The Strongest Mono Blue Spellslinger Is Here! | Eluge | $50, $100
Hey friends and welcome back to Budget Commander! This week I want to share with you one of the strongest budget brews I've cooked up in a while: Eluge, the Shoreless Sea!
Ridiculous Ramp
The biggest weakness of Mono Blue has always been its lack of mana advantage -- and in a format where the two most important things are mana advantage and card advantage, lacking in one of those two pillars is a serious weakness. This is likely why the three most popular Mono Blue commanders are ones that provide mana advantage: Urza, Lord High Artificer turns all your artifacts into mana rocks, Orvar, the All-Form lets you easily make copies of your lands and/or mana rocks, and Minn, Wily Illusionist ramps out permanents (including lands) whenever your illusions die.
But we've just got a new competitor to the Big Three: Eluge, the Shoreless Sea, which I bet will end up being a popular Mono Blue commander as well due to its incredible mana advantage ability for your Spellslinger decks!
Eluge's gameplan is simple: we play our commander, putting more and more flood counters on our lands which allow us to cast bigger and bigger instants and sorceries, eventually leading to game-winning spells like Blatant Thievery and Mass Manipulation, or simply killing our opponents with our massive commander. Since Eluge only gives us a mana discount on the first instant or sorcery each turn we're going to be playing Draw-Go, leaning towards casting instants on each opponents' turn to maximize its ability.
Eluge, the Shoreless Sea gives us immediate value the turn we cast it. It gives us a flood counter the turn it enters, meaning all our 1-mana spells become free with its ability. Because of this, we're running all the 1mv instant speed cantrips like Consider so we can immediately start casting one each turn. These smooth out our draws but also trigger a bunch of powerful support cards, like Wavebreak Hippocamp and Teferi's Ageless Insight which turns our cantrips into actual card advantage, or Talrand, Sky Summoner which gives us an army of drakes, or Ojer Pakpatiq, Deepest Epoch which doubles the value of all our instants.
We're also loaded up with all the most efficient blink spells. These are here primarily to blink Eluge, the Shoreless Sea, giving us an extra flood counter and speeding up our mana advantage, but also protecting Eluge from targeted removal (Teferi's Time Twist provides protection from board wipes too). They also allow us to attack with Eluge, get a flood counter, and then ambush attackers by blinking Eluge and blocking!
Because we have so many blink spells we're also running a bunch of amazing ETB creatures to further our game plan: Solemn Simulacrum and Scampering Surveyor to repeatedly ramp, and Scourge of Fleets and Floodgate (yes, Floodgate!) to repeatedly wipe our opponents' boards.
Speaking of Floodgate and Scourge of Fleets, we're running a ton of amazing cards that reward us for going full-on Islands: Spectral Deluge is another amazing one-sided wipe, Engulf the Shore is an amazing emergency wipe at instant speed, we've got Flow of Knowledge and Flow of Ideas to draw absurd amounts of cards, and we also got all the mana doublers like Gauntlet of Power and Caged Sun to cast all the spells so we can still pop off even without Eluge!
Finally to end the game we cast a huge Mass Manipulation or Blatant Thievery to steal our opponents' boards. Our commander grows huge too so by constantly removing our opponents' boards we have an easy win condition of just hitting our opponents two or three times for lethal commander damage. Artful Dodge is there too just in case our opponents have blockers. Oh and once we have 6 flood counters, Capsize with buyback is free to cast every single turn, that's usually gg too!
It's a bit salty but I've tossed in a Time Stretch since that's two more Eluge swings at the very least and it's cheap, under $3!
$50 List
The $50 brew is terrifying, honestly one of the strongest $50 lists I've ever made. The deck is jam-packed with interaction but still has access to all the mana advantage and card advantage you'd ever want. It's not CEDH level but by gosh is this deck a powerhouse!
$100 List
The biggest upgrade in the $100 version is Displacer Kitten, an absurdly silly card that is "fair" in this deck in that it doesn't do any infinite combos. Nonetheless, it's the best blink engine ever printed, which means we get infinite flood counters with Eluge in a turn cycle or two, plus it blinks all our ETB creatures like Scourge of Fleets or Solemn Simulacrum for tons of value.
Beyond that, there are a ton of other small but significant upgrades like An Offer You Can't Refuse as another counterspell you can immediately cast the turn Eluge comes down, or Extraplanar Lens another mana doubler, Lightning Greaves which protects Eluge and lets it immediately attack for another flood counter.
Further Upgrades
Now Eluge is already a baseline "salty" commander because it works so well with counterspells and draw-go style play, but honestly, it can get so much saltier because this happens to be one of the best shells for stax like Static Orb and Winter Orb. The reason is that with Eluge on the battlefield, we can still cast all our spells for free, so the Orbs don't really bother us. Heck, even Stasis seems like a slam-dunk here because we can skip our opponents' turns for multiple turns, probably letting us find a win before sacrificing Stasis!
Also since we're Mono Blue we can take advantage of two nonbasic hate cards: Harbinger of the Seas and Back to Basics.
But as I've said, nobody likes stax (not even CEDH players!) so use those cards with caution.
For more socially acceptable inclusions try:
- Better countermagic: Fierce Guardianship, Mana Drain, Force of Negation, Cryptic Command, Force of Will
- Better wipe: Cyclonic Rift
- Better finisher (also salty!): Expropriate
- Better lands: Mystic Sanctuary and if you run that get the tutors for it Lorien Revealed, fetchlands like Flooded Strand
- Otawara, Soaring City
Thanks For Reading!
Eluge is a terrifying new budget commander, so I hope you enjoy this one as much as I do! I got inspired to write this since I picked Eluge for an upcoming Salt Commander Clash episode where I went all-in on the salty cards, but the commander itself ends up being very budget-friendly if you just tweak it a bit.
The Budget Commander schedule will be erratic going forward as my priorities are in YouTube videos these days, but whenever I'm inspired and have like an hour or two to kill there'll be another article coming!
