that: Across all the formats Beza is playable in, there’s that same sense of hope provided, used for different ends. The card that helps Blue-White stabilize against an aggro pilot in Standard is looping you for game in Commander, after you sacrificed all but a couple lands, and I think that’s something truly special.
Until next time, get behind to leap ahead.
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