Statistically speaking, you’re at least aware of Loran of the Third Path. This modern take on a White Reclamation Sage has been an instrumental tech piece across multiple formats, prized for its ability to remove problematic cards out of the Sideboard, barter in Commander, and employ mild synergy with its Human typeline. That being said, Loran is the epitome of an ‘unexciting’ card to have in one’s Command Zone: Not only does she only provide access to a single color, but none of what she does is splashy or otherwise novel. She seems more fitting to have a place in the 99 of a deck that begrudgingly wants to run some artifact & enchantment removal, while playing to the crowd with a bit of advantage generation.
Per EDHREC though, Loran is in a whopping 21% of a recorded 156,386 decklists, and in Standard, she’s the 5th most played Creature, and 2nd overall most played Legendary Creature, behind Beza, the Bounding Spring. That many decklists including Loran have to be indicative of something, and I believe it’s that Loran represents the cardboard version of brussels sprouts tossed in a vinaigrette; yes, they’re still vegetables, but good lord they’re a tasty side dish. I aim to prove that Loran can be more than just a complement, however, and that a savvy player can wield the tools of Pro Tour Honolulu 2006’s Owling Mine to make the most of her as your Commander.
While Nekusar, the Mindrazer is well-known as a draw punisher, he lacks a critical aspect unique to Loran for that subtheme: Limiters on the usage of all that extra value you’re generating your opponents. By flexing her capabilities to “help” one opponent at a time, coupled with Rule of Law effects, we’ll be playing towards a prisoner’s dilemma where we’re the warden. In this series, I’m exploring what it takes to bring the individual Legendary Creatures from 60 card formats to Commander, and the lessons we can learn from the differences between their unique metas & circumstances.
“You and Target Opponent”
To start things off, let me note that this is not a Group Hug deck; while helping the table draw plenty of cards, and even answer key threats at opportune moments may make you seem a worthy ally, this is a crude veneer over the actual strategy: Group Slug. Yes, Monowhite lacks the traditional damage options offered to colors like Black & Red for this concept, but we’re lucky enough to have a multitude of colorless options that help press opposing life totals into the single digits. For starters, though, let’s break down Loran’s abilities, and how that’s steered the way this deck was built.
Loran, at her core, is a Rec Sage that has the option to, once relieved of summoning sickness, provide targeted advantage to yourself and another player. Removal in the Command Zone is a contentious topic, and many people would argue that it results in negative play experiences; opponents are usually more leery to play out critical pieces so long as you’re holding Loran in the Command Zone, and she punishes decks reliant on Artifacts & Enchantments. That being said, Loran brings a carrot along with this proverbial stick, and if you apply her political angle correctly, this can be an interesting dance that keeps every player engaged. Certainly, she might blow up your Sol Ring, but is it really so bad if you’re promised her next draw?
To capitalize on this limited removal option from our Commander, though, we’re on two cards that get more relevant each set release, Liquimetal Coating and Liquimetal Torque. These cards transform any permanent into an Artifact at will, meaning our normally inflexible removal suddenly has the capability of taking out anything that lacks Indestructible, Shroud, or Hexproof. And, being in White, board wipes can take care of the rest. To that end, we’re also on more Artifact & Enchantment removal than most decks, such as Devout Chaplain, which taps to remove them, and the underrated Abolish, using our spare advantage from cards like Loran to unexpectedly deal with problematic pieces onboard.
Too Much of a Good Thing
Much like Nekusar, Loran has the tendency to fill opposing grips, usually one at a time, by way of her tap ability. This is enhanced by a number of cards which let us untap our creatures, which we’ll get into later, but suffice to say hand sizes will be chunky with us at the table. One of the most famous decks to actually position the loading of opponents’ hands is that of ‘Owling Mine’, which brutalized control decks back in 2006. By pairing pieces like Howling Mine with Ebony Owl Netsuke, players who were unable to empty their hands fast enough quickly found themselves ground down to nothing. We’re similarly employing these tools in Loran, with the full suite of Black Vise, Iron Maiden, Viseling, and Sword of War and Peace all playable in Monowhite. This doesn’t sound like much, but White has a reasonable ability to tutor for Artifacts, and between their density and the number of cards we’ll be drawing ourselves, it’s highly likely to slam one or more of these pieces in the midgame.
That’s not all, however, because we also have one of the more underrated ways to punish a loaded grip: Apple of Eden, Isu Relic. If employed correctly, this lets us turn opposing draw into functionally our own, while keeping their hand loaded up for our punisher effects. Wedding Ring likewise lets us double-dip on their draw, as saving Loran for their turn bounces her advantage right back to us. Finally, Scrawling Crawler is both sides of the equation, both burning opponents for draw, and being a Howling Mine on legs, how times have changed.
In terms of actually getting cards into opposing hands, however, few tools beat out Loran’s best buddies, the Advocates. Spurnmage Advocate and Pulsemage Advocate each put an alarming amount of cards back into an opponent’s hand, resulting in direct damage by way of a Black Vise effect, but they’re a savvy political tool as well. If you can strike the right bargain, maybe giving an opponent back their Swords to Plowshares isn’t so bad, if they promise not to use it on your board. After all, Commander is a 40 life format, and they can afford a few more ticks of the Vice for their troubles. Better still, the Advocates are tap abilities, which means we can potentially reuse them multiple times across a turn cycle, with the right tools.
It’s the Law
Normally the downside to loading your opponents up with oodles of resources is the inevitable fact that, gasp, they get to actually play out those cards. This is a tragedy indeed for decks like Nekusar, who aim to finish the game before the overwhelming advantage accumulation comes back to bite them, but for Monowhite, we lack the luxury of that burning clock. What White does provide, however, is the capability to limit our opponents’ abilities to empty their hands by playing their cards, through Rule of Law effects. Even if our opponents have a grip of 7+ cards, we need only worry about the single scariest card on a given turn, outside of instant-speed play. This also puts a massive crunch on control decks that might want to interact multiple times on the stack, or combo decks that need to resolve several key pieces in a single turn to win; these are incidentals for us, though they are the historical reason RoL effects see play in formats like Legacy & cEDH.
Activated abilities are notably absent from these effects, however, meaning we can use our tap effects and more whilst under the weight of law, allowing our primary form of advantage generation (and indeed, damage) to work under the thumbscrews at play here. While we are on RoL itself, there’s ample sidegrades available, such as Ethersworn Canonist, Archon of Emeria, or even Unstable Glyphbridge//Sandswirl Wanderglyph, a board wipe that goes over Loran, and then flips into a protective clock. If we have need of a means to get out from under these effects, however, it’s convenient that our Commander has the capability of destroying enchantments, meaning a pop-off turn is only a blink on the opponent’s End Step away. We also have Devout Chaplain, and a total of 10 Humans (plus Loran), meaning we can access repeatable removal while on the board as well. Don’t forget, while they lack the text on the card, both of your Advocates are Humans too!
Beyond that, we’re also on the rules nightmare that is Trinisphere, which sets the minimum mana payment to {3} for any given card. This naturally hoses a lot of the unfair free spells we often see in Commander, but also supplements our RoL gameplan, requiring opponents spend that minimum payment per card played from hand, stopping a series of cheap spells from reducing their hand size too quickly. For those unaware, Trinisphere has its very own layer, meaning it is tabulated after any other changes in cost, so classic cards like Urza’s Incubator or the Medallions don’t help fight off the taxman.
Deal with It
So, your gameplan is going swimmingly, how do you actually take advantage of the, well, advantage going around? First up is the poison pill of Coveted Jewel, which not only serves as a fantastic mana rock and draw tool, but also a harrowing question for greedy opponents: Do you actually want to draw 3 cards, with everything else going on? If this gets passed around, you can treat it like a sort-of Monarch-lite, but with 3 cards per pass the hand size issues stack up fast. If you’re getting too low, however, you always have the expensive out of Champions of Minas Tirith. More often than not, this blocks all attacks from power 7 or less, and as you might surmise, that’s ~90% of all creatures in Commander, including most dedicated aggro tools. Sure, you might get decked by a Craterhoof Behemoth if a Green player has a sufficient amount of mana, but until then you’ll be safe and sound.
But if you need an answer or tools White might not provide, why not take a bite out of Apple of Eden, Isu Relic? This keeps your opponent’s hand size at whatever it started with, on top of giving you 7 new cards to play with for a turn. This can rob combo pieces from a player who seems to be setting up, or potential interaction that could come at you. For the cards in your hand, however, there’s both Abolish and Sunscour. These cards are normally pretty terrible in Monowhite, as the color tends to have issues with advantage in hand, but here they can pitch things like spare RoL effects to solve problems on the board. Abolish is even better than it seems here, as well, because of the Liquimetal effects mentioned earlier on, often being a free answer to whatever issue is stuck on the table!
Manabased? On What?
I think one of the cutest aspects of this list comes through in our land selection, which begins with both Emergence Zone and Winding Canyons. Both of these cards allow us to play at Instant speed with very little opportunity cost, compared to something like running a bonafide Vedalken Orrery; this has value because of the amount of Rule of Law effects at play, meaning we can get out more than one Creature per turn cycle if necessary. Furthermore, if we see one of our critical creatures about to be removed, we’re able to swoop in and play another. Due to how these static effects function, if one of those Creatures leave play while another either enters, or before another enters, the fact our opponents have cast a spell lingers. Redundancy is key here, and there are a total of four creatures with roughly this effect available to us.
Next up we have Tower of the Magistrate, which can make opposing equipment fall off at face value, but also synergizes with our Liquimetal effects in order to avoid damage or potential Creature-based interaction by turning the offender into an artifact, and targeting our own with Tower. In a similar artifact-centric vein, The Mycosynth Gardens is akin to a Sculpting Steel, able to turn itself into more redundant copies of our few Black Vice-style cards, helping to increase the consistency of that gameplan in a color certainly not meant to do so. We can also sacrifice our own annoying artifacts to Phyrexia’s Core in a pinch, if we need to get out from under a Trinisphere, for example.
Example Decklist: Grasping Pearl Medallions
This is a list that really goes all-in on its hand punisher gameplan, and as such lacks a lot of the normal best-in-slot wincons you might find in Monowhite. Of course, we do have Halo Fountain available to us, but it’s actually played here more as a value piece, untapping critical creatures like Loran to make bodies or draw even more cards. In Bracket 3, that should be enough, as you do have ample tools to load up on hands and duplicate sources of damage, but the clock is often going to be 3-8 life lost per opponent, per turn. That’s not fantastic, but it’s also reasonable coming from White of all colors. As this list was built and tested before the release of Final Fantasy, one inclusion that seems fantastic here is Tataru Taru, a literal godsend of Treasure generation that can even spread the love a bit, albeit optionally. It sucks that Taru is not only a may, but also once per turn, but I suppose Wizards is still gun-shy from Smothering Tithe‘s ubiquity in the format.
Decklists are kept updated, and may change with set releases.
One odd facet of this list in particular is the fact that a Construct sub-theme emerges, helmed by Scrapyard Recombiner. Scrawling Crawler is not only a draw punisher, but also additional draws, and as we have no multicolored cards, in theory it’s all upside with Zenith Chronicler. Truthfully, perhaps we would prefer to have multicolored cards given what our deck does, but I wanted a third name for Recombiner, and Chronicler fit the bill. Finally, our beloved Viseling is a Construct, which drastically improves the ceiling on what Recombiner can do for us, especially as a tap ability. Over the course of a single turn cycle, Recombiner is usually finding 2-3 of these names before going away, and that’s quite the tutor for a deck yearning to access these specific effects!
Slug It Out
When I started playing Commander, one of my first experiences was facing Seizan, Perverter of Truth—unlike Nekusar, this was a far less scary clock, and the advantage accumulated seemed to help the game speed up on a busy convention day. [mtg_card]Mogis, God of Slaughter[/mtg_card] too was a name that popped up, and these three titans of tough love were fantastic icons of how beautiful EDH could be as a multiplayer format. Giving everyone a rocket launcher when it was previously a pistol standoff is a blast, but even better is when you do so while dressed in the facade of innocence. Monowhite is not traditionally a color associated with this doling-out of high caliber weaponry, nor the capability to punish people for being too greedy, so it has a double advantage in that regard. Triple, too, with Loran herself at the helm, being such that she is only a known quantity as a reasonable card in the 99, never seen in the Command Zone.
I’ve had the luxury of playing this deck a few times with both friends and strangers, and it’s one of the most unorthodox political decks I’ve seen at a table. Coupling your capability to give people numerous options, but only one spell each turn, ensures the game moves closer to chess, and given your ability to act on each players’ turn by way of your untap effects there’s never a dull moment for you as a pilot.
If your group has tired of your Nekusar list, or you’re a group hug/slug player looking for an interesting spin on the archetype, Loran might just be for you! As we’ve seen in this series, Commanders being good in 60 card formats generally ensures they’ll have some teeth in your Command Zone too, even if it’s a slightly more circuitous route to victory than the multiplayer value engines you often see. Furthermore, seeing how different Loran is to my favorite Commander of all time, Beza, the Bounding Spring is a great showcase of what White is capable of…employing the correct colorless tools, of course.
Until next time, take the third path.
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