Rydia Breaks Bracket 2 Containment

Winning can sometimes feel unsatisfying. Your opponents struggled valiantly, maybe they slowed your advance by aiming some removal at your board, but it was futile. The end was coming. Without some luck of the draw they could do nothing to stop it, and that wasn't your intention. You wanted a "battlecruiser" kind of game, where everyone has fun and the eventual victor isn't clear until the final turns of the game. That wasn't what happened.

Sometimes you want to look back and see where it all went wrong.

Turn 1:
• Play Stomping Ground tapped

I built Rydia, Summoner of Mist almost reflexively when Final Fantasy was released. One of my favorite characters from Final Fantasy 4 was fully rendered in two new illustrations and she got her own card that represents her in-game abilities and her story.

The cEDH community briefly considered her as a new top contender to bust into the meta. Low mana cost: check. Card selection in the command zone: check. Sometimes, that's enough. But it turned out that in Gruul colors, it simply wasn't enough.

That's fine, I didn't want her to have a cEDH reputation to ruin her casual credentials.

Turn 2:
• Play Mountain
• Cast Rydia, Summoner of Mist

Final Fantasy and its Commander companion product brought lots of Saga creatures to the game. They almost perfectly translate the summon mechanic from the Final Fantasy series into Magic card form. But most importantly, I get to see some of my old favorites; Shiva, Ifrit, Bahamut, Knights of Round. Unfortunately, so few of those classic summons are in Rydia's colors.

So how do I build a thematic-but-effective Rydia "summoner" deck?

Turn 3:
• Play Bloodstained Mire
• Discard and draw to Rydia's landfall trigger
• Sacrifice Bloodstained Mire to fetch Taiga
• Discard and draw to Rydia's landfall trigger
• Cast Fanatic of Rhonas

Looking through Scryfall at every green and red Saga ever printed, the answer appeared.

I've long avoided playing with Dinosaurs in Magic. It's not that I dislike those fascinating beasts — at some point, I was young and loved raptors and, in particular, the impossible-to-pronounce Archaeopteryx — it's just that Dinosaurs was one of the first changes to Magic that didn't feel true to the game's original theme. Earlier sets were always thematically dialed-in to '90s-era dark fantasy, which is partly why Innistrad is considered one of the best sets of all time.

Ixalan broke new ground. We got Pirates, Dinosaurs, conquistador-style Vampires in white, and nature-aligned Merfolk in green. It was a spectacle, but also a step in a less serious, more experimental direction for Magic's core themes. Once a game that usually took itself very seriously, now Magic gave its adult fanbase the privilege — or burden — of playing with dinosaurs again like we were seven years old.

By the time Final Fantasy came out, I had tread so much ground in my years of deckbuilding for Commander and yet I was still avoiding the t-rex in the room. It was time to build Dinos.

Turn 4:
• Play Thornspire Verge
• Discard and draw to Rydia's landfall trigger
• Cast Summon: Titan
• Summon: Titan's chapter 1 ability triggers and mills five cards

Welcome to . . . // Jurassic Park built the bridge between Sagas and Dinosaurs. That doesn't mean they sit comfortably in the same list together. They're generally ambivalent to each other. Outside of Rydia's activated ability, neither of them really benefits from being in the graveyard unless you use the transformed side of Welcome to . . . // Jurassic Park or Intrepid Paleontologist's activated ability.

Turn 5:
• Summon: Titan's chapter 2 ability triggers and returns three lands from the graveyard to the battlefield
• Discard and draw to Rydia's landfall trigger three times
• Activate Rydia to return Summon: Bahamut from the graveyard to the battlefield
• Attack Seat 1's Ajani, Nacatl Avenger with Summon: Titan (7 damage)

Gruul is notorious for being "stompy." Ramp is plentiful and put to good use casting creatures that pass the vanilla test with flying colors.

The pressure from big creatures such as Agonasaur Rex mounts quickly, and once life totals are getting low, I can cast one of green's many overrun options. For Rydia, I chose Pathbreaker Ibex. Should I ever find a chance to discard Anger to one of Rydia's landfall triggers, he's an immediate and repeatable Overwhelming Stampede on a body. Ibex is vulnerable to removal — a well-timed Swords to Plowshares can stop the stampede before it starts — but that's what I was building for. I elected for Bracket 2-appropriate telegraphed wins.

Turn 6:
• Summon: Titan's chapter 3 ability triggers and gives +8/+8 and trample to Fanatic of Rhonas until end of turn. Summon: Titan dies
• Attack Seat 3 with Summon: Bahamut (9 damage)
• Attack Seat 1 with Fanatic of Rhonas (9 damage)
• Activate Rydia to return Summon: Titan from the graveyard to the battlefield
• Summon: Titan's chapter 1 ability triggers and mills five cards
• Play Urza's Saga
• Discard and draw to Rydia's landfall trigger

This wasn't the first time I'd played this deck. I've played it at a Bracket 2 table and lost. I had 128 Scute Swarms on the battlefield at the time, yet I couldn't penetrate the winning player's defenses. I had board superiority, and as the Gruul deck at the table, that made sense.

This time was different. Three of us joined the lobby expecting Bracket 3-level decks, and I joined intending to play a deck meant for Bracket 2 that could probably tread water in Bracket 3. I wanted to play an active, but underpowered deck. I wanted everyone to have fun and "do the thing." Something went wrong.

Turn 7:
• Draw two cards with Summon: Bahamut's chapter 3 trigger
• Sacrifice Bloodstained Mire in response to Summon: Titan's chapter 2 trigger to fetch Mountain
• Discard and draw to Rydia's landfall trigger
• Return four lands from the graveyard to the battlefield with Summon: Titan's trigger
• Discard and draw to Rydia's landfall trigger four times
• Attack Seat 1 with Summon: Bahamut (9 damage)
• Cast Pathbreaker Ibex
• Play Forest
• Discard and draw to Rydia's landfall trigger
• Cast Etali, Primal Conqueror
• Free cast Topiary Stomper, Enlightened Tutor, Dryad of the Ilysian Grove, and Scute Swarm with Etali's enters trigger
• Play Boseiju, Who Endures as second land for turn
• Discard and draw to Rydia's landfall trigger
• Scute Swarm triggers, creating one copy (two total)
• Seat 3 casts Path to Exile targeting Pathbreaker Ibex
• Seat 3 copies Path to Exile with a Spider-Verse trigger, targeting Summon: Bahamut
• Search for two basic lands
• Discard and draw to Rydia's landfall trigger twice
• Scute Swarms trigger twice, creating six copies (eight total)

I love tuning my decks. Even ones that aren't meant to win quickly or combo off — I want to see them do their best and see all the synergy pieces work together and support each other. Could it be that putting an unassuming uncommon legendary at the helm of a Dinosaurs and Sagas deck tipped the scales?

Card selection is not card draw, but when you have one or more ways to use your graveyard as an extension of your hand, rummage effects become card-positive instead of card-neutral. I built Rydia with this idea in mind.

Threshold is an old mechanic, and Far Wanderings is an old card. Once you reach that breakpoint of seven cards in your graveyard, it becomes one of the most efficient land ramp spells in the game, giving you an as-of-yet unbeaten three lands for three mana. Mono-green and Gruul have some of the best landfall payoffs ever printed. Rydia herself has a strong landfall ability. Far Wanderings is one of those perfect-fit cards.

Turn 8:
• Search my library for Dino DNA with Urza's Saga's chapter 3 trigger
• Recast Rydia, Summoner of Mist
• Cast Entish Restoration, sacrificing a Forest to fetch three basic lands
• Discard and draw to Rydia's landfall trigger three times
• Scute Swarms trigger three times, creating 56 copies (64 total)
• Cast Dryad's Revival targeting Agonasaur Rex
• Cast Agonasaur Rex
• Play Disciple of Freyalise on its land side
• Scute Swarms trigger, creating 64 copies (128 total)
• Opponents concede after I point out the Anger in my graveyard that grants all my creatures haste

Not only did Rydia do well at the bracket above what she was designed for, she even overperformed there. My opponents were good sports and one asked, innocently enough, if this was really a Bracket 3 deck (and not a Bracket 4 deck). They had a good laugh when I told them it was actually made for Bracket 2.

Undoubtedly, it's time to graduate Rydia to Bracket 3. I was in such a resilient position that two of my biggest creatures got removed and it didn't matter (Seat 3 probably should have Path'd my Scute Swarm, but that might not have changed the end result). The overall card quality in my Rydia deck is too high for Bracket 2, and her ability to constantly select for better cards while fueling graveyard synergies gives her an edge starting on turn three.

Rydia and her summons unintentionally broke free of Bracket 2 containment.

Thanks for taking this trip through a memorable game with me. I'll be back with a Bracket 2 to 3 upgrade guide for Rydia, Summoner of Mist, adding more reliable card advantage for when my hand is empty, a faster way to close out the game than the telegraphed threat of Pathbreaker Ibex, and more varied removal for the more diverse threats I'll see in Bracket 3.

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