chaoswand

[chaoswand]

So they went and printed a Fifth Chaos Wand style effect in #FFMTG in Strago and Relm and I gotta admit this excited me at first. First off two characters I deeply love as its an old man who dotes on his incredibly talented Grand Daughter and promotes her love of art which is perfect. Plus this card potentially opens up the idea of running Chaos Wand in Jeskai colors as Jeskai is more favorable to Creature synergies. However sadly, the thing that kills this is the presence of Relm. As much as I love the young girl she brings the creature clause which actually makes this card much less Reliable. The real power of Chaos Wand effects is how consistent they are, they will almost always get us an Instant or Sorcery and do so at Instant Speed which is another area where Strago and Relm really fails to meet our specific needs. Comparing Strago and Relm to Dazzling Sphinx or Grima yes it is nice they dont need to attack, however costing 3 mana hurts this a lot. We are often hitting cantrips or cheap ramp or removal all of which spending 3 mana on at Sorcery speed feels pretty bad. Compared to Chaos Wand its Sorcery speed Compared to any of the above its just slow and much less reliable... I really want to like the card but already being in a spell slinger strategy where we need so much I just dont think Strago and Relm make the cut.

[chaoswand]

otag:theft-cast

lol so on Scryfall under otag:thef-cast there are 41 Unique Commanders legal in the commander format among 14 unique color combinations including Red, Black, Blue, Dimir, Rakdos, Izzet, Azorius, Grixis, Temur, Jeskai, Abzhan, Sultai, Jund and Esper. If you look at partners Ramirez De Piertro allows you to run any 2-4 color combination including Black Blue, with Bruse and Akiri making it Sans Green, Sidar Kondo making it Sans Red, and Tana making the deck Sans White. With Breeches you can make any 2-3 color combination including Red. The color combinations that do not have the option of having a Theft Enabler in their command zone are Mono White, Mono Green, Selesnya, Orzhov, Golgari, Simic, Bant

[chaoswand]

Why Choose The Wand?

So I have previously talked about the History of the Wand, and sort of what makes the wand what it is and even talked about why I like it so much, but I want to talk about why I think you would also enjoy it as a Build Around set of cards. Keep in mind when I mention Chaos Wand on this blog I am talking about 4 cards right now, those being: Chaos Wand Wand of Wonder Grima, Sauron's Footman Dazzling Sphinx though I am also talking in part about building a package around them in order to better facilitate playing them which includes cards like Memory Plunder Arcane Heist Deluxe Dragster Sorcerous Squall Flawless Forgery that all let you cast spells from opponents graveyards. See most players sitting down to a commander game have 98 or 99 cards in their deck, with of course 1 or 2 in their command zone. However once you put the Chaos Wand or more likely Wand of Wonder into your deck that number explodes exponentially, generally speaking from 100 cards to 400, or probably more like 160 seeing as people dont actually run that many instants and sorceries. On the other side of the coin the Wands act as a sort of Tutoring effect as they don't steal just any card. I have mentioned it before and will likely continue to reference it in the future but Gonti, Lord of Luxury as a commander is a great Foil to Chaos Wand as Gonti is a general theft deck. While he sees more support one can imagine that a Spellthief with similar support would be stronger for the sake of Consistency which is a point I am going to continue to try and hammer home in this blog. I continually insist to others that Chaos Wand is not, unlike the name implies, a Chaos Deck which hinge on turning things unpredictable, instead it is a High Variance Spell Slinger or Control deck. It might sound weird to call this a control deck but hear me out, what Instants and Sorceries are most often put into a deck? One shot card draw, ramp, and removal with room added for Synergy cards and occasionally for tutors and those are all things what control decks love, minus the Synergy Pieces. And that is the primary appeal and the thing I most often try to pitch to people when thinking about Chaos Wand is to consider it a control deck with the card advantage of having all of your opponents cards, but the card selection of a chaos deck.

[chaoswand]

Please do remember that your buy in is optional. I used to love Doubling Season back in OG Ravnica, and I jammed my one copy into my Saproling deck right away... but since I started back playing commander I dont really do that anymore. My tokens deck run tokens but no doublers and you should consider the same. Play more honest magic if that is what you want.

[chaoswand]

OMG LOOK AT THIS HAPPY LIL BABY!!! I luv himb!

Another MtG card sleeve design! I love Bello so much, look at this dandy lil raccoon!

[chaoswand]

What Makes A Wand?

So I am making a blog dedicated to the Chaos Wand not just as a card but as an Archetype of deck and so I figure I should probably break down what exactly is a "Chaos Wand"//Spell Thief deck. Some of you may be familiar with the recent Gonti Precon from Outlaws of Thunder Junction called "Grand Larceny" which was a deck that sought to make theft more accessible and specifically pay off the card "Villainous Wealth". The deck was a mix of low to the ground aggro, ramp, and of course theft smacking your opponents in the face and taking their things. You may also be familiar with another deck from the same pod of precons helmed by Stella Lee from Outlaws of Thunder Junction called "Quick Draw" which attempted to quickly build up a storm turn and allow Stella to cast a bunch of spells in one turn. Effectively what Chaos Wand as an archetype attempts to do is to marry these two archetypes into one unholy abomination, allowing the Spell Thief to either take control of the board via using our opponents removal, get advantage by using our opponents draw/ramp, or close out games by establishing an on board engine that sort of fakes the use of Storm on any card we steal. The central cards in the deck are Chaos Wand, Wand of Wonder, Dazzling Sphinx and Grima Sauron's Footman which all allow the would be spell thief to reveal cards from the top of an opponents library until they find an Instant or Sorcery and then cast that spell. This is the central lynchpin in the deck, the thing around which the whole deck revolves. When thinking about how to pilot a Chaos Wand deck you want to consider it more of a control deck that relies on the pod to maintain its power level. We get natural card advantage as all 4 of our central pillars virtually "Draw A Card" or even you could consider it "Tutoring" since it looks for a specific kind of card that you always know you will get. Keep in mind in 60 card magic Jegantha isn't strong because he is a 5/5 mana dork, but its because he is a 5/5 body you know you will always have access to, and the same can be said about the card type we focus on. When Grima/Dazzling/Chaos Wand/Wand of Wonder are on board we always have access to between 1 and 3 random instants and sorceries and can learn to leverage that for clever play.

[chaoswand]

So you might wonder why I care about the Chaos Wand really as a card and why I am so fascinated by it. Frankly speaking it's because in its entirety it's kinda bad... But specifically I enjoy the 4 cards that make the Chaos Wand archetype because they give a sense of unpredictability to the game and force me as a player to adapt to wild circumstances with narrow strategies.

I love theft decks but frankly speaking I think they can make games a bit less difficult than I like, being that they just give you all the good stuff you want from the strongest deck at the table.

Spell Theft on the other hand asks you at different points in a game to do different things. After a few activations of Wand of Wonder you need to maintain the WoW activations and then go over to Memory Plunder and so on to harvest already cast spells, generally paying more mana for more diversity in options effectively having the ultimate modal spell.

I'm also fascinated with the character of Davriel Kane from.... Children of the Nameless? I don't remember, but it was the Brandon Sanderson mtg book that was really good. His ability to steal people's spells was cool.

[chaoswand]

The History of Chaos Wand

So in the earliest days of Magic's history an idea was born, and it was simple

"What if you didn't just play with the 60 cards in your deck, but also the 60 cards in your opponent's deck as well?"

And thus the first of the theft cards was born in a simple little card call "Word of Command" which could allow you to force an opponent to cast a spell from their hand using their own mana. This card wasn't very useful though as it was 1-on-1 and your opponent still got the spell themselves even if you assigned the targets and so on. While Lightning Bolting your opponent's Goblin using their own bolt is funny, its very fringe in its uses.

Spell theft continued on with its innovations getting Desertion in Visions which allowed you to counter a spell for 5 mana and then you would gain control of it if it were an Artifact or creature. This would later be power crept in Judgement with the Printing of Spelljack which could counter a spell for 6 mana, but you could cast it at a later time without paying its mana cost regardless of the type of spell.

As History marched on in Kamigawa block we saw the spell Knowledge Exploitation which cost 7 mana normally, but if you managed to hit your opponent with a Rogue went down to 4 mana and allowed you to search an opponent's library for an Instant or Sorcery and cast it for free on the spot

Next up came the Shadowmoor set with Memory Plunder which allows the caster to cast an Instant or Sorcery from an opponent's graveyard at instant speed. This allowed users a lot of flexibility as it sat in hand until absolutely necessary, but still the 1 on 1 nature of magic still kept spell like Memory Plunder from really being competitive as they relied far too much on your opponents.

In 2011 several major things occurred both culturally and on the card front. Starting with the spells 2011 we were given a gift in the card "Praetor's Grasp" which is the strongest version of have seen of Word of Commander or Knowledge Exploitation so far, for 3 mana you could search your opponent's library for any single card and exile it and you would be able to cast it. Yes, you have to pay and it doesn't color fix but it was the first time Spell Theft was considered viable enough to see some play in Tournament Formats.

The more important Cultural shift happened with the Wizards of the Coast printing of new format Decks called "Commander" which was a format in which 4 players would run decks of 100 cards helmed by a Legendary Creature that defined the color identity of the deck. With the 4 player nature of Commander Spell Thieves had 4 times the resources of any other player at the table and a clever mage could leverage this to their advantage.

Continuing on to 2012 in Avacyn Restored we got the spell Stolen Goods which gave us the basic mechanical underpinning for how Chaos Wand would function, having an opponent Exile cards from the top of their library until they exiled a non-land card and allowing the Thief to cast that spell for free.

Time marches on with new theft cards being developed with Jeleva being one of the first Spell thief commanders to be printed and we even got a Planeswalker who could tick up in order to use Stolen Goods every turn in 2017 with Nicol Bolas the God Pharoh.

2019 would see the creation of Chaos Wand but it wouldn't be until 2024 that I personally would have even seen this as a viable "Archetype" as it released the fourth card that specifically has the Stolen Goods text looking for Instants and Sorceries. In 2019 we got Chaos Wand, 2022 we got Battle for Baldur's Gate which gave us Wand of Wonder, 2023 in Tales of Middle Earth we got it on a Creature with Grima, Sauron's Footman and then finally in 2024 we got a 4th copy of the effect in Outlaws at Thunder Junction with Dazzling Sphinx allowing Chaos Wand to finally start to breach into being a Commander Archetype and is kind of where my journey with it at started.

[chaoswand]

New Wand Blog

This blog is dedicated to my favorite Card/Deck/Archetype in Magic the Gathering//Commander and that being Chaos Wand. Effectively the entire deck archetype's goal is to focus primarily on stealing your opponent's Instants and Sorceries and trying desperately to cobble together a win condition out of them.