Let’s talk about the Mardu deck lead by none other than Caesar, Legion’s Emperor from Fallout: New Vegas. It’s not only a tokens deck but also has a bit of combat shenanigans and dice rolling thrown into the mix. There are some majorly impressive cards in this deck! Even if you’re just taking it apart, the pieces provided are quite powerful.
Let’s take a look at some of the new cards featured and what they do for the deck at first glance.
Hail Caesar Indeed
Super value here. Essentially, you get to pick draw a card and lose a life plus another mode until you build up enough of a board to start ending the game with the third mode, dealing direct damage. You can quite easily drop Caesar on turn three with an early mana rock and, with some luck, you will have played a creature as well. The potential to start building your army and drawing extra cards that early is quite nice, and it means you do not have to over commit to the board. Sit back, make tokens and watch the game develop. It seems like a reasonable game plan which has decent inevitability.
The Other half of the deck
Well, if you like rolling dice, Mr. House, President and CEO could be the commander for you. Half of the time you get a 3/3 Robot simply for rolling and rarely you will get a free Treasure, too. A built-in roll mechanic for four mana is pretty steep, however, it does come with an option to turn your Treasure into up to four additional dice. Rolling more dice certainly means you will generate more Robots and probably recoup a Treasure or two. This is very interesting when looked at in light of a crazy alternate win condition featured in the deck.
Are you Feeling Absurdly Lucky?
Enter in by far the most difficult alternate win condition that has ever been introduced in Magic.
For the statisticians out there, let’s say you have exactly seven Bobbleheads. Getting seven Bobbleheads from including them in your deck, and copying them, isn’t particularly difficult, but it’s far from automatic. Now, it’s time to roll. The odds that, in seven six sided dice all of them are exactly six? About one in 279,938. Yeah, not impossible, not winning the lottery lucky but it’s not going to happen.
But wait, you say, what if I have a bunch of cards that grant me re-rolls and other abilities? The calculation gets more difficult, but keep this in mind. You have to roll six exactly seven times. So if you thought you could simply copy your Luck Bobblehead 1,000 times to guarantee seven results, well, that does not work. Your best bet here would be to copy the Luck version and get that many extra chances to roll. But, odds are, you win using all the Treasure or Robots from Mr. House way sooner. I’m all for new and interesting win conditions, but this one could have been a little bit more forgiving. Rolling six sixes is almost one in 47,000. Rolling five is slightly better than one in 8,000. Or remove the “exactly” part and let people copy their way to a win.
Hey look, (Multikicker) Squad!
The deck features multiple cards with the Squad keyword, first seen in the Warhammer 40K decks. The interesting part about Squad is not that you get multiple things; it’s that the copies are tokens which have excellent synergy throughout the deck. This also allows you to also scale up your spells. A single Securitron Squadron isn’t much to look at, but getting three or four off one card makes a large difference, and is excellent post board wipe. Overall, the keyword makes sense and belongs in this deck. That being said, it’s a weird design decision in my opinion.
These cards could have had Multikicker. I mean it’s not like the deck already features a card with Multikicker like say Marshall’s Anthem. Oh, oops, it does! Sure, the abilities are not exactly identical and that merits pointing out. In fact, Squad gets beaten by a lot of cards like Hushbringer, Hushwing Gryff or Torpor Orb. On the reverse side, Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines can either double your Squad triggers or shut you out depending on who has her. Both doubling and shutting off ETB triggers is increasingly common, and that can lead to some pretty one sided games in each direction. Meanwhile the design space for kicker is still wide open and calls back to years of cards, but not even ancient ones! We only have to go back as far as Dominaria United for kicker and Modern Horizons II for multikicker. A minor nitpick, but this deck could have taken design in a different direction, especially when you think about the dice mechanic tied in. A missed opportunity, perhaps.
Under the Radar Power
Look at this two mana power house. MacCready, Lamplight Mayor makes all your tokens hard to block, that’s not bad at all. It also makes you incredibly tough to kill.
Say your opponent has ten 4/4s. They swing in. Trigger, they lose 20 life, you gain 20. Now you don’t even have to block and they have lost half their life. Technically, if nothing changes, they cannot even kill you because they would die on the next attack step. That’s on the macro level.
On the micro level, just getting chipped away by a single four or five power flyer hurts. But when they are only netting two or three damage? It’s significantly more sustainable. This card looks extremely decent and may end up being overlooked by many, but is straight value and combos with some really interesting cards.
Massive Draw Potential
ED-E, Lonesome Eyebot might not look like much, but it’s an easy way to draw a lot of cards. Firstly, you don’t have to attack with ED to get the counter, so this virtually enters the battlefield with one quest counter on it. At that point, you can already draw two cards for two mana. That’s good enough to consider the card. Once you start to include all the quest counter synergy and future options for increasing counters like proliferate or various doubling effects, you can see that this card has potential. Since it’s colorless, it can go into a wide variety of decks and likely will. Solemn Simulacrum version 2.0? Probably!
A Dangerous new Rakdos Commander
Speed. That’s one word to describe Kellogg, Dangerous Mind. With fast mana it’s extremely possible to turn one or turn two this card and immediately attack for a Treasure token so you are not even tapped out. Furthermore, you’re in red so you can have a Deflecting Swat at the ready for protection.
Speaking of red, you can make Treasure easily, so you can steal the best creature on the board extremely quickly. This card is reminiscent of Slicer, Hired Mercenary, but has a mid and late game because of the five Treasure steal effect.
One more thing, he’s a Mercenary! Yes, very cool! Don’t forget that Mercenaries are a unique creature type and have some support. Cateran Summons can go find him if he’s in your deck so you can make a play from out of nowhere to generate a Treasure and then steal something bonkers. While Kellogg isn’t exactly the most synergistic card in Hail Caesar, it’s certainly got possibilities outside the deck.
Crazy Powerful Reprints
For seven mana of various colors, a spell had better have a pretty strong effect. How about a game winning effect? An absolutely one sided board wipe, Ruinous Ultimatum balances out the difficulty of casting the spell with the power of the spell effect perfectly. If you resolve this you’re almost certain to win and if you don’t own a copy of it, welcome to Fallout! Certainly there are plenty of counters to board wipes and they are usually only two or three mana. Keep that in mind if you’re trying to clear the entire board. However, there’s always the route of diplomacy. Maybe you’re in third or fourth place in terms of board and you suspect the second place player has protection. Work out a deal ahead of time and buy yourself back into the game. It’s better to have two opponents instead of three!
On the reprint note it’s also really cool that Fervent Charge is getting its first reprint since Apocalypse in 2001! While this card does have a little bit of anti-synergy with certain effects in your deck, an overwhelming amount of the time it will boost your board by double or more. For four mana that’s not a bad pseudo-anthem. It works well considering things like Vault 75: Middle School where you don’t want your creatures to be permanently bigger. They can dodge your own removal.
It’s also worth mentioning Hour of Reckoning here because that ups the count of extremely one-sided wipes to three, potentially more depending on board state. It’s safe to say the deck is loaded with board control, but its even better that it’s almost completely one-sided.
Everyone Loves Math…
Huge points for flavor on the Decimate keyword! It does exactly what the word meant to the Romans. The only problem? If you understand math, this is a super simple card. If someone does not, it can be hard to see what is going on. Hopefully, this reminder can help.
If you have up to ten creatures, you are losing one creature. The second you go over ten, you’re going to lose two creatures. At 21, you will lose a third creature and so on. That being said, reanimating Legate Lanius, Caesar’s Ace can get pretty oppressive, especially in a deck full of edict creatures. Cool card, wish they wrote the ability in a different way, but I appreciate them going all in on the flavor angle.
The Best Card in the Deck
Heck yes, a very cool card, and hopefully the future of the “dilemma” cycle, Vault 11: Voter’s Dilemma takes democracy to the extreme and heavily incentivizes table talk. This is the best diplomacy card probably ever, and certainly is a lot more interesting than Prisoner’s Dilemma. This card has the potential to destroy four different creatures, twice. Alternatively, everyone can play nice and just draw a card.
In many situations, you can try and work together to fight the archenemy at the table and make them lose three different creatures. However, your opponent can choose to pick one of their own creatures to try and lose only one creature with the most votes. The amount of deception, double talk, double crossing and strategy to this card is massively higher than what they have designed so far in this area, and we need more of it! To top it all off, you get to do this twice. Ten out of ten, would cast again.
Edicts, Dice, Board Wipes, Voting oh my!
Yes, Hail Caesar does everything. The question will be does it do it well? With a smattering of several different mechanics, it remains to be seen if the deck can pull off consistent plans or if it can win by winging it. It has more ideas and more mechanics than any of the other Fallout decks by a mile. But, it also has considerable ways to draw tons of cards, make piles of mana and generate a vast army. Caesar is central to all of those plans. Watch for the game play review coming up.