Fun with swords: A look at Magic: The Gathering’s Forged in Stone Commander 2014 deck

If you’ve read my first article it is clear that this year’s offering of Magic: the gathering Commander products is a success overall in my eyes, but I’d like to talk about each individual deck focusing on the good and the bad of each one for the discerning consumer. We start that off today with the Forged in Stone deck featuring the powerful new Planeswalker Nahiri, the Lithomancer. Players who have been playing for a while may notice a shocking similarity between Nahiri and the incredibly powerful Stoneforge Mystic, not only in their art but also their equipment-centric themes.

Nahiri’s abilities all focus on equipments, which this deck is chock full of, and allows you to get around some of the more expensive mana costs required to play or equip them. It’s rare to see a Planeswalker have an ability that places more than one loyalty counter on them at a time and not only does Nahiri’s first ability give her two counters, but also a guy to protect her freshly suited up for battle! Since Nahiri only produces 1/1 creatures let’s look at the various equipments available in her arsenal. Skullclamp, an old favorite, is included with art available for the first time in paper and is poised to eat through your army and draw a lot of cards along the way. Argentum Armor, though expensive to both cast and equip, is a very powerful effect and allows you to deal with all sorts of problems your opponents may throw in your way. Forged in Stone also features three brand new equipment; Masterwork of Ingenuity, Assault Suit, and Stoneforged Blade, the latter of which is produced by Nahiri’s final loyalty ability. Masterwork of Ingenuity allows you to choose another equipment in play and have it become a copy of it, a powerful and unique effect sure to be desired by commander and constructed players alike.

The deck features a very well balanced suite of mana costs and you rarely feel like you have nothing to do at any given point during a game. The cheap creatures complement some of the more powerful and expensive spells. The removal available allows you to deal with most situations without crippling yourself too much, although there seem to be a few omissions in card choice. Condemn is present in place of Swords to Plowshares and Oblivion Ring isn’t present at all. In the games I played it appeared that I was behind, but a well-timed Fell the Mighty allowed me to stay in the game with an army of cheap creatures.

For fans of attacking with creatures, Forged in Stone offers a very well-built pre made deck that features a slew of great new cards as well as many commander favorites. This deck is fun to play and able to hold its own in even the craziest of commander games right out of the box.

by Ryan Bez

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