For any go-wide EDH deck, board wipes can be absolutely devastating to your gameplan. After all, building up a formidable offense takes time and resources. Just when you think you’ve pulled ahead on, a Wrath effect can set you back to square one.
While some colors have access to an array of powerful anti-board wipe tech, red and black decks have a tougher time protecting themselves against sweepers. Nonetheless, even if you’re playing a mono-red deck built to flood the board with creatures, there are a handful of colorless options that can help save your side of the battlefield.
Cauldron of Souls MTG
Of all the colorless choices for board wipe protection, Cauldron of Souls is definitely the most abusable. First of all, Cauldron doesn’t just give your creatures Indestructible or have them Phase Out like some premium options in other colors. Instead, the artifact resurrects your creatures that died. This means that in addition to keeping your squad, you get to retrigger all of your enters effects.
The best part of this is that Cauldron sticks around, threatening to activate every turn cycle. Obviously, giving Persist to your creatures that already have -1/-1 counters on them in response to another board wipe won’t help. Nonetheless, this means that as you continue to play more creatures to the battlefield post-board wipe, you still have a means of protection for them. This also opens the door for you to pair Cauldron with creatures like Dearly Departed that can cancel out the -1/-1 counters, thus creating a recursive engine. Of course, any Commanders like The Scorpion God that reward you for putting -1/-1 counters on your creatures make for elite homes for Cauldron of Souls, too.
Gerrard’s Hourglass Pendant MTG
As one of the most underrated anti-board wipe artifacts out there, Gerrard’s Hourglass Pendant provides a ton of utility. Unlike Cauldron, Pendant has Flash, so you don’t have to expose it to artifact removal. This can also allow you to catch your opponent unawares when playing colors that don’t usually have board wipe protection. As such, a well-timed activation can put you very far ahead, potentially on a now otherwise empty board.
Pendant also gains plenty of bonus points for its versatility. Powerhouses like Austere Command threaten to blow up more than just creatures, and Pendant keeps everything safe. Additionally, if you expect to play against land destruction, this legendary artifact can be a savior. The ability to Flash in Pendant to invalidate a Time Stretch is just the cherry on top.
Notably, if you want to dig deeper, you could always use Pendant proactively alongside mass removal effects to set your opponents back. Doing so typically requires a lot of mana, but there are some cards like Nevinyrral’s Disk that can blow up a bunch of stuff at once at little cost.
Warping Wail MTG
For many decks, using reanimation effects like Pendant will get the job done. Unfortunately, though, these cards aren’t as effective in token decks, since your tokens still won’t come back to play. Commanders such as Krenko, Mob Boss, for example, are extremely vulnerable to board wipes and have few ways to answer them. This is all the more reason why Warping Wail should be a common consideration for non-white token decks.
A huge percentage of cards that blow up all creatures are sorceries, and Warping Wail is super cheap. Add in the extra value this instant has against Doran, the Siege Tower, and other archetypes with low-power or low-toughness creatures, and you’ve got a perfectly reasonable inclusion.
Of course, the elephant in the room is Warping Wail’s casting cost, which deters a lot of players from using it outside of colorless decks. Yet, enabling it isn’t actually as hard as it seems. Many mana rocks like Sol Ring and Mind Stone naturally produce colorless, and prioritizing these choices over cards like Fire Diamond in a mono-red shell shouldn’t leave you color screwed. Similarly, there are tons of utility lands from Ancient Tomb to War Room that can cast Warping Wail at little opportunity cost. Warping Wail isn’t the flashiest card, but that doesn’t mean it can’t lead to some big swings in your favor.
Stick with us here at mtgrocks.com: the best site for Magic: The Gathering coverage. Be sure to check out our deckbuilder for your next big brew!