Budget Oathbreaker – Windgrace’s Exploration

Hello there I’m Linkguy. I’m a big commander player who has recently gotten into Oathbreaker. My goal is to build fun and inexpensive Oathbreaker decks, give a quick breakdown on how to build the deck, how it plays, and some reasonable upgrades for the deck. You’ve already seen my Estrid’s Armory deck tech. Today’s deck is Lord Windgrace [] and Explore [].

Oathbreaker and Signature Spell

Lord Windgrace [] is a 5 mana Jund Planeswalker with 3 abilities. Go on, check them out. I’ll wait.

Jund is an excellent color combination, giving us access to some fantastic ramp spells.

• The first ability is a great way to draw through our deck and set up our graveyard. We have a lot of lands in this deck and putting them in the graveyard to dig into our deck is exactly what we want to be doing.
• The second ability will ramp us using those lands in our graveyard. This ability has great synergy with the first. It just happens to work well with some of the other cards in our deck. This ability is fantastic with fetch lands as we can crack them the turn we play them and put them back on the battlefield. Cracking two fetches every turn is enough to make our opponents cry.
• Windgrace’s last ability will create a large army which can deal a lot of damage quickly.
• Our Signature Spell Explore [] will allow us to draw a card and play an extra land. This effect will help us trigger the landfall this deck is filled with.

Deck List

Let’s get straight to it! Dive into the decklist with me.

Deck Construction – The Five Pillars

The major pillars of a good deck: ramp, card draw, disruption, recursion, and offense.

• Ramp is when you have access to more mana than you would normally have on a specific turn. This is one of the most important parts about getting big spells out.
• Card draw is gaining access to more cards than your 1 draw per turn. This is important as it will give you more options of cards to play each turn.
• Disruption is a broad category which applies to removal effects, counter abilities, and tax like effects which cause issues for an opponents’ strategies.
• Recursion is the act of playing cards from your graveyard. In a singleton format, it allows you to cast powerful spells more than once.
• Offense is how we win the game. This is usually done through direct damage but could be achieved through other methods, such as mill.

Let’s breakdown how the cards in the deck slide into the five pillars explained above.

Ramp: This is a lands matter deck, so ramp is a big feature of the deck. Most of the cards in our deck have landfall, which means they will be triggering whenever we play a land card. This is one of the reasons why our Signature Spell Explore [] allows us to draw more cards.

Card Draw: Explore [] and Lord Windgrace [] both have abilities to allow us to draw cards each turn. This will help us see all of the cards in our deck, get to our best spells, and keep our hand stocked with lands to play.

Disruption: This deck has several removal spells which deal damage to target creature whenever lands come into play. We also have a pair of removal spells like Broken Bond [] and Purify [].

Recusion: This deck is almost all land recursion. Our Oathbreaker has an ability to get lands back from the graveyard. We are also running Grapple with the Past [] to get back our non-lands. We have The Mending of Dominaria [] to get back all of our lands and recur some of our creatures.

Offense: We have a couple of big win conditions. The first is to whittle down our opponents’shealth with landfall damage triggers from retreat to Hagra [] retreat to Hagra [], and retreat to Hagra []. It is slow but not as slow as it seems; remember, we will be playing multiple lands every turn. We have several cards which create tokens for us when we play a land or turn our lands into creatures. This will give us a big army of tokens to use for offense. The final win conditions are our big creatures with power equal to the number of our lands in play.

Playing the Deck

The ideal play pattern for this deck is to ramp hard and get our landfall cards on the field quickly. Then we use our Oathbreaker and Signature Spell in conjunction with fetch lands to get as many landfall triggers as we can in a turn. Once we have done enough damage and gotten enough lands into play, we can use our large spells quickly and finish our opponents off.

Upgrades

Let’s talk about upgrading this deck. Here are some reasonable upgrades to consider based on price. I am going to be describing these cards in 3 categories: drip (cards under $2), drop (cards under $10), and splash (no budget). I will only be including 5 cards from each category. In the mana-base section, I talk about lesser known land cards to add to the deck.

Drip

• Comet Storm []: This card is a fantastic finisher as we can use multikicker to kick it twice and deal x damage to all of our opponents.
• Experimental Frenzy []: This may seem like an odd choice, but the amount of fetchlands in this deck allows us to easily to shuffle away the top card of our deck if needed. This card combos well with any of the effects that let us play an extra land.
• Sakura Tribe elder []: This will enable us to have an early blocker who can be sacrificed before damage to ramp.
• Atarkas command []: This modal spell provides numerous effects we can take advantage of. It makes a great replacement for our signature spell.
• Anger []: This card enables you to give all of your creatures haste when it is in the graveyard. If you like winning with over-sized monsters, this card is for you.

Drop

• torment of Hailfire []: This card is like comet storm [], but much much better. In multiplayer, it’s one of the funnest things we can sink a crazy amount of mana into.
• The Gitrog Monster []: Not only does this card enable the -2 effect of our Oathbreaker, but it also helps us draw more cards.
• Splendid Reclamation []: this card will bring back all of the lands which are in our graveyard. It can do a lot of work.
• Avenger of Zendikar []: I’m sure you already know how amazing this Avenger is.
• Mina and Denn, Wildborn []: This card will let us play an extra land on each of our turns. It can give our creatures trample and give us an extra land to trigger those glorious landfalls.
  

Splash

• Oracle of Mul Daya []: This card is so busted that Commander can’t play it. We can!
• exploration []: This card is broken for its ability to allow us to play an extra land each turn for only a single green.
• Scapeshift []: This card is crazy. It allows us to sacrifice any of our lands to go get other lands. This will set off a massive landslide of landfall triggers!
• Amulet of Vigor []: This card will allow you to activate your lands as soon as they enter the battlefield. (Many effects force our lands to enter the battlefield tapped.)
• Bloodghast []: This card will come back anytime we play a land. If you like making some fantastic shenanigans [] with sacrifice effects, this is your engine.

Manabase

Because this deck is so focused on lands, I listed general land categories to add rather than specific lands to add. I would also recommend keeping a high number of basics in this deck so that you can fetch lands out of your deck each turn. The ability to get multiple landfall triggers a turn enables you to gain more advantage from the landfall mechanic.

• The Fetchlands: Any of the fetchlands are fantastic in this deck as they enable you to easily grab needed mana from your deck. They can fetch up duals.
• Dual Lands: Shocklands, Battle for Zendikar lands, and Bi-cycle lands are all fantastic, as they can be searched with the fetch lands mentioned above, allowing us to fix our colors and get us an extra landfall trigger.
• Karoo lands: These lands, like the Ravnica bounce lands, will return a land to your hand to be played again for another landfall trigger.
• Myriad landscape []: This card is like a slightly worse version of Blighted Woodland []. Just be careful not to crack it if you don’t have 2 basic lands of a specific type in play.
• Ghost Quarter []: This card is brutal with Lord Windgrace []‘s -2 effect. This card can also be a card like Strip mine [] or dust bowl [], but I can’t keep a clean conscious recommending that combo.

Lord Windgrace [] is a fun Oathbreaker which runs a series of landfall based effects and can leverage the graveyard for extra land support.

What would your changes be? Let me know when you try this deck out and how your playgroup responds!

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linkguy

Linkguy is a brewer who is always looking for cheap and effective ways to spice up his deck. He is a big fan of commander and other casual formats where sometimes winning is less about reducing your opponent’s life total to 0 and more about playing force of will on a turn 1 sol ring.