Hello everybody and welcome back to the weekly brawl spotlight, Brawl Haul! Before we dive into this week’s brew, there are two things I would like to address. First, I would just like to thank everybody once again for taking the time out of your day to read the article. Second, I want to remind everybody to tell me what card you would be interested in seeing at the end of the article. As much as I enjoy being able to pick the commander that interests me most, I would much rather pick a commander that interests the most amount of people. All this being said, time to jump into this week’s brew!

Overview

This week’s commander is Eutropia the Twice-Favored, a card that I did not know existed about a week and a half ago. The gameplan of the deck is rather similar to that of a classic Magic deck, Bogles. That deck focuses on playing small Hexproof creatures, then playing a bunch of enchantments, which the community has dubbed pants, and killing the opponent before they have time to react. Unfortunately for us, there are no small Hexproof creatures in standard and as such, I have had to improvise with the best currently available. Despite this, I am going to refer to the small creatures as Bogles and the enchantments as pants because it is significantly more fun to say.

What Makes Eutropia Stand Out?

Eutropia is a card that requires a significant amount of building around to make her strong, but when the deck goes unhindered, she is exceptionally good at closing out a game quickly. While her ability seems to not be the strongest, the counters add up faster than one would expect, and given that the creature also becomes evasive, this damage is hard for the opponent to prevent. In addition to being deceptively strong, she also is the only enchantment matters commander in this color pairing, with the other two being Calix, Destiny’s Hand, who is more focused on controlling the board, and Siona, Captain of the Pyleas, who is goes wide while we go tall. Nothing against these two as commanders, they just do not offer the same playstyle as Eutropia does.

Eutropia is fairly straight-forward in terms of what her strengths and weaknesses are. I mentioned it earlier but she has a surprising amount of burst damage, being able to give your largest creature some form of evasion and go in for lethal with the opponent being unable to interact. In addition to this, Theros, Beyond Death brought along a fair amount of instant speed enchantments, which essentially become combat tricks and let us make favorable trades more easily. In addition to that, a lot of the enchantments have some form of relevant enter the battlefield trigger, which when combined with a few cards I’ll bring up later, can make a strong value engine and we can go through a majority of our deck.

As for her weaknesses, the deck is very reliant on her sticking around to maximize all the frankly weak enchantments we are running. Due to the fact she’s only a 2/2, if she dies early the game starts looking a lot rougher. In addition to this, she is very telegraphed. This means that the goal of the deck is very straightforward and the opponents can typically read the commander, know what our gameplan is, and then try their best to counteract the inevitable beatdown by a bunch of bogles with a ton of pants on. The last issue the deck has is that it folds very easily to early board clears. The deck has no way of giving indestructibility so something like Shatter the Sky or Kaya’s Wrath will often just close the game out early as we effectively two for one ourselves by playing so many pants.

Our Bogles

The first part to make our plan work is to get some form of bogle onto the field. While not all of these targets are cheap they all excel in either wearing the pants or getting buffed by Eutropia. The cards that benefit the most from being buffed are Benthic Biomancer, Pelt Collector, Setessan Champion, and Mowu, Loyal Companion.

         

These cards all excel for being the targets of Eutropia or the pants as they all do something in addition to just becoming larger. While Benthic Biomancer was designed to have its ability triggered by adapting it if we add additional counters to it, we can still loot through our deck. This helps us make sure we keep the pressure up by constantly having some form of action in hand. Pelt Collector also plays very well with buffs, giving itself trample after it gets three counters. This means that we can develop two threats on board at the same time, putting the pants on him and the counters onto something else to make several large attackers at the same time. Setessan Champion does not require us to actively buff her with either Eutropia or the pants, she can become very large quickly, as well as being an enchantress to help us keep applying pressure. Finally, we have Mowu, Loyal Companion, who becomes absolutely massive with a few buffs from Eutropia. Combine this with the fact he has vigilance and trample, he is a must-kill threat in our deck and if he gets the chance to swing for damage, he will often kill the opponent on his own.

Our Pants

The other main part to make this gameplan work is the pants we throw onto creatures. The goal of them is to interact with the current board state first, then double up by triggering Eutropia to grow our team. The pants that stick out the most are Hydra’s Growth, Starlit Mantle, Warbriar Blessing, and Setessan Training.

         

To start off with the pants, we have Hydra’s Growth. While this card does not follow the main goal of the pants I had just mentioned, it makes a creature into a massive threat, especially given that Eutropia can help the creature grow faster by putting targeting the buffed creature. Next is Starlit Mantle, which is one of the best combat tricks we have up our sleeves. Giving flying and a +1/+1 counter to a creature, as well as giving +1/+1 to a creature and Hexproof for two mana is absurdly good, as well as being able to blow out people trying to remove our bogles. Te card often closes out the game by just preventing the opponent from killing the massive creature going in for damage. Warbriar Blessing on paper looks rather boring, letting us have a creature fight another as well as giving +0/+2, but being able to keep the opponent’s board clear lets us get in for damage much more easily. Finally, we have Setessan Training, which also looks underwhelming at first. However, it cycles itself, triggers Eutropia, and gives a creature trample which means getting in for damage is even easier than it already was. It also plays incredibly well with some of the value engines, which I’ll be getting into next.

Value Engines

While Eutropia already lets us get a lot of value out of our enchantments sometimes we just need a little extra for when we start falling behind the opponents. While a lot of the cards synergize well with each other already, the ones that go above and beyond are Nessian Wanderer, Medomai’s Prophecy, The First Iroan Games, The Great Henge, and Shimmerwing Chimera.

      

   

Something that arose when I was playtesting this deck was the constant need for more mana. This is where Nessian Wanderer comes in. Like most other cards, his ability seems lackluster at first, but it essentially turns all of our enchantments into cantrips, making sure the other draws later down the line are all better as they have a smaller chance of being a land. Medomai’s Prophecy and The First Iroan Games are our two main ways of card draw, both are slow but they both give a lot of value over the turns they are out. The First Iroan Games is better because it comes with a body and pumps up one of our creatures a fair amount. The Great Henge is just a solid card overall, it becomes relatively cheap depending on how many enchantments we hit, and once it’s on the board, it turns all our creatures into draw spells. Finally, we have Shimmerwing Chimera, which allows us to double-dip on the value of our enchantments. Due to most of our pants having an enter the battlefield trigger, Shimmerwing provides a ton of value in itself, being able to close out the game on its own often enough.

Closing Out the Game

While this deck is much more of a beat down deck than one that has a flashy way of winning, but there are still several cards that make us win on the spot if we have any resemblance of a board state. These cards are Biogenic Upgrade, Skatewing Spy and Renata, Called to the Hunt.

      

Biogenic Upgrade makes our entire board absolutely massive. Being able to distribute 3 counters then have them all double combined with Eutropia is often enough to make three creatures that all must be blocked, and combined with the fact chances are one or two will have flying, there is not much counterplay. Another notable combo is to biogenic upgrade Mowu, which puts on 6 counters, then doubles it to 12 making him a 15/15 vigilance trample if you have not buffed him at all. Up next is Skatewing Spy, who is there for redundancy for Eutropia for the most part. Being able to play a single card to give our entire team flying can often surprise the opponent if they were not prepared. Our last surprise way of winning is Renata, Called to the Hunt. While her ability is nice and all, the real strength of her is that her attack is our devotion to green and that she is an enchantment. She is a great way of beating down the opponent for their last bit of life.

Other Notable Cards

Once again there were cards that I could not find a proper spot for, but believe they deserve a mention for how powerful they are. These cards are Jiang Yanggu, Wildcrafter, Incubation Druid, Leyline of Anticipation, Frogify and Kenrith’s Transformation.

      

   

Both Jiang Yanggu and Incubation Druid provide an insane amount of ramp. Similarly to Benthic Biomancer, Incubation Druid does not require us to adapt it and instead just put a counter on it. Leyline of Anticipation makes it significantly harder for the opponents to interact with us, turning all of our non-flash enchantments into more combat tricks, as well as being able to flash out creatures to keep them safe from sorcery speed removal. The last two notable cards are Frogify and Kenrith’s Transformation, which both essentially do the same thing. If you target the opponent’s commander, they are just stuck with an essentially worthless body for the rest of the game, given that they have no way of sacrificing it or blowing up the enchantment.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Once again I touched upon it briefly in the introduction, but Eutropia excels when the opponent is doing their own thing. The same can be said about most decks, but she is able to maximize on this by making creatures large very quickly and beating them down before they have the chance to interact at all. She has a large amount of burst that can catch most people off guard, as well as being able to flash in a variety of enchantments to mess up the opponent’s plan.

The weaknesses come mainly in that the Eutropia by herself is very weak and if she dies once or twice, it is very hard for the deck to get back into the game due to how heavy the deck relies on her. While we have some cards to counteract this, due to the nature of Brawl, we cannot always prevent her from being killed.

The Decklist

Here is the decklist that this article has been featuring.

Wrap Up

This list is the one that has taken me the most time to refine, due to a couple of factors. The first factor is the fact my entire first day of testing she did not stick on board for a turn and so a lot of the deck shifted onto just keeping her safe until I noticed that there just is not a lot of cards to do this. Part of me wanted to just focus on a different commander but I ended up doing another day of testing and it just clicked and performed very well. While I would say this deck is weaker than the Klothys and Niv-Mizzet deck, it is certainly more explosive than both, being able to close out games as early as turn 5 in a lot of scenarios. Overall I had an enjoyable time brewing this list and hopefully, if any of you give it a shot, you will be able to get similar results to my later testing.

As for next week’s article, we have finally exhausted most of the cool cards from Theros Beyond Death and as such, the cards for this week are going to be from Core Set 2020, these being Yarok, the Desecrated, Kethis, the Hidden Hand, Rienne, Angel of Rebirth, Kykar, Wind’s Fury, Kaalia, Zenith Seeker, and Omnath, Locus of the Roil. Anyway, that is all for this week, and so until next time, good luck brewing!