In General: RAMPANT FEAR-MONGERING

All right Zoners. This is In General. I am Grandpa Growth. I am back from having a week off. I hope you missed me because today you're gonna get your medicine!

You're watching reading The General Zone's Sunday segment, In General, where I talk about the bigger topics. Broad strokes strategy, game theory, player psychology, etc., and today I have a complaint. I don't like what the Theros God cards are doing to Commander. I am projecting a bleak future where we all live in subservience to the overwhelming indestructibility of the Legendary Enchantment Creature. It is undeniable that they have had a profound impact on what cards get main-decked and Devotion strategies have quickly become a pillar of the format. In fact, the ubiquity of these decks has all but completely edged out the existence of other mono-color decks. Although I don't necessarily expect it to stay that way forever, things are likely to get a lot worse before they get better. Let's break down a few of the things that make Devotion great in Commander and what we can do about them. Typical SWOT analysis. Let's bring down the Theros tyrants!

STRENGTHS:
Obviously, the keystone of the Devotion strategy is one of the God cards. The ability to continually re-cast them from the Command zone means that you can quickly exhaust your opponents counters and exiling removal. The low casting cost of these cards ensures that you will be able to put them into play multiple times; even if they are answered. Indestructible requires specific types of answers. Opposing sweepers are less effective. Your own sweepers are less destructive and easier to use. In the case of Erebos, you get easy access to card advantage. Heliod gives you a steady stream of tokens to abuse. Thassa balances your draws to ensure an even flow of gas. All of these things are just strong anyway, but when you have the added reliability of being tough to take away, you have a solid foundation for a winning strategy.

I wasn't all that thrilled with the Devotion mechanic until I saw Nykthos. At that moment I knew it could only go down one of two ways: either it sucks or it's awesome. When cheap, fast mana is involved, there isn't much a middle ground. You just get there or you don't. As it turns out, giving a brand new strategy its own Cabal Coffers that can be used for ANY color is pretty filthy. Nykthos is a powerful enabler that kick starts some blindingly fast draws. Devotion is a proactive, board-centric strategy. If you empty your hand quickly and begin to attack aggressively early on in the game, then your opponent can have a lot of trouble stabilizing. Note that Nykthos gets out of hand VERY FAST. You often have only one chance to kill the first Creature they play before they dump five more on the board next turn.

Mono Devotion strategies have the advantage of using older single-color tech like Scrying Sheets. The fact that you can play so many basic lands protects you from much of the potential hate, like Back to Basics, and you generally have fewer mana problems than multicolor brews.

That is pretty much it. Adding a resilient threat, ongoing incremental advantage, and fast mana to any deck would make it an instant metagame breaker. You just don't need anything else.

WEAKNESSES:

There are only a few cards that can deal with the Gods directly, but because of the popularity and ubiquity of Devotion strategies, you can expect to see them often. Some more regular tech is incidentally good against the Gods as well. Spin into Myth, Spell Crumple, and Hinder should already be format staples in your local metagame, but now you can bet more copies of Hallowed Burial, Condemn, Terminus, Deglamer, Unravel the Aether, and others, will show up.

Devotion requires particular card selections to be optimally effective. We want Creautres in play that add the highest possible number to our devotion. Unfortunately, these cards will require more colored mana and be harder to cast. The means things like Wasteland or Blood Moon can really get our goat if we aren't careful. This is even more true in multicolor decks.


OPPORTUNITIES:

Black and Red decks make easy pickings because they don't have ANY way to remove our God card. That is going to be very frustrating for them. They can still go after our resources, like cards and lands, but that is true of any deck we would want to play. Devotion has a real competitive advantage here.

White and Green have the most relevant answers AND the most of them so these matchups will be more interactive, but not necessarily tougher to win. Devotion has built in protection from board sweepers and can go toe-to-toe with token+Overrun strategies. Voltron style decks will have a very tough time getting past your huge, Indestructible, never-goes-away blocker.

THREATS: 

Blue, the perennial scourge of nearly every format, tends to present the most problems for Devotion. They have access to Control Magic effects to capitalize on all the powerful permanents that we put into play. They can use bounce and counterspells to stall out our fast draws and make us 'play fair' by casting our threats one at a time. When you are trying to use Nykthos for extra mana, a simple Boomerang can often set you back more than one turn if you no longer have a high Devotion. Blue also has a decent array of permanent answers to God cards as I mentioned above. Of all the possible decks you could face, Blue based Aggro-Control is by far the most effective against Devotion. Particularly, Blue-Green and Blue-White tempo like Edric, Spymaster of Trest.

That's all for this week Zoners. I hope you have all the information that you need to keep Devotion decks in check around your kitchen table. I'll see you next week.
-GG