There are 43 legendary creature cards in Magic: The Gathering that use the word ‘And’ in their name, which is used to represent a pair of creatures. For a number of them, like Firesong and Sunspeaker, or Tibor and Lumia, these cards represent relatives, and I have done my best to check for these, and also the pairing with actual children in them. Here then presented are ten different decks where your commander represents some measure of Wife Guyness.
These two are the earliest example of a card that actually represents a couple on them with ‘and’ in the name. I did some digging but I could not find an earlier card that did this. It’s also a card that isn’t particularly powerful, and certainly doesn’t look like it stands high in this current era of powerful commanders. Look, you don’t become a Wife Guy because you’re dealing with perfect materials, you become a Wife Guy because you see what nobody else can appreciate as perfectly as you do. And if you’re building Anax and Cymede, you wife guy these two.
What I think I’d want to do with Anax and Cymede is a go-wide strategy that uses Auras that create creatures. Anything in this deck wants to be:
- A cheap aura that creates a body
- A cheap body that can be an aura
- Expensive and creates a lot of bodies
- Things that draw off the above
Also mixed in with this is it’s very important to throw in some hexproof stuff to protect your stuff while you’re casting auras onto them. Beaming Defiance and Loran’s Escape are my favourites here because they also trigger heroic for Anax and Cymede.
Where Anax and Cymede did it first, it was our Big Gay Kings that did it best. First revealed on Guardians of Meletis, as a couple who after their death had their history rewritten as total buttholes who hated each other and everyone was glad to see dead. That’s pretty homophobic of everyone who was mad about them and glad to see them dead, jerks.
Kynaios and Tiro are an iconic example of a group hug deck. You don’t need me to give you any advice on this one, the EDHRec page is well-worn on how these two work together. The important thing to me is that 8 booty seems a fun angle to take the card. There are, in these colours, plenty of ways to attack with toughness, and I think that’s a fun angle that isn’t just More Group Hug.
This is Yuri.
Drana and Linvala are a card that’s hard to predict in terms of what it’ll let you do, because it looks at what your opponents are doing. In most cases, you’ll see people build Drana and Linvala as a stax deck, with cheap creatures that slow the game down and limit your opponent’s options, and that makes sense since they lock your opponents out of a lot of choices.
Hypothetically, you could spend cards to exchange control of cards you’ve played to give them to your opponents, and use that to make Drana and Linvala into a combo engine, but I wouldn’t. I think your options are extremely thin for giving them creatures – Avarice Totem is pretty much it. Instead, I think you need to think of this as The Second Date; show up with a truckload of value and be willing to slow the game down in the name of just ensuring that you get a little bit more at a time.
If you read the story, sure, Hazoret is a goddess and Djeru is her lieutenant. On the other hand, Hazoret is twelve feet tall and Djeru is something like half that size. Is Djeru a monster-fucker? Is that not a question for you to answer in your own heart, in your own time?
Lords this is a wordy card! You want to keep your hand low, you want a deck full of legendary creature cards, and you want them in red and white. You also want those cards to not strand themselves in your hand because you’re trying to keep your hand low if you want to attack with Djeru and Hazoret, which you do, to cast the free cards. I would look for options in red and white that are legendary creatures that aren’t embarrassing and which would let me kick cards out of my hand.
The big thing to check for is being choked on mana. I would treat Djeru and Hazoret as the curve topper, so that once you can cast them you can reliably kick whatever else you have onto the table.
Fun tidbit: You can cast Kellan’s adventure, Birthright Boon off this for free!
Mechanically, this is a cool card because what it asks is pretty simple: Evasive hasty creatures. The payoff is 5/5 flying dragons, and those solve problems on their own. Like, it’s possible to feel that you need to be able to reliably haste-attack every turn, because you want that hash-tag-value every turn, but you’re making 5/5 dragons. They are big, they defend you until they’re smashing, and you don’t need to have your hasty creatures hit very hard.
I don’t think I want to cast lots of hasty little durdlenauts. They’re easily blocked. What I’d look for is cards that let me create hasty tokens and send them at people, like Legion Warboss and Goblin Rabblemaster.
As a couple, I think these two are cute together. You have your serious scene cybergoth boyfriend and his much more traditional historical LARPer boyfriend. The only real wrinkle, though, is that, like, Goro-Goro is a Atsushi Reply Guy?And he keeps calling her her dad’s name? Keep an eye on this situation Satoru.
Black does not have an exclusive hold on goth girlfriends in Magic The Gathering. Katilda is a witch, but she’s the kind of witch who wants to bring everyone together to get hammered and have a big party (where she can use a bit of your soul, stop worrying about it). You might ask ‘well is she really goth?’ Katilda died and came back. It’s hard to get more goth than a literal ghost.
Lier, on the other hand, is, you know that guy who dresses in grim clothes and is a bit too into quoting Lovecraft? And you know that goth girl who thinks the world would be better off if we just drowned everything? Lier is like if that goth girl was that lovecraft boy.
Be honest; You know that girl, if you’re reading this blog and you might be her. As far as that religious belief in the inevitable drowning of reality’s sorrows, uh, [citation needed]. Quite frankly, I look forward to Lier discovering whatever the Innistrad version of Melatonin, SSRIs, or Estradiol is, and maybe cheering up a bit.
As far as a deck goes, this is a Bant Value card. As a creature they’re pretty basic, just a 3/3, so you’re not voltronning here obviously. They’re a great card because they ask you to do two things at once: you want to cast humans that let you cast cards out of your graveyard. That suggests you want spells that are cheap, flexible, and can be useful early or late, and you want humans that are worth casting. Humans are really good in these colours, obviously, and there are a lot of cheap flash ones that you can use to reuse spells in your bin. I wouldn’t normally bother with a card like Brinebarrow Intruder but in this deck, with them out, it’s a Snapcaster Mage, and that’s a pretty cool card. Look at cheap humans who get you mana, mill you cards, or even get you mana and mill you cards.
I like cards like Flower//Flourish here. If you’re early on, you can use it for a land drop, then cast a human the next turn and get another land – but if you don’t need that, in the end game you can use the Flashback on the Flourish.
You want to see a cool synergy card with this pair? Check out Escape Artist. It lets you put a card into the graveyard, pick up a human and cast it again, in a way that means you can flash back the card you discarded. And you may wonder well why do I want that? Well, check out cards like Secrets of the Key. For one mana, you can investigate twice, because it got a second flashback effect. Is this powerful? No! Is it cute? Yes!
Alright, so like joking around here about these being couples, because you know they’re not, not really, but here in this case I genuinely want to hold out that this is a cool and interesting idea for a couple. If you’re not familiar, Inga is an unsighted Omenspeaker, and Esika is a goddess of the tree, and both of them experience a pretty debilitating condition during the time depicted on this card. Inga can’t see, but she can chart paths to anywhere an Omenseeker has been. Esika is a goddess of the World-Tree, so in this scene she’s suffering from basically overwhelming vertigo, and is unable to work out where she is.
This is a really cool kind of story that reflects something frustrating about our world, which is to say, that often, those people we categorise as disabled are the people who have to come up with ways for them to help solve one another’s problems. It depicts an emergency, a momentary experience where these two find one another and take care of one another.
Alright, so this is a deck for creatures, and ideally, ways to make creatures that make more creatures. Wolfbriar Elemental is a really good example, you can use it to make a big pile of creatures. Verdeloth The Ancient is in the rare category just like it. These are cards that can feed into one another.
Another thing is wanting creatures that can be cast for 3 mana or more, but don’t start your mana curve at 3. For that, check out Morphs and Disguise cards, like Den Protector, Ainok Survivalist, Bubble Smuggler and Mistway Spy .
Fuck lord of the rings
Shalai and Hallar are a cute kind of couple; knightly femme and enby are not a pairing you see that commonly, since you tend to see enbies wind up with enbies in most fiction that bothers to show them. It gets this way that they can segregate the ‘queer’ couples away from ‘the normal ones’ because any relationship with a nonbinary person is necessarily not heterosexual.
(And psst, dude, if you’re one of those people who thinks that some nonbinary people are cute? Guess what, you’re less straight than you thought, and that’s okay.)
Anyway, dice tower! This is a dice tower commander, something that wants to put counters on things, a lot of them. You can go tall, putting counters on Shalai and Hallar themselves, or you can go wide, treating wide counter placement as also burn spells.
Also, if you’re building this deck, please find a room for a Kavu card, because as badass as ‘archer riding on their angel gf’s shoulders and snipe-shooting things’ is sick as hell, don’t neglect the importance of Serahane, Hallar’s Kavu mount.
Ha Ha Ha, Jurassic Park.
I actually went looking for if these two wound up together by the end of the Jurassic Park stories, but it turns out that… maybe? The Jurassic Park Wiki treats this entry as ‘TBA,’ which is a pretty funny way to say ‘nobody in this fandom really cares.’
Anyway, what can you do with this in these colours? My first impulse was that if you use it alongside cycling cards, you can throw one mana cards into the graveyard, exile them with these two, and cast otherwise uncastable spells ‘for free’: Crashing Footfalls, Ancestral Visions, Gaea’s Will, Hypergenesis are potentially cool, but also… what does it matter if you draw a lot of cheap creatures?
Another option is to use them in a deck with nothing but expensive pieces with alternate costs, things like landcyclers, evokers, and channelers. You want to rush from one to five as quickly as possible in most cases, which means a 1 mana accelerator to a 3 mana accelerator, but that requires putting 1 mana cards you can discover in your deck. By comparison, you could take things slower, permit lands that enter tapped, and instead use mana acceleration around the 2-3 range – things like Greater Tanuki and Shefet Monitor.
As for me, well, I think I’d probably wind up making the Katilda and Lier or Anax and Cymede decks I’ve described here. They appeal to me, and they don’t feel like they’d be pushing very sweaty, hard-competitive edges.