AMAZING New Dwarf From Kaldheim! | Magda, Brazen Outlaw | Kaldheim Preview
Kaldheim spoilers have begun trickling in and oh boy was there a SPICY reveal today! Everyone, meet Magda, Brazen Outlaw:
Magda is jam-packed with value at just 2cmc and there's a lot to unpack here so let's go over everything.
First and foremost she's an absolutely incredible Dwarf Tribal support card, giving all other Dwarves a nice power boost along with generating Treasure tokens whenever they tap. Keep in mind this just requires tapping, not necessarily attacking, which makes it much more flexible as you can tap Dwarves other ways too: you'll still make treasure tokens when activating Dwarven Blastminer to blow up a land or Dwarven Bloodboiler to give a creature a power boost, but most importantly it works with piloting Vehicles, which make a return in Kaldheim (Gilded Assault Cart) and have been a subtheme of Dwarves in the past. So the flexibility of how you generate these tokens is amazing and much-appreciated.
Magda's treasure generating ability ties well to her final ability: sacrificing five Treasures to search your library for an artifact or Dragon card and put it directly on to the battlefield. Not your hand. The battlefield. Holy crap that is a STRONG ability! The flexibility here is insane, letting you cash in just five Treasure tokens for something like a Blightsteel Colossus or Balefire Dragon. Red is also fantastic at generating Treasure tokens outside of Magda as well, like the Commander allstar Dockside Extortionist or Brass's Bounty! Now we have even more uses for all those Treasure tokens! Absolutely incredible.
And of course one big thing I have to highlight is the combo potential between Magda and one of the most notorious combo cards in Commander: Aggravated Assault. Tapping five Dwarves will generate five Treasure tokens, which you can then cash in to pay for Aggravated Assault's ability, untapping all your creatures and get an extra combat steps. This yields infinite untaps and infinite combat steps. If you tap six or more Dwarves then you're actually gaining Treasures in the process, which yields infinite Treasure tokens and infinite mana, letting you tutor infinite artifacts and Dragon cards from the deck with Magda. Expect this enchantment's price to be ... aggravated .. soon.
Looks Great, But How Do We Use Her?
There's at least three immediate homes for Magda, Brazen Outlaw. The first is putting her at the helm of her own Mono Red Dwarves deck. Magda is the strongest Dwarf Tribal support card ever printed and costs a mere 2 mana, making her the best candidate to lead a Dwarf deck. The only downside to running her in the command zone is that Dwarves are a relatively weak tribe without a lot of support, so while your commander will do a lot of the heavy lifting to make the deck function, your card pool is a bit lackluster. However, if Kaldheim brings a lot of great new staples to the tribe then this can be an excellent route to use her.
In my opinion, an even better home for Magda would be the other best Dwarf Tribal leader: Depala, Pilot Exemplar. Depala is a fantastic supporter of both Dwarves and Vehicles, two interwoven archetypes back in Kaladesh which seem to once again be connected in Kaldheim. The main difference is that instead of generating mana and tutoring like Magda does, Depala acts as card advantage, letting you sink mana into her ability to refill your hand with Dwarves and Vehicles. The other huge perk about picking Depala as the Commander is you get access to White, drastically increasing your card pool and adding even more powerful Dwarves like Duergar Hedge-Mage and Sram, Senior Edificer.
I've long been in love with Depala ever since she was first released years ago but she has always come up short on the polls when choosing what budget brew to cover. But once Magda is released, I won't ask the viewers: I guarantee you I'll be jamming a Depala deck at the first opportunity.
But as much as I love Depala, there's a deck that I'm even more excited to run Magda in: Tribal Tribal!
Tribal Tribal is a deck that uses a bunch of Changelings (e.g. Mirror Entity) to take advantage of all tribal support cards. It's a super open-ended archetype that lets you mix and match hundreds of potential tribal support from as many tribes as you want, ideally focusing on specific subarchetypes. I've recently done an exhaustive primer on Tribal Tribal, focusing specifically on how to build a Combat version and a Tap/Untap Shenanigans version. Tribal Tribal is my pride and joy, the primer and deck that I am by far the most proud of creating.
Magda, Brazen Outlaw is an allstar in both the Combat and Tap/Untap versions of Tribal Tribal. Attacking or tapping with Changelings yields tons of Treasure tokens which can then be used for ramp or tutoring any artifact or Dragon card in the deck. Also keep in mind that Dragon cards include changeling cards like Morophon, the Boundless or even Changeling Tribal cards like Crib Swap. My personal deck runs The Ur-Dragon as the commander so Magda can tutor up Hellkite Courser which then puts The Ur-Dragon into play, absolutely insane value.
MAGDA IS GOOD!
So yeah, Magda is amazing. I can't wait to run her both in Tribal Tribal and Depala decks, possibly even as the commander of her own deck as well if Kaldheim brings enough Mono Red Dwarf support. This is an incredible card and honestly I'm surprised it's just 2 mana, it feels like a three or four mana card at least! I'll be back with another quick article in the future as more Kaldheim commander goodies appear, so until next time, friends, see ya!
