Crush Tables With This $35 Equipment Deck! | Nahiri, Forged in Fury
Hey friends and welcome back to Budget Commander! Do you want to play an Equipment deck but the price tag of archetype staples like Sword of Fire and Ice keep you away? Well I've got good news for you: you can kick butt while swinging with dirt cheap equipments using the new Nahiri, Forged in Fury!
Making Budget Equipment Look Busted
Nahiri, Forged in Fury provides both card advantage and mana advantage for our Equipment deck: we simply need to attack with equipped creatures and Nahiri will reward us with card draw, and then cast those cards for free if they are equipments! Best of all, Nahiri has affinity for equipments, so as long as we have enough equipments on the battlefield we can keep casting her for just 2 mana, making her a super reliable engine to keep the deck chugging along!
Unlike most Equipment decks that rely heavily on expensive utility cards like Sword of Feast and Famine for mana and Sword of Forge and Frontier for draw, Nahiri provides all the mana advantage and card advantage we could ever desire and actually prefers cheapo garbage-looking equipment to help enable her: equipments that already come equipped so they can immediately trigger Nahiri like living weapons (Batterbone), for mirrodin (Hexgold Halberd), similar stuff without a keyword (Barbed Spike), and also equipments that enter equipped (Maul of the Skyclaves) and equipment creatures (Lizard Blades)! These cards are amazing in Nahiri because they:
- Reduce her casting cost since they're equipment.
- Trigger her ability without having to spend extra mana to equip them first since they come attached to a body.
- Can be cast for free with Nahiri since they're equipment!
So the bulk of our budget Equipment deck will be all those types of equipment to enable Nahiri. The rest of the deck is a mix of utility and support cards to further enhance our Equipment Beatdown plan.
For ramp we've got the equipments Beamtown Beatstick, Prying Blade, and Goldvein Pick make treasures, Bladegraft Aspirant and Danitha Capashen, Paragon make our equipment spells cheaper, and Fervent Champion, Astor, Bearer of Blades, Nahiri, Storm of Stone, Bruenor Battlehammer, and Bladehold War-Whip reduce equip costs!
For additional card draw we've got Mask of Memory, Jor Kadeen, First Goldwarden, and Sram, Senior Edificer for nice incremental draw, Akiri, Fearless Voyager which doubles as protection, and we've got impulse draw that also makes our creatures more lethal with Neyali, Suns' Vanguard and Kami of Celebration! Big shout-out to Commander Liara Portyr as well which doubles as a backup Nahiri and is just bonkers when both are on the battlefield! Soooo much draw and cost reduction!
For spicy removal tech we've got Argentum Armor which Nahiri can cast off the top for free, Citizen's Crowbar can be cashed in for a Disenchant, targeted removal with Rebel Salvo / Generous Gift / Kabira Takedown along with some board wipes Austere Command / Chain Reaction / Hour of Reckoning (since most of our creatures are tokens!)
And finally to win the game we've got mass double strike with Reyav, Master Smith, big pumps with Jor Kadeen, the Prevailer, but most importantly are our extra combat cards: Hexplate Wallbreaker, Akki Battle Squad, Response // Resurgence double our damage output and our attack triggers like Nahiri, Forged in Fury!
I also absolutely adore Goldwardens' Gambit and it's the perfect home here, a great follow-up to a board wipe to just make 10 power worth of creatures all equipped and swinging immediately!
$35 List
The $35 list has all the goodies I've just mentioned and more. It's low to the ground and aggressive: play equipments, play Nahiri, and attack!
$100 List
We've made a few major upgrades when bumping the price tag to $100: Puresteel Paladin is arguably the single most important upgrade to the deck, drawing us cards but most importantly removing equip costs which saves us tons of mana. There's also Scroll Rack which is amazing with Nahiri, Forged in Fury, able to guarantee we're hitting equipments off her ability for maximum value. Delayed Blast Fireball is also amazing with our exile draw, since we can cast its one-sided wipe effect for just 3 mana from exile! We round out the upgrades with the two best remaining living weapons Bitterthorn, Nissa's Animus and of course Kaldra Compleat, and the best dang Equipment recursion with Mantle of the Ancients!
Bonus List: My Paper Deck!
I've been playing Boros Equipment as well for a couple years now using Akiri, Fearless Voyager. This is a much more typical / expensive version of Equipments running all the common staples, but I figured some of you might like to see what a totally different version of the archetype can look like without a budget. The deck plays much differently as it's far less explosive than Nahiri, which is great at snowballing out of control. Meanwhile Akiri is slower but more consistent as you don't need a critical mass but rather just one or two equipped creatures smacking each turn for value:
Next Week: Spy Kit Probably!
I said I have a mean Spy Kit deck for you and I still do but Nahiri, Forged in Fury just came out and I wanted to strike while the iron's hot. But gosh, Kiora, Sovereign of the Deep is calling me and it's been years since I did a Sea Monster primer sooo we'll see!
