"Abzan Armor" Deck Review
As we enter the week of prerelease for ‘Tarkir: Dragonstorm’, it’s time to take a look at the preconstructed Commander decks that will release with the set. Today, I’ll be going over the “Abzan Armor” deck. This deck cares about creatures with Defender and having high Toughness on creatures. That’s because the deck has ways of ignoring Defender and allowing your creatures to hit opponents with their Toughness instead of their Power. So, let’s use the standard to see how this deck holds up.
RAMP
In terms of ramp, the deck has a lot of mana dorks and some draw power. Which is quite nice and just enough to get a passing grade. However, having access to green means that there should be some spells in here that allow you to fetch for land cards. The fact that there’s practically none here is really strange. Mana dorks are great and I’ll never encourage not having them. But they’re far more easily dealt with by your opponents than lands are. So there needs to be some land fetch spells in here and that’s something I’ll be adding to my Consultation Hour for this deck next week.
RECURSION
Next to none? In colors that are plentiful in recursion? What happened? Did WOTC forget what these colors can do in terms of recursion? Forgive the bluntness, but that’s absolutely pathetic and there’s no excuse. Commander is a format where mass removal is very common place. There needs to be recusion in a deck that relies heavily on the creature base; especially when 2/3 of the deck is black and green, the two leading recursion colors. This is outright shameful in terms of design and definitely needs to be rectified.
REMOVAL
In terms of the amount of removal, I’d say that the deck excells. My complaint here is that they should have swapped out a couple of the targeted removal spells for some mass removal. For example, instead of a “Swords to Plowshares”, I would have put in a “Fumigate”. Otherwise, I would say that this category passes, technically.
MANA ROCKS
An excellent selection here! The glorious absence of Talismans is exatly what we’re looking for, as well as having a diverse set of color fixing. My only criticism here is that they’re missing “Golgari Signet”. Great job here!
OVERALL CARD QUALITY
Other than one vanilla creature (meaning a creature with no abilities) and a small handfull of bad cards (which I’ll go over next week), I would say that the vast majority of the deck fits into the good to “good with context” categories of quality. I was pleasantly surprised with how good the card selection was for this deck. The inclusion of “Indomitable Ancients” seems like a reprint for its own sake. Not a lot of people are going to seek this card out when there’s plenty of other options high toughness creatures that actually do things for the deck.
ARCHETYPE COHESION
I would say that the overall cohesion of the archetypes for Defender and High Toughness strategies are pretty strong here. Ultimately, it’s better to go all in on one over the other. Perhaps a High Toughness strategy that cares more about +1/+1 counters, or just a full fledged Defender deck would be preferable. But maybe the deck was designed for people to modify it to the palyer’s preferences. Which would be quite the flavor and design win, really. Overall, pretty good, but some streamlining would have been nice.
COMMANDER COHESION
You have 3 options for commanders in the deck that each care for the different aspects of the deck’s strategies. It’s a great sense of diversity for you to modify the deck however you want, or for you to exploit the strategy you prefer more. I very much like the selection for this deck and I’m curious which one you would prefer more.
FINAL GRADE = B+
Unfortunately, this isn’t a deck that I would recommend to newer players. Because of the design decisions that allow for strategy options, this seems like it’s more for moderate to experienced players; especially those who love to take precons and upgrade them to their own specifications. So, if this is you, I would absolutely say go nuts with it! But what do you think of this deck?