Voltron Victory: Covered by Chris Lorensen

Voltron, that’s what took a top 5 prize home from this last commander precon league but it wasn’t an easy road there.

“Most of my losses were early on,” said Keith Fuller, who came in fifth with an enchantment themed voltron deck. “The deck was really, really slow and people killed Tuvasa [the commander] and I just sat there with nothing to do for a while.”

Fuller, who has been playing Magic The Gathering for two years, started the commander precon league with the Adaptive Enchantments deck and switched the commander for Tuvasa the Sunlit.

Tuvasa is a 1/1 for GWU and gets +1/+1 for each enchantment you control. She also allows you to draw a card whenever you cast your first enchantment each turn.

“She gets really big really quick and no one expects it,” Fuller said. “I won by commander damage every time.”

Fuller says he picked the deck for the tournament because it’s outside of his normal play style. He said he didn’t want to come in each week and buy more copies of cards he already owned.

“My deck that I have at home is totally different colors, totally different strategy,” Fuller said.

His first commander deck he ever built was focused on making lots of tokens.

“That’s incredibly different than having one creature who matters for everything and keeping one creature alive vs having a million disposable tokens and different approaches,” Fuller said.

With that in mind, Fuller knew it would be a learning curve and wasn’t expecting to get anywhere near the top 5.

“I was kind of hoping for like tenthish. I would have been happy with an above 50% win record,” he said.

Since his deck was heavily centered on Tuvasa’s ability to get big fast and any removal of her would drastically slow down his path to victory Fuller spent the first few weeks of upgrades buying ways to protect his commander.

When people killed her [Tuvasa] that kind of killed all my plans so the first five weeks I felt like I was just buying things to prevent her dying,” Fuller said. “I have like five enchantments to make her hexproof, a bunch that make her indestructible, some that make her protection from chosen color just so she’d stop dying so much.”

Most of these cards were not very expensive, but Fuller says it took a while to get enough protection for his commander because, the local game store, didn’t always have everything he needed. To get around that, Fuller said he split up the priorities of the deck and got a little bit for each every week.

“I just kind of gave the LGS a list and then asked every week whenever I came in if they had them and eventually it works, it’s just it was a bit slow,” Fuller said. “Alpha Authority I asked for for probably four weeks, it’s a 50 cent card and a really good one for her [Tuvasa].”

While it made some of his choices feel kind of sub-standard or clunky, Fuller didn’t mind the restriction of only buying cards from his local gaming store. He also didn’t ask them to order any specific cards either because he said he would feel bad asking them to take the time to order something so cheap. Still, he did wish it could have been easier in certain cases.

“The dual/scry lands, everybody wanted those because they’re just better,” Fuller said. “So I didn’t get them until two months in because everyone else got them week one.”

Upgrading the mana base as a priority is something Fuller said he would do differently in the next tournament.

Fuller also didn’t order specific cards because he didn’t want to feel locked in to them once he put the order in. He wanted to leave room for altering his strategy as the weeks went on. One such change was the mana curve of the deck and types of enchantments.

Fuller says he went into the tournament with the intention of focusing on a theme of global enchantments although he soon realized that would be too slow of an approach. Once he saw how fast Tuvasa grew, he switched to lower mana cost enchantments and ones that made Tuvasa bigger. For instance, some key effects were enchantments that made his commander bigger for each aura attached to it, essentially doubling Tuvasa’s power and toughness.

As a general strategy, Fuller recommends focusing on both win conditions and deck basics, such as mana and card draw, in the first few weeks of upgrades. After that, focus on what you had trouble with the week before. He also recommends not buying expensive upgrades right away and you should wait until you get to the point where you can’t think of what to take out anymore.

As far as match-up, he says the most difficult opponents were the morph decks. He said they had a lot of different responses, it was difficult to prepare for what he could not see and their ability to play a free morph and draw a card every turn was hard to keep up with.

“I ended up adding Imprisoned in the Moon and Darksteel Mutation just because I didn’t know what to do about that commander,” Fuller said. “I ended up playing three or four of those decks and I only beat one and that was a close one.”

Fuller says his strongest matches were around the middle of the tournament.

“Once people didn’t have their specific answers for everything yet but I, at the same time, was able to make her [Tuvasa] big and not die,” Fuller said. “Once people started getting into the more obscure cards later on that they could sub out for, those are harder to deal with.”

Fuller said he had trouble with people that were able to force him to sacrifice his commander with effects such as Plaguecrafter. He said he didn’t really start seeing that though till people got what they needed for their core strategy first. At that point he realized he may have needed more than only eight creatures in his deck and some of them should certainly have similar text to his commander as a backup.

Overall, Fuller had a great time and is excited for another season because it has basically taken the place of his normal FNM events. He also enjoyed the low price limit because outside of this tournament he had never bought a card that cost over five dollars and was happy that he wasn’t pressured into doing so. Also, there were some very memorable moments that he will not forget.

“There was one game where we were on turn… it felt like 20 or 30, I was at one health and he was at 48 and I won in one turn without commander damage because she [Tuvasa] was dead for the n’th time,’ fuller said. “Kor Spirit Dancer, every enchantment on her she gets +2/+2 and I had Wargate, which allows me to look for any permanent converted mana cost X and put it on the battlefield and I had enough mana to do X of three.”

Fuller searched up Mirrormade, copied Ancestral Mask and made Kor spirit dancer over 50 power.

Fuller will be back for season two.