Trust the Process. Question the Pilot.

It’s Maralen time!

But we’ll get into that in a bit.

First, let me preface this by saying that I did not come up with this decklist on my own. I am currently not that Magic literate.

I went to EDHTop16, pulled a couple of the higher-performing Maralen lists, and mashed them together with some of my own wildly brilliant ideas.

And by “wildly brilliant,” I mean “questionable at best.”

I knew exactly five things:

Maralen, Fae Ascendant was the commander. I was not deviating from this, despite advice from better players telling me to just play something meta.
Displacer Kitten was going in the deck somehow. Why? Because I bought the Secret Lair version and it looked cool. Sometimes deckbuilding is art.
Food Chain was staying. I had traded for a beautiful copy and knew it was a common win condition. The fact that I didn’t actually know how the win condition worked felt like a problem for Future Shi.
Rhystic Study was mandatory. My husband bought me a Wilds of Eldraine Play Booster box for our anniversary, and he pulled one that I immediately claimed. That’s basically destiny.
Thassa’s Oracle had to be included. It had kicked my ass enough times that I wanted to be the one doing the ass-kicking for a change. In hindsight, I probably should have paid more attention to how people were actually winning with it.

We’ll get to that.

Building a Deck While Pretending to Know What I’m Doing

For about a week, I compared decklists, reviewed the cards I already owned, and tried to determine what was actually important.

I’m not afraid to proxy cards, but my goal is to replace them with real copies over time.

Let’s be honest.

Nobody just has $1,500 sitting around waiting to become a Gaea’s Cradle.

And if you do, congratulations on being significantly more financially responsible than I am.

I also want to be clear that I have absolutely no issue with fully proxied decks. You do you, boo.

Let’s play some cEDH.

I spent a lot of time asking questions, reading discussions, and even using ChatGPT to help explain card choices and identify differences between lists.

Even with my limited knowledge, I’ll still question things if they don’t make sense to me.

I’m usually wrong.

But at least I learn something.

Early Mistakes

My first few versions of the deck were… not good.

If this were casual Commander, they probably would’ve been perfectly acceptable.

For cEDH?

Not so much.

I was trying to force an Elf theme while cutting interaction like Force of Negation and Mental Misstep.

I had Food Chain but not all the pieces to make it work.

I had Thassa’s Oracle but not the cards that actually enabled the combo.

I also flat-out refused to include Gaea’s Cradle.

The poor kid from Northern Upstate New York who still lives somewhere inside me physically recoiled every time somebody suggested a $1,500 land.

Eventually, I started talking to my friends.

A lot.

I pumped them for opinions, advice, criticism, and anything else that might help make this pile of cardboard functional.

Slowly, the deck started taking shape.

I identified the Thassa’s Oracle lines and added Demonic Consultation and Tainted Pact.

I removed Bitterblossom and Bitterbloom Bearer and replaced them with Misthollow Griffin and Eternal Scourge so Food Chain could actually do Food Chain things.

Opposition Agent found its way into the deck.

So did Orcish Bowmasters.

After a few casual games, I reluctantly accepted that the deck was designed to abuse Gaea’s Cradle.

I also added Talon Gates of Madara and Oboro Breezecaller after one of my friends phased out my board and taught me an important lesson:

Spite is an excellent deckbuilding motivator.