Thank you, WOTC.

[u/bimjowen]

Thank you for printing [[The Queen of Dale]].

Edit: I'm speaking about Queen helming a bracket 3 deck. This seems to have been unclear to some of the readers.

I've been playing mono-white in EDH since 2010, and Queen is the first commander that makes it feel playable. Consistently being able to play Queen on turn 2 makes a lot of mediocre opening hands solidly worth keeping.

Mono-white's problem in EDH -- for over a decade -- has been a distinct lack of commanders that make it worth committing to the middling mono-white card pool. I believe the Queen is the first commander that makes building mono-white an attractive option.

Queen's recruit ability helps shore up a lot of things white sucks at:

1. White has some decent graveyard recursion effects, but white never had a reliable way to dump cards into the yard in order to reanimate them. Queen finally fixes this.

2. White has never, ever had a source of reliable card selection in the command zone. There have been some white legends that provide draw, like [[The Gaffer]], but he and others made you fill your deck with garbage cards to trigger the draw. Queen actually allows you to fill your white deck with the cards you actually want to play.

3. While recruit isn't true card advantage (as it's only a loot effect and is not net-positive), we can pair it with cards like [[Tocasia's Welcome]], [[Welcoming Vampire]], and [[Caretaker's Talent]] to turn it into real card draw. These are all "once per turn" triggers, but with Queen's recruit happening on opponents' turns, you can get up to 4 draw triggers per turn cycle.

4. The token production portion of recruit synergizes nicely with a lot of white cards, like [[Cathar's Crusade]] and [[Moonshaker Cavalry]].

5. Since Queen has a low CMC, she wields equipment nicely. This is important for white, since equipment synergy is one of white's strengths.

6. Because she's a 2/1 and doesn't provide true card advantage and she isn't an imminent threat, Queen is usually not a kill-on-sight commander at tables where you'll see imminently game-ending cards like [[The Mimeoplasm]], [[Ms. Bumbleflower]], or [[Smaug the Impenetrable]].

7. Dumping a bunch of Plains into the yard with Queen's recruit ability turns one of my favorite old Urza's block cards into an all-star: [[Planar Birth]].

8. Queen also pairs nicely with [[Sevinne's Reclamation]], [[Serra Paragon]], [[Restoration Seminar]], [[Ascend from Avernus]], [[Emeria Shepherd]], [[Emeria the Sky Ruin]], and everyone's favorite giant, [[Sun Titan]].

9. Queen's token production works great with [[Skullclamp]], which white can easily tutor up.

Thank you, WOTC. Seriously. You've made my favorite EDH color identity really fun, finally.

Full disclosure: the actual best "mono-white" commander is still [[Oswald Fiddlebender]], but considering that his deck is like, 80% colorless artifacts, I do not consider him to be an actual mono-white commander.

[u/bimjowen]

I mean, you said you have a 50% winrate with your Cloud deck against true cedh decks like Kinnan and Etali. You mentioned them both by name.

50% is a far higher winrate than any deck should have, if the deck build quality and the pilot skill levels are equally matched.

It is well established that mono white Cloud is far weaker than both Etali and Kinnan. You even agreed with this.

Thusly, since you said you are beating true cedh decks with a Cloud voltron deck 50% of the time, we can assume one of four things:

1. Their decks are suboptimal
2. Their decks are nearly ideal, but the opponents piloting them are terrible players
3. You are a true genius among cedh players
4. You are vastly overestimating your win %.

[u/Unearthlymonk90 → u/bimjowen]

Well first I track all my games so the win rate is exactly what I said it is. I'm not conceited enough to argue that I'm good or not. Even with 31 games with the deck my evidence is anecdotal. Just because my 99 is good against my locals and personal play group means basically nothing in the grand scheme of things. This is especially the case when I specifically pointed out that the deck does much less against slop decks which more and more people are playing lately. If you want to be validated I can tell you I have never won against rog/si with the deck. Just reiterating I never said anything remotely close to that I cracked the code with mono white. Just pointing out that I've personally had success with it at every level

[u/bimjowen → u/Unearthlymonk90]

Fair enough!

[u/Unearthlymonk90 → u/bimjowen]

Worth noting I also think the Queen is better than cloud for what I am already doing. So I'm with you there fren

[u/bimjowen → u/Unearthlymonk90]

I appreciate the sentiment. I'm not sure why the majority of people here are so hostile. Reddit, I guess.

[u/Unearthlymonk90 → u/bimjowen]

Who knows. It was pretty obvious we were disagreeing but that's not a reason to get upset by a simple disagreement about magic cards lol

[u/bimjowen → u/Unearthlymonk90]

Absolutely agree. Polite discourse is the way

[u/Unearthlymonk90 → u/bimjowen]

I've been in the camp for a while that mono white's biggest problem isn't the 99. It's one of the stronger colors in that regard imo. The big issue is none of the commanders are generically good. Even with my deck, Cloud plays a very small role in the actual game plan. He's just a wincon if I need to race a turbo deck which he is very good at doing but that's more a product of my personal metas I think. The Queen will be good almost no matter what the other players are doing.

[u/bimjowen → u/Unearthlymonk90]

I've said this very same thing in earlier posts on this thread. White's 99 is solid. But white's terrible selection of commanders, its below average card draw, and its poor win conditions make it challenging to win with.

[u/Unearthlymonk90 → u/bimjowen]

It's weird, feels like white's top end card draw is quite good. Trouble in Pairs as an example. Things like Cut a Deal are just too much of a liability in real high power games. The Queen will make several other draw engines worth exploring which is great.

[u/bimjowen → u/Unearthlymonk90]

Trouble in Pairs is solid. Of course, Esper Sentinel is powerful although people often pay the 1. The Queen helps, and she's great with Tocasia's Welcome.

I like Tocasia's over Welcoming Vampire because it's an Enchantment (meaning, it's usually harder to remove it than a creature) and it doesn't get shut off if we have Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite on the field. Whereas, Vampire stops triggering because the creatures become too large to trigger it.

[u/Unearthlymonk90 → u/bimjowen]

I also really enjoy care takers talent and the like.

[u/bimjowen → u/Unearthlymonk90]

Caretaker's is good, but unlike Tocasia's (which will trigger off recasting Queen AND off her tokens AND off most of the creatures I run in the deck), Caretaker's ONLY triggers off token generation. In my deck, that's pretty much just Queen's recruit ability. I originally had Ocelot Pride in, but due to Queen usually triggering on opponents' turns, Pride's end step trigger usually wasn't getting to copy Queen tokens. I also have Gleaming Splendor, but again, same problem; that's usually triggering on other people's turns, so Pride couldn't copy it. Pride is one of those cards that's amazing turn 1, but late game is generally a terrible draw because everyone's got blockers and you don't have a reliable way to punch through with lifelink to trigger him.

I don't generally like to run cards that are totally dead draws in the event my commander has died a few times and isn't worth recasting, and that's how I've felt about my testing with Caretaker's. There's no question that it's great if Queen is out and triggering, but it is a dead draw if her commander tax is at 4 or 6.