Orvar, the All-Form Commander deck

Deck Overview

Dive into the synergistic world of the Orvar the All-Form Commander Deck, masterfully crafted to manipulate and multiply your permanents, outsmarting opponents with intricate play patterns and a relentless token generation strategy.

Deck Composition

• Mana Curve: In an Orvar the All-Form Commander Deck, you’ll find a lower mana curve to exploit Orvar’s copy ability frequently. Cheap instants and sorceries like “Ponder” and “Brainstorm” that can trigger Orvar’s ability while shaping your draw are pivotal.
• Land Count: The deck is equipped with approximately 36 lands. Considering Orvar’s ability to copy any permanent, including lands, utility lands that can become threats or mana-fixing tools are valuable additions.
• Win Conditions: Winning with Orvar often revolves around creating a swarm of tokens by copying high-impact creatures or racking up value from copied non-creature permanents. “Rite of Replication” and “Ghostly Flicker” are some of the key spells for achieving victory.
• Card Synergy: Every card is selected with Orvar in mind, ensuring that spells like “Twiddle” or “Snap” can both disrupt opponents and create copies of your permanents, thereby maximizing the value of every cast.
• Color Balance: Although mono-blue, color balance remains critical to support a deck filled with utility artefacts and blue’s assortment of draw spells and counters. As such, color fixing is less about variety and more about depth and reliability.
• Card Advantage: Card advantage in an Orvar deck utilizes draw spells like “Arcane Denial,” which serves the dual purpose of disruption and drawing, or “Mystic Remora” which thrives in the multiplayer Commander environment.
• Tempo: Maintaining a steady tempo is crucial, with a suite of counterspells such as “Counterspell” and “Swan Song” to protect your board while you set up for the late game.
• Versatility: Ensuring versatility, instants such as “Reality Shift” or polymorph effects allow you to adapt to various threats while still advancing your own board state synergistically with Orvar.
• Sideboard Strategy: In casual Commander, sideboards aren’t typically used, but having a mental checklist of swap-ins like “Pongify” or “Rapid Hybridization” for creature-heavy matchups can be thought of as the deck’s flexible companions.
• Resilience: The deck’s resilience shines with cards like “Rescue” to protect your important creatures or “Flood of Recollection” to reclaim pivotal spells from your graveyard to maintain your presence on the board.

Deck Strengths

Legendary Power: Orvar, the All-Form, this deck’s commander thrives on leveraging its potent ability to copy permanent spells, paving the way for dominating board states.

Multi-Angle Threats: By harnessing Orvar’s cloning mechanic, the deck capitalizes on both creating a formidable fleet of creatures and amplifying value from enter-the-battlefield effects simultaneously.

Adaptability: Flexibility is at the core of this deck, as it can pivot between aggressive tactics and a more resilient, control-based approach while consistently developing advantageous game positions.

Deck Weaknesses

Complexity: Mastering the Orvar the All-Form Commander Deck demands keen awareness of combo timings and triggers, often making it intricate for players to navigate through the sequence of plays that fully utilize Orvar’s ability to clone permanents.

Targeted Removal: This deck’s strategy can falter against removal-heavy opponents, as losing Orvar can disrupt the cloning synergy. It’s essential to include counterspells or hexproof granting cards to ensure Orvar’s presence on the battlefield is constant.

Cards Breakdown

• Orvar, the All-Form: The mighty Shapeshifter that offers unparalleled cloning potential, turning your instant and sorcery casts into new copies of your creatures or artifacts.
• Ghostly Flicker: With its ability to exile and return two target artifacts, creatures, or lands, this instant synergizes with Orvar to create token copies of your permanents.
• Twincast: This spell doubles the fun and the impact by copying any instant or sorcery, triggering Orvar’s ability and potentially doubling your board presence.
• Pongify: Offering creature removal with a twist, this spell destroys a creature and replaces it with an ape token, which can be cloned through Orvar’s ability.
• Rapid Hybridization: Similar to Pongify, this spell efficiently handles threats and simultaneously provides an opportunity to expand your board with Orvar’s trigger.
• Swan Song: A low-cost counter that neutralizes big threats while giving an opponent a bird token, perfect to copy with Orvar for your benefit.
• Reality Shift: Exile a creature and give the opponent a manifest creature, which Orvar can then replicate to produce an increased threat on board.
• Baral, Chief of Compliance: Grants cost reduction for your instants and sorceries and rewards you for countering spells, enhancing your strategy and card draws.
• Clever Impersonator: Superb flexibility, this clone can become any nonland permanent on the battlefield, giving you the tools to adapt and copy the most critical assets.
• Displace: Another versatile flicker card that exiles and returns two of your creatures, triggering Orvar’s ability and can be used to protect or multiply key pieces.

Similar Decks

The Orvar the All-Form Commander Deck stands among a well-crafted assembly of clone-centric decks. It’s comparable to “Mirror Mastery,” harnessing copy spells to replicate creatures for a powerful army. “Brudiclad’s Legions” also echoes this theme, morphing tokens into any desired form. The “Sakashima’s Proteges” deck employs doubling effects to benefit from the best creatures on the board, while “Riku of Two Reflections” exploits copy spells for instant and sorcery redundancy. Lastly, the “Kalamax Copy Storm” deck amplifies combo plays with copied instants, paralleling Orvar’s strategy for dominance through replication.

How to Beat

• Spot Removal Heavy Decks:
  • Armed with pinpoint destruction spells to target key creatures.
  • Interrupts the combo pieces essential to Orvar’s success.
  • Strips away the engine that powers Orvar’s clone mechanics.
• Stax and Resource Denial:
  • Imposes restrictions on spell casting and abilities.
  • Thwarts Orvar’s capability to copy spells and permanents.
  • Prevents the deck from executing its game plan smoothly.
• Competitive Combo Decks:
  • Assembles potent combinations to win irrespective of opponents’ strategies.
  • Outpaces Orvar by racing to combo off early in the game.
  • Reduces the window of opportunity for Orvar’s deck to set up a board.

BurnMana Recommendations

Understanding the complexity and synergy of the Orvar the All-Form Commander Deck is critical to mastering its gameplay. With strategic casting and timely use of Orvar’s cloning ability, you can transform your board into an evolving arsenal of copies. Maintain resilience against removal and pivot between control and aggression to navigate your path to victory.