“The reigning of the silent tyrant“
Art:Cloudspire Skycycle
by Hardy Fowler
Please note: Rule Break Month Two is not officially sanctioned until July 2025. We are currently building and testing these decks, so by July, you will already have lists and ideas ready. These are not officially legal until July 2025. For a full breakdown of Rule Break Month Two, check this link: (https://www.reddit.com/r/PauperEDH/comments/1kcnxnv/breaktherulesmonth_two_electric_boogaloo/)
Table of Contents
Today’s Featured Commander Is:
Rule Break Month Two is coming soon, and to get the community prepared and ready to go, we have decided to test out and build our decks early! While this deck and many of the ones that follow will not be legal in the format until July, you can always rule them in to have some fun now! We start off Rule Break Month with Cloudspire Skycycle, which is a very cool card that allows us to buff up our creatures. Since we are in Boros, there is a decent amount of blink effects that allow us to retrigger our commander. In contrast, our commander ability isn’t anything super amazing, it can help us stabilize our board at many points of the game, and allows us to outpace our opponents in combat quite regularly. Our deck mainly focuses on being a strong midrange combat-focused deck that blinks and buffs up our best creatures. I am so excited for rule break month two! Without further ado, let’s get it!
The Deck:
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Cloudspire Skycycle Saddles Pauper EDH!
Why Cloudspire Skycycle?
Cloudspire Skycycle can help us stabilize our board in the early-turns and can make us a problem to deal with in combat, we have a decent amount of big creatures and adding power to them can make us a nightmare to deal with in combat, Cloudspire Skycycle is a great commander for the deck but it can stay in the command zone in the game and be fine, if it keeps getting countered it doesn’t alter our gameplan that much. I pretty rarely attack with Skyccyle and mostly use them as a blocker that can be crewed really easily, and blinking it as much as we can to spread the counters around.
Deck Matchups:
Since this is Pauper EDH, there are an absolute ton of things that can tip a game in your favor or out of it. While an archetype may seem favorable, there are absolutely good and bad commanders for our deck to go up against; I have included both these, which were all played among my testing groups using various decks, and I have included the sample size for clarity purposes. This is just meant to be a guide after testing a bunch of games with this deck!
The information below is notes about specific decks that were featured in our testing pods and how we fared against them. Naturally, Pauper EDH is a multiplayer game, so these are just a summary of my notes against different commanders and strategies. When we test these decks, we try to test their strengths and weaknesses to give a full spectrum of what the deck has to offer. Various commanders and archetypes/strategies are used to get the most accurate information.
Commanders, we have a good matchup against:
Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle
Record against Teshar, Ancestor’s Apostle
While they can get quite a bit of value out of their commander we can typically ignore their overall gameplan, they cant put up as good of a board as we can as quick as we can, because of this we can typically not care what they do at all as we beat up on them in combat, I found this matchup to be really favorable since they are in mono-white and really cant do much to stop us.
Boros Challenger
Record against Boros Challenger 4-1
Most Boros Challenger lists are extremely similar to ours, this makes this matchup come down to pretty much a race, our blinks really come in handy in this matchup since we can re-ETB our commander quite a bit which allows us to be really strong against them in combat and just whittle them down quicker than they can whittle us down. I think this is a pretty good matchup for our deck; it’s nearly a mirror match.
Rulik Mons, Warren Chief
Record against Rulik Mons, Warren Chief 3-1
This is another matchup where i think its right to lean much more to the aggressive side, while Rulik isn’t super scary against us they can ramp a lot and if they get into the six to eight mana range can drop some big creatures that we can struggle to deal with, using what little removal we have to keep their commander off the field and taking an aggressive approach against them works very well.
Commanders, we have a tough matchup against:
Heartfire Hero
Record against Heartfire Hero 0-3
This is a pretty rough matchup for our deck, sadly they are just quicker than us and can hit much harder and quicker than we can, it can be really tough to keep pace in this matchup and it can be really hard to stay alive, this is a very rough matchup that i had almost no success against.
Transplant Theorist
Record against Transplant Theorist 1-2
A winnable but tough matchup for our deck, a lot of theorist lists are pretty heavy on counterspells and other control spells which can make this matchup a lot slower and harder for us, while we arent an aggro deck we are firmly midrange and slowing down to the pace that a control deck would want can certainly cause a lot of problems with us, for this matchup i definitely recommend keeping a pretty aggressive hand and trying to lean into our more aggressive side.
Dionus, Elvish Archdruid
Record against Dionus, Elvish Archdruid 0-3
Elves are just very good against us, they are considerably quicker and can go a lot wider than we can, i had almost no success in this matchup, it was really tough to keep up with them and in my testing games they simply just ran us over, this is a terrible matchup for our deck.
Strategy Overview:
Match your opponent’s speed:
Since we are a true midrange deck we can hang with a lot of the decks in the format, whether they want to go fast or slow as long as they are combat focused it typically works out pretty well for us, keeping an aggressive hand or a slower deck against a deck that you expect to go that speed is a great part of the strategy.
Crew and Saddle as much as you can:
We have a ton of saddle and crew effects within the deck, so using our creatures to animate them as strong blockers or use them offensively as attackers are both great things for our deck.
Keep your creatures, blink as needed:
While we almost always use our blink effects to retrigger our commander they can be used in many different ways, if a key creature is targeted with removal using a blink on it is almost always worth it, using your blinks as needed doesn’t always feel great but if it keeps us alive its great for our deck, while we would prefer to use for our commander we can certainly win without any extra ETB’s of our commander.
Deck Overview:
This section contains information about cards in the deck and how they function within the deck! I also highlighted some of my favorite cards in the deck!
Creatures:
Lets start off with arguably the two most important creatures in the deck, we start off very strong with Giant Ox
and Interface Ace
both of these can allow us to saddle up and crew our vehicles with absolute ease which allows us to accelerate the gameplan quite a bit and just become a true force to be reckoned with. While we are mostly a vehicle deck, we do have saddles that have some really good effects like Bridled Bighorn
, which can help us fill up the board and give us some nice chump blockers. Against a go-wide strategy like elves, this can be quite effective. Quilled Charger
is another really cool mount for the deck; it’s well-stated, and being able to buff it up and get menace on an attack can allow us to be really tough to deal with in combat. Ingenious Artillerist
is one of my favorite cards in the deck. It can allow us to do quite a bit of non-combat damage, which can be really helpful against decks that are tough to go against in combat, as there are quite a few of them within the format. Most Valuable Slayer
and Hardened Escort
are both really strong cards for the deck that help us increase our damage, and being able to give our creature first strike and indestructible is very good.
Instants:
Blink is the true name of the game in our instant package with cards like Ephemerate
, Cloudshift
, and Flicker of Fate
all being examples of super cheap cards we have in our deck that allow us to re-ETB our commander or pretty much any of the good ETBs we have. We do have some removal but not a ton so i would always recommend that you use it wisely, we do have classics like Generous Gift
and Abrade
which are both cheap and efficient, i am also a big fan of Ride's End
while it mostly feels like a tech card against other vehicle decks it can be good against a variety of decks within the format, while the discount is nice removal doesn’t come easy over here so being able to remove anything is pretty much always worth it. It’s not all removal and blink here as we do have some fun offensive cards like Built to Smash
and Built to Last
, which are both cheap buffs that can help us output our damage and give an artifact creature indestructible, which can be a good panic button option if we attack into a bad situation.
Sorceries:
Suppose we attack with one of our big vehicles like Thundersteel Colossus
. In that case, it can be really nice to utilize Assault Strobe
and truly pile on the damage and hit hard, which is something we are always looking to do as a Boros deck. Daring Discovery
also works really well with Assault Strobe since we can take our opponents’ best creatures out of combat, against combat-heavy decks, this can go a really long way. Collision Course
is a great piece of creature removal for our deck since our creature and vehicle count is usually pretty high, while this certainly isn’t the best piece of removal, we take what we can get when we are in Boros. We round out our sorcery package with Settle Beyond Reality
, which is a bit expensive but allows us to exile an opponent’s creature and blink one of ours, truly a best of both worlds for our deck. This card is absolutely worth the five mana. In the instance that we are against a combo deck, being able to exile a combo piece can be very good.
Artifacts:
While our deck does contain some of the typical artifacts you would find in a Boros deck like the amazing Greatsword of Tyr
which is an absolute powerhouse in this deck (and most decks!) we mostly have vehicles, we have some amazing attacker/blocker vehicles like Thundersteel Colossus which can really take opponents by surprise and allows us to hit really hard, this card also has a very low crew cost which is always good. Aradara Express
and Irontread Crusher
are also really strong attackers for the deck that can help us dish out a lot of damage. One of my favorite utility vehicles in the deck is Raiders' Karve
, which is a very nice piece of utility for the deck and can help us ramp pretty easily, which is something that is certainly not common within Boros. It’s really nice to have utility from our creature package with cards like Giant Ox and Interface Ace since we can easily crew our big vehicles with ease.
Enchantments:
We are a midrange combat deck in every way so we had to have Goblin War Drums
which is a great way for us to guarantee damage, this is also a very strong card against decks that don’t run a lot of creatures since we can easily beat up on them. We round out our enchantment package with Caught in the Brights
which is shockingly fitting for a deck with so many vehicles in it and it is really good against any deck that has a combo creature or a card or commander that they need for their deck to function, we also have Reprobation
which is pretty much the same card and can really shut an opponents creature down.
Strengths of the Deck:
- We are a midrange deck through and through which allows us to have a decent board presence throughout most of the game.
- While we are vulnerable to artifact removal, we are a bit less vulnerable to creature removal since a lot of our creatures are vehicles and are not creatures all of the time. In my testing games, this helped immensely.
- We can use our blink effects both offensively and defensively, whether we use them to re-ETB our commander or just protect our stuff from removal, they are amazing assets to have within the deck.
Weaknesses of the Deck:
- We don’t have a lot of card draw in our deck and have a pretty low overall mana curve, so it can be easy to run out of resources.
- We are pretty weak to artifact removal as we don’t have much protection against it, and we have a lot of artifacts/vehicles in the deck.
- We have a win-more commander. If we have a board, it can be really good to get the buff, but if we get blown up or stall out, our commander doesn’t offer a ton of utility for the deck.
Deck Stats:
Sample Hands:
Conclusion:
Thanks so much for reading to the end! Cloudspire Skycycle is a very fun intro commander for Rule Break Month Two and was an absolute blast to play; who doesn’t love going Boros and just turning our creatures sideways? It’s an amazing matchup. I hope you are all excited for Rule Break Month Two, as we are! I think it’s great that we are getting to have some wacky fun and experiment more within the format. While we won’t be covering all the legal vehicles, we are excited to share the best of the best. Stay tuned for more articles. Stay tuned and tap in!