Moira Brown, Guide Author Quest Counters

Commander Overview

Fallout was a very quick set since it was only commander decks and collector boosters, and because of that, the set came and went extremely quickly, and a lot of cards got forgotten about. As I recently completed a playthrough of Fallout 3, I decided to check and see if Moira Brown had any cards, and lo and behold, they did! This is a mish-mash deck of Blink, Voltron, and quest counters, with quest counters being our primary focus. Moira is not in a support role in this deck, and it is extremely important for the deck, blinking them a bunch of times so we can create more and more wasteland survival guides and give them to all of our creatures. Quest counters are on quite a few Fallout cards, but more importantly, are present on some old and new cards like Luminarch Ascension and Airbender Ascension, as well as all of our quest counter cards that make our equipment better and better. While this is most certainly a bracket two-deck, it can have some strong games and is a ton of fun to play. While Moira Brown isn’t a format-warping commander, they are something unique, which is hard to come across in Boros.

How to Play the Deck

Playing the deck is extremely straightforward and quite easy to do. There aren’t a ton of complicated interactions here. Play Moira and some of the quest counter support cards, and blink Moira as many times as we can so we can get a ton of survival guides. At the same time, these may seem slow at the beginning of the game; we can amass quest counters quite quickly and get huge, quite decently early. This deck is great for a player of any skill level, and it could be a good teaching deck. It has some moderately complex interactions, but is still quite simple.

Synergy’s in the deck

We have many different synergies and packages within the deck, with the most important being the quest counters. Quest counters are what fuel the Wasteland Survival Guide’s that Moira creates. They are the primary way that we deal damage in the deck, cards like Luminarch Ascension, Craig Boone, Novac Guard and Overseer of Vault 76 we can amass a ton of quest counters and make our guides into real threats, combining these with blink effects and cards like Metastatic Evangel to proliferate those counters and make our guides bigger and better. Our blink package has two different functions within our deck: protecting our creatures or blinking Moira. If opponents aren’t threatening our creatures, we typically use these to Blink Moira and create more and more survival guides.

Phases of the Game

We can have games with a quick start, but often times we don’t, but we spend the early game getting as many quest counters as we can and getting Moira on the field. There isn’t a ton to do here, but set up our quest counters for the mid-late game.

Mid-Game: The mid-game is where things start to get good for us. We have quite a few quest counters and, hopefully, bigger creatures than our opponents, and we hit hard. We are a Boros deck, so we attack pretty aggressively, especially if we are bigger. Blinking Moira a few times is a great idea as well, since the more survival guides we have, the better we can be in combat.

Late-Game: We are perfectly ok with getting to the late-game, we get bigger and better throughout the whole game, and with the help of cards like Crash Through, we can easily one-shot an opponent. The core game plan doesn’t change at all in the late game. We keep getting quest counters and keep attacking.

Card Breakdowns

Ramp

We don’t ramp at all in this deck, but it’s not a deck where we really need to ramp. Cards like [Craig Boone, Novac Guard] or Overseer of Vault 76 are cheap cards, and overall, we have a very low cost in the deck, so there isn’t much point to ramping. Lack of ramp doesn’t mean we can’t get big or be a large threat in combat.

Card Draw/Card Advantage

We are not great at drawing cards as most Boros decks tend to be, but we do have some good sources like Scrollshift, which is a best of both worlds situation for our deck, being able to blink Moira and draw a card is great for us. ED-E, Lonesome Eyebot is a great source of quest counters and card draw. Unless they are the only quest counter card we have, we would much rather have the counters, but it can be a source of mass card draw if we need it. Since we blink Moira a ton of cards like Puresteel Paladin can allow us to draw a card every time we blink Moira, which is quite a bit in this deck.

Removal

We do not have a ton of removal in this deck, cards like Swords to Plowshares, Generous Gift and Path to Exile are great options for us but they are pretty much the only removal that we have, we don’t have a ton of ways to address our opponents biggest threats outside of these cards. While not strictly removal, we can be pretty big in combat and kill a lot of our opponents’ creatures through blocking.

Protection

While we don’t have any strict protection cards in this deck, we have a ton of different blink stuff and those can be used as pieces of protection, while we won’t protect all of our creatures cards like Craig Boone, Novac Guard and Puresteel Paladin it is absolutely worth it for our deck. It’s always situation-dependent whether we should use it, but it is a great option for the deck and helps protect us against our opponents’ removal.

Utility / Support

Let’s go over some of the best cards in the deck! Conjurer's Closet and Teleportation Circle are both consistent ways to Blink Moira and guarantee we get more Wasteland Survival Guides and be better in combat. Both of these also work great with Duchess, Wayward Tavernkeep, as when we get bigger and better in combat, we can deal combat damage easily and keep getting more quest counters. Lae'zel, Vlaakith's Champion is a great card for us too, since it will give us extra quest counters, and with so many sources of quest counters in the deck, those extras really add up for us. Sierra, Nuka's Biggest Fan is a great card for the deck as well. Just like Duchess, we can easily deal a lot of combat damage, and getting those foods and sacrificing them lets us do big damage in combat.

Mana Base

Overall, our mana base is very simple and extremely skewed to white, while we do have a a lot of dual lands, white is much more important than red in our deck. Since equipping our Wasteland Survival Guides are only one to equip, we can actually get a lot of value out of Needle Spires, which can be a big double strike attacker for the deck. I was also able to activate Karn's Bastion quite a few times to proliferate our quest counters and increase our damage overall.

Win Conditions

Our only win condition is combat, our Wasteland Survival Guide helps a lot with this, but combat is the only way we can end the game.

Strengths of the Deck

Once we have a good amount of quest counters we can be very hard to stop.

A lot of our quest counters not only buff our wasteland survival guides but more importantly have great effects like Luminarch Ascenion being able to pump out a ton of 4/4’s is great for us.

Weaknesses of the Deck

We can be a little slow to start and underwhelming in the early-game as we require a decent amount of setup to get big and scary.

We are very susceptible to artifact hate, and recursion doesn’t help us since most of our equipment is tokens.

Deck Testing/Matchups

I tested this deck against three different decks

Game 1: Vs Mog, Moogle Warrior. Matchup Record: 3-0

I had no trouble with this matchup. Mog is about the same speed as us, but even with all of their token support, we are a lot bigger, which is great for us and terrible for them. Not a ton of interesting things are going on here; blink Moira and hit with our huge survival guides on our creatures.

Cards that worked really well in this matchup:
Bureau Headmaster, Felidar Guardian and Luminarch Ascension.

Game 2: Vs The Wandering Minstrel. Matchup Record: 1-2

This is not an amazing matchup for our deck, we don’t have really any way to stop them outside of Generous Gift and there second ability can be insane and easily one-shot us, keeping their commander off of the board or having a faster more aggressive start is the best way to get a win here.

Cards that worked really well in this matchup:
Bladehold War-Whip, Bureau Headmaster and Inventory Management.

Game 3: Vs Felothar, Dawn of the Abzan. Matchup Record: 3-2

This matchup was firmly alright for us; we got the win advantage, but it certainly isn’t easy. We need a lot of quest counters to keep up with Felothar’s army of +1/+1 counters. It can be tough for us to deal with. Removing some of their key cards like Doubling Season or Ouroboroid is the best way to slow them down.

Cards that worked really well in this matchup:
Avatar's Wrath, Crash Through and Chandra's Ignition.

Conclusion

Thanks so much for reading to the end! I hope you all enjoyed this one. Moira Brown is a unique and fun commander, and while they may not be format warping, they are some good old Boros fun, and while they capture the basic idea of Boros, they don’t engage in the typical Boros gameplan, and the addition of quest counters is really fun and a great new way to powerup our equipment.