Commander Overview
TMNT week continues with a very interesting commander, The Neutrinos are a deck that I have built a few times since spoiler season as I wasn’t sure what i wanted to land on, I tried a tokens build, one focused only on blink and I finally landed on this build, a combination of a goblin deck and a blink deck, we can make The Neutrinos very big and they can be a great attacker for the deck and the real strength of the deck comes with The Neutrinos attack trigger which allows us to blink a creature, blinking something like Beetleback Chief or Goblin Instigator allows us to make our commander a bigger and better attacker and fill up our board, which also interacts nicely with Impact Tremors and Molten Gatekeeper and allows us to be great at dealing damage. While the The Neutrinos are not as effective as a deck like Arabella, Abandoned Doll or General Kreat, The Boltbringer, they are a new and fun option, and adding white adds an amazing amount of utility to the deck, something you don’t normally expect with goblins.
How to Play the Deck
This deck is extremely easy to pilot, and can be piloted by a player of any skill level. I also think this is a very good introduction deck for someone new to Pauper EDH, since there are a lot of great goblins at common, and you can find many of the same cards you would find in traditional EDH. Our gameplan is simple in this deck: play out our goblins and get all of the benefits of having all of them, and then use our commander to ETB support cards like Spirited Companion or Beetleback Chief, all while swinging with our flying commander that keeps getting bigger on a turn.
Synergy’s in the deck
Our two main synergies in the deck are the goblins and the blink package, and they both go hand in hand and interact very nicely with our commander. Making The Neutrinos bigger allows us to be a formidable force in combat just from our commander, while we certainly aren’t a commander damage deck hitting an opponent for ten with flying can be quite hard to deal with and when combined with effects like Witty Roastmaster or Molten Gatekeeper allows us to output a ton of damage quite quickly. Our Blink package also has two main functions within our deck. We can either use it offensively or defensively, whether we use it to make more tokens and trigger our commander or use it to protect our commander and creatures from single-target removal. We are much more of an aggressive deck, so we typically will use these offensively. We have a lot of synergies in our deck, and they are all focused on dealing damage to our opponents.
Phases of the Game
Early-Game: We have a strong showing in the early game. We have a low mana curve within the deck, so we are often playing creatures on the first couple of turns. While we aren’t overtly aggressive and won’t attack into bad combat situations if an opponent is open and we have some cheap creatures, we absolutely will swing to chip in some early damage. The early game is easy for this deck; play out some cheap creatures and swing if we have an opportunity.
Mid-Game: The mid-game is when The Neutrinos really shine. We are able to put a lot of creatures on the battlefield in one turn and can get them pretty big. Combining that with their attack trigger, we can make them even bigger. The core game plan doesn’t change here, fill up our board, make our commander bigger, and swing hard.
Late-Game: We don’t typically want to get to the late-game as we are pretty aggressive and one of the biggest strengths of our deck is to kill opponents quickly, but if the game does go long, we typically rely on The Neutrinos and going wide to end the game. This can be rough against decks with big creatures that we can’t get through, but relying on our flying commander is the best option here. In many of my testing games, we never got to the late game, and it is not as good for us as the other phases of the game.
Card Breakdowns
Ramp
Beyond some signets and cards like Boros Signet, we don’t ramp at all, but that is a feature, not a bug in this deck, as we have a very low overall cost and sometimes don’t even need to get over four or five mana to safely and easily cast everything we need. While we don’t have a lot of ramp, the deck functions perfectly fine.
Card Draw/Card Advantage
We are pretty good at card draw, one of my biggest focuses when building this deck was ensuring we have a lot of sources of extra card draw, while we certainly aren’t a blue deck we can keep our hand full which is critical in this deck since we tend to cast a lot of our cheap cards in one turn and having no cards in hand can be a death sentence to many Aggro decks and ours is the same. Cards like Big Score and Unexpected Windfall are a little expensive mana wise but do produce treasures so you technically get some of that mana back. The Neutrinos help a lot with card draw as well and I have used Spirited Companion in many combat phases so we can draw more cards and keep our hand full. Even though we cast a lot in any given turn and are overall pretty fast we have enough card draw that we are able to keep our hand full.
Removal
Removal is one of the weaker portions of our deck; we can kill stuff and creatures, but we certainly don’t have a ton of options. Cards like Crib Swap and Eriette’s Lullaby are great at destroying opponents’ creatures with ease. I also love Thraben Charm in this deck since it can kill even the biggest creatures our opponents have, since we have a pretty full board often in this deck. We also have some artifact removal in the deck; there are a lot of great artifacts within the format, and being able to remove them at instant speed with cards like Abrade is very helpful for the deck. Well, our removal package isn’t very big. We do have enough to get by and protect our gameplan and stop our opponents from getting out of hand.
Protection
Protection is one of the strongest aspects of our deck and a great payoff for being in Boros for this deck, while we often use our blink spells to blink our best creatures and finish up our board we also can use them to protect our creatures from removal, cards like Ephemerate are great ways for us to protect on a creature and then on the rebound blink one of our creatures to get their ETB and trigger The Neutrinos. We have a ton of different cards that blink our creatures. I’m a big fan of Justiciar’s Portal, which can be a great way to not only trigger our commander but make us better in combat, too. We are very good at protecting our creatures and our commander.
Utility / Support
Since we have a lot of blink going on in the deck, let’s highlight some of the best cards to re-ETB in the deck. Spirited Companion is by far one of my favorites and a great source of card draw for the deck. Goblin Matron is one of the best cards we can blink since it allows us to tutor the best goblins in our deck. The best options to grab are Goblin Lookout and Goblin General, as they can be very helpful for combat. Any of our token producers like Goblin Instigator, Beetleback Chief, or Mogg War Marshal are all great options and can help us build up our board and buff up our commander. Once we have a big board of 1/1’s we need to make them bigger, Goblin Lookout is a great option to buff up our goblins but we can also use cards like Inspiring Roar and Silverflame Ritual to put counters on all of our creatures and make us a little bit bigger and make combat a lot better for us. If an opponent taps all of their creatures to attack us, we can hit them like a truck if we drop either of these before combat.
Mana Base
Just like most Pauper EDH decks, we don’t have a ton of interesting non-basics. We have a good amount of dual lands in the deck. They are helpful because while we are primarily red, our commander has white in our costs and almost all of our blink stuff as well. We also have a good amount of cycling lands, which are especially relevant in this deck since we don’t have a lot of high-cost cards in the deck, and cycling them out for something else is almost always worth it.
Win Conditions
Our primary win condition in this deck is combat; whether it’s attacking with The Neutrinos or our creatures, we end the game through combat. The only exception is that I have killed multiple players in my testing games with a big board and Massive Raid. While not very consistent, it is a option to end the game and take out an opponent.
Strengths of the Deck
We are very good at going wide, even against other token decks, we can often go wider.
Our commander is not only a formidable attacker but a value machine for the deck; you truly haven’t lived till you’ve blinked a Beetleback Chief a few turns in a row with a Impact Tremors on the battlefield.
Weaknesses of the Deck
We suffer from the same problems a lot of go-wide decks have, if we are blown up with something like Arms of Hadar, we can struggle to rebuild.
While we have a little bit of removal in the deck, we don’t have a ton of ways to kill our opponents’ creatures. We do mostly care about our game plan, but decks that get big quickly can give us a lot of trouble.
Deck Testing/Matchups
I tested this deck against three different decks
Game 1: Vs Tetsuko Umezawa, Fugitive. Matchup Record: 1-3
I struggled a bit with this matchup. It can be quite hard for us to block a majority of their deck, and since they are in mono-blue, they have a lot of control elements, and it can be hard to get The Neutrinos to resolve in this matchup. But on the flip side, killing their commander is important, so if you can, kill Tetsuko as much as you can; it will disrupt their gameplan a lot.
Cards that worked really well in this matchup:
Abrade, Acrobatic Maneuver and Coronation of Chaos.
Game 2: Vs Tannuk, Memorial Ensign. Matchup Record: 3-2
This is a tough but winnable matchup for our deck. We don’t care a ton about what Tannuk does, and we have to accept that they are going to deal damage to us, and there isn’t much we can do about it. Follow the gameplan and be aggressive, and you can win this one. Tannuk can have some fast games, so killing their commander and stopping some of that passive damage is helpful as well.
Cards that worked really well in this matchup:
Celebrity Fencer, Dog Umbra and Banishing Light.
Game 3: Vs Ertha Jo, Frontier Mentor. Matchup Record: 4-1
I had very little trouble with this matchup. Ertha Jo has a similar game plan to us since they fill their board up with tokens, but we have the added benefit of having way more chump blockers, and they can give their creatures as many power buffs as they want. It doesn’t stop us from chump blocking. They also have a few ways to deal with our flying commander, and in two of my testing games, I got two commander damage kills.
Cards that worked really well in this matchup:
Infernal Captor, Boros Fury-Shield and Goblin Surprise
Conclusion
Thanks so much for reading to the end! I hope you all enjoyed The Neutrinos, they are a very fun go-wide deck, and while it does feel weird to have a flying commander in Boros, I am here for it and had a blast playing and testing this deck. The Neutrinos are by no means a CPDH but can hang easily with a lot of the other creature decks in the format. I think this is going to be a very popular going forward, while it still has the core Boros feel, it does play a bit differently than most Boros decks.