A style of deck I really like is the Revolving Door. The concept is that one area of the game, usually the graveyard, takes in cards, and then those cards either pull other cards back out of that area, or they pull themselves back out, creating the Revolving Door that keeps spinning, cards in, cards out. The deck then uses this cycle in order to generate resources.
Usually, you want to play black to pull this off (my current version is white and black, but I have a black and green version cooking). However, we’re here on White Deck Week, so how can we pull this off without black? We go back to what white is good at: lots of little creatures.
Commander
I had trouble choosing a deck to make; this is part of the problem of making too many decklists. Ideas start to run dry. But then I ran into Teshar, Ancestor’s Apostle. When you cast a historic spell (it’s going to mostly be artifacts, but there’s some quality legendary spells), you get to bring a cheap creature back to the battlefield. 51 of the 100 cards in the deck are eligible to be brought back by this ability, and another 34 will be lands. And of the 15 other cards, 10 can be recovered by a subsection of cards that we’ll get to later. 5 one-time use cards, and one of them is Teshar themselves.
Mana
The mana section is a little scattered. You’ll notice a complete lack of cards similar to my previous deck. No creatures that enter and check if your opponents have more lands. Instead, we’ve got a smorgasbord of how artifact creatures can make mana. Some of them tap for mana, a poor man’s Llanowar Elves. Some sacrifice to go get lands, a poor man’s Sakura-Tribe Elder. And then there’s the real heavy hitters. Foundry Inspector, Jhoira’s Familiar, and Starnheim Courser discount the artifact spells you want to be casting, and then we throw money at the problem with the expensive, but well worth it Krark-Clan Ironworks, allowing you to not only put artifacts into the graveyard for later recovery, but making the mana needed to replay one from your hand.
Card Draw
Mentor of the Meek continues to be one of the best card draw creatures available, and this deck gets immense value out of Esper Sentinel. Being so artifact focused, Losheel and Sanwell are both great options. The rest of the card draw suite either draws when it enters or when it dies. And then Trading Post just does everything we want in the deck. Sacrifice a creature to get back an artifact to cast and bring that creature back. Sacrifice an artifact when there’s nothing left to get back and just draw a card.
Removal
OK, the white creature-based removal on small creatures is not great. There’s plenty of creatures that exile a creature until they leave the battlefield, but that’s just creatures. This is where all of the one-shot spells that we can’t get back go. There’s a few we can get back, like Skyclave Apparition (which is just a good card) or Loran of the Third Path, so it’s not all one and done. There’s even repeatable graveyard hate, which is ironic considering that this deck folds to someone messing with our graveyard.
Winning the Game: Build the Door
There’s two Winning the Game categories again. The first one is more straight forward. These are cards that allow you to start beating people in the face. Cyberman Patrol is a wild card that means if you’re attacking with small creatures, it’s less damage to not block them. Cards like Patchwork Automaton allow you to make one big creatures, while Steel Overseer lets your fleet of little creatures get big and problematic. There’s a little bit of everything. Some unblockable, some indestructible, some blimps. But this is just the first part.
The second part is The Door. Cards whose purpose is to bring cards back from your graveyard themselves. For artifacts, these require themselves to die, which is why the deck runs multiple ways to sacrifice your own artifacts (best one is Arcbound Ravager and it’s not even close). So the loop generally looks like this:
Play Loop Creature A (creature from Winning the Game B). When you do, Teshar brings back some other useful creature.
Sacrifice Loop Creature B. When it dies, bring Loop Creature B back from your graveyard to your hand.
Play Loop Creature B. Teshar brings back some other useful creature.
Sacrifice Loop Creature B. When it dies, bring Loop Creature A back.
And so on and so forth. This will be a strain on the mana, which is where those three discount creatures from the Mana section are really helpful. You end up, at minimum, playing a lot of spells in one turn, but it’s possible to play a theoretical unlimited number of spells in a turn, creating very large creatures that your opponents will have difficulty dealing with.
Misc Top 3
- Selfless Spirit. Protects all your creatures from dying for a turn, and then next time you play an artifact, get it back and protect them again. There’s a few other protection options here too.
- Daxos, Blessed by the Sun. Whenever you basically anything with this deck, you gain life. It’s a good way to stay alive.
- Grinding Station. Technically, you can use this in the Revolving Door combo, but it also allows you to fuel your own advancement by putting your own cards into your graveyard so you can get them back later.
Lands
Nothing too special here. I’d recommend to play the five lands that are also artifacts, just because they’re cards you can get back maybe later from your graveyard. Buried Ruin is another nice include as a random way to get something back when you have no other gas in your hand.
This deck is fairly low-mid budget. Moxfield calls it about $230, and around $100 of that is three cards: Esper Sentinel Lita, and Krark-Clan Ironworks. Sentinel and Lita can probably be skipped; Ironworks is really really good here, but to save money, drop it and the other two to make the deck closer to $100 total. I know that you can make decks for $50 or less, but for me, I consider around $200 to be a good normal amount for a single color, maybe two color deck. Once we get to the three, four, five color decks, the deck cost will inflate simply due to the lands. Until then, enjoy the cheap decks.
That's Pretty NEET 